cynthia @cxli@scholar.social

"poetry, with its suggestion that time and pain can be ordered through language, strains to constrain suffering. it suggests, but rarely achieves, the redress we desire. language does not heal terror, and if it brings us closer to imagining the sufferer's experience, this too does not necessarily make us feel greater compassion but a desire for further sensation...."

and that formalism similarly has been weaponized against or rejected by confessional/personal poetry, often written by women/women of color. been thinking abt this a lot since i'm in a poetry class that's thinking about formalism and materialism and then also doing a research project thinking about the humanities/stem divide

oh i'm also thinking about noah wardrip-fruin's work on operational logics and how being like: no hypertext games _are_ formal, look at the linking/control/selection/resource/entity-state? logics at play in these games is super cool actually, since it pushes back against people who say that hypertext doesn't have "mechanics" or isn't formal enough

i just think OLs are neat

i really like formalism! i like the new critics approach of taking a work out of its context and focusing on what a text is *actually* saying! in games formalism i *like* having a vocabulary to think about mechanics and its relationship with player experience

and like, formalism isn't the only valid way to approach something and it's annoying to suggest that it's the end-all be-all of games studies. this is old games discourse but yeah

thinking about formalism (in the literary sense but also in videogame studies) and really annoyed by how games formalism has been eaten by critics who want to use it to define what a game is. like the question of "what's a game?" holds all the baggage of who has been allowed to make games and what games "should" be about

feels the same as people who dismiss the humanities for being "squishy" or "not rigorous" just bc it's not formal in a way they recognize

this book is BRUTAL (your computer is on fire, "coding is not empowerment" by janet abbate)

i've basically already done half the assigned readings and am also writing a research paper on a cs topic currently, so maybe i should just get credit for it directly??????

i think my college's cs department should let me take their senior seminar!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

are you ever casually reading something then get hit in the face with surprise michael mateas?

why do cs games studies people never seem to cite the games they're writing about in their papers?? just read one that was talking about celeste but didn't have the game in the bibliography....

the prof for this class told us that "students only see comments when there's a grade attached to them" and i beg to differ!

students only see comments when the grading ui you're using makes seeing comments easy, and on gradescope by default you see the autograder results, and comments are hidden behind a tab labeled "code" with no indication whatsoever that comments *exist*

i was today years old when i learned that gradescope has a tab that lets you see instructor comments!

are you ever casually reading something then get hit in the face with surprise ian bogost? this has happened to me today twice

so wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well

into a world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,

shoutouts ONLY to the guy who, at the end of the class where we read bartleby the scrivener, said very confusedly, "guys.... what if capitalism was bad?"

these are good poems!! https://www.fivesouth.net/post/more-americans-believe-they-ve-seen-a-ghost-than-a-trans-person-quars-poetica