This is (almost) verbatim text from a journal entry I wrote for a seminar I took on immersive documentary. I thought it was interesting enough to put here, even though parts of it might not make sense if you haven’t read the works I’m talking about. For context, my class had previously read an essay called “Disaster City” by Barrett Swanson, in which Swanson participates in a disaster recovery simulation, explores his personal fascination with disaster scenarios, and explores the blurring between reality and fiction that occurs in those simulations. A lot of our conversation had to do with rituals and performative preparedness and how they can be used to enable cognitive avoidance of the root causes of certain issues, creating a false sense of safety for the person practising (or even observing) the rituals.

You know the drill. In the last episode I did of this series, I said the next one would be coming shortly, huh?

Yeah, right. I lied. These come out when they come out.

Here’s another linkdump—a list of links to stuff I thought was interesting but likely won’t get to properly reviewing any time soon.¹

I reserve the right to more fully review any of these article at a later date, of course. (Though at this point, it’s extremely unlikely to ever happen.)

For context, these are some things I learned in the process of putting together and delivering a guest lecture to a first-year discrete math course last summer. The talk was about the research I was doing at the time, and I was allotted about half an hour for the presentation. Again, I meant to write and post this last year, but clearly that didn’t happen.

I really meant to put this list up sometime last fall… whoops. (This is yet another incredibly overdue article.) Anyway, here are a whole bunch of things I learned while attempting to “do research” last summer, whatever that means. The big theme here is to make life easier for future you, who will have to wrangle together your several months of chaos and exploration into a rigorous and coherent narrative. Present you can help by being organized and breaking things down into smaller, documentable steps.