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 clock ran out before we could get much polish on it. Though we didn’t win the competition (and the actual winners are very impressive looking!) we’re proud of our game’s weirdness, and are considering if/how/when to get it to a publishable point.

I expected to write a post-mortem about the game, our process, and some lessons learned. The key thing was that I think our process was good and our mechanic had promise, but we didn’t allow ourselves the time we needed to get from 90% to 100% done- or what we call “the other 90%” of production. It’s a common enough problem, and one that was exacerbated by our team being scattered to the four winds.

Despite losing, this was a good use of my time.

 

Overloaded on Politics

I have to admit that I’m ashamed by how much attention I’ve given this election season. I flagrantly violated my information diet with high-calorie nonsense for months. I’m bursting at the seams with useless trivia. Hours of my life have been lost, in exchange for information that is 99% useless beyond the cheap thrill I get out of it (and maybe the water cooler conversations).

No new information has changed my mind about how to vote during this election. I guess I have grown firmer in my decision, but I suspect that would have happened regardless of how much trivia I consumed. My grasp on some policy details have probably incrementally improved, but at a pretty steep cost in terms of time (and probably health, yeah, a little bit?)

People close to me knew how I was drowning myself in this dreck, and instead of pulling me out they asked me why I didn’t pull everyone I know into it, too. Ugh.

Anyway, of course I will vote because I do think it’s important. I’ll use some of my time, money, and energy to try to mobilize people- especially people who are prone to vote the way that I will vote. I won’t focus much energy here or almost anywhere else to try to publicly convince anyone who doesn’t agree with my voting preference because I’m trying to respect both of our time.

 

Money Blogs That Aren’t A Waste of Time

– “Money Stuff” column in  by Matt Levine. Light and often humorous recaps of money stuff that has happened that day.

– Most things by Morgan Hausel, who now writes on the Collaborative Fund blog. His themes are very consistent, which I appreciate. The basic principles of “being humble” and “keeping your head on” cannot be repeated enough to me to be boring, and his take is usually fun and interesting. Generally, to me, this kind of material is like going to church. You don’t go to learn something new. You know the stories and can pull out the meanings. meditate on the meaning,

 

– “An Afternoon in Early Autumn”  by Greer