According to [Johann] Huizinga [in Homo Ludens], games have certain common features. First, they are clearly bounded in time and space, and thereby framed off from ordinary life. There is a field, a board, a starting pistol, a finish line. Within that time/space, certain people are designated as players. There are also rules, which define precisely what those players can and cannot do. Finally, there is always some clear idea of the stakes, of what the players have to do to with the game. And, critically: that’s all there is. Any place, person, action, that falls outside that framework is extraneous; it doesn’t matter; it’s not part of the game. Another way to put this would be to say that games are pure rule-governed action.
It seems to me this is important, because this [is] precisely why games are fun. In almost any other aspect of human existence, all these things are ambiguous. Think of a family quarrel, or a workspace rivalry. Who is or is not a party to it, what’s fair, when it began and when it’s over, what it even means to say you won—it’s all extremely difficult to say. The hardest thing of all is to understand the rules. In almost any situation we find ourselves in, there are rules—even in casual conversation, there are tacit rules of who can speak in what order, pacing, tone, deference, appropriate and inappropriate topics, when you can smile, what sort of humor is allowable, what you should be doing with your eyes, and a million other things besides. These rules are rarely explicit, and usually there are many conflicting ones that could, possibly, be brought to bear at any given moment. So we are always doing the difficult work of negotiating between them, and trying to predict how others will do the same. Games allow us our only real experience of the situation where all this ambiguity is swept away. Everyone knows exactly what the rules are. And not only that, people actually do follow them. And by following them, it is even possible to win! This—along with the fact that unlike in real life, one has submitted oneself to the rules completely voluntarily—is the source of pleasure.
Games, then, are a kind of utopia of rules.
Games
Friday, January 30, 2026
Homo Sacer
Tuesday, November 25, 2025
Epstein: A marxist perspective
Thus, the assumption that “the world is run by pedophiles” is mistaken because it confuses cause and effect. It is not pedophilia that makes one powerful, but power that generates those distorted forms of desire that express themselves in mistreatment and exploitation.
via reddit
Eigenvalue knows the score
Saturday, November 1, 2025
[…] one detects a writer who has finally lost patience with Americans’ persistent failure to understand the obvious consequences of their own country’s actions.
via Reddit
i read Gravity’s Rainbow last year. Pynchon’s relevance is so profound as to be deafening. i have V and Lot 49 on the shelves, i should read them too.
Why do people listen to this shit?
Wednesday, October 29, 2025
Shows like this have a flow that the listener doesn’t actually participate in—the hosts have gone home, you’re the only one in the room, and it’s a dead conversation that’s already happened—but, given the intimacy of how the product is consumed, can get the same psychic impression. On your commute, while you do laundry or cook dinner, your best friend lives in your phone.
[…]
The personalities here may seem ugly or garish, even repellent, to many reading this. The shows largely consist of stupid clichés spoken by repulsive people. They are often plainly thought destroying. That is precisely the reason for their popularity.
TrueAnon: Patreon, subreddit, NYT profile, GQ profile
Other favourites: Chapo, Trillbillies, Death is Just Around the Corner, Death // Sentence, Heat Death of the Universe, not Canadaland, not Red Scare
Go home, Tilly
Saturday, October 18, 2025
Dear Tilly Norwood: Some Blunt Advice, Actress to “Actress,” From Betty Gilpin
Tilly, you can not look up and become half of someone. Because you are no one.
Scared
Thursday, September 11, 2025
What I want to talk about is about the reaction to the assassination. The hit did something I haven’t seen before. It spooked the political influencers. They are scared. Many of them spent last night issuing lengthy, serious statements on X about the gravity of the situation. Some of them are calling it a 9/11 event — a 9/11 for the influencer class.
the first example that i came across, earlier today (and i should add, a political opposite)
Another quote
Wednesday, August 20, 2025
I get high, I get fucked up … what the hell’s wrong with getting fucked up? There must be something wrong with the system if so many people have to get fucked up.
Ozzy Osbourne, interview in Sounds magazine, 1978
(via Adam Curtis, Shifty)
A long quote, true as can be
Wednesday, August 20, 2025
The further down the hill she goes the more subdued and shadowy her mood becomes, as though Bath Street were an emotional gradient. She’s thinking about history’s celebrated victims, thinking of the holocaust, the blight of slavery, female suppression and the persecution of sexual minorities. She can recall her own Spare Rib days in the 1970s and how she’d briefly entertained the idea that a woman leader might make all the difference. This had obviously been back in the early seventies. Her point is that despite the very real continuing abuses born of anti-Semitism, born of racism and sexism and homophobia, there are MPs and leaders who are female, Jewish, black or gay. There are none who are poor. There never have been, and there never will be. Every decade since society’s inception has been witness to a holocaust of paupers, so enormous and perpetual that it has become wallpaper, unnoticed, unreported. The mass graves at Dachau and at Auschwitz are, rightly, remembered and repeatedly deplored, but what about the one in Bunhill Fields that William Blake and his beloved Catherine were shovelled into? What about the one under the car park in Chalk Lane, across the road from Doddridge Church? What of the countless generations that have lived poor and have in one way or other died of that condition, uncommemorated and anonymous? Where are their fucking monuments and special ringed dates on the calendar? Where are their Spielberg films? Part of the problem is, no doubt, that poverty lacks a dramatic arc. From rags to rags to rags to rags to dust has never been an Oscar-winning formula.
Alan Moore, Jerusalem
fighting enshittification, one search at a time
Tuesday, July 15, 2025
Beware of the Google AI salesman and its cronies
[…] we spent weeks conducting research into air purifiers we reviewed (including models that don’t exist) to determine whether Google Search results and AI Overviews are leading consumers to good advice.
It turns out this rabbit hole is deeper than we thought, with ramifications that span major Reddit communities and could be leading you to scams and defamatory hallucinations.
a relatively easy answer for now:
Does One Line Fix Google?
tenbluelinks.org
or just use another damn search engine, i guess.
Xenotext
Saturday, June 14, 2025
Because now it’s 2025, and he fucking did it. The Xenotext is live and glowing in Deinococcus radiodurans: iterating away inside that immortal microbial bad-ass that feeds on stainless steel, that resides inside the core of reactor no. 4 at Chernobyl, that does not die in the explosion that disintegrates the Space Shuttle Columbia during orbital reentry. Christian Bök did not give up. Christian Bök did not fail. Christian Bök is going to outlive civilization, outlive most of the biosphere itself.
