When I don't feel like what I'm doing is crucial and possible, I quickly disconnect from it.  I'm learning to see things as parts of a whole now, and even value pastimes as a way to keep my mind steady -- to take up time in a pleasant and relaxing way so that when my current blocker moves on (e.g. my mental reserves are depleted, or I'm waiting for water to boil, or whatever else) I can return to the same Most Important Thing In The World.

I need a new word for this, so I'll call it a Monofocus: a venue or target to satisfy my need to be monopresent (as opposed to multipresent). Monopresence is just a state of mind, but it's foolish to think that all that is required is mental willpower; valuable factors create the conditions for states of mind to thrive.

Maybe I'll call it a 'pattern.'

~~~

Monofocus

P: I require a certain amount of monopresence in my life, but my focus is easily shifted to something that seems more important than what I'm focused on right now.

S: Consciously commit to a monofocus, something that is easy to perceive as The Most Important Thing In The World for a certain period of time (not forever).
 - When I don't have an opportunity to focus on it, I should reject new foci to an extent that is reasonable. (What is reasonable?)
 - When I have an opportunity to focus on it, I should be able to focus on it. (i.e. It must be actionable/available to me.)
 - It can't take over my life... (This one is hard)

~~~

To fit the structure of a pattern I would like the monofocus to be more empirically defined, but for now this will do.

Small bowl
Melt 42g butter

Small-medium bowl
300g milk (1 1/4 cups)
1 egg, beat

Large bowl (dry)
180g flour
1/2 tsp salt
1+ tbsp baking powder
1 tbsp white sugar

- Sift dry ingredients TWICE! (I just scoop it out of the bowl into a sieve held above the bowl. Don't need to get every particle.)
- Add milk, eggs, butter.
- Mix thoroughly

Heat/butter cast iron
Cook pancakes. Don't press down: let them fluff.

Heat! On "MAX" until butter is hot, then stick at around "2" the rest of the time, once the pan is hot enough. Cook the first pancake 2 min on one side, 1 min on other side. The rest should be 1 min on each side.

Adding batter! Add butter (it will sizzle and spit -- that's life). Spoon a big lump in. Shake the pan to spread it out as much as it will go.

Cooking navy beans today:
1 lb beans
4 cups water
1 tsp olive oil
30 mins pressure cook, natural release.

Will report back.

I've never finished a Pokemon game before. At the end of the credits there's a little shot of your character going into their house, then title. If you start the game, picking up where you left off (for the new game+ content), you start in your house. I like it, it's a nice closed loop. How cute.

I'm told this is what all these games do, but it's still cute. I'm done with this game.

"Make games that stream well" is the eternal refrain of indie dev business advice. "Make games that make good GIFs."

And so on, and so on.

But this is just the internet-centric advice from people immersed in internet social spaces. What if I don't want to be one of those people?

It comes and goes, but lately I've been trying to spend less time believing that the internet is this all-encompassing universe. Not everyone is 'on the internet,' and neither do I have to be. It was cool, and big, and popular. But isn't it still possible to live a life detached from this one virtual world?

I like fiction and fantasy, and false imagined worlds given the breath of life. I've dabbled with thinking about what NFTs are and I think I've ultimately rejected them, but in the process I think I've exposed part of what the internet is for me and others - like NFTs, the internet is fake.

What I mean is that the internet only has the relevance we give it. It has its benefits, of course, but it's not all-encompassing. NFTs are worth killing now so their false-labour fantasy of value doesn't get bigger. Why is the internet's false-permanence fantasy any better? The dream of connection comes at a cost -- we can reach anyone, but in an ever-shallower way. Multipresence demands it, and the internet is increasingly all about multipresence, where the biggest voice gets the most attention, to no upper limit.

We're playing the lottery.

I was having a conversation with my sister about J.K. Rowling's recent transphobic poem and ended up talking with her for an hour about this while out on a walk. And... well, I realized afterwards that I was having a conversation that felt frustrating because I thought I had to take a stance one way or another. So I wasn't really saying anything except dancing around the fact that I didn't have any passion to engage with the topic, pushing responsibility onto her to say something that would inspire me to get more engaged.

The solution, I think, is for me to recognize and acknowledge when I'm not passionate about a topic and to say so. It doesn't even have to come quickly--there's no rush to get there in the course of a conversation, but I need the practice with feeling and saying:

"This isn't something I have enough passion about... for me to engage with it meaningfully."

Reading a tabletop roleplaying game document, there might be tables and charts of possibilities -- anchors that give you space to imagine a world between them. Maybe writing is not so different from this after all, just less explicit about it.

If I write the simple sentence, Don't breathe that stuff, it leaves open so many little questions which might be inconsequential to the plot but beautifully consequential to the experience of inhabiting the world...

Every statement has negative space, but so as to be able to tie it better to A Pattern Language, I'll call it space 'outside' the explicit, instead. 'Outdoor' space.

If I'm watching a show that never describes a certain aspect of a relationship (for example), it creates a blank space that is never resolved. But done well, done in a way that I like, the blank space feels at once concrete and yet also infinite. Does that make sense? Fuck, I sure hope it makes sense.

Leaving an unanswered question for me to imagine the answer to...

It's not valuable because I answer it, but it's also not valuable because I never answer it. It's valuable because I can answer it anytime I like, and then any other time I can answer it differently or not at all. I'm free, but inspired. My brain can flicker and flutter in a cavern of just the right size.

In A Pattern Language, Pattern 106 is Positive Outdoor Space.

QuoteIf you look at the plan of an environment where outdoor spaces are negative, you see the buildings as figure, and the outdoor space as ground. There is no reversal. It is impossible to see the outdoor space as figure, and the buildings as ground.

If you look at the plan of an environment where outdoor spaces are positive, you may see the buildings as figure, and outdoor spaces as ground -- and, you may also see the ourdoor spaces as figure against the ground of the buildings. The plans have figure-ground reversal.

The imaginary space should feel the same way. The imagination reacts to empty non-concrete space in the exact same way to 'outdoor space' as it does to the conceptual 'outdoor space' of a narrative, the space outside the explicit. It should feel like positive outdoor space.

I played a clutch of chickens in the post-apocalypse, one thousand strong and it reminded me about the value of fiction. I can't really explain it except to say that I like a game that has fiction, and characters that i can sort of relate to? This could be a pattern, perhaps -- I think I have been approaching game patterns in too cold a way. Stories are part of game design. How can I write a pattern about "caring about" characters without explicitly acknowledging the image that is placed in the mind of those characters by their art and writing?

This is going to hurt my brain.

Regarding "Art is Life-Changing"

We are constantly interacting with the world. Falling into habits, old patterns. Art is life-changing, but what stops us from changing back?

Ideas that stick with you for a long period of time may be necessary for turning that momentary experience into a genuinely life-changing impact. This doesn't mean that games have to be long to be impactful... they don't have to rub your face in it. But I think they can have value that way.

Quote from: Mokesmoemy main criteria for liking a game is "did this game change my life" (but the bar for changing my life is low)

|| | || ||||| ||| is a game I played recently where I enjoyed playing it in the moment, and I believe that it objectively is a good game, but when I had finished it (100% even) it left me feeling underwhelmed because it did not change my life

it did not present me with a single new idea to think about

don't take that as a condemnation. it had a number of very neat ideas that blew my mind the first time I saw them, just not this time.

Mokesmoe said this two days ago in Paradise and I woke up thinking about it for some reason. "Did this game change my life?" "Did it present me with a new idea to think about?" As I get older and am exposed to more things, I suppose it's a mathematical inevitability that finding works that do this for me will become harder and harder. Maybe at some point I'll have to give up on expecting the feeling from anything at all, and find something else to like about stuff.

It is still the goal I aspire to with my own work -- art.

I want to present someone with a new idea to think about, one that's sticky and relevant and novel enough to change their life in a positive way. Not in a concrete way, perhaps. I don't expect to make an educational or self-help piece. Maybe a more modest way to put it would be to say I want to make art that helps a person grow.

CARING FOR NPCS - You need the ILLUSION OF LIFE, and then it's just a matter of giving opportunities for caring...
ILLUSION OF LIFE - This is "Internal Logic" + "Internal Chaos" arranged just so.
INTERNAL LOGIC - How do you create this?
INTERNAL CHAOS - I think I really need to define this one

Yes, I need some more patterns for relying on NPCs - there's illusion of life but also "RELYING ON SYSTEMS" or something like that? Hmm

Regarding Vsauce's "Do Chairs Exist?"

I wrote a basic description of my relationship to Patterns in the Tenets forum. Click on the link above to go to that thread and read about it.

The funny thing about patterns is that I haven't even read A Pattern Language, the book which seems most often cited in regard to this, yet. But I have read The Timeless Way of Building, which introduces the conceptual framework which surrounds patterns.

Quote from: i asked on twitteri'm thinking about games with 'replaceable' characters with no unique authored content that you still can get attached to over the course of a game. some games on my mind:

- X-COM
- Etrian Odyssey
- Animal Crossing (villagers)
- Pokémon
- Dwarf Fortress

got any other good examples for me?

my tweet

Load of regular clothing

-Cotton/Normal
-Tap cold
-Medium spin
-Put detergent in, let cup drip as much as possible, stick cup in machine

When done, clothes are clean and wet. Hang immediately

Heat milk to 80 c

Let cool to 42 c
At the same time, bring out yogurt (must have active cultures) to let warm
(Takes about 50-60 minutes)

Swirl in 1-2 tbsp yogurt
Instant pot 'yogurt' - leave on venting.

Mousse - would not get it again

*took Shelley 4-5 days to eat it all, very filling
*it was nice, smooth texture

EXERCISE 11: EMERGENT NARRATIVE PATTERNS

Seems ridiculous at first glance, to use this exercise about emergent narratives to explore games with massively long main quests, but it was the most obviously appropriate and... you know, in its own way, an extremely long game is absolutely a feature of an emergent narrative: that it takes a long time. It's not really unexpected, because it averages out over a long period of time. But it describes an experiential quality which emerges from the rules.