Greg Sanders

Blood on the Clocktower Review

The town storyteller has been found dead in this twist on social deduction games. Use your powers to root out the identity of the demon or hide your villainy. Even if your character dies you can still talk and retain one last vote as a ghost.

Yesterday was my first time playing Blood on the Clocktower, all four times as the game’s storyteller. This party game works similar to Werewolf or Mafia. In those two games there are alternating day and night turns: a small evil team secretly chooses a player’s characters to die at night, and during the day all the players vote to execute a player’s character they think is on the evil team.

Turning to Blood on the Clocktower specifically, the good team must kill the demon that leads the evil team to win. As in many of these games each player has a hidden role, in addition to being good or evil, that may grant helpful powers or unhelpful abilities.For example, the Empath knows the number of adjacent evil characters, while the Drunk’s player believes they have a different role but is in actuality powerless and being passed misinformation.

The storyteller is like a gamemaster in RPGs and is a key differentiator for Blood on the Clocktower from other social deduction games. They are empowered to shape the scenario to maximize in-character drama and out of character fun. So for example, the aforementioned Drunk player might have drawn the token for the Inspector and believe they know one of two players has the role of a specific evil minion. But the Storyteller is operating with full information and instead points to two innocent players chosen to seed an interesting conflict.

Another key change to the game is that players with dead characters retain the ability to speak in the game and hold a single last vote they can cast from beyond the grave. I think this is a pretty good fix to the classic problem of player elimination, because saving your vote for a pivotal decision could turn the tide and win the day for good or evil.

We played four games. The first two had 11-12 players and ended in climatic last days before team evil clinched the victory by reducing the number of living characters to two. The third and fourth games had 8 players and both had victories by the good side, once with a clever deduction by the Slayer who used a once per game ability to eliminate the demon and then once with good taking a fairly early lead and rolling on to victory. There was also some first day weirdness. I made a few rule mistakes with thankfully minor consequences as well as a few judgments that I regret because, while they complied with the rules, they were not the most fun choices.

On the balance, the game lived up to the hype for me. My mistakes aside, most people had fun, and I greatly preferred it to other social deduction games I’ve played. Being the storyteller was a different experience than playing, but came with the delightful dramatic irony of knowing who is lying and the being able to partially see through their tactics. The game also provides a fair amount of guidance on how the storyteller should use both the rules and social engineering to increase the odds that a good time will be had by all and avoid the bullying or other unpleasant manipulative tactics that social deduction games can inadvertently encourage. I specifically liked the traveler roles, which can be added for a late arriving player or be given to a player that may need to leave early without disrupting the game.

My pleasure comes with a few caveats:

Critique: The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis (Chapter 3)

Lewis is consistent in arguing that greater things build from lesser, so affection, the first of the four human loves he considers, is basic but no less important for that (for an introduction to this project, see the prior post).

Affection for Lewis is shaped by persistence, familiarity, and roles. Childhood friends, family members, pets, schoolmates, and beloved nurses or teachers are all listed as examples.

This warm comfortableness, this satisfaction in being together, takes in all sorts of objects. It is indeed the least discriminating of loves. . . But almost anyone can become an object of Affection; the ugly; the stupid; even the exasperating. . . It ignores barriers of age, sex, class, and education.

He then proceeds to cite the four animal friends in the Wind in the Willows as examples of “the amazing heterogeneity of possible between those bound by affection.” 

Co-reader Monica was charmed by one particular passage that notes how affection is enhanced by being different from the classic conception of soul mates or the like:

Made for us? Thank God, no. They are themselves, odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed.

The familiarity that is its basis can also be its limitation. Affection can be tied to the person as we came to know them, good and ill, just as one’s sense of someone’s height may be set by how they stood out when we first met them and not their stature in maturity. Even a change for the better may be regretted. The gift-love of affection is what we can offer and not necessarily what the other person needs. In many cases, for parents and teachers in particular, “the proper aim of giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer needs our gift. . . Thus a heavy task is laid upon this Gift-Love. It must work towards its own abdication.”

Finally, the chapter makes an interesting distinction between spiritual health and mental health:

But, greed, ego-ism, self-deception, and self-pity are not unnatural or abnormal in the same sense as astigmatism or a floating kidney. For who, in Heaven's name, would describe as natural or normal the man from whom these failings were wholly absent?

So, how can affection grow into something more dynamic? The next love, friendship, will explore that, but its definitions are far thornier. Nonetheless, I was intrigued by Lewis’s strengths and failings and this next chapter is also the one that justifies the critique. 

Image Source: Nisa yeh on Flickr, used under a creative commons language.

Critique: The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis (Chapters 1&2)

This is a fascinating and sometimes frustrating book. Lewis is writing with a range of Christian premises baked in through, which is not a problem for me but will turn off some readers. Unfortunately, the price of admittance also includes a few pages of defensive homophobic writing that is not simply wrong in my view, but fails to meet a standard of respect that I expect from modern social conservative writers I disagree with but find worth reading. I won’t bother to engage that section; however, I think Lewis also too frequently neglects the distaff portion of his audience and exhibits a failure of curiosity about classical female friendship that I think leaves his chapter on friendship incomplete and in one portion badly undercuts his analysis. This is all the more vexing as I’ve recently been reading Until We Have Faces, where he got some aspects of those friendships right years before he wrote this book. With that said I found Lewis an insightful writer, witty without being flashy and too wise to settle for most easy answers. Finally, I had the delightful experience of reading along with Kate and Monica; anything clever or insightful likely drew inspiration from one of them but any thoughts that fall flat I claim full responsibility.

He begins with a charming introduction that lays out his idea of need-love and gift-love. The former referring to the pull side of love for exemplified by infants with gift love being a range of acts of compassion and affection graciously shared even when full reciprocity is not possible. Most connections can involve both flowing both ways. Initially he was planning to focus more on this dichotomy but he found it introduced complication after complication. He sets of these concepts well and disabuses readers of the notion that there’s anything to be desired by the absence of a need for love.

The next chapter looks at liking and loves for the sub-human loves. Of a multitude of possible examples, he chooses nature and country. One interesting observation is that those most expert in a topic are not always those that you might wish to spend one’s time with; a horticulturalist may be so caught up in interesting plants as to distract from a larger walk, which is doubtless a charge that can be prosecuted against me on some of my favored topics. In considering patriotism, he identifies three key ingredients. First is love of home, the place and the way of life which includes this interesting passage.

Note that at its largest this is, for us, a love of England, Wales, Scotland, or Ulster, Only foreigners and politicians talk of ‘Britain’. Kipling;s ‘I do not love my empire’s foes strikes a ludicrously false note. My empire!

Lewis argues that any love (save that of God) can become a demon if overly elevated but praises the love of home and argues it should be highly compatible with the understanding that others love their own home in much the same way. His second ingredient is an attitude to the country’s past. He’s more skeptical of this, noting rightly that “the actual history of every country is full of shabby and even shameful doing. The heroic stories, if taken to be typical, give a false impression of it and are often themselves open to serious historical criticism.” He suggests that for this love the past is best engaged as a saga, ideally out of school, and with emphasis on inspiration and not to confuse it with textbook fact.

He then turns to the more dangerous ingredients, the third is a belief that one’s own country is better than all others.  This can lead to believing one’s nation has special rights and duties. Lewis is hardly an ardent anti-colonialist here, but notes “our habit of talking as if England’s motives for acquiring an empire (or any youngster's motives for seeking a job in he Indian Civil Service) has been mainly altruistic has nauseated the world.” That is an expression of duty and those that emphasize rights over duties can be even worse. He goes on to briefly critique the potential excesses of overly associating one nation’s cause with righteousness, in ways that fit with standard realist critiques of idealism.

I would be interested, and can perhaps find elsewhere, a more direct discussion by Lewis of American patriotism. His third and fourth ingredients surely show skepticism of American exceptionalism. That said, I do think creedal civic nationalism better fits in the first two category and can be far more welcoming to the immigrant and binding to a larger community than a love of home alone. Similar to the ingredient of one’s nations stories, I think creedal commitments are healthiest when seen as aspirational and that one’s country has often failed to live up to them even if we hope to have progressed closer. Having recently listened to a discussion of David Campbell’s Writing Security, I’d say Lewis does not just describe but constructs a form of patriotism here that does not align with how I’d describe and construct it as an American. However, I like his normative evaluation here and I find it useful in considering mine own love of country and its risks.

My next post in this series will look at the first of his four loves - affection - before the main event, my argument that Lewis understands friendship too narrowly by focusing on only a single dimension.

Review: No Such Thing as an Easy Job

Happily, this novel by Kikuko Tsumura is an easy read. I’d picked it up for the Argo’s Japan Book Club and the sales copy succinctly lays out the premise:

A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: it is close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing, and ideally, very little thinking.

The book tells the tale of five jobs, each weird, none well paying, though some coming with health insurance. The variety is key: none of the jobs outstayed their welcome for me and the book stuck the landing in drawing out to look at the protagonist's larger life and why she may have been seeking those easy jobs. On the whole a gentle read, not hugely incisive nor revolutionary but feeling true to life, albeit a heightened and sometimes magical version of it. That said, some passages still have bite:

‘It says here that you cited personal reasons as grounds for leaving.’

‘That’s right.’

I’d read on the internet that it was okay to cite ‘personal reasons’ for a whole host of circumstances. Even when submitting a full-blown resignation, the article informed, good old ‘personal reasons’ would see you through a majority of cases. Whether you’d had a boss who’d made barbed comments about you at a half-hourly rate, or you’d been blamed for the disappearance of a document mentioned on the job sheet that had never existed in the first place, or your colleagues had spread horrible rumors about you, or you’d been held responsible for ruining a business deal tat had fallen through after you’d refused to go drinking with some gyt at the client company – whatever your particular situation might be, ‘personal reasons’ was your man.

And yet, my ‘personal reasons’ didn’t seem to be landing too well with Mrs Masakado.

I’ll weakly recommend the book; it delivers on the concept and is a brisk read, which is certainly not guaranteed in a meditation on burnout. That said I was just as glad to have gotten it from the library, as I don’t think I’ll need to reread and don’t have anyone whose hands I think I’ll be pressing it into.

But why is there no such thing as an easy job? For that you’ll have to read past the spoiler cut.

Review: Rights of the Reader

Daniel Pennac's Rights of the Reader was recommended to me in part because I’ve been dissatisfied with the pace of my reading for some time. I found it an interesting exploration of why young people in particular may be alienated from reading and how they might be wooed back:

You can't make someone read. Just as you can't make them fall in love or dream. . . .
You can try of course. "Go on, love me!" "Dream!" "Read! Read! Read, goddamit I'm telling you to read!" 'Go to your room and read!"
What happens next?
Nothing

So, I'm the sort of weirdo that was not at all alienated by how we typically do English classes. I did sometimes run behind: I embarrassingly faked my way through To Kill a Mockingbird, not because I was blocked directly; I'd just fallen behind and lost track of the assignment.

But one of my fondest memories of English classes, I believe 9th grade, was to write a more critical book review. I'd initially suggested a Xanth book and my teacher, kindly but wisely, suggested I could find something more demanding. I went with the adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Film adaptation novels are hardly the highlight of sci fi canon but it was still a good moment for looking at some pulp more critically.

But while I don't even recall my line of argument in my essay, I remember my excitement at discovering compilations of critical reviews. People deeply engaging with texts, over thinking in their way, but in polished form.

Pennac’s focus is elsewhere. He convincingly argues that we should be reading aloud more when cultivating a love a reading. He argues said love can be lost when going from reading to kids to "and now you can read on your own, get on with it." He tells stories of engaging the words rather than making it an analytical assignment. He quotes Flannery O'Connor:

If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction.

I feel like the book is missing a typology of different and not mutually exclusive reasons people enjoy reading, though I think the book does well to focus on those most alienated, even if this limits the degree it speaks to my own reading rather than that of younger people I hope to encourage.

After the cut, I’ll cover his 10 rights and how I’d modify them for what I want for myself.

Contemplating a world disrupted by AI

I’ve been reading a lot and playing around a little with ChatGTP and Bing, guided by some helpful guest speakers at work. On the whole, I’m a curmudgeon, though not for reasons related to my sci-fi fandom or comp sci degree. Instead, I am leery as a reader because I do think these large language models (LLM) value answers but not thoughtful or factually correct writing. More selfishly I’m also risk averse and setting aside larger fears I do think it will be disruptive to my  field and others reliant on writing.

But there’s no running from automation. I think this effect will be mitigated by real constraints on time to read. Quality and trustworthy writing is more rewarding for readers at the same time cost, though I imagine this will strengthen winner take all dynamics and the importance of brands as the internet faces an ever growing tide of copycat mass-produced writing.

My biggest challenge as a scholar is the way LLM default to breaking the chain of custody for primary sources and ideas. This is a bit like wanting to identify the source tree for an individual bite of apple sauce, though Bing at least is experimenting in being able to cite. I think Tim Hickson does a good job of unpacking a range of issues in the AI art domain. One point that stood out for me is that Adobe’s generative art program and the Stable Diffusion music generator are explicitly limited to sources where they have rights due to public domain or arrangements with creators.

The scholarly dynamics for research and theory are different from art, although there are elements of both thinking and craft to unpack. I am glad not to be a teacher in this environment, because I find Paul Musgrave and Alan Jacob’s arguments persuasive and depressing. At the same time, I do think Dan Nexon is right to experiment with what the tools can and can’t do as well as thinking about how the demand for writers will change in each field.

So what are the opportunities and where does it add the most value? Starting with the big picture, there’s already more written material produced constantly than any of us will ever have a chance to read and moreover writing is a favored form of human expression that people make sacrifices to engage in. Same for visual arts and music. That said, customization is key; there are lots of places where people want middling writing or art: all sorts of promotional materials, a summary which zeroes in on a certain element of a large corpus of writing, a picture of your roleplaying game character. Quality is nice in these cases but a 33 percent solution at your finger tips could greatly increase demand.

In my work, I see three areas that are particularly promising:

• Low grade translation to identify promising documents. Credit to my colleague Alexander for this idea, but searching and summarizing documents with low fidelity can help us identify where to engage humans for high fidelity work. Timothy Lee recently wrote on how AI is changing the field of translation.
• Supervised categorization is not new to LLM, but may ease the utilization of large text fields in the process. This may enable myself and colleagues to put more work into defining taxonomies and adjudicating border cases and less work on easy but numerous calls.
• Search and summary within a particular corpus, in particular budget and oversight reports or policy documents or contract descriptions. Here AI may be able to do some scouting and I could then use that to inform my subsequent engagement with the primary sources.

All three cases involve existing applications of machine learning and other software tools. That said, open source tools such as those provided by the creepily named HuggingFace mean I can potentially be creating and refining my own tools rather than relying on third party services. But whether I make or buy I think these uses all help me engage primary sources rather than replacing my engagement.

So readers, is there anywhere you’re experimenting?

Review: Five Women who Loved Love, Ihara Saikaku

Five women Who Loved Love is written in a period of value transition in Japan. There is regular reference to ukiyo which the introduction notes can be translated as either the world of sadness (drawing on Buddhism) or the floating world. The later gets at both the glamor and the precariousness involved in the stories. The stories often felt like an intensification of chivalrous romances involved with breaking of the rules and death. But the chivalry analogy this is not quite right as the characters in the stories are largely townsfolk rather than samurai.  Moreover, the bustling and commercial seventeenth century Osaka is Ihara Saikaku’s home and townfolk are also thus a core audience.

I found the stories often frustrating, often with implicit social critiques that were quite funny but with an at times outright misogynist narrator adding unwelcome commentary on gender relations. As is my present habit I skipped the introductory essay, but in my case this had been a mistake. I’d been left wondering if there was a Tokugawa era version of the Hayes code: the characters can have their bawdy romances so long as they are punished. The end essay helpfully elaborated that the criminal code made affairs or running away with the daughter or sister, let alone wife, of someone of higher stature a capital crime. The five short stories in the book draw, to greatly varying degrees, on the names and sometimes highly dramatized stories of people who’d lived in the author’s era or a generation or two before. The transition to a new era was happening but strict social codes where very much a factor and the characters are often rebels who win some popular acclaim. Even without direct critique, Saikaku tells a story that criticizes these laws and may have skated the edge of what was safe to publish.

I found it most interesting as a cultural artifact, if an often troubling one. For all the death, there's not much graphic violence, though what the women feel forced to put up with is often deeply disturbing with two of the stories involving resigned "my reputation is ruined I may as well have an affair." As the introductory essay comments, the writing style is not novelistic and I found it difficult to get a strong sense of the characters of the leading women, especially at the moment of pivotal choices.

Some of the moralism from the narrator is fairly shocking to me, i.e. complaining about the disloyalty of widows who remarry rather than becoming nuns. That said, while this is a critique of women, he also notes it applies to the male lead in a story who accepts a new partner after tragically losing two pretty young men to sudden love interest death syndrome. The role of homosexuality in Japan in the book is not tied up with in moralism from Saikaku, and the stories show multiple instances including oaths of fidelity and a prominent role in the theater, which was often limited to males by regulation.

I think the audience that might most appreciate it would be those that are culturally curious about classical Japan and want to go deeper than the “oh, Japan” reaction and have a sense of cultural history in a light weight and fast paced set of alternatingly funny, tragic, and always somewhat problematic stories. I’ll close with a passage from the first passage of the first book that gets at the experience of reading these tales and their sometimes black humor. Content warning, blithe treatment of suicide:

Seijuro [just disowned] could only say, “It’s heart-rending,” and thought to himself that he would take his own life, if only Minakawa would not insist on joining him.

She guessed what he had in mind, and said: “You are thinking of taking your life. Alas, how foolish! For, however much I should like to say, ‘Take me with you,’ I still have attachments in this world and cannot. In my sort of work one’s heart belongs first to this man, then to that. Let us simply call our affair a thing of the past.” So saying, she rose and left him.

Crushed by theses unexpected words, Seijuro abandoned his plan of suicide, . “How fickle these whores are! Read any time to cast away old lovers.”

But as he rose in tears to leave, Minakawa came back clothed in garments of white, ready now to die, and clung desperately to him. “How can you live? Where will you go? Oh, now is the time to end it all!” she cried, pulling out a pair of knives.

Seijuro was almost speechless with delight to find his lover faithful after all…

Bird of North America, Urbanite Theater Sarasota, FL

Birds of North America is a two-person play about a father and daughter over a series of autumn bird watching sessions. The father is a staunch environmentalist and prides himself on a scientific mindset and the daughter finds her initial career doing copyediting for a conservative website he rather disapproves of.

The characters, played by Stephen Spencer and Denki Rongé, are both well realized and the bird watching does give a chance to track the world shifting around them. I think Denki, playing the daughter Caitlyn, in particular had a chance to show a lot of emotional range as she tried to maintain an often painful relationship and Stephen showed how John brought the same outlook when he was, by my politics, right and when he was sabotaging his own work or committing one of the most painful acts of mansplaining I’ve seen on stage. The Urbanite theater staging was evocative and had good sound design for the bird watching itself. I’ll definitely keep the Urbanite in mind in future trips. Spoilers after the cut.

Play: D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls

A business and scientific true crime story, Radium  Girls, a play by D.W. Gregory, tells the story of young female laborers who used glow-in-the-dark paint to illuminate watch dials. In the heady era of 1918 to 1922 in which the play is focused, radium goes from being hyped as a miracle cure-all to being increasingly recognized the source of the mysterious and horrific source of necrosis that leads to the death of the workers using it. (For a bit of context the play is different than the more fictionalized movie. I’m not sure how closely related it is to the book of the same name).

I had the chance to see the play twice in a high school production with a cousin of mine playing a six-fold role that included the vice president of the U.S. Radium Corporation and scientists on opposite sides of the dilemma. To commemorate the occasion, here’s what I found most interesting in the play.

The play effectively covers the way that profit incentive can compromise expertise. The U.S. Radium Corp ran studies, didn’t like the results and covered them up, and then found a different expert to give them cover. This is certainly not a new story, and as ever shows that trusting the scientific method cannot be the same as trusting individual scientists, as even greats like Madame Curie made terrible mistakes and experts with impressive credentials can be compromised. I think one thing the play does particularly successfully is looking at how people of means and credentials can lie to themselves with carefully chosen vocabulary. Payoffs to victims are a humanitarian gesture and not an admission of fault; payoffs to experts would be a consideration and not a bribe, and for legal and I’d suspect self-justification reasons constantly push back against any suggestion to the contrary. The staging I saw avoided cackling villains and showcased the lines people drew and those they transgressed.

The other strong point of the play for me was showing the costs of rallying public opinion to force change. The lead character ends up estranged from multiple relationships because she’s not taking easy buyouts that would ease her individual financial situation at the expense of the collective struggle. The New Jersey Consumer League leader is shown to have a self-promoting streak, but one in service of justified righteous outrage. That said, notably absent from the play was the labor movement, although it does mention that the jobs had comparatively high pay and recruitment from young women in a way that implied that the biggest limitation to their recruitment was the company’s reputation and not a limited supply of sufficiently skilled workers.

All-in-all, the play left me pondering what potential victims of my choices I was failing to look squarely at and what rationalizations and sanitary language I was employing to help me do so.

Review: Sputnik Sweetheart

This is my third book by renowned Japanese author Haruki Murakami. It’s an intimate tale of three people. Sumire is a college dropout and aspiring writer whose first love is Miu. It’s “an intense love, a veritable torando sweeping across the plains.” Miu is seventeen years older, disconcertingly close to my own age, and a married woman. The tale is told by narrator K, Sumire’s closest friend who shares a love of reading with her, crushes on her, and has a habit of entanglements with somewhat older women that are not strictly speaking single themselves.

That premise could easily go quite soapy, but that is not Murakami’s way.  Instead this is a character study of those three. The otherworldly aspects of this tale are not quick to arrive in a way that might surprise some readers of his other tales. Sumire is the one that stuck with most of us, both in her story and character and the poritons we read of her writing. Yes, this is a book about a writer that suffers from some writer’s block, but not one that bogs down in navel gazing or self-pity. All three characters land for me and the way Sumire grapples with a newfound queer identity and all three manage their role in society and the physical aspects of loves they cannot fully reciprocate proved fertile thematic ground.

At a well-paced 211 pages, I would recommend it to those who find the above appealing, but with three caveats. First, some male gaze is the price of entry. That could be written off to the narrator, but some of my fellow Argo Japan book club members did note that this comes up too when we’re hearing the tale of Sumire in a way that rang untrue. That part might not have bothered me - I’m part of the target audience for much of it - but YMMV and I think it muddies some of the thematic waters. Second, content warning for some sexually related trauma. I think it has a valuable role in the story, but combined with the first point may be off putting. And third, while the core plot resolves as much as one might reasonably expect for weird Japanese fiction, I think I would have been left unsatisfied without someone to talk about it with. To desire such is my default position, but my favorite of his tales I’ve read, Hard Boiled Wonderland, did not require company in chewing over the book to make it a fully satisfying meal for me.

Spoilers after the cut.