The Rules Of The Game #1: Joining In

[koganbot]

Hurrah, I've been given a column (first one here: The Rules Of The Game #1: Joining In) at the Las Vegas Weekly website, where I can actually get paid to write stuff I've always wanted to write - to ask questions, basically, and to intellectualize to my heart's content. The column runs every Thursday* with a brief minicolumn update on Mondays. I welcome your commentary: in fact, will need it, since my hope for the Monday minicolumns is that at least some of them will have me addressing people's comments about the previous Thursday's column.

*The especially sharp-eyed among you will notice that today is Friday, not Thursday. The Las Vegas Weekly is revamping its website and going through something of a shakedown cruise, so things don't always go up in a timely fashion. Some future Thursdays may also end up as Fridays, and some Mondays will be Tuesdays.

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about randomness a bunch...but another point I made (and articulated more clearly on Bedbugs) was that the deck is stacked toward "like," and rather than think of taste in terms of "like" and "dislike," it might be more balanced to think of it in terms of "like" and "ignore."

Not to say we can't legitimately dislike things (and for no seemingly justifiable reason plenty of the time) but that we very seldom dislike, say, a genre because we have actively listened to it and have decided it's all crap. Also that where we "dislike" something based on little information, we are most likely to radically change, given a new set of social variables -- new friends. new radio stations, new clothes, new clubs. I thought I disliked _____, but turned out I'd never really listened to it! I doubt this is a very common event, because I'd guess that people don't LIKE to radically change "who they are" (their friends, their clubs, their radio stations") all that often.