Will the bird come with the game though

We can’t go “tit for tat”… brings out larger hammer

Libertalia (Winds of Galecrest)

Love the ideas and even the gameplay, but the setup is so much for the emotional oomf of the experience.

It’s actually ok for ideas 6 days old and 6 weeks old to sit together. It happens all the time. Basically not possible with social media. So you get this loopy de loop effect where the same thoughts come back over and over. It’s disorienting

I think that’s partially why twitter felt so alive during live news events. It was the one time where the time based feed actually lined up with the ordering of coherence of the situation. But that just not the case 99% of the time.

That incoherence… I think is part of the fun of social media (which no one really wants to admit).

Trying to imagine a world where a sports app organized things by feed. If I were following two teams that had games that started at the same time and I got interspersed updates. That would be incoherent.

I don’t think algorithmic vs “non” algorithmic feeds make as much of a difference as folks like to believe. Time sorted is certainly less aggressively manipulative but it encourages immediacy in its own way as long conversations and dramas. It discourages thinking about bundles of ideas together

Didn’t expect that the Mariners would cause me pain so quickly

Yes

"The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing. Not a dramatic collapse. Not Skynet. Just a generation of researchers who can produce results but can't produce understanding."

Love this idea that the cosmic horrors cannot match allergies 😂

What a gem that the game I’m most excited about this year comes out on my birthday!

Oh lucky me.

I also think the money and momentum have created a really compelling story for the value of each data center. This is something that coherent and focused advocacy groups would help with. Perhaps they could be named something to do with the sun…

Me, learning this is a crank take 😭😭😭

Everything is so bleak and so dumb right now. I'm taking psychic damage just by being awake.

Tbf this is how they handled the pandemic too

The dominant conversation happens to be online. Which is exactly that thing of “trying to influence”, which feels inherently corrupting and destructive to creative aims…

For some random reason this connected a thought in my head… One of the weird ways that social media (feed based culture? Something…) corrupts us is that it makes people (maybe just me but feels connected to other things I’ve noticed online…) feel like they need to respond to or engage with whatever

Gone to a lot of therapy to process exactly this to be honest… lmao 🤣 🥲😅🫠

So… yeah… feel that deeply

I’m probably getting pretty close to tiptoeing up to it. It seems really unhealthy for any given person or subculture to exist to influence pop culture. But I guess I do think there’s value to imagining what a healthier pop culture might look like, given that we seem to be stuck with one.

Or… maybe that’s just a hope

Subcultures give players and designers space to breathe and to explore the territory beyond local maximization. It’s really hard to do that when everything gets pushed to a single feed, like Steam. But if there’s space to grow there’s a chance they can be successful even in a bigger space, perhaps

Subcultures provide spaces to challenge and reflect. Thinking about the Block Koala subplot in the year of UFO 50 on Eggplant or the number of guests and hosts who had mixed feelings about a game. It’s not just that it’s hard to critique in pop culture it’s that any critique becomes a yes/no

I.e. in the Roguelike space branching decision trees between levels are everywhere regardless of how well they seem to serve the player or the game. It more seems to be an outgrowth of a set of successes that made it visible for copying and therefore “good”.

Yeah and I’m definitely not trying to lessen the exploitation, but I think “popular” cultures tend to be very normative. The capitalism on top of that creates a kind of pure refinement, but for me it seems like it’s less about what broad appeal is and more about whatever happens to be “it” right now

I even think about the way that Marvel was an outgrowth (now toxic etc etc) of superhero subculture and was able to burst onto the scene the way it did because there were interesting ideas to tap into. Algorithms or not it feels way harder when there’s one gigantic amorphous conversation

Not a fully formed thought tbf. I think some of the flimsiness of popular media of late is the way that everything exists in “one feed” means it gets homogenized very quickly without having a chance to develop interesting characteristics that subcultures can develop without constant outward pressure

I also think successfully influencing popular culture requires these sorts of spaces where ideas can grow and thrive before more “popular” arguments get made. Where they can build support and momentum. Popular spaces are enriched by thriving subcultures, I think.

Cut to the Doctor Manhattan meme