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.

Virtual paradise in the hands of the machine
When I make a videogame it is a world imprisoned in computers
In some way, Apple's frustrating policy of deleting old projects is in touch with reality, is honest:
Digital universes are ephemeral, kept alive only as long as they can float in an ocean of living circuits.

The custody of such an ocean has become a humanity-wide project,
Something which we created and which now burdens us,
Creates work for people,
Gives us purpose.

Videogames are this artificial purpose made into art.

I've been reading Jorge Luis Borges' Ficciones.

The Lusory attitude involves "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles".

An attitude towards game design can take an immaculate stance, which overlaps with certain philosophical stances -- that a game and its players should not overstep certain bounds (see, for example, the negativity inherent to the terms pay to win and unbalanced), and that a person should aim to have no [negative] impact on the world around them.

I'm not there yet, but playing around with real-world art forms -- fashion in this case? cooking? etc -- has been slowly opening the gate. Is it still a game if we play with things that are important? Is it still play? I think the most important lusory attitude is to play with whatever material comprises our lives, and I think the life well-lived is comprised of only things that matter, that are real.

When I turn off my shower, the shower-mode toggle (a little metal plunger thing) either stays lifted up (in shower mode), or drops down (reverting to faucet mode). I wanted to make sure that every time I turned off my shower, I left the toggle down. Since sometimes the toggle was already down, I didn't have to do anything, so I didn't do anything -- meaning the habit never took root. I tried making a habit of looking at the toggle each time I turned off the shower, but it wasn't enough.

I have no problem with turning off the shower; I do that by habit. So why not this?

My solution was to build a stronger habit: Lifting the toggle up, and then down. This has so far been successful. So what are the requirements for a habit which can be built? It's subjective, of course, but...

• A habit takes the form IF X, THEN Y.
• Both the trigger "X" and the action "Y" must be discrete (i.e. non-ambiguous) and tangible (i.e. have strong sensory evidence).

Anyway, this is definitely a game design pattern. I think any kind of pattern regarding human activity is a game design pattern.