Tag: Affect Engineering

Theory of Emotion

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Epic Poetry + Comic Strip Art = Epic Comic Strip

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New content is on the way!  Oscar the Bard, Necromors, and Wild the Muse is a side project I fiddle with from time to time, like when I should be editing my manuscript (i.e. flogging my book) or enticing literary agents into representing me (i.e. flogging my book). Ok, that’s a bit of a stretch… it’s actually informed by Affect Engineering, and it helps sate my witty side when I’m editing.  It’s not always easy to wax poetic when one is also explaining cosine functions and exponential decay. A more in depth description of my dabbles in comic strip land is also in the menu under the new Just for Fun menu bar.  I make no claim to be the fastest or best illustrator out there, so the updating of it may be sporadic, depending on my time to draw and revise or write poetry, you know, when I should be doing other stuff.

Oscar the Bard, Necromors, and Wild the Muse

Oscar Necromors Wild edited Names jpeg

Accordingly, this post is under the new Artsy-Things category.  I’m looking to add a Deconstruction category and/or Hypotheticals category to keep the content mix lively in the near future.  They’ll likely be posts where I show how Affect Engineering would deconstruct a real life and plausible situation. Real life and plausible… did somebody say tabloids?

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The Zugzwang and the Zwischenzug

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Chess analogies are always fun to make to life, and equally exciting to dissect as they typically reveal something about the person who made them.

These two chess terms were chosen because, taken together, they account for nearly all of one’s success or failure in chess, with outright blunders making up the other portion. That, and all of those Z’s look pretty impressive in the headline.

First, a zugzwang (German term meaning compulsion to move) is a situation on the chess board where a player would prefer to make no move at all. Moreover, upon moving the player is forced to yield a decisive concession that leads to either defeat or a draw if one actually had the upper hand in material and winning opportunities. This can frequently occur in the endgame when both kings may be fighting to take the opposition. It goes without saying that one would want to avoid being put in a zugzwang as it is strongly associated with failure.

Secondly, a zwischenzug (German term meaning in-between move) is an intermediate move done before an anticipated response (i.e. before recapturing a piece) and can swing the outcome of a situation in one’s favor.  One would want to find a zwischenzug if it will lead to winning opportunities, compel one’s opponent to move into a zugzwang, or force a draw if one’s winning opportunities are slim to nothing. It is strongly associated with success.

These terms probably won’t make their way from the chess world into mainstream lexicon anytime soon. I might be surprised though. While people are not necessarily chess pieces that can be moved around to suit one’s whim, there are some who would beg to differ.

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The Difference Between Jealousy and Envy

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This piece of knowledge I have to initially tribute to my high school, freshman year, English teacher, Dr. Lane. I don’t know why I chose to remember this, as she only went off on this tangent for what seemed about a minute or two before continuing with the lecture. Maybe it chose to be remembered by me, sticking out like an intentional detour that a tour guide might take to promote the local vendors.

The gist of her commentary was that the vast majority of people inappropriately use the term jealous when they really mean envious. Moreover, she lamented, because so many people (students and professors alike) were misusing the term jealousy, it was becoming synonymous with the term envy.

That was news to me at the time. I had thought they were cousins all along…

She went on to explain that envy means to covet something owned by another, whereas jealousy was more akin to the fear of losing someone’s loyalty and/or resentment of a rival, before returning to the topic at hand… something about parts of speech or Les Miserables, I can’t recall. My brain was still downloading content, I guess.

Sure enough, while working on Affect Engineering and pouring over hundreds of entries in psychology dictionaries I discovered that she was right, but that’s not really the point I want to make here.

If I could be mistaken about one interpretation of one word, then what other words might I be using incorrectly? What other tools of the trade might I be bending, warping, or breaking through their incorrect usage? Though no language is indestructible, some, it would seem, are clearly hardier than others.

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To Catch a Literary Agent

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With this last round of major editing coming to a conclusion, I now feel fully equipped to play the waiting game (a.k.a. hunting for a literary agent). Agent… it’s one of the few words that just seems to inspire an aura of confidence. Agents carry about them an ineffable mystique; they can instill fear among world leaders or assert their power as catalysts for destruction. Here are some examples:

Literary Agent
Secret Agent
Double Agent
Agent Orange

They are men, women, and things of action! Catching one of these elusive creatures, the literary agent, will necessarily require a tremendous amount of effort, craft, and stealth (i.e. my posting may go on hiatus until I wrestle one into signing a contract, figuratively speaking).

Also, have you ever noticed how any word instantly becomes hip, cool, and fierce sounding if it precedes or comes after the word agent? For instance:

Agent 50%

What exactly is being implied here? Would this agent only do half the job that you paid to have done in full? Maybe, but I’d be willing to bet that half of the job would be top notch with a moniker like that. Other examples include:

Butterfly Agent
Agent Cupcake

I rest my case.