these visions are not pre-programmed encounters but other players connected to you via the internet, and they have already played through the same events. Think of this as an asynchronous multiplayer system like ghosts in Elden Ring, only here they tangibly affect your game, perhaps leaving a key item such as a knife to plunge into said, unsuspecting kingpin.
You only ever follow in the footsteps of one player at a time, getting to know them through their decision-making impulses.
It’s a very apt mechanism for a game about the climate crisis, where collective action problems abound.
For all the whiz-bang novelty of this component, the lead designer maintains that it speaks to the game’s deeper themes – indeed, that the mechanic doubles as a carefully considered metaphor. After all, what is navigating the all-enveloping climate crisis, and perhaps even mitigating its worst effects, but a gargantuan collaborative effort involving people spread across vast continents?
Apropos of nothing in particular, certainly nothing that’s going on right now, a video of found footage where lots of people died, where the cameras are all focused on one side as protagonists. Where bombs go off far away but we get close ups on the artillery being fired. Absolutely top notch song though.
I’m against young men dying. I’m against people starving each other and murdering each other and driving each other from their homes. I do not think death is the solution for much and stories don’t stop just because we think it’s a good conclusion.
I’m sure everything is more complex, I’m sure, I’m sure – but that’s where most of my reactions stem from.
Max rides with me on this to school. We got it from some parents who don’t need it anymore and we fixed a flat tire and replaced a stolen seat.
We don’t have a great private place to secure it. It’s all just locked up on the street. One day we came out and one of the handlebar grips was gone. Ah well. People can be jerks. Such is life. No big deal.
We just ride without the grips and make do. “It’s fine!” says Max.
Today we came out to take Max to Brooklyn Game Lab for Dungeons and Dragons club. This is what we found:
Someone bought new handlebar grips and installed them on the bike for Max. Those are good ones, too! Better than what we had by a lot.
We were blown away by this thoughtful kindness!
Maxwell’s reaction was that he wants to learn how to fix things for other people. We have no idea who did this for us. If I figure it out I’m gonna hug the hell out them and thank them so much.
I started tracking books a long time ago on LibraryThing, when LibraryThing was giving out a CueCat. I liked LibraryThing, but they never got as popular as GoodReads, and I had friends who actually used GoodReads. So I moved on to GoodReads to be with my friends, since community trumps technology. I really wish I could have used the functionality of LibraryThing but still kept tabs with my pals. Sadly, these folks want to have a walled garden and don’t value interoperability.
I don’t want to give my data directly to Amazon (the owners of GoodReads). I don’t want to lose APIs or access to all the data that I’ve been putting in. I also care about my friends, but not that they use the same website as me!
So I was incredibly excited to discover a great book tracker in the Fediverse!
BookWyrm is a social network for tracking your reading, talking about books, writing reviews, and discovering what to read next. Federation allows BookWyrm users to join small, trusted communities that can connect with one another, and with other ActivityPub services like Mastodon and Pleroma.
https://joinbookwyrm.com
BookWyrm is open source, decentralized and federated. It’s built on top of the ActivityPub protocol like Mastodon.
BookWyrm is decentralized. That means it isn’t just one website like Twitter, GoodReads, FaceBook, LibraryThing, etc. It is made up of many sites – there are 22 sites live as I write this. If you don’t like one of them, you can leave and move to another, you’re not locked in to the choices and beliefs of whoever owns a server.
And Federated means that all these sites speak about books to each other in a special set of ways called ActivityPub. Some of these sites are for folks who speak a certain language or live somewhere or are interested in a certain kind of book… But if you have a friend on a different site, you can still be friends! The sites all speak to each other in a federation of small common websites. Bookwyrm has good people on it – you can find a good like minded community or span across communities.
And because BookWyrm speaks ActivityPub, it means that people who left Twitter for Mastodon can be friends with you on BookWyrm – they can comment on your books safely from their own community! It’s as natural as sending emails from your work to someone else’s.
And when I want to just get the books that I marked to-read so I can search for them across multiple places, I don’t have to spend a ton of time faking my way to get my own data. BookWyrm is here for me, not as a place trying to find a business model to exploit me.
In the past week, the federal government used some very flimsy excuses to send federal “police” into Portland and take protestors into unmarked vans without identifying themselves. The scary times have gotten even scarier, the authoritarianism even more blatant. There is so much awful stuff going on that I can’t even take in all of it, much less do meaningful work on it. I’m trying to just do small things often. I’m trying to do things like donate to campaigns that will help, sign petitions, elevate small things that are going to turn into big things.
We paid off the ticket from the fourth, met with a guy about solar panels ( we don’t use enough energy to justify the cost even with multiple incentives from the state). We’re also looking for electricians to add some outside outlets and a ceiling fan in the living room.
We sorted out better schedules for me to work and be with the family predictably during the day. It’s easy to both work forever when it’s in the house or to bunk off when something cute is happening. Trying to be balanced, so we solved it with a gCal that Sam can see with times that are marked out of office on my work calendar. That way it’s easier to know when “I’m definitely working, don’t bother me” and when “let’s take a break and play”. Making it visible to work lets folks there plan around when they shouldn’t expect me to be available.
The Brooklyn apartments are getting some interest on the market – 25H at least has some people viewing it. 25J is where the bigger mortgage sits, so I hope that it pans out quickly as well.
Also set up 2 way syncing on the Synology NAS drives in brooklyn and upstate so that everything is backed up everywhere. For the meantime at least, the upstate is the new primary and brooklyn is the secondary. I tried out Ranger as a terminal file manager. Also, I made a dumb little script to make memes easier.
Highs and lows in the ladder of abstractions, highs and lows success wise.
I worked very high in the ladder of abstractions, transforming a large backlog of tasks into a program of new product features and a big revenue opportunity. At the same time I had a pull request submitted and accepted to fix a client issue. I got a great review ( we use OKRs to have quarterly conversations around progress, so it is sort of like a review), and then my laptop died!
It’s a sweet little lenovo yoga 920 and was running Ubuntu and Windows, I was loving using it. But it’s really disappointing for it to die hard after 2 years. To get it replaced involves shipping it out, going through a 3 day quarantine, up to 9 business days to fix, then 5-7 business days to ship back. I’m lucky to have enough spare laptops in the house that we were able to get Sam’s macbook hooked up. My 2013 macbook air would have been fine, but the thunderbolt port apparently doesn’t work (first time I’ve ever tried it!)
I hope when I get the Yoga back it won’t be wiped and I don’t have to go through a whole setup process again.
I didn’t think America was ever going to take black lives seriously in my lifetime. I’m close to thinking we might. There was finally a murder so slow and egregiously awful by police that it seemed fewer people came out to defend it than normal. People protested – which has happened before, but this time the police responded swiftly and brutally all over the nation, which helped more people realize the urgent need to demilitarize and defund or abolish police departments all over the nation.
More people have been murdered by police and by right wing activists. More people are seeing that there is significant infiltration of right wing racist groups into military and civilian armed forces like the police and the national guard. Significant effort seems to be put into either pretending the grievances we list are fake or that protesters are the same as rioters or into sparking riots to give a chance for crackdowns or to trigger broader societal conflict and breakdown.
The plague of systemic racism is getting acknowledged and the movement is being recognized enough to be co-opted. Many states have decided to paint a road with “Black Lives Matter” which is nice. None have revoked qualified immunity. Still, this co-option is a good sign – people are uncomfortable enough to start making the most basic gestures. DeBlasio still sucks. He can’t get the road painted in front of Trump Tower because he sucks. He and the City Council failed to defund the NYPD, instead shuffling money and police officers around.
Still the streets fill with people angry that they have to fight for simple recognition that black lives matter and the police are not here to protect or serve them. Even in the tiny village of Saugerties, people are showing up every day to stand vigil with their plague masks on.
I hope that we can skip reforms and channel some of our vast wealth into things that benefit people instead of control them.
In our home, we are much more settled into a routine. I’ve got a space to work. Max has rules around how he can earn precious screentime by doing workbooks or reading a new book. Zelda has similar… She’s learning to count and does M&M math with me because she’s insatiably into chocolate. Sam’s growing an impressive number of things outside, where the filthy dirt is. I’m no farmer, but it’s really nice to eat a sandwich with your own lettuce in it! Today she showed me where beans are coming up near some corn.
It’s been a ton of activity around here for home improvement. I’ve built a pretty large stone patio by leveling one stone at a time. Sam came up with the idea of putting an outdoor rug over it and it looks great – gotta finish the edges somehow though.
Sam’s gardening has been huge – we’ve got plants everywhere and it looks amazing. Together, we built some raised planters and they are full of the three sisters: corn, beans and squash. She tore out our old sink since there was a leak that screwed up the cabinet and we put in the replacement. We also tore out the old vent exhaust light and put in a new one – plus a better light for the entranceway. Sam bought a tiny washer and got it installed near the kitchen so we can continuously wash clothes. Speaking of continuously washing, we have to continuously wash dishes since we don’t have a dishwasher and don’t want to be set upon by insects.
We celebrated July 4th in style with a TON of fireworks. The neighbors applauded.
I’m working too many hours because work bleeds into everything when it is so close. I also think we are all sick of sitting around the house – the newness has worn off and we crave change. I started running with Zombies, Run to explore the neighborhood. I registered for a virtual fitness championship, and tomorrow afternoon I’m going to try to submit my first workout.
We’re still getting out and exploring.
That picture is from earlier on the 4th. To get here you park your car by the side of a road on the path through the Catskills on the way to hunter mountain. You hop a guardrail and navigate the rock fill to get down to this paradise of mountain streams and waterfalls everywhere.
Hike down a bit and we came to little pools dug into the bedrock, natural water slides and everywhere it was gorgeous.
It was amazing. The mostly black and brown families around us had managed to bring music, barbecues, hookahs, kids – it was amazing. We left as it got packed. When I got to the road, of course the police were ticketing and towing cars. We got a $75 ticket.
Worth it.
The federal government is paralyzed from the top down, offering no solutions, only misinformation and confusion. As NY is beginning to be less wildly dangerous, other states are beginning to see their lax policies have the same payoff as Cuomo and DeBlasio’s initial bungling. Here in Saugerties I see some restaurants reopening with “social distancing” but it’s very poorly observed. Here’s an idea: people can’t be trusted to make smart decisions when they are drinking. So no wonder I’m seeing even in big open spaces people hopping from group to group, saying hello and hugging with masks around their necks. Places that haven’t seen ice trucks holding bodies are probably going to have to experience it for themselves.
I told Max we might not be back in Brooklyn for a long time or that we might sell our place so he could have a place with a backyard and more room. He seemed heartbroken by the idea – I think I really messed up. He could articulate that he missed it and it was special to him. But given that we think there’s very little chance the schools can safely reopen by September, what can we do? I think about how I never felt attached to the second place we moved to in Colatown.
As always, our problems pale in comparison to what’s happening around us.
Since my internet connection is crucial to my work these days, I wrote a little utility to graph ping time so I can see if things are going wrong early. I’ll neaten it’s up and share it.
Just looked up and realized it’s tomorrow so I’m gonna schedule this to publish in a few hours and get some sleep. Let this be a reminder to me to never mess with .htaccess rules again.
This week I dropped off 13 phones at the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund. I saw Executive Director Peter Goldberg speak at the NYC Tech Solidarity meeting in February and he went over the story of Kalief Browder.
Peter said they ( and all non-profits) have surprising needs that nerds with good jobs wouldn’t expect. They need laptops, desktops, phones.
In the BCBF’s case, loaning someone a phone means they have a vastly higher chance of not missing their court date. It allows the bail fund to communicate with their clients and make sure everything works out.
I went to my help desk and CTO, and talked with them about old phones available for donations – we cycle through new equipment and have lots of “loaners” or used phones – more than we reasonably need. Just by asking and working with the help desk team to wipe old phones we managed to get phones that we’d just pay someone to recycle for us into the hands of folks who can fight for a fair trial.
Not bad, and not much work to do a hell of a lot of good. If you want to give them a few bucks to do this good work, you can also donate to the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund online. Let me know if you do!
My hack-night project for a long time was Orbital Feed Reader. I’ve been slacking on it a lot recently. Especially after the election, I feel like I need to find things to work on that have a more direct impact on people that I can help.
I worked on a project called Donate the Difference – it wasn’t as successful as I wanted it to be, though it did raise $25K for some charities. I learned a lot, and I’ll write some of that up here later. But it made it clear to me that I need to work on projects that make a bigger difference than a feed reader plugin.
I’m not certain what that is yet, but if you were hankering for updates to Orbital, that’s why they haven’t been coming. It’s open source, and I’m happy to take pull requests or turn it over if someone wants to do more with it. I just don’t want to lead folks on.
