yu-gi-oh was so smart. transformers had already proven you could forcibly
extract money from parents by pretending your advertisements for children's
toys comprised a television show, but hasbro still had to pay for injection
moulding. what if they just printed the money instead?
in the yu-gi-oh tv show1,
the main thing that all the characters do is play the card game
yu-gi-oh2.
all disagreements are resolved via dueling3, and even though this is shown to
favour the rich, at the end of most episodes the child protagonists justly win
and you feel an urge to go to the toy store and purchase yu-gi-oh cards.
a classic thing that happens is someone says "i think the reason is blah" and
then another person says "i think it's something else" and then a third person
says "it's a bit of both" or "it's somewhere in between" or something like
that.
it's such a reliable thing to be able to say and it takes so little effort,
yet you can sound quite wise saying it. oh shit! it's both things?
i realised recently that there are at least two ways in which we ask the
question "is x a y?"
it was when i asked "is Terminator a monster?" which is the sort of question i
like to ask, to get into all the necessary-but-not-sufficients of dumb shit
conceptual analysis.
does a monster need to be biological, or more fundamentally, not
understood? are all monsters morally permissible to kill?
there is a tweet that responded to
Chess Is Not A Game by Deborah P. Vossen
that i can't find. it said something to extent of "What the author fails to
consider is that chess is, in fact, a game." because the other way we ask
these sorts of questions is the Family Feud way. if you surveyed one hundred
people with "Name a monster" - zero of them would say Terminator. they would
say Dracula or Zombie or Frankenstein. and so in that sense, Terminator is not
a monster. it is important to be considerate of your friends and realise this,
when asking these sorts of questions.
What is a crystalisation of the mind?
The gaseous, evanescent process that is thinking, is
entirely internal.
I don't have to worry about the incoherence of my thoughts if I don't have to
communicate them with anyone. But the moment I write, I create the first
molecular bond: a dynamic of relations. Me and you.