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cyril focht

@ceciltheawesome

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21.11.2024
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Latest posts by cyril focht @ceciltheawesome

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This bookcase has clocked me too well not to be suspicious

06.03.2026 21:10 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

A thing I am kinda fixated on these days is thinking about how the incentives of virality and social media make for hundreds of people auditioning to be the smoothest on ramp between “inchoate feelings” and “vicious ideologies”. and many don’t even know they’re doing it, at least consciously.

28.02.2026 18:56 👍 127 🔁 20 💬 2 📌 0

My cozy play for the last couple years has been doing steel soul runs of hollow knight. When I mention it people often ask "what the fuck is wrong with you?"

It's still cozy

01.03.2026 02:18 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

I cannot think of a funnier or more appropriate summary of the state of the news industry in 2026 than “the Onion has more subscribers than the Washington Post”

please help make it happen

25.02.2026 17:16 👍 2008 🔁 484 💬 2 📌 5

This is a (deserved) critical hit to his legacy so hard I've been dealt splash damage.

05.12.2025 04:10 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

"landmark study" proving a thing that you can figure out by
*Checks notes* having a baseline understanding of how ai works.

22.09.2025 04:40 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

"Age verification" laws are actually "upload your ID or get your face scanned to access every website, ending anonymity and associating your identity with everything you do online" laws and if more people understood that they would not be down for this authoritarian nonsense

02.04.2025 12:57 👍 38434 🔁 15192 💬 361 📌 312

I love seeing other small essayists who decide to keep it up as a hobby, even without attracting a bigger audience because those are usually the same people whose growth you can actively see in their writing or filmmaking.

10.08.2025 02:17 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

In an Internet landscape where vitality and mass consumption are The Thing, there is something compelling about making things for the Internet with a small audience.

More often than not I have to remind myself of that because view counts in the hundreds are also really discouraging.

10.08.2025 02:17 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Most of the videos I've put on YouTube took a year to make and almost all of them have just gotten a couple hundred views. I wouldn't have kept it up if I wasn't compelled by the craft, but even for those who are and still put it down despite that-I get it.

10.08.2025 02:17 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

if you are interested in having a deep relationship with art of any kind, you owe it to yourself to start engaging with it the way Stacey describes here, you will have a much better time with every piece you come across and learn a ton in the process

04.08.2025 01:33 👍 149 🔁 73 💬 0 📌 0
2.1 Lenses, Not Boxes
I wondered whether this section was necessary, but games discourse seems to repeatedly find itself adrift in questions of whether _ counts as a _. We have seen
the question repeatedly: Do games count as art? Do games without goals count as games? Is The Sims a game? Are hypertexts interactive fiction? Are
Twine pieces literature? In fairness to the researchers cited here, all of whom I respect immensely, many of these sources pose or imply the question rhetorically. Still, the necessity of such a framing frustrates me.
"Is _ a _?" is, in my opinion, a fruitless question. The question can never be answered to anyone's satisfaction, and it often serves as either a provocation
to espouse politics or as a cover to institute gatekeeping. Its agenda is usually opaque
to onlookers and bewildering to those trying to advance the field from across disciplines.
We should be thinking in lenses, not boxes.
It is always more interesting to ask "If we think of _ through the lens of _, what do we learn?" We know it is more interesting to ask "What do we learn
by considering Tom Stoppard through the lens of poststructuralism?" than to ask "Is Stoppard's work poststructuralist?" And while some works may be more or less fruitful when examined through different lenses, sometimes the most unlikely pairings of lenses and objects are the most rewarding. Certainly any of the questions above would be much better served by reframing them in this way.

2.1 Lenses, Not Boxes I wondered whether this section was necessary, but games discourse seems to repeatedly find itself adrift in questions of whether _ counts as a _. We have seen the question repeatedly: Do games count as art? Do games without goals count as games? Is The Sims a game? Are hypertexts interactive fiction? Are Twine pieces literature? In fairness to the researchers cited here, all of whom I respect immensely, many of these sources pose or imply the question rhetorically. Still, the necessity of such a framing frustrates me. "Is _ a _?" is, in my opinion, a fruitless question. The question can never be answered to anyone's satisfaction, and it often serves as either a provocation to espouse politics or as a cover to institute gatekeeping. Its agenda is usually opaque to onlookers and bewildering to those trying to advance the field from across disciplines. We should be thinking in lenses, not boxes. It is always more interesting to ask "If we think of _ through the lens of _, what do we learn?" We know it is more interesting to ask "What do we learn by considering Tom Stoppard through the lens of poststructuralism?" than to ask "Is Stoppard's work poststructuralist?" And while some works may be more or less fruitful when examined through different lenses, sometimes the most unlikely pairings of lenses and objects are the most rewarding. Certainly any of the questions above would be much better served by reframing them in this way.

Wow we’re having “games are art” discourse again! Just gonna leave this here.

From my dissertation:

04.08.2025 00:17 👍 1347 🔁 492 💬 29 📌 41

good

03.08.2025 04:04 👍 227 🔁 32 💬 6 📌 1

Once again perfect for the culture! No one has any idea who invented spickles (all-sport pickles) but we all marvel in horror at the ubiquity of such food crimes

28.07.2025 00:50 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

I need to share this with all the other hike guides I'm working with this summer

28.07.2025 00:46 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

No you cannot determine which drugs are safe and effective with machine learning. You cannot. It will not work. People will die.

01.07.2025 21:15 👍 651 🔁 204 💬 8 📌 10
Rigging Elections for Fun and Profit
Rigging Elections for Fun and Profit YouTube video by Cyril Focht

Link here
youtu.be/PuLzZ-oO4Us?...

22.06.2025 15:36 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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New video on YouTube, making a return to longform content! As with every election, conspiracy theories have been floating around the internet about the 2024 election being hacked in trump's favor. What's plausible? What's bunk? And what concerns does it raise about modern elections?

22.06.2025 15:36 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

reminder that in most cases what it outputs is something that convincingly resembles an answer to someone who doesn't know enough to produce a correct answer. it produces answer shaped text, is easily nudged to give a different answer, like a fortune teller trying to figure out what you want to hear

29.05.2025 19:22 👍 88 🔁 19 💬 3 📌 1

That we continue to persist at all is a testament to our faith in one another.

09.05.2025 17:37 👍 281 🔁 116 💬 0 📌 1

This has exactly the same energy as my students who call me "Dr focht" even though the first thing I say every semester is "hi I'm cyril, don't call me Dr because I'm not"

Clearly paid zero attention to the very first thing I said, and I assume not a thing since

07.05.2025 22:41 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

This is so weird to me because my takeaway from that announcement was that you weren't already on hrt

07.05.2025 22:39 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

When it's not house of leaves, you'll find infinite jest in it's place

07.05.2025 22:35 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Directly downstream of recasting college as a work credential than a site of learning.

07.05.2025 11:14 👍 637 🔁 146 💬 9 📌 4

This is spot on, re chatGPT cheating in college. A lot of the moral panic aspect focuses on the tool itself, as if that's the entirety of the problem. And while it isn't great, the widespread usage is definitely a symptom, not a cause, of wider rot in what the education system does to students.

07.05.2025 15:30 👍 59 🔁 16 💬 0 📌 1

@squidtips.bsky.social made a whole video a while ago about his choice to do that

21.04.2025 00:06 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

And you still wrote something! Just having it on the page means you've got something that will be easier to work with later when you come back to edit

07.04.2025 07:49 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

When I'm hitting similar slumps, I try to remind myself that even if it doesn't make it into later drafts, it's still helping to think through my direction. When I don't like it there's a reason I don't like it and I can dig into that.

Ofc sometimes it also helps figure out what direction not to go

07.04.2025 07:46 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

The “ceasefire” was an inauguration PR stunt.

18.03.2025 02:42 👍 26 🔁 9 💬 0 📌 0

When you practice such that the everyday becomes divine, sometimes you theology gets tangled enough that the showerhead looks like G-d

14.03.2025 00:49 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0