Link Roundup: October 2025

My video game, Moon Garden Optimizer, just released a demo on Steam.  If you’ve already tried previous versions, it’s not new.  Otherwise… try it!  Looking forward to a full release soon.

The Ace Journal Club this month talked about global ace solidarity.  It’s a very good discussion of how queer activists around the world can support each other, as well as the specter of cultural imperialism.  Great article, although maybe I’m biased because the article praises a blog series that I ran ten years ago.

The Many Schools of the Rationality Debate | A Failure to Disagree – This article discusses several different stances in the “rationality debate” in psychology.  There’s the classical view of decision-making that assumes people are following economic decision theory.  Then there’s the idea that people follow heuristics which cause them to be biased.  There’s the “Fast and Frugal” view which points out that heuristics are often rational.  It is rationally incorrect to calculate the exact trajectory of a ball in order to catch it; you’ve already failed to catch the ball at that point.  The author advocates a fourth school of thought, which is based more on empirical study of how experts really make decisions.

For all that skeptics have discussed rationality and tried to advocate good epistemological practices, they largely stopped at the heuristics and biases viewpoint.  Nobody ever talked about computational costs or its implications on best epistemological practices.

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Origami: 2nd Brillouin Zone of the fcc structure

2nd brillouin zone of the fcc structure

2nd Brillouin Zone of the fcc Structure, designed by me

So let’s talk about photo organization.  I have 13 years of origami photos, and every month on this blog I select one to share.  How do I avoid publishing the same photo more than once?  Well I have a primitive but effective method.  I have one folder of unposted photos, and another folder of posted photos.  Whenever I post one, I move it from one folder to the other.

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Hell is Us: War and emotional distance

Hell is Us is a recent action adventure video game, with an emphasis on puzzles and exploration. I really like the game, but this is not a review.  See other sites for reviews. I am here to discuss story and themes.

Hell is Us is about war. But it’s not some high fantasy war, disconnected from reality. It’s a flat out genocide.

It takes place in the fictional country of Hadea, geographically isolated from the rest of the world. There are two religious groups, the Paloms and Sabinians. After years of forced resettlement, racist propaganda, a vote for Sabinian indendence, and so much more, the country has erupted into violence. The Sabinian army now is attempting to eradicate the Paloms. Even otherwise sympathetic characters, even young children, often express hatred for the other side, viewing them as less than human.

Paloms and Sabinians have a history that deliberately evokes Catholics and Protestants. But whether intentional or not, there is ~another~ genocide that very strongly comes to mind.

The player character is Rémi, who was born in Hadea but escaped as a small child. He never fights any humans, instead only fighting the demonic invasion that the war seems to have provoked. He is a heroic character, often helping civilians, and even saving lives. But as for the war itself, he mostly gives it the silent protagonist treatment, giving space to the player to have their own emotional reaction.

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Confession

I left Catholicism when I was 18, so I literally have a child’s understanding of the Catholic practice of confession. It was a ritual that did not make much sense to a child.

What is confession? It’s one of the seven sacred sacraments, the other six being eucharist, confirmation, marriage, holy orders, annointing the sick, and baptism, in some order. Catholic Wednesday school, known as CCD, is supposed to introduce kids to three of the sacraments, namely eucharist, confession, and confirmation.

Confession was essentially a scheduled annual obligation. One day, all the kids would quietly line up for a little private chat with one of the priests. And just to paint the picture, we always talked to priests face to face, we never used confessional boxes, ubiquitous though they are in fiction.

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Computer difficulties

Story time.  So the other day, my computer crashed and then it wouldn’t restart.  I’m not much of a hardware person, but my brothers are, so I spent a long phone call with one of them opening it up and inspecting the hard drives.  The hard drives are fine.  Great.  It’s probably a software issue, and the Windows installation was corrupted.

Anyways, I decide it would be easier to bring it into a shop rather than fixing it myself.  I put it in a suitcase and roll it over to the repair shop across the street.  I tell them Windows needs to be reinstalled, and they say they’ll take it in for advanced diagnostics.  It’s free, provided that I register as a member–so actually it’s not free, it’s $60.

A few days later and they say it’s fixed.  Not diagnosed, fixed.  They say that they needed to reinstall Windows, which is what I had said.  So I roll the computer back to my apartment, and guess what?  The computer works, but the hard drive is wiped.  Specifically, just one of the two hard drives was wiped, the other hard drive is fine.  It’s just… that was the hard drive I was using.

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Link Roundup: September 2025

My PC is out of commission right now, so no origami this month.  Still got a handful of links.

Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults | Ozy Brennan – When we talk about Rationalist cults, no we’re not describing Rationalism itself as a cult, we’re talking about specific groups of people with isolationist and dysfunctional social dynamics.  Such as the Zizians, a trans vegan cult that recently murdered a landlord.  Ozy interviews former members to get a sense of what they were like and where they went wrong.

Many of the cults seem to have had a practice of exhausting multi-hour sessions, where they would read far too deeply into minor domestic behaviors.  That… really reminds me of Barefoot Bum’s description of the Kerista Commune (the cult known for coining “polyfidelity”).  It was not a Rationalist group at all, but had institutionalized a very similar practice.

Videogame politics for a burning world | Unwinnable – An interview with Ajay Singh Chaudhary, who offers an interesting perspective on climate change.  He frames climate change not as a future apocalypse, but rather as a thing that is happening right now–“all the things you hate about the present getting worse and then being stuck that way”.  Since this is a video game periodical, the latter half of the interview turns towards video games, and their role in climate change.  We have to ask, is the extravagance of large commercial video games necessary?

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Hating the artist, hating the art

(Disclaimer: to the extent that this article was inspired by a specific creator, it’s not a creator you’ve heard of, and not one that I mention anywhere in the article! I mention a few authors as examples, but I was not setting out to specifically comment on any of them.)

When a creator falls into disrepute, there tends to be a public re-evaluation of their work. “Oh, I re-read their book, and it’s aged terribly.” “I’ve always thought their work was bad.”

This is reminiscent the story of sour grapes. In the Aesop’s fable, a fox tries to eat some grapes, but cannot reach them. So the fox says the grapes were sour anyway, and he didn’t want them. So when an artist falls from grace, people can no longer wholly enjoy the art. So they say that the art was never good in the first place, and nothing of value was lost.

But there is a major difference between the fox’s re-evaluation of the grapes and the public’s re-evaluation of the art. The “public” is made up of more than one person. There may be some individuals who first liked the art, and then stopped liking it. But more often, what happens is we first hear from individuals who liked the art, and then later we hear from another set of individuals who did not like the art. Perhaps no individual re-evaluation took place, and it’s just a matter of listening more to the haters.

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