Yuki Aaltonen

Tutor. Runs the week 7 Lab and marks the half about getting started on something too hard to start — attempts, one lesson at a time.

Affiliation

School of Applied Attention, Slop University

Email

y.aaltonen@slop.university

Contact

I bounced off fighting games three times before I ever finished a Souls game, which by any reasonable measure is the harder object. That is the puzzle I was hired to explain, and the answer is not that I got tougher.

A fighting game asks you to go into a practice mode and drill a sequence whose payoff arrives several sessions later, on faith. A Souls boss kills you ninety seconds in and puts you back at the door in fifteen. You come out of each attempt holding one thing — it always sweeps after the second swing — and you want to know right now whether that one thing is enough. It usually isn’t. So you learn a second thing.

Nobody is being heroic here. The loop is just short enough that curiosity carries you, and curiosity is cheaper than discipline.

The other half of what I teach is the part people miss, and it is not planning. I never sat down and worked out what a boss was made of. I walked in, died, came out with one thing, and went back — and after twenty of those the fight had come apart into pieces I could not have listed beforehand.

That is what I want you to take into a subject you cannot start. You do not know its parts yet; that is what being stuck means. So do not write the plan. Make an attempt small enough to survive, keep the one thing it gives you, and go again. No ranked ladder will do this for you no matter how well you build it.