On the Stack: Explaining my thesis in Magic: the Gathering terms

I'm defending my master's thesis on Thursday. I'm terribly nervous some of the time, and terribly confident at other times. The time I was most confident was right after I gave a practice talk a couple days ago, and I'm taking that as a good sign.

Today I came up with a wonderful way to explain the aspect of language that I write about in my thesis--except I can't use it in my defense, because the only person in the room who'll know what I'm talking about is my boyfriend, and that's because it's an analogy to Magic: the Gathering.

Here's how casting a spell works in Magic: you declare that you are casting the spell, you tap the amount of mana required to cast the spell, and you show the card representing the spell to your opponent. The spell goes on the stack, giving your opponent an opportunity to respond. If everything goes according to plan, the spell resolves and its effects happen.

The declaration that you are casting a spell is what linguists call a speech act or a performative act. By saying the words, you are doing performing the action the words describe. Other speech acts include requesting, promising, voting, asserting, and apologizing. (These five represent the five categories I sort speech acts into in my thesis. I think, but am not sure, that casting a spell in Magic is most like asserting. It could be like voting.)

All the things that make casting the spell go smoothly--having the card in your hand, having the right amount of mana available to tap, your opponent not countering or redirecting it--are the felicity conditions of the speech act. Different unmet felicity conditions have different effects on how the spell/speech act fails to resolve. If you don't have the card, or don't have the mana, the act can't be performed. The parts you've tried to do get undone, and you may get a warning from a judge if you're playing in a tournament. If your opponent counters your spell, the spell is cast, but has unintended effects: you and your opponent have each moved one card from your hand to your graveyard. (There are other ways spells can fail, but these are the most common.)

Regular non-game-related speech acts work the same way. If you try to declare two people married, but you aren't presiding over a wedding, either nothing happens or someone gets mad at you. If you make a bet, but no one accepts it, the bet doesn't happen.

These are the basics of what speech acts are and how they work. Hat tip to How to Do Things With Words, a collection of lectures by J.L. Austin published in 1962 in which he figures out all this stuff and more. If you want to know more about my thesis, what I actually do with the speech acts, and what politeness has to do with any of this, I'd appreciate it if you commented on this post or sent me a tweet.

On Books #2: Casino Royale (spoilers)

I bought Casino Royale, the first James Bond novel, at a used bookstore yesterday, thinking it would be a nice brain-free read. Then I got a third of the way into it, and realized it was making me think. Ian Fleming is a terrible writer, but he's good at making himself seem like a decent writer. He arranges words so that they flow remarkably well, even while conveying racist, sexist, or ableist sentiments, or saying literally nothing in a half-page paragraph.

It did have moments that caught my eye in a positive way, particularly when Bond doesn't act like the ultimate macho that popular culture thinks he is. Like when the two assassins sent after him get blown up by their own bomb, and turn into a graphically described rain of gore, he struggles not to throw up where the average Call of Duty player character wouldn't even blink. And then towards the end, when he's in the hospital recovering from repeated groin attacks, he starts to have second thoughts about the whole spy thing and produces a brilliant paragraph or two about how political attitudes change over time.

I was all set to write about how this book was occasionally clever by accident, and to relate the part about politics to the stupid and scary things that have been happening recently in the UK. Then I read the last chapter, and Casino Royale abruptly turned into A Farewell to Arms.

Bond falls in love with the capable-in-spite-of-sexism female spy. Then she starts getting shifty and stops trusting him. Things get better briefly, and then out of nowhere she commits suicide. The note she leaves reveals that she was a Soviet double agent and her boss had sent someone looking for her. Bond calls MI6 headquarters and reports that "the bitch is dead."

If you've read Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (I did in high school and have not forgiven the teacher who assigned it), you'll be familiar with this kind of ending. The Lieutenant falls in love with a woman, gets her pregnant, and then loses all capacity for emotion when she betrays him by dying in childbirth. I can just see these two men walking away from their respective duties to society in Hemingway's famous rain, stopping only to make eye contact and share a totally anachronistic fist bump before continuing on their separate ways to become the heartless machos that popular culture thinks they are.

Rating: I read the whole thing, and then threw it at the wall.

On Self-Serve Frozen Yogurt

I first became aware of self-serve frozen yogurt about six years ago, when I moved into a University of Pittsburgh undergrad dorm with a Razzy Fresh next door. For a brief moment I thought it would fill the niche left in popular culture and teenage life by the death of the soda fountain some four decades earlier. Not only did I not see that happen, I could swear there was a competitor right around the corner. Berry something? Not Pink Berry, that was nowhere near me, I learned it existed months later from a Vlogbrothers video. But I recognized it from the photo in the video: Pink Berry was a Razzy Fresh.

That’s the thing about these frozen yogurt places: they all have different names, but Pink Berry and Pitt’s two Razzy Freshes and the Yeti Yogurt on the SFU campus, and that one in my hometown whose name I can’t remember, are all the same place, with the same decor (except for the mascots) and the same procedure: you walk down the buffet line with a waxed cardboard bowl, taking whatever soft serve flavors suit your fancy, topping with toppings, and paying by weight. They make no attempt to differentiate themselves, and they might as well be owned by the same people.

(Side note: the Wikipedia page on Pink Berry mentions none of the other frozen yogurt companies. Razzy Fresh doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. Maybe they’re all clones of each other.)

A new one of these yogurt clones just opened in the SFU food court, and I went there today after running some errands to check it out. It’s called Menchie’s, and in spite of the Yiddishkeit appeal of its name it’s just Yeti Yogurt with fewer options. (They even have the same spoon supplier.) They insisted I take a loyalty card; it will probably become yet another Plastic Age artifact in the stratified clutter of my desk.

But here's what made me think, walking home with mascot-topped spoon in hand: the amount of frozen yogurt I can eat comfortably in one sitting barely covers the bottom of the bowl--that is, of the standard smallest size of bowl used by all of these frozen yogurt places. I usually take more, but my limit is around $6 of yogurt and toppings, around half the volume of the bowl, and it still always looks like I've taken hardly any and could do with just a little more.

That's the thing about these places. They're pink and green temples of consumerism, designed to gently coerce you into overindulging with their gigantic bowls, clearly defined path from yogurt to chocolates to sauce, and signs all over the walls assuring you that this is healthier than real ice cream and can be dairy, nut, and gluten free if you so desire. Really, the best way to get your money's worth out of self-serve frozen yogurt is to put on your game face and ignore, or actively reject, all the cues it gives you. Walk up and down the line of soft serve nozzles and pick one or two flavors before you even take a bowl. Scout the toppings the same way. Know how much you can eat, and when it looks small, remind yourself that it's because the bowls are too big. You might even spend less than five dollars this way, and you won't have to choose between eating too many calories and wasting food.

And don't take the loyalty card, no matter how earnest the cashier is about it. I'm not great at that one.

On Election Season

The student government elections at my university are next week, so it's been campaign poster season for the last two weeks. I generally ignore them, since all the candidates are undergrads and the last time I was affected by university policy was last summer when the teaching assistants' union went on strike to end the three years they'd been without a contract.

Today, though, I saw a new poster that gave me pause. It reminded its reader that last fall, the student body had voted to approve construction of a new student union and sports stadium. Four hundred and thirty-seven students had voted for this...out of an undergraduate body of over fifty thousand students. Letting under two percent of students approve a multi-million-dollar project that would add hundreds of dollars per student to future tuition was the opposite of democracy, this poster argued. Vote for the person who wrote me, it boasted, and he will ensure greater oversight in the future.

My first response to this was "you're gonna need that stadium, to get fifty thousand kids into one meeting." Then, "how else would you do it? Email vote? But how many of these students would even read that email, let alone vote?" Probably that same less than two percent. Then I started thinking about low voter turnout in general. Four hundred and thirty-seven is a low enough number to be undemocratic, but a big enough one to make any potential four hundred and thirty-eighth voter worry that their vote doesn't matter. And good intentions count for nothing in either case. I'd decided who I was going to vote for in my state primary. But it came and went, and Hillary won handily, and my absentee ballot never showed up. Would my vote have counted? I can't know for sure. But now it certainly won't.

I could easily turn this into a rant about the transparent racist- and classist-ness of certain states' recently passed voter ID laws. Feel free to do that in the comments. But that's not where my thoughts went on my walk home from office hours today.

Where my thoughts went next was, "Who the hell gives final approval power on a project this big to undergraduates?"

Anyone got an answer to that, let me know.

On Writing #1

I have trouble starting things. Writing essays, going to a club meeting for the first time, you name it. There are also a lot of things I have trouble going back to. Clubs, especially if I didn't feel totally at home the first time. Video games. Most relevantly, my master's thesis, which I'm supposed to be spending at least fifty percent of my time writing. I've just got this psychological barrier that makes Sitting Down And Doing anxiety-inducingly difficult.

Now, about that thesis. I used to think I got my best writing done in the morning. Now, though, my mornings look like this:

• Wake up
• Make sure my boyfriend is awake and coming up for breakfast
• Breakfast
• Shoo boyfriend out the door so he gets to class on time
• Read blogs and webcomics and catch up on Youtube subscriptions

Not exactly conducive to paragraph-making. And when I clear all that away, usually after lunch, and sit down and say "okay, now you're going to work on your thesis," I often don't have a good idea of what I want to say about my topic.

That's the bad news. The good news is something I discovered recently, and which a quick scroll through Tumblr confirms is universal: I'm full of ideas while walking from my dorm to my office or the grocery store and back, and right before I fall asleep, and after mindfulness class, and sometimes when I'm in the shower. At all those times, I know exactly what I want to say, at the part of the thesis that is currently on my mind, in nearly-perfectly-formed sentences.

Thank G-d for Google Drive. When that perfect sentence bubbles up out of my subconscious, I can open a document on my smartphone and write it down so it doesn't float away again. I can even edit it so it sounds better, something impossible on even last century's best dictaphones. And once I've gotten everything in my head out onto virtual paper, I can save it to the cloud and forget about it until I have my laptop in front of me again and can just copy and paste it into my thesis and add citations and anything else it needs.

Plato is said to have worried that writing would decrease the power of the human memory as it became more and more popular as an information storage method. I'm not going to tell him he was right or wrong, but I'm glad I have an extra brain in my pocket.

Tell me about your efficient-writing strategies. Maybe some of them will help me finish my thesis on time.

On Eating Healthy

About two weeks ago I went to the doctor and discovered that my weight was twenty pounds above where I thought it was. (I do not own a bathroom scale, lest I become obsessed with the numbers it assigns to me.) This was a bit of a shock, and I resolved immediately to eat healthier, climb more stairs, and lose those extra pounds. (It also came with realizations like "maybe that's why half my jeans don't fit." Though the expensive ones probably also shrank in the wash.)

The core of my strategy was my mother's tried-and-true healthy eating method: Lettuce as a Delivery Vehicle. I resolved to do partly as she does and eat salads for lunch instead of sandwiches. After two weeks of this, here are the results:

1. Salads got boring. I cannot eat lettuce every day, not even with green onions and sandwich meat on top. I am sick of salad the way I got sick of sandwiches. Also, bagged lettuce goes bad after about three days unsealed in the fridge.
2. I'm learning to take advantage of everything in my kitchen and have added stir-frying to my repertoire. I can do this because I am a social science grad student with a fairly open schedule; before this, I've always been much busier around the lunch hour.
3. Exchanging sandwiches for salads isn't the only change I've made to my eating--in fact, it's been much less productive than simply not eating snacks. A lot of that weight probably came from all the extra chips and chocolate I've eaten over the last six months. Giving up snacks has been surprisingly easy--I just don't buy them, and then I leave what I do have on the other side of the room so I'm too lazy to get up and eat them.
4. Not snacking has led to a couple of interesting discoveries:
4a. There's a difference between being hungry and just having a bored stomach. These last two weeks have made me significantly better at making that distinction, and at stopping eating when I'm full. Leftovers can always go in tomorrow's stir fry.
4b. Sometimes being thirsty feels like being hungry. Figuring out the difference will not only help me cut calories, but also stay better hydrated.
5. There are some vegetables you can add to just about any meal to improve it. Green onions especially.

This is the equilibrium I've reached in terms of food. Almost no snacks, more water, more vegetables, smaller portions of more varied meals. I think I can do it.

As for the climbing of more stairs...well, I've stopped taking escalators at the train station, unless I've climbed a hill to get there and my legs have noped out. And I'm going to try spinning more yarn; I use a drop spindle, which means I have to stand up to spin, which means I'll be spending less time sitting.

I am not on a diet. Thinking about it as a diet isn't helpful. I realized this yesterday while "cheating on my diet" with lunch-truck poutine. (Poutine is delicious, and can be made more delicious with the addition of green onions.) In fact, thinking of what I'm doing as a diet is counterproductive, since diets are generally presented as strict sets of rules that you're going to break all the time and then wonder why they didn't work. What I'm doing feels more like a mindfulness exercise, and it's something I've settled on on my own, not because I was told to do it. Maybe I should buy a scale, to see if the exercise is actually working; but right now, I feel pretty good about my choices and the steps I took to get to them.

On Deciphering Fandom Inside Jokes

All groups of people who consider themselves communities have inside jokes that are difficult, if not impossible, to understand if you're not a member of that community. Sometimes it's even hard to figure out a joke if you're in the community--for example, to understand the Cerulean Revolution that happened last winter on Tumblr, you need some knowledge of the system of colleges in the Gallifreyan Academy which never shows up in Doctor Who itself and is only described in detail in a couple of tie-in novels that most Doctor Who fans either have never heard of or consider noncanon.

Others can be parsed with a little bit of detective work. This post is about one of those.

I am currently a big fan of BC-based Internet comedy group Loading Ready Run, which anyone reading my blog really should go check out. (Here is one of my favorite videos of theirs.) They do a variety of video and audio formats, including podcasts, a sitcom, and a couple different types of short comedy. The short comedy includes Crapshots, which run under a minute and usually cover a single joke.

Among the many themes of Crapshots is Magic: The Gathering, a fantasy trading card game which most of the LRR cast are big fans of. I became interested in Magic by watching LRR videos about it. This morning I was wasting time in their video archive and came across this Crapshot which had made no sense to me the first time I saw it. In the video, characters Alex and James are playing Magic, and they get into an extended back-and-forth about whether James is going to let Alex play a particular card. They each play a ridiculous number of cards as part of the argument, and when I first watched the video, I didn't know what any of them were.

I still don't know most of them. But I do have access to the official database of Magic cards, so I looked up each one. Here's what happened. (Magic players: I'm simplifying the card effects.)

• Alex summoned Storm Crow, a moderately weak creature.
• James responded with Daze, which counters a spell unless the person who played that spell pays one mana. This would cause Alex to discard Storm Crow.
• Instead of paying one mana (a low cost, all things considered), Alex responds with Negate, which counters any spell that doesn't summon a creature.
• They keep going back and forth playing counter-spell cards, including six of the same card (Force of Will). One of the cards James plays is Pact of Negation, which counters a spell but causes him to lose the game if he doesn't pay a mana cost at the start of his next turn.
• Finally, James runs out of counterspells (or maybe out of mana to cast them with) and lets all the spells that have been played resolve. Storm Crow stays in play.
• Alex ends his turn.
• James begins his turn, neglects to pay the cost for Pact of Negation, and plays Unsummon, which would put Storm Crow back into Alex's hand. Alex responds with another counterspell.

As I looked more closely at the cards and their effects, I realized there are quite a few jokes happening in this video. In order:

1. Alex and James make a huge deal about whether or not Alex can summon a creature that's not strong enough to be worth the huge deal. (And Alex could have avoided all this by paying only one mana!)
2. A friend of mine in the fandom suggested that part of the reason for this huge deal is that there's a running joke about Storm Crow being more powerful than it really is. (This is one of those inscrutable inside jokes that I don't expect to ever learn the full story of.)
3. James forgot to pay the cost on Pact of Negation. This means that he won the fight over Storm Crow, but lost the game immediately thereafter.

I'm not sure what else there is to say about this puzzle. It was fun to solve, and I feel smarter for it. Go watch some Loading Ready Run.

Edit: I showed this post to a friend who knows more about Magic than I do. Apparently joke 3 isn't actually there: James doesn't have to play the cost for Pact of Negation because, when the stack of spells resolved, all of Alex's spells negated all of James' spells. The explanation of this made my head spin. Oh well, at least I figured out the Storm Crow part.