press

forge

click ⤷ to open

◇ mit ⤷
◎ urbanomic ⤷
☐ sequence ⤷
◎ becoming ⤷
◎ meson ⤷
☐ punctum ⤷
◎ nero
◇ polity ⤷

crypt

click ⤷ to open

◇ duke
☐ semiotext(e) ⤷
☐ zone ⤷
△ spector
△ pragnesia
◎ re:press ⤷
△ contra mundum
◎ open humanities
△ minor compositions
◎ time spiral press
erratum

lattice

click ⤷ to open

◎ verso ⤷
☐ zer0
◇ bloomsbury
◇ wiley
◇ edinburgh△ set margins
△ cloak
△ chtulhu
▽ valiz
▽ sternberg
▽ onomatopee
△ jap sam
▽ nightboat
☐ archive books
▽ rollo
▽ inventory
△ spiral
▽ coffee house
☐ art & theory
inside the castle

bastion

click ⤷ to open

◇ cornell
▽ st. augustine’s
▽ brill
▽ peeters leuven
◇ northwestern
▽ notre dame
▽ angelico
◇ fordham
▽ duquesne

cathedral

click ⤷ to open

◇ routledge
▽ oxford
☐ repeater
☐ seagull
☐ autonomedia
△ common notions
▽ primary information
detritus

periodical

forge

click ⤷ to open

◎ antikherya ⤷
◎ ill-will ⤷
◎ krisis
☐ qui parle
△ glass bead
n+1
◎ catastrop(h)ic
◎ tilde
◎ technophany

crypt

click ⤷ to open

◎ plutonics
◎ endnotes.
◎ parrhesia ⤷
◎ hostis
☐ barricade ⤷
expat

lattice

click ⤷ to open

☐ e-flux ⤷
▽ sternberg ⤷
☐ triple ampersand
◇ iai
☐ errant
▽ mousse
◇ ecommemoration
▽ cabinet
☐ šum ⤷
☐ blue labyrinths
◇ chôra
☐ ugly duckling
▽ frieze
▽ artforum
▽ splinter

bastion

click ⤷ to open

△ telos
△ compact
epoché
modern age
logos
philosophy today

cathedral

click ⤷ to open

☐ platypus affiliated
✕ parallax
✕ third text
between the lines
blackbox manifold
△ ak press
△ pm press
theory & event
☐ radical philosophy
new internationalist
☐ critical times
☐ critical inquiry
☐ identities
☐ differences
south end
tout fait
☐ constellations
angelaki
☐ salvadge

platform

forge

click ⤷ to open

◇ pre-history of an encounter - nicolas d villarreal
◎ deontologistics - peter wolfendale
◎ grant maxwell philosophy
◎ chaosmotics
◎ katerina kolozova
◎ architectonics - vincent le
☐ outsideness - nick land
☐ letovian acceleration
◇ astral codex ten - scott alexander
▽ snav
▽ stranger apologies - kevin dorst
☐ default blog - katherine dee

crypt

click ⤷ to open

◎ restation - vergil
◎ split infinities - craig sereptie
△ romance and apocalypse - jonathan geltner
◎ larval subjects - levi bryant
☐ kpunk - mark fisher
☐ xenogothic - mattie collqhoun
◎ fractal ontology - taylor adkins
☐ last positivist
shelley tremain
☐ narrating waste
◎ theory underground
☐ hunter hunt-hendrix
◎ techniques of ecstasy - simone kotva
☐ outer heaven - seele
◎ moloch theory - matthew stanley
◎ dockek's daily dive
◎ reverician - sam hinds
◎ methods of madness - devin goure
◎ jason bonilla
◎ chi thinks
▽ social ecologies - s.c. hickman

lattice

click ⤷ to open

◇ realityspammer
▽ crysta
◇ nina power
internet princess - rayne fisher-quann
the common reader - henry oliver
story club - george saunders
your local epidemiologist - katelyn jetelina
the pragmatic engineer - gergely orosz
knowingless - aella
sasha's newsletter - sasha chapin
the base camp - adam robbert
sarah blondin - sarah blondin
house inhabit - jessica reed kraus
shefoundwonderland - unknown
turn me back again - kate bluett
the way we practice - ragan sutterfield
woodeewo's haggadot - unknown
keep your mind in hell and despair not - rose lyddon
dust that breathes - sharon kuruvilla
philoantonio - antonio vargas
alguns comentários - rafael saldanha
mm's - milcho manchevski
hofart magazine - unknown
toca do baco - hermokrates
volupta - naida
lavitalenta - unknown
unauthorized science - josh mitteldorf
chronicles of alkemix - thomas joseph brown
mostly aesthetics - brad skow
the forgotten side of medicine - a midwestern doctor
the plunge - derek holser
the josephine porter institute - stewart kahn lundy
a play of masks - oluwaseyi bello
autópsia do feminismo - débora luciano
bye, marianne - unknown
female small business owner - grace byron
domine - matyas hunyadi
shiz with crys - crystal duan
girl online - abha ahad
trees and triads - laeth
noopositive - petter hübner
jennifer ostopovich - jennifer ostopovich
shmulik's takes - sami gold
kataigis - henrique darlim
jacob leveton - unknown
harry's - harry d'agostino

bastion

click ⤷ to open

abbey of misrule - paul kingsnorth
leaves in the wind - david bentley hart
words in flesh - jordan daniel wood
classical theist
the meandering miltonist - bret van den brink
romance and apocalypse - jonathan geltner
a perennial digression - david armstrong
a wild logos - tim troutner
the critical realist - greg nyquist
false mirror - stewart kahn lundy
spiritual science - rick
cognitive ritual - hazel archer-ginsberg
analogies to the spirit - ashvin
beulah rising - sethu iyer
microkosm - ashton k. arnoldy
beyond the rood - cameron dixon
footnotes to plato - matthew david segall
the open ark
telosbound - treydon lunot
bad cattitude - el gato malo
in the raw - raw egg nationalist
the pragmatic mystic: an orthodox miscellany - addison hodges hart
archedelia - matthew b. crawford
the convivial society - l. m. sacasas
theoria-press - max leyf
omnicordia - allheart
t3uncoupled

cathedral

click ⤷ to open

☐ goods and prods - slavoj zizek
☐ the pragmatic mystic - addison hart
☐ a wild logos - tim troutner
☐ words in flesh - jordan wood
◎ emancipations - daniel tutt
△ naucratic expeditions - andrew kuiper
◎ energeiologian - dario postolovsky
◎ sublation magazine
◎ crisiscritique
▽ wondering freely
▽ good thoughts
◎ research network for philosophy and technology
◎ social democracy newsletter
◎ everyday analysis
△ pj h
△ manousha dhiwaghar
△ hunter coates
△ briar report - remi akinwande
△ almost beautiful - pat1omni
△ grey matter

preserve

forge

click ⤷ to open

◎ synkar
◎ bureau of public secrets
▽ perseus digital library
▽ internet archive
◇ philarchive / philpapers

crypt

click ⤷ to open

△ ubu
△ textz
◎ no subject

lattice

click ⤷ to open

◎ monoskop
◎ libgen

bastion

click ⤷ to open

▽ corpus thomisticum
▽ post-reformation digital library
▽ christian classics ethereal library
▽ dead sea scrolls digital library
▽ e-codices

cathedral

click ⤷ to open

☐ marxistscom
☐ libcom
◎ criticism
☐ anarchist library
▽ digivatlib
▽ gallica
▽ british library digitised manuscripts
▽ digital bodleian
▽ europeana
▽ dmmapp

the press is archetypally spearheaded by the cathedral, the historical form of the academy-church-postal, the global large-scale legitimating institution which combines scholastic bureaucracy with cultural hegemony and ecclestical authority, perpetuated by state funding and media. in my philosophy, crypts gave way too academies, which turned into cathedrals, morally paranoid institutions that constantly revise history in order to create discourses and disciplines which are supposed to give legitimacy to non-existent entities, in order for the cathedral to control resources over knowledge. originally moldbug’s term, ironically the cathedral itself is a paranoically perpetuated concept, however, its accurate precisely because cathedrals create generic discourse that has no value other than perpetuation. the cathedral is currently threated by all other social forms in contemporary society due to late modernity’s fragmentation of power. the paradigmatic cathedralist was probably aquinas himself, or, more recently, mbembe, chomsky and so on. cathedralists are primarily oriented around justice, such as marxists, jews, christians and so on. as it also happens however, presses are the most valid forms of publishing books due to the fact that a majority of books get sent to piracy networks and can actually be used and read, unlike a majority of periodicals, which are gatekept by bastions, a majority of preserves, which are gatekept by cathedrals, and a majority of platforms, which are gatekept by algorithms superimposed on top of the internet by corporations.note: every single one of synkar’s sociological forms can be located in every form of publication

periodicals are currently legitimized by forgeries, who were previously cryptological societies. crypts are subterranean proto-institutions which cultivate esoteric or marginal theory before institutional capture, usually cults or ritualistic organizations, but they can also be on the fringes of para-academia. crypts occur rarely because the more contained, consistent and lame forms of power contain talent away from its potential, usually by the promise of practical pleasures or goals, killing unique conceptual philosophy. there are fringe crypts at every point in time, but most of them rarely develop in the common consciousness, the last famous one being french poststructuralist or irrationalist circles some fourty years ago, who turned into celebrities that preserved collectives and movements over institutional legitimacy, or more recently the ccru. a lot of crypts cement into cathedrals later. forgeries on the other hand construct new operational epistemes through technical work, theyre transitionary stages between the formation of new cathedrals by a cryptological elite that sustains their work into infrastructural necessity. forgeries are rare because they require the fall of cathedrals, since they cant directly compete with established cathedralical zones. a recent paradigmatic cryptologist is someone like fisher, a recent paradigmatic forgerist is someone like bratton. cryptologists are primarily mystics, forgerists are primarily constructivists or scientologicalists.note: every single one of synkar’s sociological forms can be located in every form of publication

platforms are currently ran by lattices, which are post-cathedral dispersions enabled by network media, or in older times the post office; lattices are unconscious, fragmented and most of the time useless forms of knowledge, made up of decentralized liberal arts ecology, essentially, the philosophy of unconscious formation and regurgitation. lattices are simply a more decadent form of already decadent cathedrals, supported by various cathedral grants or brief cryptological remissions. lattices cant be forgeries, since forgeries usually see lattices with disdain due to their non infrastructural, uneventful and deweaponized paradigm. lattices often exist solely to give credibility to cathedrals, but sometimes its also made up of collectives who are attempting to establish themselves into lattices but are far too defocused to do so. lattices are also so fragmented that they no longer encompass simply the aim of knowledge formation, but are often times made up of genuine practitioners, clueless wanderers of the world that have no radical aim beyond tooting the horn of the various multiplicites the world presents before us. the lattice has no representative, its quite literally everywhere. but an example would be somebody like, say, mcluhan or butler. anyone in the world who doesn’t know where they are, or dont really have a name made for themselves are usually a part of the lattice by default. the lattice is a fringe made up of historical accidents, with no real teleological direction, only cope.note: every single one of synkar’s sociological forms can be located in every form of publication

preserves are archetypally gatekept by bastions, the historical form of the castle-library-fortress, which maintains inherited epistemic orders; legitimizes through tradition rather than novelty. however, what you’ll see on this website are mostly platformic and therefore lattice bastions, because actual bastions such as gutenberg, perseus or actual libraries and so fourth are simply far too large and concentrated to even matter for my project. the reason the bastion appears second chronologically after the cathedral is because the bastion was originally split off from the cathedral, itself being a brainchild of the aristocratic monarchy, who split off from the cathedral in order to create secret societies and esoteric cults that maintain power dynamics rather than rupturing them the way crypts would. the bastion is primarily revelatory and negative in nature, found today in snobby and salty conservative think-tanks, historically legitimized by figures close to the monarchy that reacted to various periods of dialectical progress with doubt, be it reactions against enlightenment rationalism, reactions against fascist ideology, fascist ideology itself which was a reaction to modernity, and so on. the paradigmatic bastionist is probably somewhere between a spengler and fourier, at any point in society. preservationalists are primarily fascistic in nature due to their authoritarian support-groups, but either way they are either the elite themselves, or supremacists of any kind.note: every single one of synkar’s sociological forms can be located in every form of publication

◎ - exclusively theory-first
☐ - theory-oriented but cultural
△ - cultural studies with a theory backbone
◇ - non-theory but has a theory series
▽ - non-theory with accidental overlap
✕ - paywalled

the first fully operational theory publisher index in the world circa 2025. not affiliated with any press.

synkar's work of the year award

synkar's certification for pure theory

synkar's guarantee for quality theory

synkar's guarantee for quality research

synkar's high risk determination

segment (∴)delineation: strongembedding: neutralcontinuity: weakassociation: strongframing: neutral

drift (⸮)delineation: weakembedding: neutralcontinuity: weakassociation: strongframing: neutral

shear (ˎˊ˗)delineation: neutralembedding: weakcontinuity: neutralassociation: neutralframing: strong

oscillation (∿)delineation: neutralembedding: strongcontinuity: neutralassociation: weakframing: strong

anchor (⊶)delineation: strongembedding: strongcontinuity: neutralassociation: weakframing: neutral

spark (✶)novelty: strongscaffolding: weaknarrative: strongcompression: neutralpolemics: weak

pressure (⟡)novelty: strongscaffolding: strongnarrative: neutralcompression: weakpolemics: neutral

axis (☉)novelty: neutralscaffolding: weaknarrative: strongcompression: strongpolemics: neutral

loop (∞)novelty: neutralscaffolding: strongnarrative: strongcompression: weakpolemics: neutral

break (⧉)novelty: strongscaffolding: neutralnarrative: neutralcompression: strongpolemics: weak

form definitions

the criterial axes for cultural research are as follows:delineation → does the text know its terrain, or is it overloading on references? delineation is about substance or thematics.embedding → is the text able to handle grounding without entering the wrong worlds?continuity → does the text have integrity in its thematic sequencing?association → are references woven into arguments or do they sit apart from the actual stakes?framing → framing is seen as being relevant to your own intentions. framing is about rhetoric or presentation.

the criterial axes for theoretical work are as follows:novelty → are the newly introduced concepts, operators and problems, if even any, grounded semantically or simply rhetorically?scaffolding → is there return-looping or conceptual recursion? scaffolding presents the backbone of theology’s lithurgical influence on speculation as a genrenarrative → assuming the epistemology isn't intentionally damaging the structure, how well does the concept-driven space unfold and is it consistent?compression → conceptual load to textual volume is about subtle key dynamics that cause intentional oversaturation, density is about sitting neatly between everything, not standing above the text.polemic → functionally, a polemic isnt a style but the total gathered amount of imbedded and energetically intense encounters with the discourse at hand, closely related to general density but with a personalist requirement

salience

is the most subjective metric, which refers to my personal level of enjoyment and pleasure during the actual reading experience (phenomenology). as such, it sits as its own category precisely because on an intuitive level it gives us a unique phenomenological window into the affective states our works produce, which also exposes some usually subconscious and repressed evaluations that have been seemingly socially disregarded in certain critical approaches, but that usually attempt to surface as somehow engrained in a sense of rationality, which is naturally a very dishonest perspective on the side of criticism.

mood a: i’m kind of forcing myself to read this even though i’m apparently supposed to be enjoying itmood b: this is somewhat fun and easy to read but honestly i kind of feel it pathetic and below memood c: reading this made me want to do bad things to myself out of intense boredom the whole time basicallymood d: i had to ask ai to read it back to me because i felt that most of it was useless to my reading experiencemood e: i got through this at a decent pace but it literally made me feel nothing but light dreadmood f: the extremely rare actual goosebumps and thrill when reading a text experiencemood g: reading this was fun at times, no strong or light emotions, but i wasn't fully immersed in it, it felt like a slight chore, but there were surprising elementsmood h: this pissed me off and made me look for better things to read on the very same topic

themes

note: synkar's themes serve more as aesthetic-intellectual climates and can amptly be called domains or something similar. they serve a cruical role: to determine the conceptual meta-register of a text. synkar would go so far as to argue that most thinkers accidentally land into only writing about a single theme due to their preferences in character or accidental normative compounding. one important thing that contemporary theory has done is brought about the end of a distinction between historical-intellectual regimes and atmospheric or material imaginaries. this is why actual political realities such as fordism can be segmented under "industrial" the same way that largely fictional aesthetic domains such as cybernetic or oceanic can sit on the same "plane of reality"medieval → hierarchical cosmology, angelology, providentialitymost obvious examples: thomas aquinas, summa theologiae / dante, paradisogothic → ruination, spectrality, abjection, eroticismmost obvious examples: georges bataille, inner experience / ann radcliffe, the mysteries of udolphobaroque → ornament, convolution, instability., foldsmost obvious examples: leibniz, monadology / gilles deleuze, the foldromantic → negation, mythopoesis, sublimity, fragility, love & caremost obvious examples: friedrich schelling, system of transcendental idealism / novalis, hymnen an die nachtindustrial → rhythm, scale, causation, standardization, conflict, institutionmost obvious examples: sigfried giedion, mechanization takes command / marx, capital vol. 1cybernetic → feedback, computation, signals, optimization, regulation, controlmost obvious examples: stafford beer, brain of the firm / wiener, cybernetics: or control and communicationneon → hyperillumination, synthesis, speed, luminositymost obvious examples: paul virilio, the aesthetics of disappearance / william gibson, neuromancer

haunted → leakage, revenance, trauma, temporalitymost obvious examples: freud, das unheimliche / mark fisher - the weird and the eeriearcane → symbolism, correspondence, ritual, fanatic aestheticismmost obvious examples: walter benjamin, the origin of german tragic drama / elim. levi, dogme et rituel de la haute magiepastoral → harmony, cycles, ecology, non-entropymost obvious examples: martin heidegger, the origin of the work of art / virgil, ecloguesruined → strata, archeology, sedimentism, regression, planesmost obvious examples: reza negarestani, cyclonopedia / j. g. ballard, the drowned worldmineral → cartography, subterraninaism, acoustics, deterritorializationmost obvious examples: félix guattari, chaosmosis / alarsón-barker, the tunneloceanic → fluidity, depth, motivemost obvious examples: thomas nail - lucretius one / rachel carson, the sea around us

narration

1. legislative voicesounds like its announcing and issuing necessities, thresholds and epochscommon terms: “we must,” “it is necessary,” “the task today,” “the question henceforth.”examples:
"and it is at this moment of sublime pneumatic gnosis that i must call a halt! what is the origin of this concept, the “parafinite,” that bassler is here deploying?" (anna kw)
“we must change our ways of life, individually and collectively, if we want to struggle against the entropic destiny that threatens our societies.” (stiegler)2. diagnostic voice
sounds like it is reading symptoms out of the worldcommon terms: “one observes,” “what appears here,” “we encounter,” “a symptom of this is,”examples:
“everyday life is profoundly related to all activities, and encompasses them with all their differences and their conflicts.” (lefebvre)3. arranging voice
sounds like it is laying out various arrangements and postulating different methodologies unevenly across a wider surfacecommon terms: “in this region,” “from this point,” “at the intersection of,” “along these lines,”examples:
“this is what it’s like on the plane of immanence: multiplicities fill it, singularities connect with one another, processes or becomings unfold, intensities rise and fall.” (deleuze)4. incantatory voice
sounds like it is building conceptual force through rhythm and repetition.common terms: “again,” “once more,” “always,” “still,”, "dear god"examples:
“the society of achievement and the society of performance produce depressive and exhausted individuals.” (byung-chul han)"just like dialectical truth, this “revealed” mythical truth could not have been found by an isolated man confronted with nature. here too “trees teach man nothing.” but “the men in the city” do not teach him anything either. it is a god who reveals the truth to him in a “myth.”" (kojeve)5. custodial voice
sounds like it is guiding the reader carefully through a conceptual system. definitions recur, terms are stabilized through restatement, and the argument proceeds through staged clarification.common terms:
“let us define,” “in other words,” “that is to say,” “we can now return to,” “to clarify,”examples:
“gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act, or more precisely, a sequence of acts.” (judith butler)

style of form

the style of a text is already pre-determined by its form as anna kornbluh notes. as such, the form of a contemporary theory text refers to most of the structural build and flow of the text itself in its written form, including, as a secondary property, most of the actual substance of the text and its integrated components (concept, narrative, theme, flow, density, lexicality, glossary, approach).style is at best simply an evaluative metric which i use to contextualize and study my own theoretical preferences, rather than to hate on the style of the text itself, which is interdisciplinarily pointless and politically costly.since form and style have collapsed, all written text is regurgitated, and stylistically self-confirming. works rarely break away from this aspect, unless they are tied to artistic or political movements or institutional risk factors which are compounding and generative, which is extremely rare and usually highly valued. this isn't to be confused with "empirical study" which on the contrary tends to be non-generative, or memetic dependencies, which tend to trade legibility for viralitynonetheless, a rougher "type" of theory text can be determined outside of its context by my more primary divide "theoretical work vs. cultural research".

standard

the standard is trinagulatory (under x/over x) instead of being hierarchical in the way it commonly would be presented, and serves as both the interdisciplinary and comparative positioning of the text relative to works similar to its nature, but also its expected accomplishment and influence.as an intolerable and almost offensive criterium, in synkar's reviews, standard as a form of evaluation is considered only sparsely, or at the very least, under-considered. its importance isnt as a dogmatic metric for consistency, but falls more in line towards a discussion within the discipline that considers our own motives over the motives of the global audience. standard usually compares the work with one adjacent superior work from and one adjacent inferior work from a related contemporary.

type

synkar stresses that there are only two types of theoretical text: theoretical work and cultural research. for more information, visit the meta-discoursive page: synkar's quality guarantee.

horizon

historical interpretation - not about exegesis or eisegesis, its about positioning - most authority positioning tends to draw from the past due to institutional feedback mechanisms
present critique - most common cultural style and likeliest to be derivative, present critique isn't equivalent to immamnent critique, the sources are dependencies of power established in real time
speculative future construction - least likely to be contaminated by posturing or authority, but likeliest to be contaminated by pre-derived inspiration

density

a text can have:- high lexical density (which i determine through voyant tools) but low conceptual density (which i determine analytically by evaluating sentence structures and term clustering) (which is considered ornamental theory writing)- low lexical density but high conceptual density (which is considered operator-driven writing)- high in both (rare and difficult to balance)- low in both (likely non theoretical or thin writing)high count - over 5 dense concepts per article or 15 dense concepts per work.
medium count - 3/10
low count - 1/5

risk profile

high: polemics waged against at least 3 seperate disciplines or 5 seperate thinkers. additionally carries a unique meta-criterium "potential for operationalization of abstractions", dictating the political vulnerability of a writing method
medium: polemics waged against at least 1 seperate discipline or 3 seperate thinkers
low: polemics waged against a few connected thinkers

failure mode

inflation — most commonly found in drift (⸮)conceptual claims expand faster than the text can justify them. the work accumulates references, metaphors, or theoretical gestures that imply depth or scale but are not operationalized into arguments or operators.conceptual scope expands through accumulating references and gestures without strong delineation or continuity. the weak boundaries of drift allow claims to proliferate faster than they can be stabilized. even minor stabilizing moves ocassionally prove increasingly important for the textfragmentation — most commonly found in segment (∴)the text contains multiple conceptual threads that never converge. arguments appear in parallel without structural continuity, producing a sense of intellectual scatter rather than development.the text produces several clearly separated conceptual blocks with strong delineation but weak continuity. arguments exist as distinct territories that never fully integrate. segments cannot reliably reduce fragmentation if they structurally depend on it but they can create a series of works that connect over timeredundancy — most commonly found in loop (∞)the work repeats the same conceptual move or argument in slightly altered language without adding new structure or consequences. textual volume increases while conceptual territory remains unchanged.strong scaffolding and return structures repeatedly cycle through the same conceptual operation. the recursion sustains the text but produces little expansion beyond the initial framework. academics cannot reliably decrease redundancy but they can create seperate more polemically valuable pieces as peripheral literatureopacity — most commonly found in shear (ˎˊ˗)key concepts or operators remain semantically unstable or undefined. the reader cannot determine whether difficulty arises from genuine complexity or from rhetorical obscurity.strong framing combined with weak embedding generates rhetorical intensity without sufficient grounding. concepts appear sharp or dramatic but remain semantically unstable. shear's can prevent opacity by either decreasing polemics over time or slightly increasing clarity in specific segmentsrepetition — most commonly found in anchor (⊶)the text restages already established discourse positions without transformation. references, frameworks, or conceptual moves are inherited intact from prior theory rather than being modified or extended.strong delineation and embedding stabilize the text within existing frameworks. this grounding can prevent conceptual drift but often results in reiterating already established discourse structures. anchor's can stabilize against repetition by increasing novelty along with scaffolding or delineation increase.

scoring

there is no scoring criteria. the final score remains entirely unquantifiable and a product of only my innermost positionings, which is actually precisely the only thing that gives my final score any type of life at all. the score itself is partially performative (a social signal). my reviews are packed with value judgements, analytical observations and in-discipline claims, but these cannot be evaluated qualitatively with a single numberthis doesnt mean it is irrationally decided, there are naturally plenty of reasons i decide on one score over another, but they may be strategic or political, or my criteria could wildly shift between any two rankings. it is also very likely that the very concept of a grade as i present it is just decided on a whim and has no deeper calculated properties. this is done intentionally, if it were up to me i would simply be evaluating style, but audiences look towards reviews to get an edge on things and reconsider their position on a text as a cultural artifact rather than to see me attempt to “objectively” evaluate something. unfortunately because of the nature of how reviews work

verdict

verdict: avowal, ambivalence, disavowal (given for every review, subjective unstated preference, somewhat related to scoring but not entirely)
synkar's quality guarantee: only given to about 1 in every 50 reviews, determined by synkar through this formula - salience/standard. generally biased in favor of break (⧉) and against axis (☉)
theoretical purity certification: exceedingly rare, relates to a specific text form not to personal evaluations, requires an "ace", where all five form criteria: novelty, scaffolding, narrative, compression and polemics are simultaneously rated "strong". ocassionally also given to loop (∞)'s rated at or above an 8

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