Intentionality Aesthetic

 "Appearing intentional" covers a multitude of sins.

This is not the aesthetic I generally aim for. It's the aesthetic that I aim for as a fallback, when I don't know what I'm doing. It's the aesthetic I aim for when something's already gone wrong. When you've got yourself a jazz solo and you play a wrong note, the plan is to fit that exact same note into something good, maybe 4-5 seconds later. If you have no idea how to set the table, make sure everything's symmetrical. If you don't know what a good way to arrange your bookshelf might be, pick any quality and sort by it - if you aim to please yourself, pick a quality that tickles you; if you aim to please others, pick a quality that is easily discernible at a glance.

I know this approach works well. I've used it a lot, I've seen the results. But I don't know its long-term effects on me. Naively, optimizing a bunch of things to lie to the world and say "attention! I definitely know what I'm doing!" might not be the best set of pathways to reinforce, if that's even remotely how the brain works.

And I'm suspicious of it, since a desire to appear intentional rears up far more strongly whenever I am anticipating other people kindasorta laughing at me or shaming me or that sort of thing but like, just a little bit, maybe not externally at all. So it sounds like a defense against stuff I don't think needs to matter to me much, which means maybe I radically overuse the heuristic.

Or maybe it really is an aesthetic that I like and endorse liking. I don't know yet, and I think there's a lot more in the way before I can confidently find out.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Liberty" Tasks

A "Liberty task" is a small, self-contained task, ready to pick up and just start. No dependencies or blockers. It must be useful rather than make-work, and very often it is one of many similar tasks. It should not require deep thought; it is a thing which can be done, not a thing which surely could be done after figuring out how. In a codebase this might look like a list of tech debt noted over the years, or like the dozen refactorings needed before an unwieldy component can be broken up into three clean components. At home this might look like the ten yearly maintenance jobs needed to avoid early breakage, or like writing out the ingredients needed for each recipe you intend to try soon so that a legitimate shopping list can be created.  Some years ago one of the cofounders of the company to which I sell my labor found out he had a brain tumor. He took a step back from being the CTO while he dealt with the immediate mental and physical issues, including brain surgery, but d...
Read more

Make A Bad Plan

One of my more lucrative techniques at work I call Make A Bad Plan. This is where you know  that something  has to happen, but no one really has a good idea of exactly what or exactly how to do it, and also it's a lot easier to go work on less ambiguous projects, so how do you make it happen anyway, when no one, including you, really knows what "it" is? Two common ways this comes up are when you can see that there's an important problem in a system even if you don't know how to solve it, and when you can see that there's an important piece of information that humans know that isn't baked into automated systems and if only it was then something would be better, who knows what, but clearly humans know and act on this kind of thing so we should be able to use it, right? Make A Bad Plan calls for you to make a bad plan. Think of a few " something "s, pick one or synthesize one from your (bad) options, write it up as a draft proposal with enough detai...
Read more

Creating an extra character

For Halloween, I'm running a light horror-ish RPG for some friends. We play other RPGs regularly. I had a great little game in mind called ViewScream, designed for online play. Everyone plays a character isolated on a spaceship that has Problems (TM). Each character has two life-threatening emergencies which must be solved lest they die in the end. Each character also has three technobabble solutions to help solve others' emergencies. These may or may not work; the player knows, but the other players don't know. Everyone takes turns dialoguing, telling about their emergencies, offering up solutions, seeing how they worked (or didn't). But there are 6 of us, and I didn't have a prebuilt scenario that went past 5. Characters are pretty minimal. They have a tiny personality description and a little bit of relationship info, a couple of barebones sentences explaining how they feel or think about another character. In addition they have one secret or twist or scripted mi...
Read more