it is never

it is mutating

it is not without stillness,

it is changing

it is liquid, a fluid moving

it is liquid, a flowing.

wombat writes, "You yourself are never really done with pondering, . . . Sometimes you just have to end it and move on to the next thing." but what if i'm not ready to move on yet? what does it mean to conclude an infinite middle -- something without beginning and therefore without end?

the audacity of putting an ending on an infinite process that started long before you were born

what audacity, putting 'the end' on an infinite process that started long before you were born

what audacity, supposing one can end an infinite process that started long before we were born.

it is liquid, a flowing.

the arrogance necessary to end any creative act: to end that infinite process of creation that started long before the first human was born.

it is liquid, a flowing. we can never follow it to its source or go to where it flows into the ocean.

it is liquid, a flowing. if there is a source at all, it lies behind us, at the birth of the universe. if there is an ocean into which it flows, it lies ahead of us, past the extinction of time.

there is an arrogance fundamental in imposing an end upon any creative act: to take some point in that infinite process of creation and suppose that anything we do has even the possibility of ending it, in any way.

the audacity of seeing anything as truly moving on.

when i, the pilot of such a fragile and ephemeral body, feel the loss of something, i wonder at the audacity of my sadness.

it is liquid, a flowing.

if there is a source at all it lies behind us, at the birth of the universe.

if there is an ocean into which it flows it lies ahead of us, past the extinction of time.

when i, the pilot of such a fragile and ephemeral vessel, feel something slip through my wet fingers, i wonder at the audacity of my sadness: the feeling that because we moved apart in this great river that this lost thing is gone.

we are forever adrift in the infinite middle.

it is liquid, a flowing.

if there is a source at all it lies behind us, at the birth of the universe. if there is an ocean into which it all flows, it lies ahead of us, past the extinction of time. we are forever adrift in an infinite middle.

otters hold hands so that they do not lose one another while they sleep.

creativity is an act of holding on.

some endings are sharp like a knife, severing.

but this loss like all losses is nothing.

an illusion produced by disassociation from the whole.

. . . They would get there eventually.

. . . All that time she could not stop thinking about the mountain. . . . In an instant she thought everything would be okay. They would get there eventually.

Though at peace and surrounded thickly by sweet-smelling flowers, she could not stop thinking about the mountain. Her retinue had needed this, deserved it: a respite from the hard road that lay both behind and ahead of them, a chance to lay down arms and become children again, childhood friends. When such a lush green opportunity revealed itself, every one of them leapt at it. But that forbidding peak would not leave the horizon of her mind.

Those few travelers with children had worried about how they would explain the brief settling to them, but the youngest had the easiest time adjusting to the sudden stillness of meadow life. As those eldermost men and women fussed about entirely unnecessary guard duty and maintenance of their first lean-tos, Tallo's kids

We few travelers with children had worried about how to explain the brief settling to them, but our youngest adjusted best to the sudden stillness of meadow life. As those eldermost men and women fussed about assigning people to shifts of entirely unnecessary guard duty and lean-to maintenance, the kids scrambled up and down shallow slopes, came back stained with green grass and innocent dirt.

. . .

In that instant, somehow, she thought that everything would be okay.

We would get there eventually.

. . . In that instant the mountain seemed to recede behind the horizon. She could see it in her mind's eye not crumbling but actually slipping behind the clouds, pulling back into the sky, a full moon growing and dwarfing that far-off peak. The pink sky that she had thought of as a sunset became a sunrise, the snapshot of despair and dwindling became a moment of new beginnings and hope. Autumn's chill became the first fingers of spring's warmth. In that instant, somehow, she thought that everything would be okay.

We would get there eventually.

"In this picture the sun is setting," she said, barely able to get the words out. "At the end of this story we all die."

That

That line he said or thought

. . .

See-Scape was dark and loud.

It was full of people in close proximity but not touching, never touching. We all live in fear of contact.

At the brightly-lit bar downstairs I hugged my friend without asking. I thought that he needed it. I thought that I knew what he needed. We all live in fear of contact.

They had chairs set up in the loud and dark, cheap folding ones. Inoffensive, functional. I chose one and sat in front of a friend. My other friends sat in many other chairs.

The speaker stood in the blue light of the projector. He read his notes by the glow of that dead signal image. "Two weeks ago," he said, "my cumulative failures finally caught up to me." I looked at him in the eye, and I thought that he made eye contact, but he certainly could not see me with that cerulean light thrown in his eyes. "My failures caught up to me and we all paid for it. Not me alone, everyone else too."

I thought about the ecological collapse.

I thought about the economic collapse.

I thought about the social collapse.

"All of our cumulative failures," he foreshadowed, "will catch up to all of us someday, and we will all pay for it."

I thought about my friends in the room. The speaker was my friend, too. Maybe it was more like fifty percent of them were friends. The other fifty percent were friends in the making. We were here watching this presentation together, basking in the glow of the projector's blue light. Someone really ought to turn that off, I thought. I stood up and deftly avoided making contact with anyone as I made my way through the room thick with my friends. They all gave me knowing glances and I gave them knowing glances back. We all live in fear of contact.

"All of your cumulative failures," his voice went on, muted somewhat by all the bodies now between us, "are my cumulative failures, and I will pay for them. And you will pay for them. And we will pay for them."

I thought about the energy crisis.

I thought about the traffic and how bad it would be getting home after all this.

I thought about the projector, its fan screaming. What a waste. I reached up and turned the thing off and the room was plunged into total darkness.

Someone asked me why I did that, now they couldn't see. Now the speaker asked me why I did that, asked if I could turn it back on, said he couldn't read his notes.

Everyone had seen me brush past them to get to the projector, all of my friends were turning on me now that I had taken away the light. We all live in fear of contact.

I placed my hands on the projector's white plastic rounded rectangular body and picked it up. It became unplugged at some point. Everyone started to get in my way. Everyone started to get loud in the dark. Everyone was confused. I was confused. I wanted to leave but something or someone wouldn't let me. We all live in fear of contact.

I could not avoid it any more so I made contact. I pushed my way out through the crowd, felt violent, felt free. It seemed to get darker as it got louder. Silhouetted body parts against the neon backwash on the ceiling. It got louder.

It was dark outside too, but not as dark, and not as loud. I held the projector like it was the only thing I had in the world. I ran.

I'm starting a new project this morning. At its simplest, I want this to be a game about . . . score. Multiple players share space, influenced and incentivized by the score engine. That's really the heart of a multiplayer game! For now, I think I'll start with a simple "SNAKE" control scheme.

Ah, but I really really really don't want this to have the vibe of an "io" game. So we'll see how to get away from that. The point of this game isn't actually the competition, but the social dynamic, the complex social fabric, produced...

THIS SUDDEN STRONG THOUGHT OCCURRED TO ME.

Hello momin! At some point in the future I will probably send you this forum thread. At that point, I hope you will enjoy reading my thoughts which I have not yet written at the time I'm writing this text now :)
love, droqen

Spicy Lightly Pickled Cucumbers
BY ANDY BARAGHANI

December 20, 2018

Cucumber spears on a goldrimmed white platter lightly covered in spices and herbs.

These quick pickles have just the right amount of sweet, salt, and tang going on. The brine can work with any crunchy veg, but we like them best with cucumbers. We guarantee they'll be the sleeper hit of your next party spread.

Ingredients
8 servings
2 lb. medium Persian cucumbers (about 12), cut lengthwise into spears
1/4 cup white wine vinegar or unseasoned rice vinegar
1 tsp. sugar
3/4 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes
2 tsp. kosher salt, plus more
2 Tbsp. chopped dill
2 Tbsp. fresh lemon juice

Step 1
Toss cucumbers in a large bowl with vinegar, sugar, red pepper flakes, and 2 tsp. salt. Chill, tossing once, at least 1 hour and up to 6 hours.

Step 2
Just before serving, add dill and lemon juice and toss to combine. Taste and season with more salt if needed.

Gathering and ranking lists. I have a bone to pick with lists. Some lists are good, and some lists are bad.

I was playing and thinking about Tears of the Kingdom (the sequel to Breath of the Wild) and it occurred to me that I wanted to do this with REDACTED so that we could discuss the nature of not the end result but so that we could seek what they tried to seek but not just seek as in strive to achieve the same thing using our own methods but seek in the way that they tried to seek.

I've been thinking about this since being exposed to the concept by Billy Dent's cohost post about open world games:

"open world games are made using certain tools, techniques and conventions, and I believe that these production-side characteristics are the main reason why they keep being made . . . [they make] open world games incredibly economical, if your goal is to create something BIG."

What are these tools, techniques, and conventions? I think that this is what every game designer on earth should be talking about: not for open world games, but for every genre, every game of note, everything that is out there.

What are the tools, techniques, and conventions that produced a game?

What were the goals for creating a game?

How did all these factors come together to produce this game, at this point in time? How is that beautiful, or how is it horrible? What can we appreciate, take away, swear off of forever, or build on top of as a foundation?

The conversations are happening, just more slowly than I'd like. People talk about crunch and say how bad it is. But beyond those spiky awful "Well that was a mistake let's never do that again" points that stick out, where are the eternal wisdoms that we learn and hold onto and never let go of, that we work with again and again for years, for generations, for millennia or at least until the last human being dies?

QuoteDo-ocracy is a decentralized, anarchist way of deciding and managing how things get changed, and is the main way that things get done at Noisebridge.

It can be summed up as follows:

    Do-ocracy: If you want something done, do it, but remember to be excellent to each other when doing so.

After reading Mer's "More questions than answers" I find myself a little grounded, which is nice. A new tangent.

Noting my thoughts here before I lose them...

- What is it that makes you feel alive? Environments, cities, languages, worlds, people

- Organic, tree, city. I still haven't read it (I'm meaning to) but Christopher Alexander wrote an essay called A City is not a Tree which... well, the name is too too similar!

Quote. . . what is a DEAD game then? // Are we talking about LIVING games in opposition to what?

^ The One-Straw Revolution quote, responding, moving toward the center. The center!

* The short stories Ezra shared with me. Their singleness. Is this haiku games? (butterfly emoji)

Quote"When you are becoming ALIVE you can feel it deeply.", Then how do you feel when you're not? Like when you get stuck at an idle game that you feel like it's sucking the life out of you?

^ I think so. If pressed I would say that when not alive I feel like I have no reason to exist, no deep reason to exist. It is not the feeling of being dead but the feeling of I might as well be dead, I guess, to be very messy and blunt about it. i feel alive when i am doing something, and there is a reason for doing it, and there is a reason for having that reason, and there is a reason for having that reason, and so on and so on and so on until my mind cannot fathom any further depth of reason and I give in to the illusion that there are reasons for my reasons stretching back as far as the beginning of the universe, the beginning of everything, and i feel whole.

In her book Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows writes:

QuoteWe can't control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!
I already knew that, in a way. I had learned about dancing with great powers from whitewater kayaking, from gardening, from playing music, from skiing. All those endeavors require one to stay wide awake, pay close attention, participate flat out, and respond to feedback.
. . . Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our ability to calculate. It requires our full humanity---our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality.

~ Thinking in Systems quote

I was having a conversation with paulby in Paradise about this and noticed that the particular word Meadows uses, "require," is not (necessarily?) the method by which one should go about designing a game for this type of play. Rather than "requiring" awakeness --

here I will define awakeness as the state of "staying wide awake, paying close attention, participating flat out, responding to feedback, using our full humanity (our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, out compassion, our vision, and our morality)" --

Rather than "requiring" awakeness, the dream ideal goal is INSPIRING awakeness, which one may also perhaps understand as aliveness, or even to some degree 'the flow state' (or even 'mastery'?). If a game does not acknowledge awakeness in some way, I am very rarely inspired to achieve or maintain awakeness, but "requirement" is not the best or only way to inspire me to get there.

Inspiring awakeness.

Hello! It's time for Lemon Square. I use this recipe but with adjustments from the comments, so here is the full adjusted version:

Crust:
2 cups (~240g) all-purpose flour
1 cup (227g) butter, softened
½ cup (50g) white sugar
¼ tsp salt

Filling:
1 ½ cups (300g) white sugar
¼ cup (~30g) all-purpose flour
4 eggs
½ - ⅔ lemon juice (3-4 lemons, juiced)
optional: lemon zest from 2 lemons

Instructions:

• Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
• To make the crust: Blend 2 cups flour, softened butter, and 1/2 cup sugar in a medium bowl until well combined; press into the bottom of an ungreased 9x13-inch pan. (If using an 8x11-inch pan, increase cooking time of crust and filling by 5-10 mins each!)
• Bake in the preheated oven until firm and golden, about 15 minutes. Meanwhile, make the filling: Whisk remaining 1 1/2 cups sugar and 1/4 cup flour in a medium bowl. Whisk in eggs, then lemon juice until smooth; pour filling over the baked crust.
• Bake in the preheated oven for 20 minutes. Set the pan aside to cool completely; the bars will firm up as they cool. When cooled, cut into uniform squares.

Regarding Adam Hammond's
"The Far Shore"