It's particularly exciting to see all the Responses to this first post, though I'm not sure it's especially useful... Click and scroll down close to the bottom, just above 'Leave a comment'. P.S. Hey, wait, we have comments enabled?

Hopefully I'll get to these in their own time, but such enticing titles:

• non-gamefeel content
• What's actually happening? Videogames are REAL.
• Creativity in social games
• Telling our stories inside and outside the games
• Brevity is the dark souls of wit
• On life, games, and everything else (42)
• play is form
• Slime Logic

HAIKU games

QuoteI want to describe to you a kind of game that I like to play, and a kind of game that I want to play.

The one that started it all. Haiku games!

QuoteI am very interested in the design of these games, the way they facilitate learning through play. I like learning things this way, and I like doing their dances.
[..]
What is the minimal form of games that can do this?

Jack sets out this beautiful abstract question: what is this nameless quality and can we use the lens of haiku, of this minimalist and traditionally-rigid-but-not-rigid-anymore form of poetry, to help us understand it better?

See also Why is Gen Z Humor So Weird? [external youtube link, not an internal link to a Close Reading thread], especially 6:55 onward

- oversaturation
- depression
- existential dread

I disagree with other parts of this manifesto, between these lines, where these common perversions (a term I love, by the way) are described as "endless" and "generic" in a way that I can only read as derogatory.

Quote[..] when writers are afraid to be perverts [..they indulge] only the safest and most unoffensive fetishes to render on the screen.

[..] when art displays the common fetishes of heterosexual matrimony, fast cars and big guns and big-but-not-gargantuan breasts [etc.] - these absolutely are fetishes.

every day you are smothered in the common perversions of so much of society [..]

Quote from: 17:22We will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one. But there's no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing.

Quote from: 12:50.. the unsolved problems facing the world today are gargantuan, including the risks of climate change and nuclear war, but we must see them as problems to be solved, not apocalypses-in-waiting, and aggressively pursue solutions like deep decarbonization for climate change, and global zero for nuclear war.

Quoteif you combine our cognitive biases with the nature of news, you can see why [people have been perceiving that] the world has been coming to end for a very long time

Quick conclusion: Is the problem with the nature of news? Should we, and can we, move on from valuing 'news' at all? First of all, what is news? Is it what it sounds like?

QuoteNews (nūz), n [From New; cf. F. nounelles. News is plural in form, but is commonly used with a singular verb.]

1. A report of recent occurrences; information of something that has lately taken place, or of something before unknown; fresh tidings; recent intelligence.
Evil news rides post, while good news baits.
— Milton.

2. Something strange or newly happened.
It is no news for the weak and poor to be a prey to the strong and rich.
— L'Estrange.

3. A bearer of news; a courier; a newspaper. [Obs.]
There cometh a news thither with his horse.
— Pepys.

Back to Steven Pinker:

Quote from: 10:12bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren't built in a day. The papers could have run the headline, 137,000 people escaped from extreme poverty yesterday, every day for the last 20 years. That's 1.25 billion people leaving poverty behind, but you never read about it.

Is there too much of a focus on the "strange and newly happened", on discovering reports of "recent occurrences"?

I suppose that 'press' and journalism in general is distinct from news. I like receiving "information about something before unknown," but some days it feels as though we are enter a post-unknown world, where everything and everything is becoming further and further documented because of how driven we are by the news, by discoveries, by changes in the world...

What could replace it? What could be as compelling, once we are omniscient?

Sometimes I open up a bag of fuzzy peach and eat the whole thing and it's like 80% sugar. It's wild to see a 65g bag contain 49g of sugar, but it's also totally believable.

Browsing the hyperoptimized internet for anything feels like that sometimes; it feels like what I'm looking for is out there if I just keep scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.

https://paradise-collab.itch.io/letterclub/devlog/363470/whole-grain-decisions

from borges' "a survey of the works of herbert quain"

Quote from: Herbert QuainI have reclaimed for this novel the essential features of every game: the symmetry, the arbitrary laws, the tedium.

Tips:
- Use more salt (I used something like 1 1/2 pinches - terribly precise, I know)
- Brown sugar clumps, regular sugar is OK
- Made it once with skim milk powder instead of whole milk. It was much more dry. Not sure if that was the fault of the powder, or the skim. (Perhaps both?)
- Don't make it so wet that it sticks when rolling

SEE BELOW FOR UPDATED VERSION

Pastry
Mix with fork:

• 5 1/2 cup flour (pastry)
• 1 tble br sugar
• shake or 2 of salt
• 1 tsp b powder

Cut in: (then add to rest)

• 2 cups lard

Mix well and add milk to make 1 cup: (then add to rest)

• Put egg in cup
• Tble of lemon juice (sub vinegar is fine, but smells bad)