#sighence

The thing I haven’t heard anyone really put into words about doing science, is that it makes you finally admit to yourself that you hate science. You love science. You like the idea of science. You like talking science and thinking science. You love science, before you have to do lots of science. You now know you need countless hours in the lab in order to achieve any semblance of science.

Before, it didn’t seem to bother you. Rock up, do some lab work, read some papers, roll home, no worries. It soon turns into to: rock up, stay in the lab all day, forget to drink water, go home, think about lab work, sleep.

glow.py

You have this identity that’s tied to you: you’re a scientist. It gives your life meaning: you're contributing to something bigger than you. I guess that's why it's​ so hard for you to finally admit that to yourself. You do science. It’s what you do. You work incredibly hard. No one works harder than you. You work weird hours, you go in on weekends, you stay late. You do what you gotta do. It doesn’t matter because experiments don’t work anyway, statistically speaking. Science is tedious, repetitive. The biological kind of science is unrelenting due to the high level of biological variation. It’s a grueling nightmare that fills you with sadness, because even though you know your experiments probably won’t work and it will most likely be a waste of time, you go in anyway. Because you can’t not. This is what you do. You have tunnel vision, and all that matters is science. Your stdin and stdout.

This is your career you’re trying to prime! It’s gotta work! Otherwise, what else are you going to do? You’ve got all your sample that took a lot of mastery to prepare on a trajectory that’s sped up its entropic decay. You can’t half-ass this and you know it. Science’s biggest problem is the sunk-cost fallacy. You’ve invested so much time into this research or idea - let’s be honest, this dream. You can’t see it, not really. ‘It’s so close to working’, ‘a few more months’, all unjust justification. By no stretch should science be instant gratification, but the low level bosses have been slayed. There’s no more decent loot in these chests. Sure our new spawn point is closer to the next dungeon, but we still have to go through the swamp of restriction cloning and over the bridge of protein expression to get there.

It will destroy you and you’ll get nowhere. You know you’ll feel bad when your experiment doesn’t work, but you know you’ll feel worse if you don’t even try. The thing about science is most of the time it’s not getting bad results, it’s getting the experiment to reliably work so you can actually collect results. It’s tweaking, modifying and sometimes completely rebuilding the rube-goldberging apparatus you’re blindly testing the universe with. Designing a method that will give you not a positive result, but a result that is true. That is what science is really about. That’s where the finesse comes in. Be it a quick and dirty proxy measurement or an elegant way to quantify something. That’s really the only way to ‘get’ science. It’s to understand what isn’t working, and why it isn’t. For that, you need controls. Your controls tell you what is going on with the experiment. Is the experiment working? How do you know? Have you included a sample you know works every time? What if you get a false positive? Do you have something you know won’t work every time?

I enjoy the intellectual buggering that is planning experiments, and I’ll run them, but I don’t have to love it.

Controlzzzz

I hate science because it exposed me. It unironically tests me daily, on an unrelentingly per-experiment basis. I wonder if it uses me as negative control, because I always seem to fail. It tests my love for it and I don’t need stats to know how insignificant it is to me. It's challenging to devote yourself to something that doesn't love you back.

I don’t know what I hate more, going into work, or leaving.

#sighence

Flash not working on Chrome, about:plugins disabled?!

For anyone who's Flash isn't working on Chrome because they at one point disabled it through about:plugins the fix is: chrome://flags/#prefer-html-over-flash and change to Disabled.

Reset Chrome then boom.

Cheers

The importance of game choice

This post is not about choices within a game, which of course is one of the most important aspects of gameplay: the ability to make decisions and impact the world around you. Your decisions are important and meaningful. Modern games are amazing technology that in their best form simulate choose your own adventure storytelling in an immersive way. This post is about choosing which games to play. Life has a time limit and it must be taken into account. Playing games, like watching series or reading books has to therefore be prioritized.

The problem is that there is so much material accumulating over time. This is especially true with literature - to not only read the epics and classics, but then all the modern critical darlings on top of that. All while, more books are written, more films are made. Games however, I feel are different. Most games are a huge undertaking. They aren't like most books, which are usually 300 pages or less. Books take a week of your time if you read every day. A movie is the fastest storytelling vehicle, and a series can vary, depending on number of seasons. But a solid game can take anywhere from 10 hours to over 200. Yes some games are short, like Portal, but most are 20 hour romps. I've invested way more time playing games than I have reading or watching series. 

To be able to choose games effectively and therefore enhance my life I use a list-based system. The list prioritizes all the books, films, series, podcasts and games I need to immerse my mind into. Not really a music fan, so I'm lucky I don't have another accumulating art to add to the list. By the way, because of this, I put gaming under my 'time management' skill set.
And yes there is a privilege to being able to spend leisure time engrossed in fantasies. I am fortunate no doubt. Though that does not mean the process shouldn't be optimized. 


I don't go out looking for games to play due to the already substantial list, but in passing while browsing if I come across a game that looks interesting or someone compared it favorably to a game that I like, I'll begin the research phase. Also sometimes you come across little gems, where someone does an analytical breakdown of the game on YouTube or written essay, where you can tell they are passionate about it, enough that it is worthy of study. That's when I get really excited. This article is the sole reason I decided to play Chrono Trigger and it was glorious. Before buying the game, research must be done.

I find out if it has done well with critics. Usually if it scores low I probably won't pay any more attention to it unless I've heard good things, if there is a cult following or if the low scores were due to bugs/graphical things which modders can fix.
Next off to YouTube to see gameplay and trailers of the game. If it appeals, then comes forums, reddit and blog posts to see what issues people have with the game. Do they find it annoying or frustrating etc?
The other thing I look at before playing a game is the modding community. If a game has a restoration mod, and a good variety of mods it instantly becomes very high on my priority list. If people love the game enough to continue to mod it years later, chances are it's a good game.
Usually this means the game I play are a little older. This has several benefits, namely that the great filter of time will push most lower quality games out of the collective memory, meaning I won't be wasting time on crappier games. It also means a modding community has had time to build many stable and game-improving mods. The other bonus is my modern PC will handle older games no problems on max graphical settings.



Games are valuable and a strong contender for the future of narrative storytelling. Anyone who disagrees should play Fallout: New Vegas, Bioshock or The Last of Us. Playing games is important, because it offers a higher level of immersive storytelling, which is the same reason cinemas darken the lights. It's the same reason they made films even though books were an existing technology. If you don't 'game', I recommend you start.
God damn, I used a lot of "I's" in this post.