I released my game

I released my game, Moon Garden Optimizer.  It’s a puzzle strategy game about growing a tiny garden on the moon while optimizing water usage.  It’s inspired by deckbuilders like Dominion, but it supports unlimited undo.

Screenshot of moon garden optimizer

You can play for free in browser on itch.

Most people are here because they like my writing, so I’ll mention that the game has writing!  As a reward for beating challenges, there’s philosophical dialogue between the robot protagonist and her human manager.  It’s fairly silly, but takes a bit of inspiration from modern AI.  For example, the human has unwarranted confidence in the robot’s expertise.

Origami: Eye of the Wave

Eye of the Wave

Eye of the Wave, designed by me

This is a pleat-based model that I made in 2020.  You can see some other examples of pleat-based models here and here.

This is made with 64×64 divisions.  Where the horizontal and vertical pleats meet, the paper is layered in a way that causes it to contort.  I really like this one.

Social justice and empiricism

I’ve toyed with the idea that one of the major values of social justice is basically empiricism.  Social justice contains certain theories, but you can’t just rely on theories.  Theories live or die by the whims of empirical reality.  In order to figure out the best way to live in a diverse society, we need to rely on observations.  In other words, we have to actually listen to people, not just make assumptions.

Of course, I would think that empiricism is a social justice value.  I spent a decade involved in skeptical and atheist activism, then departed for more social-justice-oriented waters.  It’s natural for me to draw mental connections and decide that actually, both of these things that I have liked are founded upon similar values.  Call it a personal pop philosophy.  If we’re being serious, I think most skeptics would not have thought to apply empiricism in the particular way that I do; and most social justice advocates would not name empiricism as one of their core values.

But maybe they ought to?  I think social justice could benefit from more attentiveness to epistemology.

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Coming out as political action

Coming out isn’t what it used to be. Literally, “coming out” has a rich history of different meanings. Originally it referred to young women coming of age into high society. It had a derivative meaning within gay subcultures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

But in the 1970s, “coming out” started to mean revealing yourself to the general public.  “Coming out” was contrasted with “being in the closet”.  In the 1970s, coming out was advocated as a form of political action. You can see this, for instance, in many speeches by Harvey Milk. Here’s a line from the Gay Freedom Day Speech in 1978:

Gay people, we will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets…we are coming out! We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions! We are coming out to tell the truth about gays!

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How I Made an EP

I have finally released a new EP titled Unrelenting Introspection. You can listen for free on Bandcamp.  It’s only 14 minutes long. It’s xenharmonic dark ambient drone, just some non-commercial personal art.

In celebration of the release, I will fulfill a reader request that I got back in 2022, when I released my first EP, The Stars Stirred. The reader asked me to talk about it. That reader is probably not here anymore, and now nobody is asking for it. That means the time has finally come.

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No Kings San Francisco

I just came back from the San Francisco No Kings protest.

I went with my husband, who is very much more of a protestor than I am.  He’s been attending protests on a regular basis for months.  He has a bunch of protest shirts, and a big US flag.  Normally he flips the flag upside-down, symbolizing distress.  Today, he flipped the flag right-side up, saying he wanted to dial up the visible patriotism. At the protest, there were of course lots of people with US flags, and other flags as well.

In contrast, I’m the type of person that goes outside once a week.  I freely admit that I do not like being at protests.  But I showed up in my everyday clothes and a backpack.  I enjoyed seeing the immense popular support for democracy, and opposition to everything Trump stands for.

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Link Roundup: June 2025

This month, I wrote an article about the problems with the Asexuality Identification Scale.

Also, a funny thing happened.  These link roundups often include some links to games criticism articles, which I get from Critical Distance.  But the RSS feed had been broken for a few months, and I only just caught up on the backlog.  So I guess several of these articles will be about video games.

As in previous months, I do not have any links relating to the current political trash fire, because I guess I do not feel inspired to comment on those stories.  It’s a trash fire, that’s my comment.

Blunt-Force Ethnic Credibility | Som-Mai Nguyen (via) – This article thoughtfully discusses the low standards of publishers when they strive to represent the perspectives of ethnic minorities.  For example, Penguin contracted with a prominent Vietnamese American writer to translate classic Vietnamese literature, even though he had no translation expertise, and was relying on a translation dictionary.  The author also criticizes the trope of diaspora writers highlighting superficial aspects of their ancestral language as if they were really deep.  In English, this would be analogous to marveling at the mystical connection between “big”, “beg”, “bog”, “bag”, and “bug”.

I could never muster such unwarranted confidence in speaking about my ancestral culture.  Being Chinese does not inherently give me special insight into my ancestral Chinese culture!  This mystical linguistic analysis of Asian languages strikes me as exoticizing, and overly idealizing.  I’ve written a bit about my family history, and it’s impossible for me to idealize it.  I mean, my great grandfather was a tobacco factory owner.

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