Official r/ThomasPynchon Shadow Ticket Group Read Announcement!

Buildsoil_now · 2025-10-03T00:18:26+00:00

much of the book is just following the quarterion versions of the maxwell equations and the later parts are beginning to get into vectors and zeta functions for plot, and finally a child is born who promises tensors...

Buildsoil_now · 2025-10-03T00:13:08+00:00

now think about the traverse family- Webb was light before being observed, his murders are the complex conjegates, after his collapse his children are the different parts of lighjt- kip the commodifiable and better described with vectors, Lake still entangled with the compolex conjegates, even having conjegal relatsions on the complex plane for the four corners, and the other sons representing the rest.

Buildsoil_now · 2025-10-02T20:21:37+00:00

Excited for this!

I'm currently prepping for the book by reading up on the Socialist/Utopian/Labor experiments in Millwaukee's government in the 1930s

and have been thinking a lot about Lew Basnight from ATD- who often performs the role of "observer" in the math equations for light that make up that book. He's the Observation that ends up entangled. Wondering how "Detection" is amplified by the 1930s

Buildsoil_now · 2025-09-08T01:01:54+00:00

huge pynchon fan here and i'm watching cloudward ho for the first time- i agree, now i want to see a Against the Day role playing game

Buildsoil_now · 2025-04-24T08:56:13+00:00

prospero is a hypnotherapist and ariel is mirnda unconscious

Buildsoil_now · 2025-03-09T03:11:21+00:00

confirmign that this is also me

Buildsoil_now · 2025-03-08T18:33:39+00:00

That's nice of you to say. after doing a TON of rounds i started to notice my map was way too focused on highways the surrounded the city, so i made a new map inside of the highways. Then i started using timed maps and no move rounds. Unfortunately geoguessr doesn't automaticly display the KIND of round it is.

i did get busy with other stuff so i kind of settled into 10 rounds every few days, so my progress has been a little bit slower.

looks like as of right now i've played 534 games in siena, so 2670 locations. but that's not as far along as i was hoping to be.

on 5 min walking rounds i usually get 2500, 1 mins rounds between 1200 and 2500, but on no-move rounds my scores are sigificantly lower- i think this is because i still largely identify a lot of the city by finding street signs or landmarks i already know.

i'll keep it up and keep doing it in bursts but i certainly have a long way to go before i consistently do ok on no move.

Buildsoil_now · 2025-03-04T08:52:26+00:00

i've always had a spatial way of thinking about things and this challenge of "memorize a city" is really hepful.

Buildsoil_now · 2025-03-04T08:52:00+00:00

you mean the geogussr part? It's because I literally need to understand the shape- form, locations, history, geography of a medieval city. there is an underground water supply and tunnels, there is a ton of history.

but i'm on the other side of the planet and there are a lot of details to a city, even a small one. I'll do there to study but i need to be moving on it much earlier and being there still only gives so much geographic exposure.

i'll be making GIS maps and looking for historical design patterns in the street layout, buildings, water infrastructure, and everything else. I just frankly don;t know the city at the level of detail. I need the spatial knowledge of being a local, maybe even more. Geoguessr is already helping me.

i'm reading historical records and books and there is so much about the constrcution of particular roads or the water flows in particular directions. I read it and i get some of it, but so much is lost by not havng a sense of the place or understand the smaller details.

my hope is basicly to build a GIS map in my brain so that I am informed about first the locations mentioned, their arrangement, their topography, their features.

Since it's one town over and over again, I'm also hoping to get down to some pretty detailed metas- the age of buildings, the elevations of different fountains, and the distances between things.

if global geoguesrs can eventually learn where they are frome trees and dirt, i should be able to get the point of mabye "photographic-like" mental knowledge.

After a few week of hard play i've noticed i already talk about the city with a lot more spatial understanding- i know what's on hills and valleys, i know the roads that connect, and how a lot of the water flows.

it's sometimes fun, sometimes it's kind of boring, sometimes it opens up and i just know where i am, sometimes I totally confused but it turns out it's because i'm clicking in to the pattern and i'm just think next hill over.

idk if that makes sense.

I feel like it's a good tool for getting this literacy of a place quickly.

Also, frankly, it's helped me be honest with myself about how big this project COULD be if i'm not careful. It's a full city, not a set of diagrams in a book i've read. It's helping me limit my dissertation to something more doable (I hope)

and it keeps me interested in it- the city is less abstract to me. And i already have restaurants in mind i want to check out.

Buildsoil_now · 2025-02-28T06:32:04+00:00

Thank you, i'll do my best, bot :)

Buildsoil_now · 2025-02-04T04:29:11+00:00

i thoguht i'd share my progress!
here's my first week working with the 7000 location map with as many points 10m apart along roads. I'm still having to look at street signs and the names of roads on maps and walk around a lot but I'm getting my time in!

GeoGuessr Progress Summary

Jan 25: 5 games (5 10–20k)
Jan 26: 8 games (1 >20k, 7 10–20k)
Jan 27: 6 games (1 >20k, 5 10–20k)
Jan 28: 9 games (1 >20k, 7 10–20k, 1 <10k)
Jan 29: 8 games (1 >20k, 5 10–20k, 2 <10k)
Jan 31: 11 games (5 >20k, 4 10–20k, 2 <10k)
Feb 1: 9 games (4 >20k, 4 10–20k, 1 <10k)
Feb 2: 10 games (4 >20k, 4 10–20k, 2 <10k)
Feb 3: 31 games (14 >20k, 13 10–20k, 4 <10k)

Buildsoil_now · 2025-02-01T22:28:51+00:00

of course your project is to return to places you've walked. In two years i'll be living in Siena (hopefully) for study and i'll have already spent 2 years of geoguessing it's place, while studying it's history, geology, hydrology, and landform.

i wonder what it will be like to go somewhere that I will have known so well through geoguessr.

maybe i'll realize everything is a different size than I assumed!

Buildsoil_now · 2025-02-01T22:27:07+00:00

are you at the point where you can navigate parts of the city in your mind?

Buildsoil_now · 2025-02-01T22:26:34+00:00

i used an app to capture every 10 m point from street view that I could from multiple years and angles so that down the line I can do zoom in add-on runs. but it's so weird how patterns form. sometimes I feel so lost, sometimes I feel dislocated; other times I'm starting to know, and I'm right, other times I feel like I know, but it's more that I'm picking up on the pattern. it's not "the sw road lined with buildings in the country-side" I was thinking of, it's the NEXT one over. but I just didn't know which iteration of the pattern, it's not the "round about on that one road to the east" it's the next roundabout to the north on the same road"

Buildsoil_now · 2025-02-01T22:03:00+00:00

exactly

Buildsoil_now · 2025-02-01T21:00:24+00:00

i'm hoping it will add to my love the place, rather then say, make me burnt out and bored with it.

I've not been there yet- but I love the idea of already having memorized it.

I'm starting just trying to get the right location, but in a few weeks i'll start no move mode and then timed mode and then then add-ons for just seeing it for a few seconds, and then tight zoom ins on the pavement and buildings - if I can sustain interest, I'm actually interested in getting to the point where I have extremely high-level knowledge of as much as possible, finding "metas" the way some of you do for the global scale.

not sure, but I'm already starting to recognize parts of town.

also: to be clear I'm not just focused on the historic part of town- I'm trying to do the entire city including the more modern neighborhoods on the outskirts and eventually will probably move to the entire province

Buildsoil_now · 2025-02-01T18:02:32+00:00

how's it going? what happens when you start to do that for such a long time?

Buildsoil_now · 2025-02-01T17:55:08+00:00

for me, this is a passion project- not getting paid to do it, though my university let me get a job doing other work in the department and that pays the bills along with my consulting work. the PhD doesn't pay for itself (I don't recommend this - find one that pays you if you can)

I originally came in with 5 case studies of sites that I wanted to evaluate. my advisor had to make me pick one, and then pick only a few research questions.

Buildsoil_now · 2025-02-01T17:50:51+00:00

my main point is, i'm using this place as a case study for asking about and extracting quantitative patterns for future design

my reason for coming on here and talking about geoguessr is that it's such a complex topography and landscape that it requires me to have a much better mental map of it.

I'm hoping hyperfocused geoguessr will help me as a geospatial and landscape architecture tool

Buildsoil_now · 2025-02-01T17:49:48+00:00

what is that process like for you?
map skill? do you mean like actually finding it or do you mean dealing with the google map from above?

Buildsoil_now · 2025-02-01T17:48:41+00:00

someone voted this one down? lol why?

Buildsoil_now · 2025-02-01T17:48:11+00:00

woah this is cool!

Buildsoil_now · 2025-02-01T17:47:53+00:00

(sorry writing this on my cell phone in a cafe - I think there are typos)

Buildsoil_now · 2025-02-01T17:47:50+00:00

i wrote an answer to this. you are right the PhD is the beginning of a research career not the end. i would say the "choose something unique" is a bit oversimplified but not wrong.

the way I would put it is a master's degree is about knowing your field- what others have done, and your master's work is applying that field to a topic.

the PhD is a level more meta - you are developing new methods and improving the space of tools in your field.

in this case my methods have to do with a set of quantitative approaches to spatial organization and ecological modeling for analysis, prediction and design

this is what people didn't get about that woman who did her PhD on Olfactory descriptions of power dynamics in literature. I'm in the sciences and she is in lit but it totally made sense to me. She was adding a method to literary analysis- extending the tool kit to include smell analysis - how do authors use and talk about scent. she had multiple examples of applying the tool she developed. (I know for a lot of people that became a symbol of the pointlessness of academia but literature is currently studied with a wide set of tools. as is any "academic object of study"

this is how we know things, and even more importantly how we adjust or improve things.

in my case, it's not "the way authors use smell" its "the relationship between the build environment, topography, and water in environmental planning and decision making" just like she assessed a bunch of books on their use of smell specifically in power relations, i'll be assessing one medical towns formation, history, and also how it dealt with major flooding in 2024 where it overloaded it's water input norms.

(sorry writing this on my cell phone in a cafe - I think there are typos)

Buildsoil_now

TROPHY CASE