Does everything have an explanation?

My husband described to me a version of the cosmological argument based on explanations. Everything in the world requires an explanation. Since the chain of explanations can’t go on forever, there must be an ultimate Explanation for it all. And that Explanation wants us to stop being gay. At least, that’s how I assume the rest of the argument goes. I don’t actually care.

We were joking about this, because the argument imagines that there is a cosmic pointer from each object to its explanation. But the very idea of an explanation is really quite squishy. What even is an explanation? It depends on social context.

So I dug up an old abandoned blog draft on the subject of explanations.

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The efficient fencing problem

Back in the day, I used to post math puzzles, similar to how I post origami today. Today I’m revisiting a problem that I never fully solved.

Problem statement: There is a square patch of grass, with sides of unit length. Using the shortest length of fence, block all straight paths that cut across the grass.

I did not create this puzzle, but I am not sure of its original source. The riddle once appeared on the (now defunct) wu : riddles website, under the title “Samwise and Gandalf”. In this version of the puzzle, Lord Sauron has an underground telephone line that cuts a straight line somewhere through a square plot of land. Samwise doesn’t know where it is, so he intends to uncover it by digging up the perimeter. But Gandalf tells him that there is a more efficient solution. What’s the best Sam can do?

The impressive thing about this puzzle is that you can go through many iterations of finding better and better solutions. Afterwards, we’ll consider a hexagonal patch of grass, and other shapes.

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Link Roundup: July 2026

This month, the ace journal club talked about Lord of the Rings.  The case for an asexual Frodo is more compelling than I thought.  We also talk about several asexual literary theories.  It’s a fun one.

Making Indie Games is Like Buying a Lottery Ticket | Jason Schreier (video, 20 min) – Jason Schreier educates people about basic facts of indie video game production.  Now, I’ve spent a lot of time in the indie game player space, as well as the game critic space.  I see Indie games routinely celebrated as the artistically superior form, unlike those ultra-high budget games that all kind of blend into each other and get monetized to hell.  Be that as it may, I’ve often wondered if indie games are actually worse for laborers, since they offer so little job stability, and it’s basically a bad financial decision.  Granted, these days all the big studios are laying people off–but still, it’s “only” 33% that experienced layoffs, whereas I’m pretty sure that fraction of indie games that fail is well over a third.

NO-ONE IS GOING TO BUY YOUR GAME | illomens (Click the play button, it’s an essay on a static page) – This manifesto argues that your video game is not a commercial project, and that frees you from a lot of irrelevant conversations that assume video games are commercial products (such as the paragraph above).  I have technically sold a game for money, so I have been excluded from the target audience of the manifesto, but I still basically agree with this.

It’s important to make a distinction between indie games and hobby games.  Indie games are framed as scrappy underdogs, but we’re still talking about big budget mass-marketed commercial products.  People talk a lot about the incredible number of games on Steam, like 21k last year, but this datum is somewhat problematic because it also mixes in projects that aren’t trying to be commercial.  For hobby devs, the fact that making a game is like buying a lottery ticket is mostly irrelevant, it’s just a perk.

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Designing a “balanced” strategy game

I’m going to talk about game balance specifically in the context of a video game that I made. You can play this game for free in browser, or pay for an expansion. But statistically most of you have not done that, and I’m not telling you to try it. To serve this discussion, I will assume that the player has zero knowledge, and is not interested in playing the game. (I also wrote a design post-mortem, but that assumes you’ve played it.)

In a strategy game, the intuitive meaning of “balance” is that when the player is presented with several options, the options are roughly equally strong. But that’s not exactly right. If every option were equally strong, then player choices wouldn’t matter very much. So the way I think of it, balance is not the end goal, it’s just a means to an end.  The true objective is to present the player with interesting non-trivial choices.  If one option straightforwardly dominates the other options, then player may eventually figure it out, making the choice trivial.

That concludes my context-free discussion of game balance. Balance is a context-dependent idea, and it can be more deeply discussed in the context of a specific game or genre.
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Thoughts on maintaining a game diary

I’ve been maintaining a video game diary since 2021.  I post it publicly on my pillowfort.  It is not the only media diary I maintain, I also review books (though I read very slowly).  Media diaries are very rewarding to maintain, I can wholeheartedly recommend it.  Sharing the diary publicly (to a small number of readers) is also rewarding, but in a more complicated way that I don’t necessarily recommend.  It challenges me to reconcile what I want from the diary, and what readers might get out of it.

For comparison, I’d like to discuss a couple game diaries maintained by public figures.  Gaming youtuber Razbuten has a diary on a second channel, titled “Games I played in [month]“.  Dark Souls youtuber Iron Pineapple has a series “Souls-like games you’ve never heard of” where he plays hundreds of games that could conceivably be described as “souls-like”.  Immediate caveat: both of these series are commercial products.  The youtubers make money off of them.  So I’m taking each of these series as a reflection of what viewers/readers like to see in a game diary.

The primary answer is reviews.  Recommendations.  Curation.  Discovery.

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I went gluten-free and it worked

Late last year, I was having some gastrointestinal issues, and someone suggested I should go gluten-free, as an experiment. I tried it for a few weeks, and it seemed to help.

So I started speaking to a dietician, and we did a bunch of tests to see what was going on. I kept a food diary. I eliminated a lot of different foods, and reintroduced them one by one. I determined that I have a sensitivity to a class of carbohydrates called FODMAPs.

I had heard of FODMAP sensitivity before my dietician told me about it. In a rare case where blogging has materially benefited me, I had blogged about the very same subject almost a decade ago. I had heard of (then recent) research that many people who believe they have gluten sensitivity are actually sensitive to FODMAPs. FODMAPs and gluten both occur in the same food, and so going gluten-free tends to help even if it wasn’t gluten that was the source of the problem.

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