JCC Senate Gaming P E O P L E Interviews, Issue LXXVI: Ramza, Part II

Welcome back to PEOPLE!

There are so many wonderful JCCers to interview whom I haven’t gotten to yet, but at the same time, I’m enamored of the notion of going back and interviewing people who’ve already received their own issue. So many of them were so much younger, basically just kids, in college or even high school, when I first interviewed them. We’ve grown up together, started adulting, got jobs, settled into careers. I myself was just a high schooler in my junior year when I interviewed Amos for the very first PEOPLE.

Ramza was the first person I chose to revisit; however, it was for a different reason: my regret that the final published product failed to really live up to the potential of a Ramza interview. Even still, in the past half-decade, Ramza has already grown and changed so much. If you haven’t already read it, catch his first interview here; marvel at his attempt to list all the games he’s ever played (or weep for him, that works, too). Ramza agreed to a second interview so long as I didn’t again force him to attempt such a thing.

Warning: this is a long interview and that’s by intention. I wanted to really do a deep-dive with Ramza on who he is, what’s he doing, what are his hobbies and interests, what does he think about things, etc. Maybe read it in bits and pieces? Or not, and tear through it looking for all of the numerous namedrops.

Now it’s time for office hours.

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Favorite... Writer James Joyce Filmmaker Fritz Lang Politician Daniel De Leon Philosopher Hegel Poet Dante Mathematician Alan Turing Classical philosopher Heraclitus Playwright William “Willie Shake’n’bake” Shakespeare Deity Parvati Mythological creature Vampire Comic book writer Grant Morrison Superhero Flex Mentallo Comic book movie Did The Matrix crib enough from The Invisibles to both count and satisfy the rule of three? Podcaster Giant Bomb Editorialist Karl Marx Play Richard III Film Metropolis Book Finnegans Wake Painting The Garden of Earthly Delights Building St. Vitus Cathedral Communist Karl Marx Capitalist Michel Foucault Anarchist Peter Kropotkin Power ranger Tommy Monarchist Hegel Lovecraft story? Nyarlathotep.

Most overrated... Film Probably one of the Avengers films Filmmaker James Cameron Book House of Leaves Writer Ron Chernow Philosopher Thomas Aquinas Politician Barack Obama TV show Black Mirror Artist Banksy US President George Washington Superhero Batman


Would you give us a little refresher on your origin story, Ramza?

Like many people, I started off life as a child. At some point during my childhood, I remember deciding I wanted to be a teacher. But I also remember deciding that I wanted to be a teacher who could kick people out of the classroom if they got too rowdy. Therefore, I had to become a professor. In some roundabout way that strange train of thought dictated large chunks of my life. I don’t really know how to process that idea.

We didn’t move “a lot,” but we moved enough that my mother is now worried she permanently warped our childhood development. Her concerns are well-founded, as I have it on good authority that one of her children went into mathematics. A scriptwriter would decide this also neatly explains my future willingness to relocate thousands of miles, so it seems like a salient detail to throw in. Aside from the moves, I remember it all being kind of unremarkable. I was pretty good at school and pretty bad at sports. My hobbies and friends tended towards nerd culture - it was very important to us to associate based on a shared interest in video games, sci fi movies, and whatever the hot trading collectible game of the moment was (This last one was the only real point of ongoing contention until at last we bulk migrated to Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t know why it got so heated, but I blame Yu-Gi-Oh!).

In 2005, drunk on the power of owning an iPod Nano, I got way into podcasts. Also a Star Wars film was coming out. This led to my checking out TheForce.Net’s podcast, which then led me to TheForce.Net, which then led me to TheForce.Net’s forum. I posted 60-odd posts on an account I promptly forgot about. The future refused to change.

In 2008, I graduated from high school and had broken up with the girl I was dating. This naturally made for a long summer until college started. So I got bored. Bored enough to role play on the internet.

Bored enough to want to role play Star Wars on the internet.

Actually I had done both of these things before, so I figured - hey, let’s see if TFN is still up and running. I didn’t remember my account so I opted for another variant including “ramza,” as was my lazy style at the time. I started off in the RPF and mostly hung out there for years. At some point I made mod. At some point I drifted towards the JCC (Maybe as the pressure of university and grad school got to me?). At some point I made head admin. I don’t think I could precisely piece together that timeline anymore. Has it really been 12 years?

Don’t answer that.

Describe your most memorable DnD character, and maybe game, too.

That'd probably be the bard I played for years in the DnD campaign Saintheart ran on these very forums, A Tide of Flames: Evelios D'Rtan (You can tell he's a fantasy character because there's a bizarre apostrophe in the name, you see). He started off as kind of an eccentric Harper agent who, aside from a predilection for pink kilts and "victory bagpipes," basically played straight man to his raven familiar (Who was named Poe, I am very creative) that was always hungry.

Where it got... well, I don't know if it got interesting for anyone else to read or engage with, but where it got really fun for me to write was when - through absolutely no fault of his own - Saint kind of just... forgot why Evelios had been sent to help the party in the first place, and Evelios' backstory basically evaporated. But the thing was, I did remember, and I knew there was a continuity error. I decided that this was because Evelios' personality had basically shattered, which turned him into this kind of Doctor Who sort if the Doctor was constantly arguing with his previous incarnations inside his own head. This basically became a way for me to smuggle in whatever was interesting me at the time (see, e.g., Doctor Who, obviously) and I got to play around with how the posts were organized and how much I was actually engaging with the game and how much I was just doing weird **** under the excuse of it being in Evelios' head. There was also a bit of a runner where he was best friends with the party barbarian, who thought this weird inconsistent behavior was incredibly amusing.

If that all sounds indulgent, it totally was, and like in all the indulgent metafiction I love, I personally showed up, and kind of tormented Evelios (Guess who had just discovered Vonnegut?), and this recontextualized the campaign for me as a battle between my character, myself, and the actual plot which was all about bad guys trying to summon Tiamat - as is the style. Parts of it haven't aged great, but some of it still scans... I dunno, okay I guess, there was a nonlinear training montage, that was pretty decent, and at one point there's this extended bit that could only happen because it was a play-by-post game: Saint kept miscalculating spell stuff at the start of a fight, which led to three different versions of the same post, and through a weird fluke I was precisely online at the right time to respond to all of them as they went up, so I made it into a temporal loop gag.

Like I said, I don't know how fun this was for anyone else to actually have to read, but I have so many great memories of the simple joy of writing it. It's one of the few times I actually felt like playing a game online provided a tangible benefit that couldn't be replicated at the tabletop. In the end I don't know what happened to Evelios, and that's canon. I showed up to give him a hug, set him free, and proposed some contradictory endings.

Completely self indulgent! I should've had him climb a dark tower.

ArE yOu InTo ThAt StRaNgEr StUFf ShOw On NeTfLiX?

No, for whatever reason I have an incredibly hard time getting into streaming original programming, and I'm also prone to arbitrary contrarianism, so Stranger Things has never so much as graced my watchlist. Maybe I'd actually love it! But I couldn't even get all the way through The Witcher and that's based on a book series I love. Something about the pacing allowances of the format, maybe? It's not a rational disinterest in streaming originals, whatever it is.

What is it about the Witcher book series that you love?

It's the only book series I can think of that seems to organically grow into a fantasy epic. There are fantasy epics I enjoy that are always operating at that level - Wheel of Time, the Cosmere, debatably The Lord of the Rings - but when it starts off The Witcher is basically about a grumpy exterminator brute-forcing his way through fairy tales. There are hints of a more interesting wider world, but there's a detectable shift where Andrzej Sapkowski kind of decides "Wait, I think I maybe want to follow through on the ramifications of this child of prophecy from a noble line thing." So he doubles down and writes the story of a family of misfits trying to navigate an increasingly dire geopolitical situation, and he gets more ambitious about how he's handling the written portrayal of events. By The Lady of the Lake he's relaying a major, climactic battle in cut-up collage form. There's not really anything else like it.

You’ve wanted to teach seemingly all your life, but have you ever thought about writing fantasy or science fiction? It’s not so far removed from the RP you’ve done, and you are already a prolific writer.

I have this overwhelming desire to respond with “no, never,” but as I was thinking about it I remembered that I went to a creative writing camp one summer when I was in elementary school. Was that just my parents picking something for me to do based on my hobbies (“Eh, he draws comics and reads a lot”?) or was there something more substantial there? Difficult to say. It didn’t last much beyond that, however.

As I’ve gotten older, I find a lot of the creative spark is gone - or maybe it’s more accurate to say it got sublimated into my math work - so that’s not changing. Even when I was at my best just in terms of raw output, I always seemed to be more about thinking of “interesting scenes” rather than “coherent narratives” - oh, it’ll be so cool if I get to do such-and-such thing, and if it were a movie it’d definitely be set to something slightly off-kilter but weirdly perfect like that one song I like, yeah, that’s the ticket. But I had no patience for working out the mechanics of how to get to those scenes. Then if I wasn’t hung up on neat scenes I was hung up on the medium - why can’t I get raw text to do this, that, or the other thing? There’s one particularly bad opening post of mine that’s just a bunch of weird text and formatting decisions, because I was so frustrated with trying to convey a certain state of mind that I gave up and did the House of Leaves thing but without even the benefit of a mostly coherent-if-dull story under the worthless gimmicks. It’s a testament to something, none of it good.

On top of my awareness of those issues even at the time, the drive just... isn’t there. I don’t have remotely enough experience to comment on whether or not an author “must” feel the need to get something out there, but I don’t really feel that need (Even when I maybe should with that whole publish or perish thing...). I don’t think I have a book buried in me crying to get out, or a creation I need to find a way to share with people. If that kind of desire is in me in some way, I can’t even recognize it because it’s nothing compared to the siren song of “what if you solved a cool problem?!” I feel like that’s my real driving force.

“Publish or perish”—do you want or feel pressured to leave behind some sort of legacy in some way?

Not so much, no - that phrase is more of an academia rule of thumb about how you have to keep putting out new results or you won’t have a career in academia. Of course, the job market is so bad that I’m more inclined to believe the PhD Comics revision: “publish and/or perish.”

The idea of leaving behind a legacy is kind of strange to me, mostly because it would only matter when you’re dead, and by that point I think there would be other, more pressing, concerns, such as being dead. I don’t necessarily besmirch anyone who wants to erect a giant, flame-throwing statue of themselves that periodically broadcasts a booming “REMEMBER ME!” that can be heard for miles, but I just can’t figure out where they’re coming from.


So right now you’re working in Prague, is that correct? How’d that happen?

Yes! I’m here through at least this time next year, doing Math Stuff (TM).

As academic jobs go, it was honestly pretty straightforward - in the last year of my PhD, I spent the fall applying for a lot of assistant professorships and post doc positions that my research would’ve been considered suitable for (I don’t know if people generally know this, but aside from pure teaching positions no one at this level hires a “mathematician,” they hire a “Geometer” or an “Algebraist” or what have you). Almost all of these didn’t pan out - field’s rough and I’m in an niche to begin with - but ironically one of the ones that did was one of my top choices, a research gig with one of the best guys in my field. Annnnnd he’s based in Prague. So here I am.

Btw, could you list your degrees for us?

Is Prague as beautiful as they say?

I have a BS (heh heh) in Mathematics and Physics (minor in Chemistry), an MA in Mathematics, and a PhD in Mathematics. The MA was actually just earned while pursuing my PhD - you can do them separately, I have friends that did that, but a lot of times in STEM you just get one while doing your 6-8 years of PhD study, or you exit at that point rather than continuing on.

As for Prague, it’s terrific, and if you’re like me and really enjoy just taking a totally aimless stroll while listening to an audiobook or whatever you couldn’t ask for a better place to live. There’s an eclectic mixture of architectural styles, a lot of parks, big hills that you can just climb up and up and find old castles on or whatever, graffiti everywhere, lovely little restaurants with great goulash prices, tacky massage parlors that will happily gouge you (What the hell is so Czech about a Thai massage, tourists?), cars modeled after old manufacturing styles no one ever used here, it’s just so many things all bundled up into a package of contradictions and an intoxicating mixture of authenticity and exploitative kitsch. From my balcony I have a terrific view of a garish Communist-era TV tower that was covered in statues of bizarre, faceless babies in 2000 to represent freedom or something. I love this city.

What’s your preferred architectural style for a home? On top of it, decor choices?

I don’t really know what the home equivalent is but I tend towards pretty stark, modernist looks in apartment buildings. I like looking at nice old buildings but I don’t want to live in them.

As for decor... man, I kind of just buy a lot of that dark wood IKEA look. Rectangles preferred for efficient storage and places to put documents and papers. Maybe some snazzy commercial art and hobby stuff if there’s leftover wall space? Like if I had a home with an office a framed mint condition copy of Green Lantern/Green Arrow #85 would be hung in some spot imparting quasi-ironic glory.

What do you think of brutalism?

I think it looks fine. I wouldn’t want it to be the only architectural school, but around here when any given brutalist building is surrounded by older design styles I think the effect is rather striking.


So tell us, Dr Ramza, what are you researching? What are its applications? (iS iT aT aLl UsEfUl?)

Okay, so basically there’s this very broad area of computer science questions called a constraint satisfaction problem, and we have a pretty rich ability to talk about how quickly computers should be able to solve these problems for a given situation. For example, if you have a bunch of roads connecting a bunch of different stores, and you have to visit each store, what’s the fastest route? Well, how fast a computer can figure out the fastest route depends on the configuration of the roads and stores. Sometimes it’s bad enough your best guess is about as good as anything a computer can whip up.

In the 90s some people figured out that we can look at these problems through an algebraic lens - we take these incredibly abstract, pure math tools and, in mockery of every joke made about math ever, learn stuff about real-ass computer problems. That’s obviously pretty useful! But what if we generalized it and made the use case way less obvious? That’s where we come in. We’re kind of poking around the wild, weird world of abstractions on this sort of format.

The hope is that we’ll shed some light on the P/NP problem, which is all about speed classification and is one of those million dollar problems the media kind of loves the idea of if none of the specifics. It’d be a very useful problem to know the answer to, and the theory is if we just cook up enough weird, weird abstractions we’ll find the right screwdriver or whatever to throw at it.

What is the P/NP problem?

Basically, there are these two broad classes of problems, P and NP - P is the set of all problems that can be solved “fast” (Specifically, in polynomial time with respect to the input, hence... well, P, but it’s sufficient to just think “fast”), NP is the set of all problems for which proposed solutions can be checked fast. Clearly, P is in NP. The P/NP problem is the question of whether P=NP - i.e., can all problems you can check proposed solutions for quickly also be solved quickly? Most computer scientists think the answer is no, and that scenario guarantees a a host of knock-on effects about our knowledge of computational problems. If the answer were that P=NP, then expect the total collapse of cyber security systems everywhere, amongst other things. But that probably won’t happen.

That this would be of interest to folks working in CS and CS adjacent fields is, I think, kind of obvious, but it’s also one of the Millennium Prize Problems that have a million dollar reward attached to them (in addition to basically being a guarantee that you’d be set for life tenure and grant qualification-wise). They’re basically the “most interesting” open problems in the field. You might remember news stories about that one Russian mathematician who solved one and then turned it down and immediately exited academia. That’s the only solved one.

Ok, speaking of tenure, where are you on that?

Nowhere near that; generally you're expected to work two or three postdoctoral positions at different universities before you then get a tenure track position somewhere else still that eventually gets you tenured if you keep bringing in grant money and also you do right by your committee. I'm on postdoc #1. Currently my plan is to see if I can get an extension on this job. Future career decisions will hinge on that, I guess. You have to try to be flexible about this whole thing, otherwise you're setting yourself up for heartbreak if any one of a million little details don't all line up just right and you have to go do something else for a living. Getting too married to the idea of a research career isn't worth the potential anguish.

But you do want to be tenured, right?

Well, so, it got really complicated midway through grad school, but I eventually realized I like research enough that I'm going to see if I can pull it off. It's also kind of conditional on how this postdoc goes, as I'm still hoping to get a feel on if this career trajectory is totally correct for me. But currently the plan is to try, yes. I certainly don't have interest in the very real alternative (that, weirdly, seems to mostly be an issue in the United States) of bouncing from assistant professorship to assistant professorship forever, so if that was the only way to stay in research academia I would go do something else instead. All or nothing.

Who are some of your favorite professors?

In terms of professors I had or have interacted with extensively, probably my boss, my doctoral advisor, my advisor's advisor, and his advisor before him. Vague as hell, I know, but it would be easy to track me down if I mentioned any of them by name so... yeah. The closeness of my field puts me in kind of a unique position where almost everyone I've worked with or interacted with at a conference is connected to one of those folks in some way. Plus my advisor's advisor is like this crotchety old dude who uses all of his academic travel as an excuse to find new places to fish. Life goals.

Historically, I tend more towards liking philosophers: Georg W. F. Hegel, Bertrand Russell, Alan Turing, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Theodor W. Adorno.

Also I have to give an obligatory shout-out to the earlier parts of my mathematical family tree: Alfred Tarski, Stanisław Leśniewski, Kazimierz Twardowski, Robert von Zermann, and Bernard Bolzano. I know none of those names mean anything to most folks, but man, as a mathematician, I was giggling like a little kid about Bolzano being in there. I'll let comic book Bertrand Russell explain.


Ok, let’s do a name drop... let’s say you’re teaching a class, and you have different kinds of stereotypical students. Who from the JCC fits the bill for each stereotype?

Okay, since most of my teaching has been in a calculus context, these are generally agreed-upon stereotypes but only for calc classes. It is what it is.

-JoinTheSchwarz and blackmyron are the two students that consistently get your weird jokes. This encourages you to keep making weird jokes while lecturing despite the fact that you absolutely should not.

-Healer_Leona is the student that's really good at keeping everyone on-task during group work, and consequently their group is basically always done first. You try to encourage them to go help other groups. They do not.

-heels1785 and Point Given are the two students who head up a couple of the other groups, but they both have a student they consistently butt heads with that's also always in their group for some reason, so they don't get done as fast as Leona's group.

-dp4m is the student heels1785 constantly butts heads with.

-Diggy and Darth Punk are both in the fourth group and are constantly distracting each other so their group never finishes on time. This is frustrating as a lecturer but is actually appreciated by most of the other students because it means the group work won't be followed by even more lectures.

-harpua is the student that's always wearing sunglasses and you're not sure if they know that you know exactly why that is. Zapdos is always talking loudly about how hungover they are so it's not really a ruse.

-tom is the student that is clearly a rapper, a stereotype that is extremely real, do not question it.

-anakinfansince1983, Lordban, and Rogue1-and-a-half are the students that actually respond to your lecture questions, oh thank god.

-solojones and a star war talk with other students before class but then are completely silent during lecture time, even during group work, it's kind of eerie.

-Obi Anne, TiniTinyTony and 3sm1r are the students that ask pretty good questions.

-The2ndQuest asks questions, but there's always this weird undercurrent where you're not sure they actually believe infinitesimals exist despite this being calc 3 and thus the ship sailed two semesters ago.

-SuperWatto and Darth Guy periodically make solid snarky comments. Sometimes this is a welcome bit of humor, sometimes you're trying to lecture goddammit.

-Jabba-Wocky is the student that constantly works on their chemistry lab write-ups during your lecture even though chemistry lab is only worth 1 unit, your class is worth 5 units, the GPAs are weighted accordingly, and you've even reminded them of this.

-Lord Vivec does well on the assignments they show up for but skips every lecture. This tanks their in-class assignment score and damages their final grade a bit.

-Juliet316 and Ghost are quick to point out your arithmetic errors and also ask you before class if you heard a given celebrity died. Your repeated reminders that arithmetic isn't actually that big a deal in this class and they should focus more on the main theorems and algebra go unheard.

-DarthIntegral is the much-suffering TA who you're quick to blame when grades aren't uploaded on time. I Are The Internets and Todd the Jedi are the undergraduate assistants that you try to constantly remind the students to not ask about grades because they have no input there, to no avail.

-cubman987 is the student that gives you a knowing nod when you show up in your Cubs hoody for the first time that semester.

-vncredleader is that student that you allegedly saw at that graduate student union strike you were also allegedly at. Allegedly this is based on an allegedly true story. Allegedly.

-Sarge is the ROTC kid because I am a hack.

-Chewgumma and Boba_Fett_2001 are the students that you overhear discussing the latest video game you're also interested in before class, and you're not sure whether or not it's kosher to comment, it's awkward.

-DarthTunick is constantly talking about trying to navigate homework time and his job.

-poor yorick and Rylo Ken are the students that shows up midway through the semester to try and figure out just how much web-based homework they can skip at that point and still get a good grade. It's actually a fairly straightforward calculation but you're not going to tell them that.

-GrandAdmiralJello is supposed to be in Ancient Civilizations. They are in the wrong room.

-Adam of Nuchtern and Princess_Tina are always on their phones. Are they paying attention? They seem to do well, you're all adults, and it's not your money. You move on with your life.

-Master_Lok and PCCViking missed the first two weeks of online homework owing to scheduling issues and you're going to have to program that into the grade calculation software. Luckily there's someone else whose job that is.

Has teaching mostly been what you expected it to be?

It’s somehow, kind of paradoxically, both more hands-on and less hands-on than I anticipated. I find I tailor my lectures to a given class of students (this is a luxury you have when you only teach one class a semester the way I did in grad school) in a way I never would’ve anticipated, even when I’m going off largely pre-prepped notes. On the other hand (and based on my discussions with my colleagues here in Europe, this might be more of a “large class in America” thing than a standard practice), you have to learn to put some distance between yourself and the students so you can dole out grades without worrying about individuals.

Hell, one of the weirdest things in all of teaching is deciding grade cut-offs in a large, multi-section course. Suddenly numbers on a 100 point scale are “massively different” based on a “gap” of .5, and that’s the difference between, say, a C+ and a C. You get so used to it in the moment that it’s only when you pull back and think about it that you realize how bizarre it is. The consolation is that those discussions are only happening because everyone already benefited from some sort of curve - otherwise the university would be happy to assign you much, much harsher cut-offs.

Ok. You had to see this coming: grade JCCers based on their ability to get the ****ing point in a discussion

I'll use my university's four point scale because that's one less grade to worry about:

1 - Rew, DarthPhilosopher, Lowbacca_1977, Jedi Merkurian
2 - RunJediRun, FatBurt, Jedi Ben
3 - Ramza, Gamiel
4 - black_saber


The question of depictions of certain fantasy races has come up recently—are orcs and dark elves and other races analogs for real world human races?

I don’t think they’re one-to-one substitutes, in the “ah yes, the drow are black people” sense, but I do think racialized attitudes about “the other” can leak in to how authors choose to depict these races and cultures, and what characteristics they give these groups. For example, it’s become a bit of a cliché to point out that J. K. Rowling chose to have all the banks in the wizarding world controlled by a single race of goblins with large noses. I reject the premise that J. K. Rowling was thinking “Ah yes, the goblins are Jews” (if anything if I did expect a deliberate one-to-one negative stereotype from her, it would be about transgender individuals), but I think we need to be okay with confronting the idea that antisemitic stereotypes percolating in our society may have worked their way into her work.

Where it gets tricky is that then there’s a natural impulse to think enjoying that work means we enjoy those negative elements, or that they reflect our personally held values, or whatever, but it’s rather just demonstrative of how much cultural detritus we’re all picking up and absorbing and reproducing constantly. I don’t necessarily have the perfect prescription for what to do with that information in-and-of-itself. Maybe the answer is the answer isn’t really about the works at all.

What do you think about Jar Jar Binks, Watto, Sebulba?

Same basic idea, right? George Lucas is, by all accounts, a pretty bog-standard Hollywood liberal sort. Is he sitting at his desk thinking to himself “I want Jar-Jar to be a minstrel character”? No: for one, I’m like 99% sure the driving creative impetus on the prequel trilogy was “I need to recoup my financial losses from that divorce”, and for another, I think he’d be pretty put out by the idea that he would ever consciously imitate that. But the thing is, minstrel shows never went anywhere, they kind of just got pulled apart and reabsorbed in a million constituent parts, and now it informs an uncomfortable amount of what we consider comedic (Especially cartoon comedy, oddly enough. If you have a strong stomach for overuse of the word “perform”, and really don’t want to look at squash and stretch the same way again, I’d recommend Nicholas Sammend’s provocative Birth of an Industry.). I think it wormed its way in, sure, particularly as Lucas was often consciously imitating old pulp stereotypes that traded in closer to the uglier parts of the source, but I think it wormed its way in to a lot of things. Similar problems cropped up with Watto and Sebulba, hell arguably further back - Jabba the Hutt’s palace is trading in orientalist imagery, but mainstream discourse never latched on to “Hutts = Middle Easterners” for, y’know, fairly obvious reasons. You could probably pick this stuff up in a lot of artwork if you began pulling it apart. And we should! Rip that **** to shreds, folks. It’ll survive the process.

Now, if we want to talk about stuff we actually should “cancel” Lucas over, there’s the explicit fawning over Joseph Campbell...

Hey now what’s wrong with Campbell.

He’s basically from a background of influences opposite most of my own, so I end up not enjoying his stuff that much. Also it was getting kind of heavy so I figured “What’s a typically me objection that also works as a joke?”

Who are Campbell’s influences? (I think we’ve already discussed yours)

He’s basically coming from the foundations of psychoanalysis chain of Schopenhauer-Nietzsche-Freud-Jung (although Freud liked to pretend he didn’t read Nietzsche). The sort of classic, lazy characterization of Campbell is he “reunited” the theories of Freud and Jung in particular - what ends up happening is he kind of wants everyone to “basically” be thinking in some common, crude understanding of the phrase “the same way,” but I think we’re too particularly dependent on our times and surroundings in ways he doesn’t account for for that to be the case.

I don’t think I could go on for much more than that; as I said, I haven’t really read much of his work. Sort of the standard “Well, I like Star Wars, better read some Campbell” thing I assume a lot of folks went through. This was back when I still thought I liked Wittgenstein. Ah, the days of my youth. Like the scent of fresh lemon, y’see.

Okay I still kind of like Wittgenstein. He invented truth tables!


Is there anything you suspect you might be deeply wrong about?

Well, currently I've got this theory that over this structure we've named Q4 there should be a certain pattern to the inputs for when arbitrary functions evaluate to 2 but every attempt I make to show that particular pattern behaves exactly the way I want is running up against these vague gaps that may be insurmountable.

But seriously, it's always going to be what constitutes the "best" way to go about improving society. I will probably always suspect there's an issue precisely because I've changed my mind so often. The impression that I get - and maybe people are just great actors, or something, and it's not actually this simple - is that a lot of folks are very confident that they've got the precise mechanism ironed out, they never waver, steady as she goes, and so on. Or they have one big change of mind and they're done. And... I dunno ****ing how? I feel like I read too many mutually exclusive but convincing arguments. It's maddening. Be more like the cartoon version of mathematics, all of sociology.

So how do you actually end up convinced?

I'd say typically it boils down to the usual rhetorical techniques: the argument needs to identify a problem I agree on the existence of, it needs to exposit at length on the proposed reason for why the problem exists or could exist (in the case of proposed methods), and it may or may not need to make recommendations in line with these expositions. I'm definitely looking for coherent through-lines: I don't want a sudden shift in argumentation method, and if you're proposing a combination of two thinkers or whatever that I think of as being incompatible I want a damn good argument for doing so. There's also just an x factor where on some level I'm looking for what I want in a given moment, or I'm fed up with something, and I'm just going to be biased.

That X factor gives me pause—it’s a good thing to admit one’s own biases. Do you think you just go “the hell with it” and be biased when responding to bigoted arguments? Or notions that might be pedestrian or simple-minded?

That can happen (These days my response to a lot of arguments I strongly disagree with is to just disengage entirely, especially online. I don't put a lot of stock in the worth of such arguments relative to the effort required, for reasons I don't really want to get too into. Is that maybe the ultimate in arguing from bias, like "I don't even care what you have to say"? Possibly.), but I was thinking more in the broad sense where our pre-existing assumptions are basically always impacting our experiences with the world and what theories and the like we're going to be receptive to.

We have a fetish for a crudely understood vision of the objective in a fair amount of modern society, so we like to think we're able to give every argument its due diligence and a fair shake, this kind of marketplace of ideas John Stewart Mill thing... but we don't. I think in practice - despite claims to the contrary - you just never actually have that equal distribution of ideas. That is inevitably going to wind up reflected in our own sentiments and our own openness to theories and contrary ideas in the form of biases. These biases can change or shift or go away or whatever over time, but that's a process, not a switch.

In your academic travels (you can really say this!), have you met anyone who made you think something similar to, “Wow, this person is like the Chosen One of not having biases”?

No, nor would I expect to, I’m using bias in a pretty broad sense. If anything when people try to present themselves as arguing from objectivity I start getting really interested in their tells.

Obviously this isn’t something I do constantly - if you’re presenting your math research I’m a tad bit more interested in whether I find your proofs compelling and correct than whether or not you’re using a suspicious amount of category theory, Dr. Smith, could this perhaps betray an underlying sympathy towards geometric arguments?!?!

So when you talk about the “best” way to go about improving society, what are currently your doubts?

Right now I’m hung up on the really basic question of whether people should only be broadly organizing on their own, or if this organization has to occur in conjunction with some sort of targeted top-level approach that can more effectively articulate goals and policies. That then extends to questions about how government should be arranged. For a pretty long time I was very much in favor of a type of decentralization, but this whole coronavirus situation has really thrown just the mother of all wrenches into that philosophy. I’m at least down from the heights of my concerns about the whole thing, which brought me to the cliff of “What if we just had a god king?!” Not my proudest moment of public doubt.

Who from the JCC would be most fit to be god-king?

Jello, mostly because I'm pretty sure he's been studying intensely for the role since birth.


Ok let’s do a Star Wars section—before you protest!—I’m interested in getting your definitive Professor Ramza take.

What went wrong?

I just want you to know I was badly tempted to respond with a glib "Well, in 1971 George Lucas had the idea to make an epic space movie. That's what went wrong."

But since this is an interview I'll try to be more honest. I actually do think there are of seeds of what was going to go wrong with Star Wars in the very first movie. There's a lot of really clunky dialogue (Seriously, I would encourage even people who are committed fans who hate the "Star Wars is bad" bit, go back and actually pay attention to just how often they point out Han Solo is or is not in it for the money. It's so weird! It deserves to be a more well-known quirk than it is.), and there's a gap in the performances between the extremely talented actors who do great in everything and the rookies and lesser knowns who do not. However, there's also a lot to like still buoying that first film - great special effects, innovative editing, a straightforward little adventure story with hints of a broader world, it was perfectly positioned in the right place within the changes in Hollywood at the time to become a standard-bearer for blockbusters. It makes bank - and importantly, it moves merchandise. Lucrative, lucrative merchandise.

Now, the story we usually get told is that Lucas always had a bunch of movies planned, and I guess I believe him (though for some reason this gets warped into "absolutely nothing changed ever", which is ridiculous and honestly doesn't even give George Lucas enough credit to revise his plans as he gets more ideas and more practice in the industry, I mean damn folks). So various suits said he could do just that, and he did - and can you blame him? "Do this thing you already want to do and we'll all get a bunch more money." Can anyone turn that down? Ever? So he develops Empire, and I think by the standards of the time it's kind of a dangerous sequel: the pacing and tone is different, there's another director at the helm, it ends on a cliffhanger, etc. etc. It still ended up working - critics were divided, but the audience dug it, and the kids bought lots of merchandise, so everybody was happy and they made the finale. I don't really like Return of the Jedi but, to paraphrase The Rock, it doesn't matter what I think.

It's at this point that something vaguely miraculous happens: George Lucas has enough money and retains enough creative control to tell everyone to get stuffed, they're not making more of these right now. I can kind of respect that. But I think this is precisely where the real problem begins. The takeaway from this wasn't "Wow, give someone enough leeway and they can make a blockbuster film series that makes everyone happy". Rather, it seems to have been something much darker, but maybe more clearly inevitable: "Oh, when the franchise stops, the merchandising money stops." So I honestly believe it was eventually decided by quite a lot of people in quite a lot of studios that this couldn't be allowed to happen again.

When Star Wars comes back, it has to be back forever. It must acquire a hideous unlife, it must be given a totemic eternal presence in pop culture, it must be given a universe. An expanded universe! And so with a hideous, ghastly wail it tears forth into being in a way previous "tie-in stories" could never dare dream in their darkest nightmares. Ancient spirits of commercial evil have transformed the decayed form to MUMM-RA! THE EVER- er, that is, the EU sets the stage for endless merchandising of the property that helps incentivize the eventual continuation of the film franchise. And the PT is... I dunno, it's bad, but we're never going to get over it because fandoms never get over anything, do I have to belabor the point? It's almost secondary, a mostly CGI afterbirth. Once merchandise became perpetual could anything other than perpetual films follow? And once perpetual profit was on the table could Bob Iger ever resist? Of course not.

I actually lost the thread on this one, I was originally angling for "Well, the scripts," and then suddenly the PT became incidental instead. So now I'm not sure that was a coherent answer. But it's where my brain went as I was typing it out, so I guess it's my real answer.

Is Star Wars redeemable?

Yes, but not by anyone that ever owns the copyright. Redemption would require entering the public domain - which in many ways these days would ultimately be something akin to a true death, anyway.

What are some lesser-known, Star Wars-like works that people could enjoy as an alternative?

Well, for the record I don't really think enjoying another work instead really addresses all the issues here. In terms of sweeping science fiction stories I enjoy:

- Legend of the Galactic Heroes is an obvious go-to if you want war amongst stars (it's also heavily inspired by/based on The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which I pretty openly consider one of the best novels ever written) and you can either watch a zillion episode anime (do not watch the remake) or check out the now completely translated into English(!) series of novels. I think if you thought the prequels were on to something but stumbled somewhere in the execution this becomes a must, as it touches many of the same themes. There are no magic powers here, but there are dudes fighting with axes during ship-boarding sequences and it's ****ing metal as ****.

- Gundam is actually really well known in Japan but the marketing strategy overseas failed miserably (They started off with the slick, modern Gundam Wing and then were like "Hey, who wants old-ass 70s animation?!" The answer was me! But also only me, so they cancelled it.) so it's still kind of niche. In addition to having magic powers, there are also giant robots. This is basically the "I want good guys fighting bad guys, maybe some nuanced characters, and there should be laser swords" option. It's also got a lot more of the really operatic drama going for it, as everyone is kind of written like a Dostoevsky character. I was about to add "without the ham-handed philosophizing." But that would be so, so wrong. Fun fact: Gundamis what taught me that people will never let a bad installment in a franchise go. Ever. Even when it explicitly does not count.

- Iain M. Banks' Culture series is basically the big, crazy scale space opera but with a lot of wrenches thrown into the formula. Where mainline Star Wars is pretty consistent about centering morality on protagonists, Culture really loves to **** with you. Likely even the characters espousing ideas you agree with are going to do something awful. I think what honestly happened is Banks had a change of heart about the nature of utilitarianism and it shows as the series progresses. Your mileage may vary.

And then one not sci-fi thing:

- If you really like giant, detailed worlds full of weird characters with weird backstories having fun adventures where mysteries abound and you aren't voraciously reading One Piece congratulations, you played yourself. This is the most popular comic book in the world despite it being the perennial also-ran in American geek circles so I don't even know if it counts, but if you're one of those EU fans that just wants all those details, endless details, details forever, you need to read this. I know it starts off with a dumb kid who can't swim punching people with his rubber arms. I know Usopp seems kind of lame but initially gets way more screen time than other, cooler characters. You're going to have to trust me.

What are those issues?

I guess it’s slightly reflexive - there’s a tendency in discussions about alternate media options for the framing to become about “correct” consumption habits, which I don’t really believe in. Given that we had talked about how Star Wars was positioned in the trend towards mass merchandising and had a discussion earlier about Jar Jar, etc. I just wanted to get out in front about that. If you’re just looking for something else to watch because you sincerely want something else to watch, no problem. If you want something else to watch because of some moral position, I think you’re screwed.

It sounds like you’re saying that you can’t really apply a purity test when it comes to finding something to watch or read or what have you. Is this because anything’s problematic if you scrutinize it as much as Star Wars or Harry Potter have been? Am I reading too much into this?

It’s partially the ever-present nature of problematic elements and partially that, much too often in my opinion, there’s this tendency to equate consumption habits with a kind of activism that it actually isn’t. You can’t fix the world by taking the individual action of buying or not buying something.

Not an individual, but what about a load of people together? It’s that gap between taking a lonely action by yourself to being part of a wider movement—how does the between part happen?

Well, on my worst days I would argue that it probably only happens when conditions related to some part of their lives become sufficiently unbearable that large groups of people decide they have nothing left to lose by trying to fix it. Less “apocalyptic” movements strike me as more of a kind of chair shuffling, companies and governments readjusting to not have to lose any real power or profits kind of thing.

I am in a very bad mood on those days.

How does one fix the world; or, what other ways are there than what we’ve already discussed?

As for what we can do, well, remember earlier when I said I really wrestle with political questions some times? That’s one of them. I could say something kind of vague and feel-good like “we should organize and push for our demands at the local level,” or “we should take steps to evaluate and critique our society in the hopes that a solution might reveal itself to us,” or “we should vote for the right people,” but... would any of that actually matter all that much? If I convinced every single person on the forums to agree with me, I’m looking at... 200-400 people, usually. And you could argue, well, then each of them talks to ten people, and then those ten people talk to ten people, and so on, suddenly we’ve established an autonomous zone stretching from Los Angeles to Lincoln, Nebraska, Chicago will be ours, etc. But that doesn’t happen in practice, not without something bigger than our small communities forcing us to come together. Can you ever force something that big to happen? Would entrenched interests even allow you to perceive it that way?

So I honestly just don’t know - I don’t know if there’s a way where it makes sense to try to be an active agent for change that doesn’t just constantly result in failure and burning out for almost everyone that tries. Even in successful examples I think there’s an honest question of whether they actually succeeded at what they set out to accomplish and just how much luck was involved.


Let’s do a little word association... Park Grass Freud Lacan Jung Collective Trump Orange cancel culture Log off game Spiel Jolly Roger Freedom Stars and Stripes Captain America Stars and Bars Clunky Union Jack Obscure comic book superhero Marianne Williamson ORBS Atlantis Aquaman Lord Vivec 12 years old Survival battles -2 Thomas Tank Engine aspidistra Plant Google Alphabet

Give me the answer to a question before I’ve asked it. I will fit the question to your answer.

Obviously you would have to have a pint of pilsner beer, a nice plate of guláš, and the entire time you would have to complain about how Babiš is a corrupt demagogue enabling the KSČM. Švejk references optional but encouraged.

How do you have a nice and fulfilling dinner in the Czech Republic?

Again!

That would have to be the flight I took from Florence to Zürich. First, it was the little things: the looming threat of coronavirus as evidenced by some passengers wearing respirators, my rolling carry-on being stored as oversized when it certainly wasn't, the stewardess not being able to hear me until I had seemingly exhausted basically every English and German permutation of the words for "still water" that I could think of while trying to order. This would have made for a tiresome but forgettable flight.

Then the screaming began. Loud, loud screaming, all in Italian, all from behind me, all from exactly one woman. It turned out that her and her boyfriend had had a vicious breakup but were on the same flight, some kind of altercation had occurred, they had to interview both people, she just kept yelling. I actually figured out who the plainclothes officer was because he interviewed both of them and aided in the hand-off to authorities when we landed. Eventually the story got out in exasperated and variously accented exclamations of "What the hell was that?!" as we all bussed over to the terminal - because of course since we were flying out of Florence this was one of those "board on the tarmac" little airplanes.

Lovely airline company, though, Swiss. They give you a nice chocolate, sometimes you get an Apfeltasche or a pretzel roll, can't complain.

What is a European travel experience you will never forget?

Now I’m going to ask you a question, which will be hidden from the reader. Answer however you wish.

[secret question #1]

I'm sitting in a job interview with a prestigious university, just way outside of my usual reasonable job range, and finally the interviewer turns to me with a mischievous gleam in their eye.

"Dr. [Ramza], our institution is prepared to offer you a tenured position - no future strings attached. But you must retrieve the jade monkey before sundown exactly one month from today."

Ok now I want to watch this, or read it—what medium, do you think?

Comic book. Possibly straight to graphic novel.

[secret question #2]

Dying of some easily treatable but undiagnosed condition like sleep apnea in my mid-30s.

Who needs to take remedial JCC courses?

[secret answer #1]

What is the meaning of it all?

[secret answer #2]


What’s most surprised you about living abroad? In Europe? In the Czech Republic? In Prague?

Abroad - the nearly endless insistence that I present my passport just to stay at a hotel.

Europe - robust and easy-to-use railroad systems.

Czech Republic - there are actually free restrooms if you know where to look (since the stereotype about Europe is that all restrooms are pay to use), and there’s a geographical divide that basically amounts to an “Amazon Prime curtain” that we’re on the wrong side of.

Prague - there are still malls that people shop in.

Can you elaborate about that Amazon Prime curtain?

Amazon has two main European websites, FR and DE (France and Germany, naturally), we of course use the latter. But in former Warsaw Pact nations we can’t get Amazon Prime - or, rather, we canget Amazon Prime, but all that lets you do is stream video, none of the delivery benefits. Now, this could be somewhat understandable - VAT can differ across national borders, we use a different currency, etc. etc. ... but there’s a fulfillment center in Prague. They can hire you to work for Amazon in the Czech Republic. Makes it kind of egregious. At least they do “normal” delivery here, apparently that wasn’t a thing until 2016.

The net result is I tend to use Alza, which is a Czech/Slovak focused electronics site. But sometimes the price difference is just too high, so then you have to go to Amazon, figure out the way that won’t automatically switch your language to Czech or German, make sure it’s not keyed to your US address, it’s a to-do.


Who or what is on your Mount Rushmore? So, you take four

Mt. Rushmore of philosophies?

Idealism, Materialism, Madhyamaka, Existentialism

Of JCCers?

JoinTheSchwarz, Darth Guy, harpua, a star war

And of individuals, period?

Karl Marx, My Parents, My Advisor

Lastly, what to do about the real Mt. Rushmore?

As for the real Mt. Rushmore, it should be returned to the Sioux nation as a part of moving into accordance with the 1868 treaty, for them to do with as they see fit.

What is Madhyamaka?

It's a Buddhist philosophical school that basically prioritizes causality as the primary driver of being. My philosophies Rushmore is kind of a metaphysics joke, I guess: "Everything is mind," "Everything is matter," "Everything is causal links," "Metaphysics is bad actually."

Philosophy seems to go arm-in-arm with a lot of different disciplines—psychology, political science, sociology, etc. One such is mathematics, which when you think about it is sort of surprising. Why are maths and philosophy so linked?

For the same reason philosophy is connected to so many other subjects: people didn't previously divide these topics up, in multiple cultures they all basically came from the same thinkers for literally thousands of years. Specialization the way we understand it is a surprisingly modern phenomenon, motivated primarily by changes in how research and education is funded and utilized for profit. So I don't think we should be surprised that techniques developed by people engaging in philosophical work should have applications in mathematics, and vice versa.

That said, I'm actually not that surprised mathematics and philosophy are so closely linked: we're all talking about highly abstracted ideas that we hope will give us insights into how the real world functions, even if in very obtuse ways. We also use pretty similar rulebooks*: you're only allowed to argue based on previous statements other parties have to agree with - it's obviously a little easier to get people to agree on those previous statements in math, though sometimes less easy than you'd think. And we all have to teach massive sections full of undergraduates who have zero interest in pursuing our fields beyond their general course requirements. Truly a brotherhood to withstand the ages.

... Of course, there's also the less glamorous theory where basically philosophy and mathematics are closely interlinked because early Greek philosophy was full of BIG NERDS who liked math because they were BIG NERDS and all the COOL KIDS in OTHER CULTURES' PHILOSOPHICAL SCHOOLS were not BIG NERDS and did not do as much BIG NERD math but then thousands of years of history blah blah the global expansion of European ideologies through colonialism and imperialism blah blah and lo and behold those BIG NERDS have influenced GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENTS by DEFAULT.

*Actually there's a great bit in the front matter of Phenomenology of the Spirit where Hegel (take a shot) laments, albeit in quintessentially roundabout and overly articulated Hegelian fashion, that philosophers are always trying to get their arguments to look like math, but there's nothing all that special about math arguments, and actually math arguments require a certain amount of presupposition he thinks philosophy needs to interrogate, etc. etc.

Why is Hegel your favorite philosopher?

Largely it's because I fell in love with Phänomenologie des Geistes, or rather, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, the translated text by A. V. Miller (In that footnote I apparently went with Phenomenology of the Spirit as the translation so I'm well on my way to really getting into the grime on this now, hoo boy), which is a book I have often described to my friends and coworkers as having "big cocaine textbook energy."

To unpack that a little: "cocaine textbook energy" is not something I mean literally, rather it's a feeling one gets when reading a text of a feverish excitement to get all of the ideas out as quickly as possible, resulting in some sloppiness of form, maybe some redundancies, but more than making up for it with sheer intensity. You can even find this in math textbooks, so of course it should occur in philosophy, a sometimes less clinical field.

Anyway, PdG has this in spades. Hegel is absolutely, 100% convinced he has definitively figured out the way consciousness progresses in development to something resembling a fully philosophical worldview, and at this point he's like, 50% sure that actually this should work for groups of people forming into governments, and ethics. And everything else! So he's scrambling through the book at breakneck speed, but also he's not the best writer in the world, so all of his sentences are doubling back on each other in this fever pitch as he's just so desperately caught between his twin poles of trying to get you to understand and trying to get all of the ideas out and hey, when you think about it, if there are twin poles, does not this process too undergo a dialectical motion of negation and negation of the negation? Oh, ****, and then he's got to remember to disprove all of phrenology by talking about how self-evidently stupid it is. You know, for kicks.

It's like reading a bomb-blast. When the dust settles, it's hard not to feel like there's been a shift in how you're taking in everything. But... no one can quite seem to agree how - is he trying to build on Kant, fix Kant, destroy Kant? You can seemingly make the case for any of them, partially because Hegel's method is basically a highly advanced version of Plato's old technique of literally writing about people arguing with each other. There is no other philosophical text like it.

I think this was the overwhelming draw for me. Other works are less immediately dynamic but compelling in their own right - Wissenschaft der Logik presents an attempt to systematize the processes of high-level thinking in a way very different from the manner the eventual formalization of logic narrowed in on, and the Encyclopedia project is basically yet another German philosopher attempting to show that they have finished philosophy, time to wrap it up, which is always fun. The lecture notes are also interesting to really get a handle on how he thought his arguments should be distilled.

He's not without his flaws, oversights, prejudices, and lengthy treatises which may or may not be arguing that government was basically solved if they just got a few more liberties out of themonarchs. Contrary to memes, I don't think too many people think philosophy was done with Hegel, but there's a lot to like: the idea that our struggles can ultimately drive forward an engine of human progress, and that the end goal of this progress is freedom - not a crude, slapdash freedom but an active freedom that will work out for the best even when it seems to impose limits - is immensely appealing.

What is the goal, or aim, of philosophy?

Philosophy should always be trying to provide a thorough understanding of the world around us. Why is language the way it is? What is the mind? What does it mean to make a true statement? Why do states interact the way they do? Why do we feel the way we do? Etc. Trying to find answers to questions like these is its constant goal. I just also think it’s a never-ending battle because as society marches on around us our philosophical understanding will also have to march on, and that will provide new insights into old problems and old philosophical observations.

JoinTheSchwarz, Guy, harp, and asta are your JCCer Rushmore—why each of those four?

As for my picks, I chose the folks I thought of as having the most impact on how I thought about things on and off the forum (that also guided my "people" picks, for the record). For all of them that's media recommendations, posting method, and political considerations.

Your parents—many people, perhaps most, would fail to put one or both of their parents on a Rushmore of people in their lives, but you have not. Why so? How important are they to you? How much did they have to do with your development into Ramza, professor of maths, avid comic book and philosophy reader, ex JC HA, etc etc.

I think I agree with your assessment of the usual situation, a lot of times talking about my parents with other people is a little like being Nathan Explosion in my favorite random little bit in Metalocalypse:



Thing is... I dunno, we just have a pleasant relationship. They would typically enforce a certain amount of control about video game and movie ratings based on my age, but aside from that they were usually pretty encouraging of me checking out books, movies, and hobbies with reckless abandon without ever imposing a career path on me or forcing me to study over and above my regular schoolwork. They liked that I was interested in comics because it meant I wanted to read something, my closet nerd dad was more than happy to make sure we owned Star Wars and the like on VHS as soon as was possible, they let me waste my small amount of pocket money on collectible games, they didn't pitch a fit about satan or whatever when I picked up DnD, they allowed me to waste a certain amount of their money learning piano for a few years, they bought me frequently-requested copies of Beatles 1 and Mozart for Your Mind for Christmas when I was 10 which kicked off a completely bizarre saga of musical tastes... About the only thing they consistently did that I couldn't stand was make me go to swim team practice way past the point where I was openly against the idea (mostly because my brother was pretty earnest about the sport) and drag me to church on holidays (until it eventually got out that my dad also hated this).

I don't even know what I look like in an alternate scenario. Would I still be as interested in computers and math if my dad wasn't a homebrew tech guy constantly putting together new desktops? Would I still be into comics if I hadn't been allowed to reread my copy of X-Men (1991) #1 until it fell apart? Would I still be generally uninterested in swimming if I hadn't gone to all those ****ing swim meets (Okay, bad example)?

And beyond that... we still get along fine? It's shockingly easy to call the US from Europe these days what with cellphone data and voice chat apps, so we still talk a few times a week. They know I'm out as queer and never had an issue with that (though it did shift annoying conversations from "so you seeing any nice girls?" to "so you seeing anyone nice?"). About the only thing that doesn't work out so well anymore is living together for extended periods of time, and I think that's down more to my being so used to living alone that I start chafing if I have to share my space with anyone for too long. I can still make it work in a pinch (see: moving in with them for a few months while I was in-between grad school and my visa being approved), but otherwise one-to-two weeks of total holiday visit time a year suffices.

What has your journey been like on the road to eventually coming out as queer?

Mostly there was a lot of confusion involved - I liked girls, but I also liked boys, so it was always kind of this thing where I would think to myself “gosh, I really enjoy being around so-and-so, he’s attractive, I bet girls would want to go out with him” and I couldn’t put two and two together because, y’know, I did still like girls, therefore (the conclusion went) I wasn’t gay.

Things kind of just kept progressing in this manner throughout middle school and high school, and I think some other folks started putting two and two together about me, but I was still very much in this mindset where, because I assumed you either had to be straight or you were gay, I must be straight.

Anyway eventually I got to college, and I think that rattled around enough parts of my brain that I finally turned the corner and realized bisexuality was A Thing (TM). Also I made out with a guy which... y’know, if you’re making out with a guy and you’re queer but never realized it before, suddenly a whole lot of things click into place. So by this point I was feeling pretty confident that I was bisexual, but I didn’t necessarily want to tell anyone.

Cut to one month later and I accidentally came out to most of my friends because we were all really, really drunk. Oh well. My friend group was the pot smoking raised by hippies set, this was a non-issue. I still wasn’t telling anybody in my family because I was pretty worried about the response, and because unlike a lot of queer folks I mostly pass and I don’t really date people as a rule so it was pretty easy to keep quiet about.

Eventually, I did tell my brother, who was of the opinion I probably just needed to tell our parents and get it over with. So I told my folks, they were more upset that I didn’t think I could just tell them (which is the ideal response, I guess, I’m very lucky in that sense), and by the next National Coming Out Day I decided that everyone I interacted with regularly could either deal with it or **** off so I posted about it on Facebook.

Since then I’ve basically been out, but it’s always been a bit of a combative, need-to-know basis sort of thing. Eventually I dropped the bisexual label in favor of queer because it combative, unconcerned with the dynamics of the gender spectrum, and it seemed to fit my attitude about the whole thing. “**** you, I’m queer, I don’t have to fit any expectations on the matter.” That sort of thing.


Tolkien—cellar door
Henry James—summer afternoon

What, to you, are the two most beautiful words in the English language?

Free coffee.

I note btw that it’s morning where you are—I wonder what you think the two most beautiful words are when it’s evening

Free dessert.

Hmm... favorite dessert?

Apple strudel, though I'm also just fine with similar apple-based foods like apple pie, apple turnover, Apfeltasche, just eating an apple... Actually there's an ice cream place near me that sells an apple sorbet, that's pretty great.

I'm sensing a theme.

So now I have to ask: favorite apple?

If I'm just eating an apple and I have money to burn, I'll usually go for a honeycrisp. Although those were literally cultivated to be eaten raw, so maybe that's a cop-out. Lately I've been favoring Jonagolds, which are also good (and cheaper and easier to find here), but much sweeter.

I don't really cook so I don't necessarily know what makes for a great cooking apple. My mom uses Granny Smiths in her apple pies, so maybe those?

How are you coming on that Abel Prize?

You know, better than I would've guessed. I've gotten directly involved in a research project that applies probabilistic techniques to my field - and that's something the committee is way into. Weird coincidence or master plan? You decide!

Are you still negatory on the idea of having kids?

Not exactly; I think in the past I was very firmly in the “no kids ever” camp, but these days it’s more that I would be fine with whatever my hypothetical partner wanted. I certainly have no interest in raising kids on my own, though short of my deciding to become a billionaire vigilante who needs a ward to act as an appropriately themed sidekick I don’t see that version of events happening anyway.

The last time we chatted, you hadn’t yet met any JCers. Has that changed?

Nope; the timing and geography just never quite worked out. Grad school in particular was kind of a huge obstacle to doing much of anything fun, much less going to a Celebration or whatever. The most direct contact I’ve had with a fellow JCer was Obi Anne very kindly sending me a couple of face masks in the mail back when I was having a lot of trouble finding them around town.

If other JCers in Europe wanted to have a meet-up once things are decidedly less terrible I’d be certainly be game. They could even come to Prague! We like tourists here, allegedly.


What are five must-read essays for any JCCer?

"The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" by Walter Benjamin
"The Meaning of Decay in Art" by the Situationist International
"Response to a Questionnaire from the Center for Socio-Experimental Art" by the Situationist International
"The Old Iron Dream" by David Forbes
"This World We Must Leave" by Jacques Camatte

What is art, anyway?

A commodity, albeit one that may or may not be more special than other commodities depending on who you ask.

I would go so far as to cynically describe the existence of this debate regarding a possible specialness its defining characteristic.

So I think you would say that art is not special, then?

What is special?

It would be more correct to say that I believe that even if art is special this special nature is subservient to its principle function as a commodity like any other.

Special here would be possessing properties over and above those generally agreed upon, i.e., a special commodity is a commodity that plays a societal role beyond that played by other commodities. Of course, ultimately all definitions are subservient to a kind of circle of self-references always already present within our experience, so at some point one would arrive at an apparent paradox of definitions referring to other definitions with no clear starting point.

Is Star Wars not special?

Well it's the only film series that brought us all together here on the Jedi Council Forums so...

No.

What about me, I’m special, right?

Well, there I’d say the problem is almost the opposite, in that you have a collection of characteristics that make you a unique individual but under capitalism these are all varying degrees of obstacles towards the commodification of your labor-power and therefore must themselves be commodified or (perhaps preferably) sanded away to the point of irrelevance.

How do we solve the problem of money?

Destroy the circulation of commodities.

And just what is the point of it all?

Everyone should strive to achieve universal human freedom. This can only be accomplished by defeating the Zenith Dragon, who guards the top level of the castle in the sky. Take your best equipment and go forth!

***

Thank you again for the pleasure, Ramza! And thank you all for reading—it means so much!

@Ramza, I have two “live” questions for you: 1.) why do you associate the Jolly Roger with freedom, and 2.) why is Batman overrated?

Past Issues

73. Point Given (scroll to bottom for complete list of issues 1-72)
74. Princess_Tina
75. Vaderize03

~Cor

 

Come back to Twitter, Ramses, I miss you

 

fantastic interview. Look forward to peering into the darkest recesses of everyone's minds.

 

Evanarola is a pretty high quality namedrop.

 

@Coruscant, @Ramza I'd hope for a little bit about the 2016 World Series, but alas, no. Seriously, though, that was a ****ing fantastic read. Related particularly to the question/answer concerning how being queer has impacted Ramza's life, and why you love Prague (i.e.: the hills... one of the things I love about La La Land are the hilly areas).

 

This looks like a fascinating interview.... I'd love to read it all the way through, but I'm busy checking my phone...

 

being compared to a US president is probably the worst thing that has ever happened to me.

 

Great interview gents.

-Healer_Leona is the student that's really good at keeping everyone on-task during group work, and consequently their group is basically always done first. You try to encourage them to go help other groups. They do not.

You're far too young to have watched me in school... weird.

 

Great interview Cor! If only for the fact that I now know Ramza's name is Amos. I have beem curious. When Ramza was going to email me his recordings for the radio drama, I thought: now I'll find out his name! Only to get files from some email adress like "mathguy@hotmail com".

So, if you can just interview soitscometothis next?

 

Fabulous interview Cor and @Ramza. Covered many topics and a wonderful read.

Math: I have made peace with geometry due to my design eye, and I at my name drop, because here anyway, I am unfashionably late for many threads (Like this one). Real Life schedule is sadly a thing.

That said, good Prof-in-Traing Ramza, I was never late in submitting homework to my college courses, even math. I will say thank you for tackling this field so I do not have to.

 

I didn’t make it through it all yet. But I found The Witcher to be a struggle too. I do recommend Stranger Things season 1. Pacing is very good.

 

I am only a small way through this glorious interview, but just wanted to stop by to say.... Real talk, I had no idea you were younger than me.

 

I OBJECT! I would always be on my laptop.

Seriously though, really great interview guys.

 

Thanks for conducting the interview, Cor, it was fun to think up the responses!

This is 100% Leiji Matsumoto poisoning my brain. There is a constant, drum-beatingly repetitive theme of the Jolly Roger being "the flag of freedom" in Captain Harlock, so now the phrase makes me immediately respond with "AH YES, THE FLAG OF FREEDOM!" One Piece doesn't help this association, and combined that's probably like 50% of my pirate media exposure.

This is a little tricky to phrase, because I do like Batman and I think there's a ton of good Batman #content out there, but for me an overrated superhero comes down to popular perception, since the quality of stories is so variable. In that sense, it couldn't really be any character other than Batman - everyone always talks about how he's inherently appealing because he's just a guy in a costume, but simultaneously he's the best in the world at absolutely everything ever, is typically depicted as one of if not the smartest beings in the entire universe, and he never really loses unless there's a cool story in it (see also: every superhero). These are all fine things, stock tropes, no problem, except then people hold this simultaneous view that he's still just some rich dude and that's way more relatable than Superman or The Flash or Wolverine or what have you. Like, come on! That's not a "more relatable" character, that's an unbearable tension about some bourgeois übermensch fantasy. You put that kind of apparent contradiction together to argue the whole concept should collapse and be overcome! It drives me up a wall.

So, Cor's phrasing is a little ambiguous, but my name is Kevin (as indicated in the last interview). However, please do not refer to me as such.

 

Ramza, please explain to me how and why you aren't 45.

 

It all began in that magical summer of 1975. I didn't exist yet, so it was very difficult for me to be alive at the time. By 1989 change was in the air. Revolutions were imminent throughout much of the Eastern Bloc in Europe. Prince's "Batdance" was tearing up the charts. A maturing Joe Piscopo had cameoed on Star Trek only a year ago. It was decided by a committee of top scientists that people who were born in 1989 would be in their 30s by 2020 at the absolute latest. And so they had no choice but to allow me entrance into living society.

 

Kevin is a fine name, Amos.

edit: 1989 was a very good year. I was seventeen.

 

A fine interview.

I was the student that hated group projects, but I didn’t really disrupt them.

when Cor said Amos, he was referring to the first interview he did.

speaking of @Coruscant didn't we do two of these?

Kevin is off the table, but Kev-bo is fair game I hope?