- cross-posted to:
- anarchychess@sopuli.xyz
- cross-posted to:
- anarchychess@sopuli.xyz
Source unknown, some sites assign it to Oppressive Silence comics by Ethan Vincent. But that website in the corner is shady
Source unknown, some sites assign it to Oppressive Silence comics by Ethan Vincent. But that website in the corner is shady
Depends.
If the goal is to just play a game with a clear winner and loser, there’s no benefit at all.
But that isn’t what chess is. It’s more like a strategy game where there are multiple outcomes that would reflect degrees of skill and thinking.
If you’re already behind, but you can pull off a stalemate, that’s hard. In some ways, it’s harder than winning in the first place. It means that you and the other player are well matched. I’ve heard serious players rattle on about difficult draws the way football (both types) fans will talk about decisive victories of their favorite team. They’ll pick the moves apart and use those moves and tactics in their own games.
I was never a serious chess player at all. I simply don’t have the willingness to study it the way you have to to be really good at it. It felt too derivative for my preferences. But I can still remember more of my close games and draws than I can my wins because it took more of the kind of gameplay I enjoy, where you’re kinda winging it and calculating based on your own way of thinking instead of relying on a body of research and theory.
Mind you, there’s nothing wrong with that at all. The folks that play high level chess are amazing, and I fully respect the work they put into grokking chess at that level. I’m just saying that isn’t fun for me, and I play board games of any type for fun and companionship, not personal improvement or a sense of competitiveness.
Which, going back, is why I can recall my draws better than my wins or losses. They were me having fun and managing to hang with smarter, better players by dint of sinking into the play of it.
But when one of those players pulls off a draw from disadvantage? That’s fucking art, it’s mastery of a complicated but finite set of possibilities.
Thanks for the word grokking.
You and Elon can compare notes about how much you love the idea.
?
https://x.ai/
“Grok” way predates xitter and predates elon himself by a decade. It was coined by Heinlein in ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ and means ‘to understand fully’.
Just because some ass-hat uses a word doesn’t immediately give it a negative connotation.
The boringly misogynistic screed about how you’re stupid if you aren’t an anarcho-capitalist into polyamory that became popular among nerdy misogynists because it was ahead of the curve on 70’s swinger culture?
Yes, I’ve read it, and I’m aware, it’s a common pairing with his quasi-fascist work in Starship Troopers.
It spent a hundred pages pondering the concept of words in an alien language that don’t necessarily translate to English!
Wow!
Big think!
Don’t let the nerdy ancap incels have it!
Fair enough. I haven’t read it, but I knew that the term is not new and figured out where it originated. My understanding of it was a neutral term that became slang.
I’m tired of the right-wing taking ownership of terms/icons/etc and wanted to push back.
In the service of not bringing politics where it isn’t wanted, I’ll stop there.
I will continue to grok things, despite Heinlein’s positions or elon’s chatbot.
Fair enough fair enough, but the point of grok is that you can’t really grok grok as a human that grew up on Earth.
Mahmoud:
“‘Grok’ means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the process being observed—to merge, to blend, to intermarry, to lose personal identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us as color means to a blind man.”