A scientist must be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting.
Recent Posts
- Manifold Betting Calculator
- The Worst Crime
- Prediction Markets Are Not Polls
- Event Bracket Printer
- One Ring to Confuse Them All
- Stop Trying to Make CR Backups Happen
- Negotiation Assistant
- Teaching Magic
- The Economics of Organized Play
- Watching Magic
- You Have To Make a Ruling
About
I'm Isaac King. This is the general home for all of my writing and other projects that don't fit anywhere else. Most of the content here relates to the trading card game Magic: The Gathering, but not all of it. I've sorted all of my content into general categories below, so that you can easily find the things you're more likely to be interested in.
I take a slightly different approach from most blogs; I don't write very much, but I try to keep what I do have here up-to-date as things change. If you notice anything on any of these pages that you believe to be inaccurate or outdated, please let me know so I can fix it. If you'd like to be notified of new posts, you can subscribe in the top right corner.
MTG Rules
- RulesGuru
- Meet a Melvin
- Step By Step: Layers
- Step By Step: Damage
- Step By Step: Dependency
- Step By Step: Declaring Attackers
- The Magic Rules are not Complete
- Deep Analysis: Text, Abilities, and Effects
- Step By Step: Replacement Effect Lookahead
- Grafdigger's Cage and Grist: A Detective Story
MTG Judging
- Confidence
- Card Legality
- Spindown Dice
- Trick Questions
- Positive Feedback
- Judge Terminology
- Staying Up To Date
- What is "Cheating"?
- How to Extend Time
- Judge Search Engine
- It's Ok To Ask For Help
- Judge Conference Tips
- Card Counting Calculator
- The Lost Art of Shadowing
- Disqualification Information
- Why Players Don't Call Judge
- Round Robin Results Calculator
- The Philosophy Behind Deviations
- Competitive REL Tournament Primer
- Assigning Blame vs. Solving Problems
- Running Effective Roleplay Workshops
- How to Avoid Unnecessary Match Losses
- Guidelines for Writing Good Judge Questions
- Magic Judges are Obsolete; It's Time to Replace Them With Prediction Markets
Other MTG Content
- Magic Math
- Card Name Sorter
- Probability Calibration
- Judge's Tower Design
- Randomness in Magic
- Card Name Regex Golf
- Counterfeits Vs. Proxies
- Misprints I'm Looking For
- In Defense of Pile Shuffling
- The Competitive Megacombo
- Misprint Price Guessing Game
- In Defense of Not Pile Shuffling
- High quality image of the MTG card back
Non-MTG Content
- Trivia Platform
- Manifold Search
- Disease Statistics
- Fantasy Realms Bot
- The Hidden Complexity of Thought
- Testing GPT-3's Mathematics Comprehension
- Testing DALL-E 2's Mathematics Comprehension
- Rational Agents Cooperate in the Prisoner's Dilemma
- Human Communication is Complicated and Frustrating
Contact Information and Other Profiles
Other Recommended Reading
- SMBC
- Action!
- Nohello
- Unsong
- Exhalation
- Dollar Street
- Salad Theory
- In My Culture
- Earth Reviews
- Planet of Cops
- A Small Fiction
- The story of Jim
- Science Heroes
- How to Disagree
- Silent Treatment
- Notes on Nigeria
- Existential Comics
- #RebootThePolice
- Reductionist Magic
- Arguing with Myself
- To Wash It All Away
- Farokh vs. Mr. Beast
- Programming Sucks
- The Security Mindset
- Meaning, the Cryptid
- "Nobody gives a shit"
- The Metropolitan Man
- Cops, crime, and class
- A Practical Guide to Evil
- Do Not Replicate Orders
- The five kinds of paradox
- They Write the Right Stuff
- Mnemonic Map/Acevedo
- The story of VaccinateCA
- A Mathematician’s Lament
- Academic Urban Legends
- The Bitter End of "Content"
- What Colour are your bits?
- Language modeling game!
- Credit Card Debt Collection
- The Gentrification of Disability
- The Missing 11th of the Month
- Twitter and Anti-intellectualism
- Who regulates the regulators?
- Not Everything is For Everyone
- The Online Business of Torture
- Twelve Recursive Explanations
- War Propaganda About Ukraine
- List of Common Misconceptions
- Failure to Cope "Under Capitalism"
- Your Favorite Writers Aren't "Brave"
- I Want a Political Movement That's...
- Things You Should Never Do, Part I
- The Vault Of The Atomic Space Age
- The Centre for Applied Eschatology
- The Satanic Panic Is Incredibly Weird
- The Seven Deadly Sins of Politi-Speak
- A Person Paper on Purity in Language
- 500 Million, But Not a Single One More
- Isaac Newton, His Eye, and His Bodkin
- The Twitter Files and Writing for the Maw
- The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics
- Who is included by "inclusive" language?
- Why Cross-Examination Is So Damn Great
- Morality is Accidental & Self-Congratulatory
- NSA, NIST, and post-quantum cryptography
- The rise and importance of Secret Congress
- No Silver Bullet Solutions to the Werewolf Crisis
- I'll Let Myself In: Tactics of Physical Pen Testers
- Coronavirus, Conspiracy, and Coping with Death
- Specification gaming: the flip side of AI ingenuity
- Do we Stand at the Precipice of Radical Change?
- Excerpt from “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”
- How I Joined Teach for America—and Got Sued for $20 Million
- Did the Entire Media Industry Misquote a Hamas Spokesperson?
- Common Tech Jobs Described as Cabals of Mesoamerican Wizards
- Your Top Priority is The Emotional Comfort of the Most Powerful Elites
- On Being Rich-ish: Lessons I learned becoming suddenly middle-class
- Some preliminary notes towards a *real* Cost-Benefit analysis of prisons
- Photovoltaic growth: reality versus projections of the International Energy Agency
- Obligate Brood Parasitism On Your Part Does Not Constitute A Responsibility On My Part
- Guessing C For Every Answer Is Now Enough To Pass The New York State Algebra Exam
Hold stick near centre of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion.