What We Talk About When We Talk About Anything: A Sketch of a Philosophy of Language.

But being exposed at 14 to the idea, “the people who exercise power over you can be loudly and confidently incorrect,” actually had a strong effect on who I am today. It’s encouraged me to admit when I make mistakes in class, and it’s encouraged me to think critically about the information I’m presented with. But I think this is also the genesis of a fairly important idea for me, but not for the above reasons. You see, it’s also where I discovered that being correct or incorrect doesn’t always matter.

Analysis, Written by: CameronCameron SummersOctober 2, 2024Language, Analysis, TeachingComment

The Decompositive Move (Contraslop, Part 3)

LLMs are among other things predicated on an atomistic logic of language. Because they simply work by predicting the next symbol in a sequence based on a large repository of statistical data, they cannot actually create a functional top-level structure except incidentally.

Written by: Cameron, AnalysisCameron SummersJuly 24, 2024Large Language Models, Teaching, AnalysisComment

Quarantined in Horny Jail: on Metaphors of Disease

But we can see an interesting trend: as the number of epidemics tails off, so – generally – do the number of major moral panics. We have the red scare, sure, and prohibition and the devil’s music, and filthy literature – but, generally speaking as the number of epidemics tapers off, the moral panics become fewer and slightly more grounded.

Die Anywhere Else: On Night In the Woods, the Nostalgic and the Traumatic

There is a bit of generational discourse that forms the backbone of the plot. The older generation knew prosperity, they knew the value of a hard day's work and that if you put in your time you should get what is due to you. The younger generation knew only the loss of that prosperity, a town where local institutions close down, where jobs are few and far between.

Analysis, Game Reviews, Written by: CameronCameron SummersSeptember 4, 2019AnalysisComment

Closed for Construction: on Leaving Midtown.

The problem with railing against nostalgia as a cultural phenomenon is that when you experience it yourself, you feel like a phony.