~ linked from The Art of War

"Attention seeking behavior is to act in a way that is likely to elicit attention."

The article 'Look at me' summarizes several expert opinions into the basic idea that "people have been shown to need [..] attention that is positive and accurate." In this case I'd like to emphasize need. It's absolutely crucial.

brittanica.com describes technology as "the application of scientific knowledge to the practical aims of human life," and in this case I'm identifying technology which is applied to the practical aim of acquiring attention that is positive and accurate, or as 'Look at me' calls it, 'belonging'.

We walked along College on Saturday night -- after midnight -- and saw so many people doing so many things. This kind of living nightlife reminded me that such cultural phenomena occur, and I missed it: escaping loud places with friends to get a bite to eat at 2AM when none of us should have been awake but we were anyway.

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.

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)

Rara Racer, increpare

The game is about how it's a game about a fictional game.

I read this novel as a kid, and I remember being fascinated by the weird little adventure game that Ender plays -- not the wargame likely referenced by the title.

Mike Meginnis has written a couple of fictional videogame stories. I like them both a lot.

• Angband, or His 55 Desires
• Navigators

A short story from China Miéville's Three Moments of an Explosion

This novel is about the protagonist's search for an arcade game which he played before as a child, Lucky Wander Boy. He -- the character -- writes about the game and the experience of playing it, while also writing about his experiences with other real games.

Quote from: p447-448It felt like the right decision at the time but you know, you wonder. What might have happened next?

That's what I started working on, even though it was unplanned. I wasn't working, at all, for a while there and I didn't know what I wanted to do, I didn't know what I wanted at all so I kept thinking about what is it that I want and kept coming back to telling stories in game form. I got to thinking all of this might be a halfway decent game if it were a game. Part spy movie, part fairy tale, part choose your own adventure. Epic branching story that doesn't stick to a single genre or one set path and turns into different stories but it's all the same story. I'm trying to play with the things you can do in a game that you can't do in a book. Trying to capture more story. A book is made of paper but a story is a tree.

You meet someone in a bar. You follow them or you don't.

You open a door. Or you don't.

Either way the point is: What happens next?

It's taking an absurd amount of notebooks full of possibilities but it's getting somewhere.

See No timeless fashions.

There is an ever-evolving culture which surrounds each of us. What do we expect? There is always A Pattern Language though we don't talk about it as such: things we have accepted as reality or shorthands to it. Justice, karma, employment. We can perceive our cultural patterns through the focus of words, though they are imprecise. Words fall out of fashion slower than patterns do. Words are just pointers.

What is the game design equivalent of 'foreshadowing'? Consider a deck of cards from which one draws a hand of cards: this hand of cards gives a sense of the composition of the deck. In a sense this is foreshadowing; we are given a hint, a piece, of a larger conclusion: the understanding of such a system.

Is technology accelerating fashion? Accelerating boredom?

The internet, the great network of humanity, is a catalyst for connection and change, and our symbiotic relationship to it -- no, not symbiotic, the internet is composed of nothing but people, is a family member symbiotic to a family? -- is growing stronger at a constant rate.