a movie review

so for the second time in as many years the military-entertainment complex failed to emergency-alert me to this runaway vehicle wherein mackenzie davis busts it across LA in a bloodied tuxedo running into such as alia shawkat and carrie coon

tragically, it’s shit

more descriptively it’s pretty much as bad as it could be, given that it fulfills the above specification. which is to say it’s entertaining enough to offset the frustration at the wasted opportunity

it’s basically a 90s pastiche, visually mixtape to such a one-eighted-hearted decree that you’d (wrongly) think the director was a /r/lewronggeneration zoomer aping an image search. he soundtrack consists of spotifying “riot grrl” and picking whats cheap. i’ll also note that its almost offensively straight in the bulk given the surface signifiers

rating: loop it in the background at a party / 10

• game abstract: players publish papers in journals for fun and profit
• papers constitute terms in some structure. these terms include rules, conjectures, and proofs related to some object-level structure.
• let’s say for definiteness that our object terms are those of integer algebra and arithmetic, embedded in some relatively simple formal meta-system including substitution and transitivity of equality. papers are either assertions (conjectures) of identities, like 1+1=3 or (a + b)2 = a2 + 2ab + b2, or proofs of such assertions which are derivation trees represented as a tree of the relevant rules/identities.
• certain elementary identities/rules are provided (by god) and published in his journal, The Book.
• players compose papers and submit them to two journals: The Rag (which publishes all assertions submitted) and The Record (which publishes all valid proofs but prefers originality)
• paper composition is a structured editing process where papers are written by composing rules/identities, which must themselves be extant papers. adding (composing) a rule triggers a payment from you to the ‘original’ author. if you do everything axiomatically, you’re only paying god, which is cheap but slow.
• so you grow a paper by selecting/searching transformations in a menu which is a list of your Journal bookmarks. you start out with some of The Book bookmarked. if you want to use more complex identities in your proofs though, you need to either find them in a journal, or submit them yourself, spending/earning $$ accordingly. if everything you reference is valid, your proof is valid.
• The Record also accepts complaints, which are derivations of published papers from other (previously?) published papers using less than N steps (for some fixed N). This entitles the complainant to some of the ongoing proceeds. So one play tactic is pursuing the Record which are “really just a special case” of something you’ve already published
• the basic gameplay loop involves publishing as many and/or as central results as possible, hoping to extract rent. do you go wide to hedge your bets or deep to corner an entire niche? do you spam out a lot of basic but obviously derivative results, risking that someone might preempt that income? how much time do you spend reading and how much do you spend writing? how do your actions affect the player ecology?
• The Rag also accepts bets on assertions, which are pooled/paid out; gameplay mechanics left as an exercise to the reader.
• Further directions: player-customizable journals to support alternate economics. coauthorship and forced labor. the ability to 'kill god’ by unseating The Book in popular usage by proposing more compelling primitive rules/axioms.

(via hamiltonianflow)