Artificial Life | Emergent Garden (video, 35 min) – A video about simulations that simulate evolution or generate life-like complexity.  He draws a distinction between three kinds of simulations.  In the first kind, entities are given a goal, and they find a solution via genetic algorithm.  In the second kind, entities are given space to wander around freely, and evolve organically.  In the third kind, entities are not explicitly coded, and instead we see life-like patterns emerge from the rules.  I’ve played several games like this (mostly of the second kind), and I kind of want to make such a game, but it’s probably beyond my ability.

The underlying misogyny of grand romantic gestures | The Soak (video, 47 min, via) – I’ve never seen most of the movies discussed, but I’m still familiar.  I think film often depicts grand romantic gestures because they have to convincingly present a romantic entanglement within a very short amount of time.  Perhaps this is not unlike how porn jumps right into the sex, because that’s what the audience is here for.  Narrative justifications aside, I think many people have taken the trope seriously, and it’s damaging to people’s social skills, especially men’s.  Like, public education can’t realistically teach people about respectful dating etiquette, so instead people are left to absorb norms through movies.

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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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In last month’s journal club, we talked about ace characters on TV.

Why Video Games Cost So Much to Make | Jason Schreier (video, 17 min) – Schreier is a highly regarded games journalist, and I mean journalist rather than games critic.  He explains why video games are so expensive.  In short, it’s labor costs.  Take the salary of a programmer, multiply by the number of employees and number of years, and it’s a lot of money. Of course, any video game at any price is inherently an incredible deal because video games are great.

I disagree on Schreier about why programmers are so expensive.  The salary of a tech workers is more than enough to live and raise a family in the SF Bay Area.  Like, there are many workers who manage with less.  Even within the games industry, there are lower paid workers than the programmers.  One mustn’t imagine tech workers like we’re subsistence farmers!  Our skills are in demand, and so we are able to take a profit margin on our labor.  Which is what I would wish for all workers.

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Sawatsky: Sexual pain in Christian Women | The Asexual Agenda – Okay, so this is for my journal club, and I wrote up the discussion notes.  But I have a few things more to say here.  The paper is exploring possible causes for the high prevalence of sexual pain among Christian women (primarily Evangelicals).  But the authors of the paper are evangelicals, and they frame it like religious belief is generally great for sexual outcomes.  To them, sexual pain is this one mysterious exception where religious women are doing worse.  Color me skeptical.

I recalled that a long time ago, there was a study that circulated among atheist blogs, seemingly claiming the opposite, that people who leave religion have better sex lives.  The study was called “Sex and Secularism” by Darrel Ray in 2011, and it was based on a survey that recruited a lot of participants through Pharyngula.  You can find news articles talking about it, but the article itself is totally gone. I’m skeptical of that study too, and the ephemeral circumstances of its publication certainly don’t help.

The thing is, “better sex life” is a normative judgment, and perhaps it’s not very surprising that any given value system results in better sex lives, as measured by researchers who share that value system.  Obviously my values would overlap more with Darrel Ray’s than with the evangelical authors.  But I’m also ace, which tends to come with its own sexual values.  Like whenever “better sexual outcomes” means higher frequency of sex, I’m just going to roll my eyes.  But sexual pain, that’s uncontroversially a bad thing, even when ace people have it.

Why was I invited to Beast Studios | Folding Ideas (video, 1:30 hours) – MrBeast is the most subscribed youtube channel of all time, valued at $5 billion dollars.  But they’re losing money, viewers, and their film production is at once lavishly expensive, yet made of paperclips and glue.  Dan makes few attacks on Mr. Beast’s character, yet exposes the organizational rot at the heart of his media empire.  They prioritize viewing metrics above all else, and seem uninterested in hiring any real expertise.

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I wrote an article for The Asexual Agenda which may or may not interest readers, talking about umbrella terminology.

“I am Jesus Christ” and Other Games about Jews | Jacob Geller (video, 40 min) – Jacob diving through obscure games to find any Jewish games at all is actually so relatable.  I do the same for queer media.

Saw | Contrapoints (video, 1:36 hours) – Saw is a 2004 movie about people trapped in a game devised by a serial killer, forced to choose between death and ultra violent suffering.  There is no way I would ever enjoy such a thing myself (that is, a movie), but I appreciate this analysis of what other people might like about it.  Violence is really common in movies, but often it’s couched in terms of justice–violence against people who “deserved” it.  However, in Saw, the character who enacts violence in the name of justice is the villain.

What do we owe the insufferable? | Psychiatry on the margins – Some people with mental illness are challenging to deal with on a personal level.  We can suspend our moral judgment, but that also deprives them of moral agency, treating them like a patient rather than a person.  People with difficult personalities often need help, but even caretakers can find them exhausting, and they end up with lower quality of care.  There are no known solutions.

Heated Rivalry is the romance story I’ve been missing | Council of Geeks (video, 42 min) – This echoes some of the points in my review.  One of my persistent issues with the romance genre is the dilemma between internal and external sources of conflict.  Straight romances frequently have internal sources of conflict.  As a result I often think the relationships are bad, and the characters would be would be better off if they broke up!  M/M romances frequently have external sources of conflict, but this can make the relationship itself boringly perfect.  Heated Rivalry does it differently, the external conflict made internal.

This month, the ace journal club discussed an article about gender detachment.  And I wrote an article on the game design of my game.

Epstein Files Reveal How Pathetic Richard Dawkins & Other Men Are | Rebecca Watson (video + transcript, 27 min) – I get readers from outside FTB who have little background with the skeptical and atheist movements, and who don’t get what that means for us.  Here it is.  This is where we came from.  This is what we rejected.  These pathetic thought leaders who were enraged by a woman speaking, and turned around to seek bad advice from then-convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.  First we wanted better, and then eventually we just wanted out.

The Fascists are Lying about ICE Murdering an Innocent Women | Rebecca Watson (video + transcript, 27 min) – Another cathartic video from Rebecca, also featuring a cameo from Michael Shermer.  Fun fact: Michael Shermer got me into the skeptical movement, and fun fact two: he’s a terrible person.

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This month, the ace journal club discussed a quoiromantic manifesto, translated from Japanese!  Probably not the easiest read if you don’t have prior familiarity, but we thought it was great stuff.

The World of Pride and Prejudice is Not the World of Purity Culture | Tell Me Why the World is Weird – Christian purity culture frames itself as a continuation of centuries-old practice, but if you look back at history there are many differences.  This is a pretty insightful look at the idiosyncrasies of purity culture, by way of comparison to Jane Austen’s famous 1813 novel.

Exposing a $10,000,000,000 Debt Industry | Coffeezilla (video, 16 min) – Hey, I know a bit about the debt settlement industry.  When someone is having trouble with debt, a debt settlement company will offer to step in between the lender and debtor, and negotiate to pay only a fraction of the debt (maybe about half).  In return, the debt settlement company takes a cut.  It ruins your credit score, but could in theory reduce your debt.  But I wasn’t familiar with the abuses and scams in the industry.  That’s something that should be pursued by the consumer financial protection bureau (CFPB) as a violation of UDAAP oh wait

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