Date: November 28th, 2005 7:43 PM Author: red heady dragon
No, I don't have any of those personality disorders; I have been evaluated. I have a mild streak of post-traumatic paranoia; paranoia != PPD, though, nor is paranoia one mental illness, but a trait of several.
Date: November 28th, 2005 7:47 PM Author: red heady dragon
The conflict could be totally nonviolent, with no human life lost. Yet the basic fact is: there will be massive winners and losers as some major part of our society is about to be destroyed. Will it be the property ideology, the market-fetish exclusivist luxurizers? Or will it be the idealistic, opensource pioneers of new multimedia and transmedia forms of communication and culture? The possibly creative and possibly destructive destruction will be monumental, and must happen as antagonists inexorably collide.
Date: November 28th, 2005 7:49 PM Author: red heady dragon
The standard deviation of relative scores over a game is 21. Therefore, we conclude that hand-luck contributes about (4.3/21)^2 = 4.2% of the variance, among roughly equal, intermediate players.
Which may sound prosaic, but it means that Ambition is 95.8% skill and strategy. Now, "strategy" is sometimes "luck", because the term as I use it refers both to intentional and incidental interactions of players' objectives; there is some "strategic luck" in Ambition but I knew that would be there. A game needs some uncertainty to be fun; in my opinion, strategic elements-- which a la Poker are part skill, part luck-- are a better source of said uncertainty than pure chance.) Aside from Duplicate Bridge (100% skill in theory; probably 95-98 in practice because you might play table X against an opponent who's really good at that type of hand) this may be unprecedented in this genre of card game.
For comparison, one game of Chess, if you randomize the white/black determination, is about 98% skill. Of course, for Chess (as we can't, in Ambition) we can consider the strategic elements to be "pure skill" because it's a 2-agent system. ("Strategy" is pure skill in 1- or 2-agent games, mix of skill & luck in 3+ player games.)
Sure, Poker converges to 100% skill over a lifetime, but very slowly on the micro scale (the variance is just insane; it's skill in the long long run). Besides, any mixed luck/skill game converges to 100% skill if iterated long enough (Rock, Paper, Scissors) but Ambition achieves this 95.8% in one sitting.
96% decisivity in one hour. Wow. That surprised me quite a bit.
Date: November 28th, 2005 7:54 PM Author: red heady dragon
So, I'm an attractive guy when I'm just standing still. I should be the envy of other men, right? No way. As soon as I lift a finger, I fuck up, I just utterly fuck up. When I'm just trying to have fun and ignore all that romantic crap, women come into my outer sphere like moths to a flame. I reach into that outer sphere to invite them to the inner sphere, because I know it'll take a long time before they come in on their own right. Bam! I start getting overly aggressive, then when she gets standoffish, I get insecure and needy and stupid and very unattractive. I do this "reach" 4 or 5 or 6 times, no success on any, each time more insecure and angry than the last. On the last "reach", I might even get really stupid/insecure and explode in front of the girl, which doesn't set things up well for the next cycle. After the last "reach", there aren't any girls attracted to me. I survey the wreckage, get angry about my fuckups, and get really depressed and inward for ~5 days. As I undizzy and come back to normal life, then I start being attractive (too much for my own good) again and the cycle renews. I've traced this and it's about a 20 to 40-day cycle, usually close to the 20. With only 5 of those days in the "spring" (above base-level and rising) part, I just don't get much time to be at my best. Fuck this 20-day man-period. Fuck it.
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:07 PM Author: red heady dragon
Part of why I'm squabbling and head-casey right now is because I'm on the outskirts of the most hellish weeks of my life, and I'm overwhelmed beyond description. Overwhelmed by what?
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:01 PM Author: irate resort
My girlfriend and I have a pretty good sex life, but sometimes it feels like we have fallen into a rut (no pun intended, lol). Can you suggest some tips that will help us "kick it up a notch" in the bedroom?
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:03 PM Author: red heady dragon
I don't want to live the player lifestyle, which I find abhorrent and immature, but I want that capability. I'd rather have 1000 women attracted to me per year than 10 because, statistically, I could expect to find my ideal relationship 100 times faster.
Carleton aside, I actually seem to do better than the average male at attracting women, and I still don't attract women with enough frequency to find the type of relationship I want. I wonder how average or below-average people do it.
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:04 PM Author: red heady dragon
At this point, not to divert the conversation so abruptly, but I don't want to discuss this anymore. While I use economic metaphors to describe romantic activity at Carleton, economics really doesn't suffice-- it's not about trade of goods and services or currencies or the menas of production-- it's distributive politics. For whatever reason, I have a bizarre fascination-- academic more than personal-- with said distributive politics. Just as I find it bizarre that another person might be interested in something as specialized as "The Effects of Inflation on Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, circa 1975", I, for whatever reason, have my own unusual academic fixation: I take interest in analysis of the "Distributive Politics of Romantic Activity at Carleton, circa 2004".
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:06 PM Author: red heady dragon
The resulting trick, 6♣-A♠-K♣-K♠, was worth 29 points, the greatest total possible. There are six possible 29-point tricks, but this was the highest-ranking of them, making it the single most prestigious trick possible. I took no others that round, and still struck (the split was 29-26-19-11) because of it, but because I had not yet seen a 29-point trick, and because I'm a prestige whore who wanted to be the one getting the first 29-pointer, it was well worth the strike.
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:04 PM Author: Brass Piazza Gaping Subject: You have answered my prayers. Please keep it up.
How popular do you think Ambition is going to become, and how much money do you think it'll make you? Feel free to estimate, and please explain all of your meticulous reasoning.
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:05 PM Author: red heady dragon
As the number grows, I have less and less track of it. I would estimate that between 500 and 3,000 people play it regularly, 2,000 to 10,000 have played it, and that around over 150,000 people have heard of it (but probably most of them know nothing other than that a card game with the name "Ambition" exists.)
The doubling time for Ambition's popularity seems to be about 9 months.
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:15 PM Author: red heady dragon
Parts of my life were ruined for reasons not my fault. There's no getting around that, nor the fact that the process made me somewhat of an insecure, irrational person.
I don't want to be an insecure headcase, a belligerent argumentative prick, or a noxious self-destructive attention-whore. I don't want any of that. I know sometimes my conduct here makes it seem like I do, though.
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:18 PM Author: red heady dragon
I would like to impose a 125 percent tax on those high-society shit artists who make thousands of dollars by selling offensive, decadent "art" (if it can be called that) to wealthy people with worse tastes in consumption than a toilet. $33,000 for a dead ladybug in a styrofoam cup? (This actually happened.)
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:29 PM Author: red heady dragon
So, the overarching theme of this long and surgical self-analysis is that I had something powerful, but for a long time was way too immature to know how to use it. In fact, I didn't even believe that it existed.
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:18 PM Author: gold jew sneaky criminal
I know there was one post where he tried to calcuate this, based on (I think) advertising he could sell on a site where people played Ambition, but I don't remember.
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:07 PM Author: irate resort
Dear User File,
I'm a pretty good street style skater. I can pull off ollie kick flips, and sick rail slides. But when it comes to vert, its a totally different story. When I stand on that ramp, ready to drop in, my whole body tenses up, and I just cant do it. What can I do?
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:09 PM Author: red heady dragon
To support the endurance contest claim: At least at Carleton, the people I've seen struggle have normally done so because of primarily emotional rather than intellectual issues... or just bad choices or bad luck. It's not that these people are stupid or lazy, just that they weren't positioned to handle the things that came against them at the times they did; not knowing specifics, I'm not sure if I could have either.
You're absolutely right that there is more to the word student than just what I've read in the word. When I said "I'm a mediocre student", I didn't mean I'm lacking curiosity or earnestness, but that I'm pretty bad at the endurance-contest thing. I've had many terms where my guts were hanging out by the end.
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:10 PM Author: red heady dragon
Take the Wikipedia controversy. I made some mistakes, but overall there's no question that I was right in that thing, but I eventually lost the fight-- I retreated from Wikipedia (may return, but probably won't) and thus my detractors won. Where'd I mess up? My first gaffe was to go into a very volatile forum and begin working with no understanding of how it worked. Worst move one can make. I should have lurked on Wikipedia for 3 months minimum before even thinking about an Ambition article, and definitely not written under my own name (as I would have known if I'd lurked for long enough). By being way too impulsive, I got myself into a pissing war where only I was accountable (my detractors, a band of cowards, were all psuedonymous) for my actions and lost badly. For a contrast, consider the Ambition article on the French Wikipedia. I wrote it in April (w/ 4 mo. familiarity with Wikipedia culture) and it has been attacked not once.
The Wikipedia thing is pretty amusing. It was my impulsive grab at a higher k-constant and a lower exponent for my differential equation... but it didn't work out well.
The good, successful promotion example is the Usenet work I've done, the strategic essays (I just wish I had time to write more of them) and such. This is because they give me a high profile while performing a generous action-- teaching people how to play a strategically-complicated game-- and it's not intrusive at all.
At any rate... how'd I get to this tangent? I don't know. The good news is that I survived 5th week.
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:19 PM Author: red heady dragon
I don't know how this happiness is determined-- unlikeliness of depression, maybe? Brain scans? I would measure happiness by this equation: actual intellectual function divided by potential intellectual function, but then again I'm a person who cares more about freedom to accomplish/experience than material comforts.
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:22 PM Author: Godawful lay
maybe this is what you've been saying all along. but there's an inexplicable clarity now.
and maybe it isn't for everyone, but i particularly enjoyed the post about ambition above. the aspiration of maximizing the skill/strategy component in a card game really intrigues me. talk up the game like that, and the self-promotion takes care of itself. high-grade girls like guys who are are good at things -- and confident enough that someone else will spread the word. you're probably not far off from that happening. and someday you'll see what a guy who wishes that he, too, had invented a card game looks like when you walk away with the girl.
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:32 PM Author: seedy shimmering ratface
this is someone else posting excerpts taken out-of-context from mike's "user file" (a non-anonymous internal carleton version of xoxo). it's not really mike responding. it's his words, but it's not him.
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:11 PM Author: irate resort
Do you have any insight into the intelligence or moral character of the types of people who hassled on Mike Church during his first year at Carelton college?
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:13 PM Author: red heady dragon
Here's what's really at the heart of Carleton's long-running "Mike Church war", and has been for 3.5 years: There's a divisive split on this campus between two types of people. (1) Those who are going places, who have futures because they are smart and curious, and who tend to be individualist in nature. (2) Those who want to make Carleton into extended high school, who tend to be conformist and gossipy, who have mediocre futures at best. Almost certainly, these two types of people exist on every college campus, and I won't claim to know what the proportions are here... but I'd guess that at least 50%, probably many more, are in the first, better group. Though not often discussed, the split is palpable and extremely divisive.
So, where do I fit into this? Well, for whatever reason, I became a "marker", an emblem, if you will, for the first group, at least from the perspective of the second. Which has made me, to them, an enemy. That's what all this gossip about me being "sketchy" has been about, and it's nothing other than pure, bald envy.
In fact, if I were even a bit better known on campus I'd probably qualify as a litmus test in measuring this division.
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:16 PM Author: red heady dragon
I told that story because, then, I didn't have the confidence that I could articulate what actually happened to me, much less that people would believe me. Freshman year was a large-scale he-said/she-said battle, and often people believed my enemies over me-- I was outnumbered. So, yes, I fabricated a story that, first off, I thought people were more likely to believe than what had actually transpired, and, secondly, could be used to make my enemies look bad. Thirdly, I didn't want my enemies to have the satisfaction of knowing that THEY were responsible for mindfucking me.
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:18 PM Author: seedy shimmering ratface
fyi to those for context, this post refers to how pensive made up a head injury to explain his antisocial behavior his freshman year. after his freshman year, he admitted that the head injury had never happened, but for some reason the antisocial behavior stayed.
Date: November 28th, 2005 11:45 PM Author: Vigorous Bistre Indirect Expression French Chef
This is a technicality where he suspected a mild injury (no more severe than a soccer concussion) had caused his psychological weirdness freshman and soph. year, not the PT effects of being stalked. It wasn't so much dishonesty as utter befuddledness.
Does anyone have the file? katrinabush2005 at yahoo dot com
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:20 PM Author: red heady dragon
If we make the humanistic (and normative) assumption that each human life has the same worth-- 1.0 human lives-- and subdivide a life into different quality elements (leisure, health, economic security, autonomy, consumption) we can compare utility functions. It's true that utility is technically merely ordinal-- there's no such thing as "I got 69 utility points from that lollypop"
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:22 PM Author: red heady dragon
Okay, if a woman doesn't want to date me, I have one data point. I can't judge her tastes because maybe she doesn't want to date anyone. Maybe she's a lesbian. Maybe she has a boyfriend and isn't comfortable bringing it up. In that regard, no I can't say-- and I don't-- "she's not interested, ergo she has bad tastes." There are plenty of reasons she might not be interested.
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:31 PM Author: Trip kitty address
Someone got a hold of his "user file" from carleton. Basically OP is posting excerpts of mike's musings and rants over four years in reply to questions.
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:32 PM Author: red heady dragon
There's one thing I do find unjust with the Magic scenario. I can't fault Richard Garfield (who would've probably never believed in 1993 that one of the cards in his game would top $500) or Wizards of the Coast (WotC) for the state of their game. WotC is, after all, behaving rationally and using their game to make the maximum profit possible. Fine, they have the right to do that.
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:44 PM Author: Godawful lay
if it's meant to denigrate him, i'd say it does exactly the opposite. if not, it works for both the poster and pensive/mike. the few things i've read in any detail all cause me to revise prior assumptions and want to hear more -- but this time in a good way. i think the guy just needs to be cut a break, and maybe given a second chance occasionally. he concedes that he handles precisely the situation that arose yesterday poorly, and it's not the fake self-awareness he's sometimes shown. i, at least, am willing to cut him that break. not as charity: i'm truly interested in things like what he was aiming for with the card game. i'll enjoy watching someone self-immolate any day. but, all else equal, it's a better story if he turns into one of the most well-liked people here
Date: November 28th, 2005 10:09 PM Author: Offensive hall alpha
this cant be happening... i thought you finally realized what a nutjob pensive is, and now these excerpts from his carleton file are persuading you otherwise? no im sorry, i cant accept this. pensive must have blackmailed you; this is the only reasonable explanation.
Date: November 28th, 2005 10:15 PM Author: floppy stock car
Deshada has a knack for taking a contrarian stance, but I agree with him here; the posts in the userfile tend to illustrate a profile of someone who freely discloses flaws and directs the blame at himself, instead of at the outside world.
Date: November 28th, 2005 10:17 PM Author: black free-loading temple hairy legs
Read the thread "Pensive is WAY more fucked up than we thought" He basically blames "the Carleton women" for everything and thinks they are trying to kill him "by sunset on June 12, 4:56 am." Or some such shit.
Date: November 28th, 2005 10:23 PM Author: motley french theater stage
that's a much more accurate interpretation than the one Renada is offering. through thousands of posts on the user files (and elsewhere on the caucus system), pensive's hallmark was his absolute refusal to accept any responsibility for his actions or predicament.
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:35 PM Author: gold jew sneaky criminal
It's not inconceivable that it's still him. I mean, only Carleton people would have access to it, so unless he gave the entire file to someone else, or if it's that girl from the college board who goes to Carleton, I don't know who it would be.
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:42 PM Author: gold jew sneaky criminal
I wouldn't be shocked if this person and the OP in that thread were both Mike. At this point, I wouldn't even be shocked to find out that *I* was actually Mike the whole time.
Date: November 28th, 2005 10:21 PM Author: motley french theater stage
anyone who went/goes to carleton has access to it. it doesn't get passed beyond carleton b/c it's non-anonymous. dozens of people posted to his user file, and it's signed with our real names. so even if one wanted to put pensive's words out there, you couldn't do the whole thing without posting the words of a lot of other people who haven't consented to beyond-carleton distribution.
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:21 PM Author: irate resort
Dear User File,
My wife has always wanted to visit Morocco for our 20th aniversary (which is coming up this year). However, given the post 9-11 political climate, I'm worried such a trip might be dangerous. Advice?
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:26 PM Author: red heady dragon
Dear Reluctant Regarding Rabat,
The unfortunate truth is that, when I was a social suicide bomber, the fact readily advertised itself to the whole campus. As I improved myself and my life, there was no way for me to achieve the same "blast radius" because to wave my hands and shout, "Look at me! I'm not an asshole, I'm a reformed, chill guy!" would prove the precise opposite of what I wanted people to know.
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:21 PM Author: exciting toilet seat point
Dear User File,
There's a cute girl in one of my classes that I kind of want to go out with me, but I'm too shy to say anything. How do I know if she likes me? What should I do?
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:27 PM Author: red heady dragon
Dear Scared in Anthropology,
In situation 1, my forcing her out of my life is exactly what she wants. She gets her space, I don't waste my time. Situation 2 is trickier, but I've had more shit blow up on me from falsely assuming a disinterested girl was shy and awkward, than by assuming a shy girl had no interest in me. I'm probably missing out on some really neat women with this strategy, but not having my name used as toilet paper (in the flip case) is worth it.
If a woman wants to pursue me (and being at Carleton pretty much precludes that) she'll just have to watch her subtleties; one hint that I should forget all about her, and I vanish. I'm too old to throw away self-respect for the hell of it.
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:29 PM Author: red heady dragon
Dear Angry in Anchorage,
Why I failed socially was because, for most of my childhood, I was immature (spent my time on books, math, computers rather than soccer and "hanging out", which I really didn't learn how to do till college) and, being aware of my social deficit, pretty unconfident. A late puberty also added to my low confidence levels with women.
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:32 PM Author: Diverse Blood Rage Toaster
dude. user file. i've been accepted to a top-15 math phd program and to HLS. which one should i go to? i need to go somewhere to silence the prestigeless loser-fuckers who seek to discredit me.
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:46 PM Author: exciting toilet seat point
Dear New, Untested User File:
I have high class tastes but those around me are of much lower class; as a result, they often mock me. It can be frustrating. How can I teach my friends to be more cultured?
Date: November 28th, 2005 8:47 PM Author: Hairraiser outnumbered parlour background story Subject: Another trainwreck
When I first read the User File posts, I thought they were meaningless word salad, like the Hipcrime Usenet posts, if anyone remembers back to 1998. But now that I realize they came from pensive's brain, they are beyond creepily disturbing.
Date: November 28th, 2005 10:25 PM Author: Submissive quadroon
You all are pathetic. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Mike took legal action to take care of some of the things going on in this thread. Enjoy yourselves while it lasts.
Date: November 28th, 2005 10:28 PM Author: Indecent school cafeteria boiling water
If Mike is listening, I would advise him to seriously look into the option of legal action. The pseudo-anonymity we have here is not an excuse for slander.
Date: November 28th, 2005 10:31 PM Author: Submissive quadroon
Knowing Mike and his connections, he probably already has something in the works as we speak. I think the trash will be taken out sooner than everyone thinks.