Regarding
Anuschka Rees'
The Curated Closet

Quote from: ~15:50People see the all-white chess set in a gallery and they play through in their heads. Just because they're not physically touching the pieces does not mean they're not interacting with it. {musical intermission.} This how to play piece really resonated with me because I'm someone who finds themselves with a lot of games that they want to play, and a lot of games that sound fascinating and I really want to interact with, but not enough time to actually engage with them. I spend a lot of time watching speedruns and being fascinated by them, but not trying to speedrun games myself. I spend time watching let's players play games that I will never play and going "oh wow this looks really interesting and I'd love to play that, but this is a 40-hour experience, I don't have 40 hours."

At this moment in Alistair Aitcheson's Incredible Playable Podcast with the scent of the facilitator in the air I found myself forming a distinct thought, or question: Is this the era of passively observing from behind glass, or has passivity always been so present in human society?

QuoteI can watch a livestream while I'm brushing my teeth.

You can imagine playing Play It By Trust, but your imagination and actually sitting down to play it yourself are wildly different experiences. Just because you can watch a livestream of a 40 hour game while brushing your teeth does not mean you're receiving the value of playing a 40 hour game while brushing your teeth. It is non-transferrable.

Cyberpunk's braindances predict a future where first-hand experiences become increasingly technologically transferrable, fungible between individuals. But in these incomplete transfers of experience I see a life not lived, and a world not lived in.

... Maybe he will talk about this? Alistair says that the experience of observation and imagination is a legitimate experience. And of course it is! It is! But it's materially distinct. You have to play smell chess to know what it is to play smell chess. Please, AA, talk about this, don't let me down.

He makes an explicit claim that putting a playable artwork in a non-playable context "wouldn't destroy" the artwork, it would just "change" it, which I think is the coward's way out, but yeah, sure! It changes it! Destruction is a change. Change is a value-neutral term. How does it change it? The answer is materially clear (it makes the work more likely to be engaged with in a way that does not involve touching it, let's say), but what is the consequence of such a change? How do you feel about it? How do I feel about it?

Unfortunately it sounds as though we are going to move on to another topic rather than digging into this, at least without digging into it right away.

-

AA talks about Pawns next for a while. I left off at around the 30m mark.

I've played a handful of hours of Roadwarden.

After the first session: I am interested in this world, but I don't want to be making these choices.

After the second session: This game is making me make choices framed as transactional favours and it's affecting the way I think about people and my relationships to them in a way I don't like.

The Dynamics of Fashion (second edition), Elaine Stone, p20
Principles of Fashion
1. Consumers establish fashions by accepting or rejecting the styles offered. [..] No designer can be successful without the support and acceptance of the customer.
2. Fashions are not based on price.
3. Fashions are evolutionary in nature;  they are rarely revolutionary
4. No amount of sales promotion can change the direction in which fashions are moving. [..] cannot renew the life of a fading fashion unless the extent of change gives the fashion an altogether new appeal. This is why stores have markdown or clearance sales.
5. All fashions end in excess. [..] miniskirts of the 1960s finally becomes so short that the slightest movement caused a major problem in modesty. [..] Once the extreme in styling has been reached, a fashion is nearing its end.

Watching Tim Rogers' video Story #6 ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS Cyberpunk 2077 @ 1:41:50 someone says you can get a 'real' version of a vintage jacket by the original company that made them, rather than a more expensive reproduction.

While this may be true, multiple things differ

1. The company ages

2. The company may have gone through a 'snatching', transforming wildly in terms of its constituent parts. I've been reading a lot about emergence, and while a company may be some form of emergent organism, it is also affected by the top down, and may be completely changed under the skin. A minute or two later in the video it is revealed, also, that the company indicated was not really responsible for the best-quality versions of the original either.

Even still.

Thinking about things that appear to be other things - taking their name, their identity. Identity theft works in part because we trust systems more than faces. Exploitable systems. It's weird to think how much power we've deferred over to systems of trust. Maybe there's something to explore there. We are reduced to different parts in the eyes of these systems. We cannot be transformed, but our avatars are our whole selves in the eyes of these systems. Submitting to become an avatar means submitting to the system's affordances. A security exploit is an affordance.

from ugly feelings, sianne ngai

paranoia, envy, animatedness, stuplimity... yet to read ngai's chapters on these

[...]Eudamonic Emotions[...]

moral elevation, awe, kama muta, admiration, appreciation, "being moved," tenderness

admiration (being moved by skill)
kama muta (being moved by communal sharing)
pride (being moved by one's own behaviour)
hope (being moved by expectations about the future)
nostalgia (being moved by the past)
musical chills (being moved by music)

When you perform your intelligence, you're not supposed to explicitly say that you just learned about some narrow term of art that you're now using.

This is a useful observation. My first response was to take up arms, but luckily it was directed at someone else and not me (whose own tone I was already predisposed to dislike) which allowed me to slide into the analytical-learning stance much more easily.

(I need a better term than 'analytical-learning stance', but I don't know what; in the off chance I check this out later, it's the position where you can analyze your own actions from a place 'above' being hooked described by Frank Lantz in that one interview.)

Basically my conclusion is if you're 'performing intelligence' (a useful concept in & of itself) it can be useless to listeners, it can be seen negatively (perhaps because of that*), to use a 'narrow' term that you just learned and to lampshade that you just learned it.

I do this a lot, so I feel I need to do a bit more research into this dynamic in order to understand it.

Regarding Steven Johnson's
"Emergence"

I felt strangely exhausted by Salmon Run : it seemed like a futile effort, struggling to fight bosses, collect eggs, and whatnot. The end goal was not in sight. Then there was a shift. One wave on Gone Fission Hydroplant it struck my once-tired brain that if we just killed each boss before they had a chance to pile on more, the usual chaos of Salmon Run would be reduced to a simple boss rush... kill one after the other.

This tweaked my mental model.

A game that requires a password to access it. The password changes if it is ever found on the internet.

(This is difficult because the password should be something that is easy to transmit verbally.)
(It also requires a thing which a person would want to access.)

I had an idea an hour ago to make something like a todo list of ideas . . . some kind of 'shuffled index card' simulator, so I could write ideas and shuttle them off into the void and maybe check back on them in the future sometime. Well, here I am, and I realized (foolishly, after 55 minutes of puttering around in jsfiddle) that I should absolutely just use the tools already at my disposal, use my comfort zone, use my newforum. So I made this subforum under DevLogs, and I hope it doesn't derail me. If I start to feel weird about it I might make it private, but for the most part I really believe art should be free. I'm quite used to being very public with my ideas (see my history of posts on TIGSource!), and it's not like an overwhelming number of people keep track of my forum anyway ;)

Quote from: Summary/Review on torontopubliclibrary.caWith its promises about the saving of time; the reduction of labor; and the expansion of value, the gimmick gives us tantalizing glimpses of a world in which social life will no longer be organized by labor, but also of one regenerating the conditions that keep labor's social necessity in place.