Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
Chess is a perfect game. That is, according to game theorists. A "perfect-information" situation refers to when there is no hidden information within an enclosed environment. In chess both players can see all the pieces and exact state of the board at all times, thus making it impossible to hide anything from your opponent. This is in opposition to a game such as "Old Maid" of imperfect-information, where the cards the other players are holding is an unknown.
The world is, of course, a highly imperfect game. The state of the environment, the players and the resources are almost always entirely impossible to know. The world is far too intricate, divisible and opaque to be mastered in the way that chess can be. And even more than merely being an imperfect game, the world is an ill-defined one too. There is no aim, no win condition, no manual; and that's obviously down to the innate truth that the world is no game at all. Its something bigger, much bigger.
However, as souls with free will we are still able to "achieve" by constructing a game around ourselves to play. We create aims and scoring systems. We try to discover the rules that do exist, and expound upon them with our own. It brings us comfort to shrink the world down to a more manageable size, so that we may be grandmasters of our own little section of the world if nothing else. And there is nothing inherently wrong with this. The power to compartmentalise the world into smaller chunks, master them, and then recompartmentalise the world into another chunk to focus on that one is the only real method through which we can truly become a "master" of anything. Its the old strategy of divide & conquer, and by doing so humans have mastered larger and larger portions of the world. This is the great "Leviathan" of human civilisation, the city, the "polis".
In the polis we find the greatest creation of mankind. The division of labour and a safety net for experimentation. Each citizen takes on a specialised role, and over his career is to master that role. These lay-masters can create much more than that same collection of people could have if they had spread out their skillset over the whole spectrum. And by combining together into a city, they create a being many times stronger, wiser and hardier than the sum of its parts. But as a city grows and becomes more complex, we reach the stage where the interactions between the different parts of the city become so intricate and interwoven that it shatters the box you have built around your mini-domain. When the baker has to deal in marketing, accounting, legality, politics, etc; he loses grip on his bread kingdom, and the security that the system had brought collapses around him. The world is infinite after all, any attempt to tame it will over feed itself to the point of disgorgement. But there is hope for us would-be petty-monarchs, and that is to physically contain the very world itself.
Imagine a bubble that contains everything you need to survive and thrive within. Not that it is all handed to you on a plate, but it is eminently achievable to live here through the actions of just those within the bubble. But since the world is contained within that bubble, it is physically impossible for it to expand past those limits too. This is how I see life onboard a ship. Every person is the master of their own domain: the chef is the King of the Kitchen, the mechanics the Earls of the Engine Rooms, and the navigator the true Dictator of the Deep. In fact the Captain is legally regarded as the ship's "master". Everything and everyone is in their rightful place, all constrained by several inches of steel hull and several hundred miles of black water. This is a highly attractive world to many, a legitimate form of escapism through which they can finally take back control of the world and of themselves. For many young men it lets them take back the reins of their life, putting them back on the right track: and in that way it can function much like a prison does.
But when one spends too long playing a perfect-information game, one's brain starts to (temporarily) rewire itself to work within those confines. Psychologists call it the "Tetris Effect", and personally I've experienced it when playing a variety of games before: Chess, Minecraft, Sudoku and yes, Tetris. You become so engrossed that you start to forget that the rest of the world even matters at all, and when rudely thrust back into society you struggle to reintegrate immediately. I've never had this experience stronger than when I disembarked my ship this winter after four months of living solely within its iron utopian confines. The strongest sensation was that of disbelief at the way normal people conducted themselves: sloppy, undisciplined, disinterested, unfriendly, unfamiliar. I could no longer glance at someone and instantly know their name, job and specialisation, and I could no longer assume that they could do the same to me. It took me several days before I returned to normality and stopped seeing those things. But even now as I'm writing this a large part of my mind wants to go back to it and regain my rightful throne upon the waves. I've yet to really delve into the rights and wrongs of such a world, but the comfort it elicits has simultaneously the ring of a band of brothers and a pillow fort.
