I made a video game. I have not published, but I’m currently looking for playtesters. In fact, I’m trying to get playtesters right here and now, please let me know if you’re interested!
It’s a small puzzle strategy game titled “Moon Garden Optimizer”. I’m sure say more about the specifics of the game design at a later time. Today I’m sharing my development process up to this point.
A screenshot of my game
A couple years ago, I wrote several posts about AI art. But AI is a moving target, and there’s no sense to committing to one single view about it. So let’s reconsider.
1. AI art as theft
The argument against AI images that has had the most staying power, is the idea that training an image generator on art is stealing from the artists. I’ve become somewhat more sympathetic to this argument over time.
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Conspiracy | Contrapoints (video, 2:40 hours) – Back in 2016, Contrapoints got a reputation for “deradicalizing” people who fell down the alt-right pipeline. But for people who adopt conspiratorial modes of thinking, there’s virtually no hope. And conspiracism is frightfully common even in “ordinary” times, when there isn’t an establishment political party outright promoting it.
My instinctive reaction to conspiracism is to identify where people on “my” side seem to slide into it. Which is not necessarily helpful, but at least I feel like I have more power over it.
For example, I think about leftists who say that Trump’s economic policies are so absurdly bad that he must know they are bad, and he’s trying to crash the economy on purpose. Okay, but is that what the typical Trump fan believes? Because Trump is basically his own biggest fan. If the typical Fox-viewing person can believe absurd things about tariffs, Trump can very well do so too. Oh, of course it’s plausible that Trump is not high on his own supply of lies, that’s hardly wild conjecture. It’s fine if people believe that, it ultimately doesn’t matter whether Trump is nefariously incompetent or incompetently nefarious. But I’d ask, what attracts some people to the more conspiratorial hypothesis.
Indiana Jones and the Objective Existence of God | Jacob Geller (video, 28 min) – I’ve never actually seen these movies (and tbh they always looked like trash, sorry nerds). But Jacob Geller talks about how the Christian God (as well as Shiva) obviously exist within the Indiana Jones universe. But Indiana Jones still puts on airs of being a rational skeptic. I guess Indiana Jones’ rationality is just an aesthetic attribute that the story uses to place him into a certain character archetype.
Back when I started working in finance in 2020, I remarked to a colleague that I felt pretty ignorant about all this finance stuff. So they suggested a basic online course in macroeconomics. That course: “The Power of Macroeconomics: Economic Principles in the Real World” taught by Dr. Peter Navarro.
In case the name doesn’t ring a bell, Dr. Navarro is currently the senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, in the Trump administration. He is seemingly the only economist in the world who thinks universal tariffs are a good idea. That guy. Even at the time I took the course, Navarro had been the director of the White House National Trade Council during the first Trump administration. But I swear, I didn’t realize who he was until 2022, when he was arrested in relation to the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.
No deep dive here–I’m not going back through the course to sift for oddities. This is just storytime, recalling what I can about Dr. Peter Navarro from several years ago.
Jagged Bomb, designed by me
I’m going to the East Bay Origami Convention this weekend! I’ll be teaching this model.
I specifically designed the model in order to teach it. Normally, modular origami takes a while to make, and people wouldn’t finish within the session. Especially something like this model which has 14 units. But this is just about the fastest thing you could possibly make with 14 sheets of paper, so I’m hoping some people will be able to finish it.
The mathematically inclined may raise eyebrows at 14. What symmetrical shape has 14 components? And it’s pretty hard to tell from looking at it, because it’s so chaotic. Ask me in the comments if you can’t figure it out.
I also made diagrams.
I just watched a video by Daryl Talks Games titled “What Artificial Romance Does to People“. Although crushes/romance/relationships with artificial characters are stigmatized, Daryl discusses psychological research that suggests that they often have beneficial effects (although not uniformly beneficial). I’m not responding to the video, I just felt inspired to comment on the same subject matter, from an ace lens.
I believe that part of the stigma around artificial romance comes from the idea that they are replacing real girlfriends. “The guy who married Hatsune Miku should get a real girlfriend.” That’s people’s gut reaction, and I am not immune either. Some degree of crushes on fictional characters seems fairly common, but that degree of artificial romance strikes me as weird. However, I do think we should take our initial reaction, and consciously reject it.
A core ace principle is that nobody needs to get a real girlfriend. No exceptions, not even for allo people. It is irrelevant whether or not a person has a romance with a fictional character–there is no moral imperative for them to form a romance with a real person. We could say that if someone is in love with a fictional character, they’re really just in love with a mental projection, so it’s really just a kind of self-relationship. To this I would say, having a positive self-relationship is a good thing, and it is eminently reasonable to prefer it over a romantic relationship with another person.
I didn’t talk about it much, but until recently I was technically still involved in academia. I participated in Project Recognize, a research grant to improve survey measures of sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity (SSOGI) for public health research.
The project was particularly interested in measures of asexual and intersex groups, because there is a gap in the academic literature. For example, this NASEM report has hundreds of pages on SSOGI measures, but barely anything to say about asexuality at all. We were filling that gap by looking beyond academic literature, such as exploring grassroots community literature.
We were funded by an NIH grant, but as you can imagine, this is exactly the sort of research that’s getting targeted for being too “woke”.