Reflecting on Recent Failures
Game Design Competition I read The Power Broker as a prerequisite for a game design competition revolving around the book. I did finish the book, but never got around to organizing my notes to post. We did build a game (several, actually, in pursuit of a good mechanic) and though we landed on something we liked, the more »
The Power Broker I
The New York Sun reports Moses, in the totality of his reign as ‘Master Builder,’ “built 13 bridges, 416 miles of parkways, 658 playgrounds, and 150,000 housing units, spending $150 billion in today’s dollars” across the City of New York. Nearly unfathomable nowadays is that Moses was able to wield such lofty power, from the more »
Before Reading “The Power Broker”
I’m 1/6 of the way through The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. The audiobook doesn’t divide in exactly the same way as the book does, but that sixth takes me through Moses’ first 35 years. Most of that time, he personally has no power at all. Brief overview: Robert Moses would become more »
Self-Congratulation
I’m starting Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. I will probably share some notes or thoughts, but I’m actually trying it as an audiobook (there’s no ebook! What was I supposed to do?) so my usual e-annotation method won’t quite work. I’ll work out how I’ll write to it. — I more »
The Internet is a Red Pill Dispensary
I very clearly broke my promise to “see you next week”. I deserve to be shamed. Below, I take what I think might be a pretty mixed metaphor, and stretch it pretty badly. As I’ve done before, I figured I’d publish it as a snapshot of an idea-in-progress to reference and clean up later. I would promise to get more anchored more »
What I don’t know
I had a great year last year, although I didn’t return to publish much of anything here (3 pretty short posts in 2015). The previous year (2014), I published 74 posts, some of which I was even pretty proud of. I felt that writing helped me to crystalize my thinking, even when I didn’t publish. When I more »
How I Have Become Even More Boring (Part 1 of 1000)
This recent(ish) Ribbonfarm article about banal ideas becoming loaded with meaning got to me. I immediately deleted an old draft I had left unpublished on a similar topic, one of a flurry of scribbled-out ideas from my post about Law of Unrecognized Novelty last year that I never picked up. The gist of it was that phrases or concepts can become imbued with incommunicable more »
Coatesian History
Reading this warmed my heart: God does not care about history, and history does not care about humans. It’s a great joy to find someone articulate your beliefs even better than you do. It’s perhaps an even greater joy to find those string of words that you almost feel that you felt all along. It’s more »
24
Every time I open my browser there is a countdown to my death, according to some actuarial table. It’s a big hit at work. Anyway, broadly speaking I am expected about 21000 days to live [controlling for almost nothing]. I turned 24 earlier this month. It is an intimidatingly small number. It also maps cleanly to more »
On 2014
I’m certain that no one finds my own wrap-up posts more interesting than I do. That’s fine. I can review old thoughts, I can condense, and with some distance I can ask myself “How could I have said this better?” I’ve complained about this before, but I still don’t edit much before publishing. There are miles to more »