tfw you take your job way too seriously and you need an unbiased selection methodology NOW (Patreon)

how's it going? you good? i hope you're good. we're still settling into our new place and slowly remembering how to be adults.

few quick updates before the main course:

• i'm gonna take the next week or so to finish up the godfeels 3.1 chapter 8 epilogue, as i really want to put this part of the story to bed before the end of the year. after that i'll be taking time off from the fic to focus exclusively on videos (including one[s] about the fic).
• i'll go ahead and say that static crisis is gonna be something i iterate on and build up over time. i missed my chance to get it out quick while the feelings were still fresh, and now that i'm not in immediate crisis for the first time in months it's a bit too much for me to try to recapture that mood just yet.
• genderpunk is gonna start soon. i swear to god i'm not joking. moving just sucks the life out of you.
• i talked to caio coletti at the portuguese media outlet omelete about the matrix sequels! they did some really incredible art for this piece, so even if you don't read portuguese it's worth scrolling through. i'll be publishing the full answers to my questions somewhere in some form at some point.

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one of the vids that's been on my whiteboard longest is "unraveled vs game theory," especially with unraveled having officially ended a year ago. if you don't know what those things are, i'm not gonna take the time to explain them to you right now -that's what the video will be for! their quality isn't our concern this evening anyway, but rather their quantity.

unraveled and game theory beg to be compared, in fact it was the common refrain early on that "unraveled is just game theory but self-aware and good" that made me want to take a closer look in the first place. the problem with undertaking such a task is that, where unraveled has a pleasant 28 episodes (29 if you count the isolated pokerap, which i don't) that ran from september 25, 2018 to december 28, 2020, game theory has a whopping 434 episodes (at least!) stretching from april 18, 2011 to their most recent episode at time of writing on december 4, 2021. that's a lot of theory for one goat to take in!

here's the question looming over this project that has kept it from leaving the conceptual stage: how the fuck am i supposed to do this analysis fairly??? i vastly prefer unraveled on every level, i grew out of watching game theory a decade ago, and generally speaking i think anyone watching my channel that knows who matpat is already considers him something of an analytical jackass. how do i approach this research in a way that compensates for my personal and subcultural biases, gives gt an inarguably fair shakedown, and that DOESN'T require me to watch every single god damned episode?

because the thing is, i DO want to give game theory a fair shake. i'm not so much interested in which show is better as i am what separates them rhetorically & experientially. selection methodology is an essential question when you're only sampling someone's body work for critical purposes!

i initially assumed i'd just go through their back catalogue and pick 28 random episodes, but within minutes i realized i was intentionally avoiding some key topics or otherwise picking topics that i thought, you know, i like [game], this one could be kinda interesting at least... oh, the selection bias! no, the selection criteria needed to be scientific and out of my hands.

the obvious first solution is to watch the 28 most popular game theory episodes by viewcount... the problem is, by definition this only lets me sample the "best" of what the series has to offer, and i'm very much interested in its worst. my second thought was to have a random number generator pick 28 numbers from 1 to 434. this would definitely take the choice out of my hands and give me some lesser-trafficked eps, but what if i got a bad roll and most of the picks were in the 400s or whatever? sure, i could run the rng multiple times to make sure i got a decent spread across the spectrum, but then what's the point of even using rng in the first place? and even with a proportionally "random" selection of episodes, that selfsame randomness undermines my critical credibility. what does it say about me that i'd compare a complete series start to finish with a grab bag of episodes from a series i don't like that were picked by a computer? it might be fair in some detached mathematical sense, but it feels unfairly arbitrary to me.

a week ago, the solution hit me in the face. today, i put that solution into practice.

i decided that the only way to keep my selection methodology for game theory both FAIR and RELEVANT was to tie it directly to unraveled. specifically, i tied it to the relative scaled-up release window of each individual episode of unraveled by doing some math!

we start with the release dates for every episode of unraveled:

using a date duration calculator i figured out how many days into unraveled's 826 day run each individual episode was released. this naturally leaves us with a bunch of fractions in the form of x/826. the resultant number is the release date ratio, rounded up to the fourth decimal place:

i won't bore you with the full play-by-play of my poor addled brain's struggle to connect decade old high school algebra neuron connections; suffice it to say, when i remembered how equations work i felt like a fucking genius.

holy christ we just solved for x! if you're having trouble understanding this nonsense, imagine that unraveled released at the exact same proportional rate as it did originally, but over the course of 3883 days this time instead of 826. lay the resultant calendar down on top of game theory's release window and presto, you've got yourself a selection methodology.

from there i went back to the date duration calculator to get the specific dates i needed to look for:

we're not quite done yet, because of course all but the first and last dates have no material connection to game theory's release schedule. that means we've got to consult game theory's release history and pick episodes that are as close as possible to the date in question.

ah, but, a hiccup: turns out that you can only see exact publication dates for youtube videos on the videos themselves. in the channel view, the best you get is shit like "10 years ago." wow, thanks google!

i went through two wikis before i found an up-to-date list of every episode of game theory, but even THIS wasn't the end because none of them bother to link out to the videos themselves! so i had to cross reference the approximate date range with the actual publication dates, then individually search for each episode and add it to my research playlist.

this is the shit that pushed me over the line into writing up a full post about this process because my GOD it almost took as long as the math! not a well-boding omen, if you ask me.

anyway, here's where we landed:

there's a few weird hiccups with this list. in a couple cases the approximate date was perfectly in the middle of two other episodes, so i elected for whichever one wasn't part of a longer series of videos (as per the endnotes above, i plan on taking their five nights at freddys and undertale theories as whole works in their own right... uh, mostly). the fourth video should be about la noire, but i guess that one got taken down? so i just went with the one nearby that was about boobs. there's also one two-parter in there, which is why the playlist is 29 episodes instead of 28.

oh hey, speaking of playlists! behold the fruits of my labor: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7EKZPFs6_hSXAZta2wQCOY1IVPs9wVpS 

i'm gonna supplement this with other curated episodes from the series obviously, but this playlist is the spine of it. i'll probably stream myself watching these sometime later this week! so, you know, twitch dot teevee slash sarah zedig 

don't expect this video to come out soon! ideally it'll drop on march 8 to commemorate the three-year anniversary of its spiritual predecessor 'the politics of the mcelroy brothers', but i'm not about to give you a gun to hold to my head for that one. lots of gears are in motion and the work has resumed, but you may have to wait just a little while longer yet before you get to partake in the fruits of all this whatever you'd call it.

take care of yourselves!