Samuel Bishop's website
In the ancient times before costco guys walked the earth, the twitter user roon was the first to ever successfully cleave the world perfectly in two: You are either a wordcel or a shape rotator , said he. Either you seek to appeal to language, or to material reality. Either you are convinced by a cleverly phrased argument, or by raw unchewed data. You may already be picking up on a tiny narrative…
I’m a youngest child. This may not come as a surprise to you. I’ve always loved (positive) attention. Throughout my childhood and adolescence I felt I was very good at commanding it from my peers, whether through creating things I wanted them to look at (little games and stories and such, too embarrassing to get into here) or acting out in absurd ways to get a laugh. My main extracurricular…
i love betimes to brush my hands along the bush as i proceed from whence to whither and some may notice i carry an inexplicable scent of rosemary
I always strive to be a charitable conversator/reader/viewer. One need only encounter a single bad faith interlocutor to quickly become an expert in why good faith is important. Disingenuity, nitpicking, and all the other (sometimes accidental) social defections are incredibly easy to deploy against a claim-maker to waste their time and fail to engage with their arguments. But there are almost…
I made a point in my last essay to distinguish between the behaviors of a hater versus a thoughtful critic. Ironically enough I was clearly approaching this issue from the hater perspective. The essay almost entirely focused on negative examples of the phenomenon instead of exploring positive alternatives. In fact, a good number of my essays (the becoming uncringe series in particular) are framed…
I: Impressions It was only the first week of my time at the Saloy University that I met Lyman. I was still feeling dizzied by my new surroundings. The bazaars started their noisemaking before the sun even rose, and I was cursed to be lodging directly above one. My residence was one of those Saloy utarmonds , elevated bridgehouses over large thoroughfares that adjoined two towering tenements on…
i curse you with unsolved mathdoku ! oooooo you can’t resist it oooooo (click on it to start, use wasd or hjkl to navigate and numbers to insert. refresh for a different puzzle)
ive been wondering how much of my writing you all retain. maybe you have been wondering too. so i made a quiz . let me know what score you get!
Remember that part in Return of the Jedi when Luke is wailing on Darth Vader and Darth Sidious is like “gooooooood, let the hate flow through you”. I can’t deny, morally grandstand as I may, that being a hater feels good. It’s fun! But what really doesn’t feel good is when I have even the most microscopic investment in the target of someone’s hate. Then it feels really bad. You’ve heard the Teddy…
My wife recently took a weeklong work trip to New York City, so I got a chance to watch a show that wouldn’t play well with the usual crowd. I chose something that had long rotted on my list: Ken Burns’ magisterial Civil War miniseries. I don’t have any novel takes about it: it’s great. The confederate-sympathizer amateur historian guy has weird vibes but maybe he brings some needed perspective to…
i rarely feel more religious than when im watching Planet Earth (2006) . the soaring soundtrack, the awe inspiring imagery, the fearsome powers of nature, and david attenborough possesses a voice that i like to imagine sounds sort of like God’s. it’s a cathedral in my TV.
It kinda feels like filmmakers are more amenable to featuring flip phones in their movies than smartphones. But I guess that makes sense. There’s more to be done with them from a blocking standpoint: you can flip them open aggressively, smack them shut aggressively, throw them out the car window aggressively (try that with a glassy smartphone and the audience will all wince) . They can’t browse…
theres something charming about artists who express disdain or even outright hatred for their own work. it usually speaks to a restless and relentless pursuit of perfection. its even funnier when the piece they finally do claim as their magnum opus isnt as well received as the ones they spat on. but these guys are a dying breed. most of the art that reaches me is so thoroughly captured by…
A Parable As a tween, I stumbled upon an eccentric community of Lego wargamers called BrikWars . I quickly became obsessed with the system they had developed. I printed out the rulebook pdf onto copy paper, 3 hole punched it, put it into a quarter inch binder, and started forcing any and all of my friends to play it with me. BrikWars was a revelation to me, because I had reached the age where…
caveat lector This essay is about geopolitics and war in the Middle East. It is necessarily deeply political. Not in a Red vs Blue type of way, like in a Roman history type of way, except about current events. Try not to draw any conclusions about my personal politics from this, because you'll probably be wrong. My hope has always been to make my essays palatable to reasonable folk from any…
In a past life I watched a lot of video essays on YouTube (I’ve since given up that vice, more on that later) . These videos had the incredible ability to engage, enrage, and move me, when the topic was prosaic as speedrunning a game that I’ve never played. These sort of documentary-style deep dives into a community or individual doing battle against an arbitrary goal— creating and solving higher…
i keep noticing this pattern online among the commentariat where they act like a joke is really funny just because it requires some level of background knowledge to understand the punchline and thus flatters their self-conception of knowing obscure things. it should be noted the reference usually isn’t actually that obscure at all—which is why the joke-maker felt confident enough to deliver it in…
there come some friends of fools and yet polite without guile with spite I: Friend of Fools Yotan was sharing his bacon with highwaymen. It hadn’t been his dinner plan for the evening. But then again precious few plans he made on the Jao had worked out just how he wished. The unexpected had a way of sneaking up on you out here, just as these bandits had snuck up on him and his party and clubbed…
i know this isnt a very novel observation but ive arrived at the same conclusion as everyone else: beekeeping seems like a cool way to spend my golden years. you get to be in touch with nature, it keeps you active, you’re caring for little animals with fascinating behaviors, you get some yummy honey and maybe some honey money, you get to overcome your fear of bees. its really just an all around…
caveat lector some readers have informed me that this essay comes across as overly elitist and self-congratulatory, and after a close reread i think i mostly agree. i made some egregious stylistic errors in choosing to base almost all the positive examples in my own experience and the negative examples in others. then i failed to properly scaffold my arguments about why economic viability is…
remember when the video game and film industries realized it would be safer to cannibalize proven IPs and the ratio of sequels/remasters/reboots/remakes climbed precipitously in the 21st century? is it just me or are musicians rereleasing the same song across multiple editions of albums just so it has more opportunities to show up on your discovery feed. the algorithm needs to figure out how to…
Why do we stereotype politicians as being liars? No, really! Why do dishonest, slimy, used car salesman types keep bubbling to the top of every electoral system? You would think that the most appealing candidates would be people of integrity, saints that radiate blinding virtue from their angelic face like a madonna. Instead we have… you know… these guys. Survivor: A Case Study A little over a…
look, i get it. if the murderer with the axe showed up at your door and asked where your friend is, you don’t wanna tell him, i get it. but in a locker room, the ethical code has gotta be the formulation of universal law . every time you want to do something, ask yourself “wait, would the locker room become completely unusable if everybody did this?” i dont care if your locker room behavior grants…
I: A Game It was one of those summer dusks you dreamed of in the winter. Perfectly cool and still and golden, the sun just hovering over the horizon, the lamps already lit in anticipation of the coming dark. A perfect evening to play some cards. Pyotr hurriedly wiped his wrinkled hands against his shirt as he scrambled up the riverbank, a pewter cup stuffed under his arm. The plates and cups and…
im a live and let live gym guy, you know? i wont, like, ask you how many sets you have left on the squat rack and then awkwardly hover waiting for you to finish. but dont you ever let me catch you doing one of these.
If you get into the habit of reading blogs—as I so foolishly have—you’re going to be bombarded with a lot of well-reasoned and highly articulate worldviews that are fundamentally incompatible . The first mistake any novice ideologue makes is denying that their intellectual opponents have any point whatsoever. Trapped in the arguments as soldiers mindset, we cannot display weakness by ever yielding…
I remember the first time I was ever the victim of a crime. I was around 14. I had forgotten to bring a lock to the rec center that day. As usual I was swimming with a bunch of girls (my sisters) so I had nobody to share a locker with. I trusted that my locker would be lost in the mass of closed unoccupied lockers and left my stuff unlocked. When I returned wet and shivering, my wallet had been…
You should learn vim. Many a novice programmer has experienced the flash of panic that comes when you pull changes in from your remote while you also have local commits. This little dialogue pops up, asking you to enter a commit message to explain the merge. The reason this is one of the most universally traumatizing experiences for newbies is a confluence of two things: the remote needs to have…
so why does the great war get to be called “world war i” if every important engagement happened in a few tiny slivers of europe and the middle east? seems a little silly when you compare it to the truly global scale of world war ii. go back to calling it “the great war” and call the second one “the world war” , implying there will be no sequel.
my wife has been stuck deep in the postgame of pokemon heartgold for the last week or two, after a short 5-year break from all video games. for the longest time pokemon’s enduring popularity among adults hasn’t made sense to me. i was thinking of it like a linear adventure game, and its a very poor one. it has an uncompelling narrative and really terrible pacing. watching her set goals and make…
It’s a bitter pill to swallow. Nothing lasts forever . Everything must change and pass away . Things cannot stay the same . Guess what else can’t stay the same? Change itself . I see a lot of pro-progress techno-optimist folks high-fiving about our rosy future. The rate we are innovating at is unprecedented. When you graph the wealth of humanity over time you have to start at the Second Industrial…
We all remember the core conceit of the Prisoner’s Dilemma : defecting is advantageous for the individual, but cooperating is advantageous for the collective. In iterated games, strategies that incentivize the maximum amount of cooperation through a mixture of punishments and rewards are the ones that win. Since you make everyone’s lives better by cooperating, I wouldn’t hesitate to say you need…
Our generation (the sociologists, bereft of creativity as always, designated us "Gen Z". Like Gen Y before us, we rebelled against such a derivative appellation but we did it the only way we knew how: by becoming even more self-referential and riffing on "Boomer" as well!) grew up on the internet (though not quite to the extent of Gen Alpha!) and we have developed a certain vocabulary around…
At risk of sounding like a broken record, I must remind you that we live in the Information Age . It has transformed every aspect of life across the world, but especially in the West where much of our industry and manufacturing have given way to knowledge work. The most visible economic sector of our brave new world is media . It’s what we spend much of our time looking at and talking about, after…
the castro/mission balance patch has landed, and there are some welcome changes. the sanchez and market intersection has been nerfed, rendering the left turn strategy entirely unviable. hopefully we’ll finally see more players utilizing 15th for their routing.
there’s always a percentage of people participating in any sport who aren’t there for the love of the game but rather to be seen doing it. for some reason my gut tells me that this percentage is quite high for pool. it’s not a very stimulating game but you look cool and dangerous while you’re playing it.
why do so many moderators on irc act grumpy when people are using their chat platform to chat. im attracted by the elegance of the protocol and driven away by their bad vibes. discord may be full of weirdos but at least they want to connect.
guys i think i permanently damaged both of my knees by running full tilt down a san francisco hill to get to the post office before it closed. how was evolution able to produce both the mighty frontal cortex and the troublesome ACL?
look at my cat
it’s kind of like if twitter only had one user and he was really cool
In this essay I’m going to cover three main topics: The economics of internet software > Information addiction can degrade your life, but going cold turkey is no longer an option > The pragmatist’s guide to having your cake and eating it too > If you don’t need to convincing that you’re having your lifeforce sucked dry by platforms, then skip straight to section 3. Over the last decade you may…