The most unruly and least considered, most shameful among various Idiomdrottning components and libraries can be found here.
To contact me, send mail to sandra.snan@idiomdrottning.org
Lots to love in this book. Plenty of bad things too.
I might or I mightn’t read more books from this guy. Reading over his bibliography, he sure has a lot of interesting pitches that makes me really curious.
The main story here, I liked. It’s an adventure story that does feel like an adventure story but also has a somber, heartbreaking Tove Jansson vibe.
But just like some of her books (looking at Sun City for example) he doesn’t use quotation marks nor dialogue dashes. People just say things and it’s not offset in anyway That gets annoying real fast. I first heard of this guy maybe twenty years ago and how he hates quotation marks, how he replaces a lot of commas with “and” and how he likes to run sentences together also with “and”. “Oh, that’s interesting”, I thought, “I’d like to read one of his books and see whether I’d like that style.” Now I have and now I know I don’t. I did enjoy the read but I would’ve liked it much more if it was just formatted normally.
There’s also “dont”, “wont” and “wouldnt” in lieu of “don’t”, “won’t” and “wouldn’t”. (But thankfully we at least get “I’ll” and “you’re”.) Worst of all, “‘ve” is consistently spelled “of”. “He would of written this sentence like this”. Mostly that’s in dialogue (and one more educated character makes sure to say ‘would have’) and I guess the point a lot of the characters probably would’ve spelt it that away themselves, but, as someone who normally hates eye dialect since it comes across as so patronizing, this is one step beyond that in the worse direction since it’s not even something they’re saying differently, it’s just his imagination that these folks are probably the type of people who spells “‘ve” like “of”.
There’s a lot of spots where it’s just hard to understand what happens.
I’m going to get into spoilers now so just go read the book yourself if you’re interested.
Early on, two guys sneak off into Mexico and I’m like “okay did they rob someone?” and they soon start kidding around about how they robbed a bank. But really, they didn’t. They’re just kids looking for a new life. The understated show-don’t-tell story-telling (reads more like a movie script than a novel) and weird formatting makes that hard to grok at first and there are plenty more situations down the road that have the same problem. So I guess this book is a valuable experiment that proves that overly showing and never telling isn’t all good. Now y’all know I ain’t the sharpest tool in the proverbial, and with that comes how sometimes I have a hard time following movies that are overly visual and they never explain with words what’s going on. This book has a lot of that same frustration for me.
There’s also a reckless bull-in-porcelain-shop approach here, but that’s a mix bag of bad and good. Guy glorifies bovine agriculture and oil rig work and that passes without comment, which sucks for a 1993 book (set in 1943). But the guy also seemingly glorifies coming in like some sorta white savior who is gonna show the Mexicans how to handle horses and he courts a girl in a way that kind of wrecks her life. In both cases the narration seems to go along at first but ends up pushing back.
The main story here is great. Like most books I’ve read lately I like the first part the best; here I like the first half the best. Two boys sneak off into Mexico and meet a third boy on the way and their lives get changed. There’s plenty of awesome locations and characters and lots of attention to detail on bags, clothes, guns and horses. I loved horse books growing up and this one goes into more detail than many of those did. Sometimes the detail is weird and makes no sense (using trot, which is the most exhausting way to ride, when you’re injured and two to a saddle? Uh okay) but most of the time there’s a lot of love there. This guy loves horses and that shines through.
The setting is also great. It’s 1943, World War is roaring, but it feels fully like an old west tale.
I mentioned on BookWyrm how I reread the 1980s kids book This Island Isn’t Big Enough for the Four of Us in conjuction with this. That one has no horses but two buys go camping on their own; just like John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins here they pack Kool-Aid. And that book was the first time I ever heard of huevos rancheros which they also eat in this book. Both have that same camping out under the stars vibe with plenty of focus on bags and gear. I dunno, the books just felt like mirror universe versions of each other. That one’s a light-hearted kids’ comedy, this one is a bloodsoaked tale of regret and rootlessness. I’m glad I got to alternate a lighter, brighter, safer book with this because that made this hit even harder.
I’m gonna end on a pretty low grade overall but what a mix of great and bad this book has and maybe I’ll revisit this grade if I read more books from McCarthy. But I’ll say this. I read plenty of hard-to-grade books where I find the overall structure awful while there are a couple of absolute gems in the sand. More rarely there’s the converse; the book as a whole is a gem but there are some poison pills snuck into the flaws. (For example there might be a book that’s overall awesome but marred by something like a cruel rape joke or a racist comment. [Also this is one reason why I hate writing reviews now: as the zeitgeist is moving on from the all-too-brief era of sensitively executed diverse representation, I realize how I come across as a pearl-clutching relic and I get self conscious over how I still want do books that actually care.])
What we have here is rarer still. This isn’t a mostly-shining gem with a few singular poison pills. It’s a gem worn down into dullness by grime and filth. The structure and plot as a whole is good and it’s built up masterfully off a great pitch. At one point near the end the main character retells the entire book to a couple of kids and he gets through the entire story in a third of a page and had this been a lesser book I would’ve said “aaargh you should’ve made this the entire book then” but here there’s no need. It’s a deserved flex because as a reader I loved all the detail and sense of getting to live through that story across a couple of hundred pages.
So that’s why it is a gem on the macro level. What I hate is what I’ve seen others praise about McCarthy and it makes me hesitate to press send on this dumb review. People love his prose style and his dialogue and I just don’t. Ear for dialogue? Maybe of the tin variety. The formatting is a suffocating wall-of-text, the clunky child-like grammar is a schlep to get through. I am hating on the exact thing that some people say is the best part.
My war against Screen and against Online is over and this is the peace treaty: No screen without a matching TODO item.
I can spend any amount of time online or on devices or watching TV and do anything on there as long as I do this:
Away from the screen, with the screen off or out of view, I look at my “to do” list on paper, I look through the whole thing (things I want to do onscreen or IRL), and I write down things I want to do. I can then go to the screen, “enter Screenland” so to speak, and try to do as many things as possible on the “to do on screen” part of the list. No gimmicks, no app limits or blocks or guilt.
And then I can’t do anything else on screen that wasn’t part of the list. If my screen life prompts more screen life actions I can’t do them right away. I write them up on the paper (in a way I can tell it apart from the original “to do on screen” list I’m already working on) and then I can do them later after again leaving the screen and weighing them against everything else. If something mediumly urgent comes up I can write it down, pause all the other to-do-on-screen stuff, quickly close the screen and look at my lists. So far I haven’t had to do that. And if it’s a life-or-death real things are on actual fire then that would need an even bigger exception.
Everyday routines like “check messages” have a pre-printed daily allotment. Or that sounds way too fancy for what’s really going on in my case: I use a pen to draw circles in the corner of my calendar the day before how many times I am supposed to check messages the next day and then check those circles off as I use them up. It’s just a shorthand for “open mail app and RSS reader and respond to everything in there that I want to respond to”.
GTD fans, hark: there can no longer be any two minute rule for stuff in Screenland. I absolutely use that rule (which says that if you want to do something that takes less than two minutes, there’s no need to bring out the pen and paper lists for it, instead just do it) offline as much as possible, now more than ever, but the idea behind this peace treaty is that Screenland time is not allowed to beget more Screenland time. Within the context of “message replying time” I’ve alotted a little bit of time to do random undefined things as long as it’s both in direct service of each message, and it’s something I actually want to or have to do.
That “in direct service of” items on my “to do” list is a good mindset to cultivate. No longer do I have to feel any guilt for looking at a maps app or travel planning app in order to get to an IRL meeting. But this requires a judgment call. It’s easy to get nerd sniped into yak shaving for tangentially related minor connections to what you actually wanted to do.
I talked to a friend on the phone about this system and he was a bit incredulous. “Wait, did I get this right… You just have to look at your other lists, you don’t need to do anything on them? You can read that you’ve written ‘wash windows, make bed, sort books, prep food’, and then decide to not do anything of that and scribble in ‘watch cartoons’ and then go watch cartoons on screen?” Yes! Because this peace treaty is about doing what I want to do on screen as opposed to doing things I’m compelled to do, or that I do mindlessly.
I never said this peace treaty solved all life and productivity issues. It’s a life-long commitment, I don’t want to deprive myself of all rest and relaxation.
But my problem with Screen and Online hasn’t been that I’ve been doing anything bad on there. With a few exceptions, like when I’ve been a li’l addicted to chatbots (they are bad for the environment and bad for mental health), I’ve mostly been doing good and productive things online. Learning, being entertained, or talking to people. (Or even making programs, texts, images or other art.) The problem has been the compulsion. The lack of control. The runaway hours. The neglect of all other parts of my life.
This new approach is instead like serving up a big bowl of delicious food and then closing the door to the kitchen before eating it.
Notifications are now turned off by default all the time. I turn them on during “message reply time” and I can also, with the help of my pen and paper and looking at my other lists, decide to turn them on for specific time stretches. This is the inverse of my previous setup where notifications turned on every morning and I turned them off only when I wanted to really focus on work. Here, instead, they are off and I can turn them on when I want to be extra reachable. I haven’t been experimenting too much with this; so far I’ve kept them on for a few minutes during “message reply time” and one time I decided (not on a whim, I used the lists&paper method) that I’d have them on while watching a movie and then turn them off again when the movie only had fifteen minutes left. I didn’t end up getting any messages during the film and maybe that was lucky because maybe that was a dumb idea.
I’ve written before that being interrupted by messages while I’m doing something else isn’t all bad. Sometimes it has helped me get into what I’m doing because I can do it without fear of missing out. I was like “I’d rather hang out with friends than read comics but I don’t have to worry about that since if there’s a ping I won’t miss it while reading comics”.
But it’s not just the pings and buzzes. I’ve set it up so that when notifications are off, I can’t even see them. No badges, no pull down banners, no nothing while it’s in do-not-disturb mode. That’s the best part. Because say I’m playing a board game with a friend and we need to look up a rule. Now, I try to learn to just be like “it doesn’t matter what the official ruling is” but sometimes we do end up looking it up and in the past I might’ve seen a disturbing or upsetting message in the notification bar and I’ve been like “okay the rule is… Uh… Oh. Wow. Okay the rule is…” and then back to explaining the rule, trying my best to put the message out of mind for now even though it’s one that has stirred up a lot of sadness and worry. But now, I can just use the screen as a single-tasking, practical tool that doesn’t sidetrack me into anything else.
Because of how I now have notifications off most of the time, I’m grateful that I have a dumbphone as another way for fam to reach me. I quit smartphone in 2017 but it was a short-lived bliss since in 2020 I got addicted to using a tablet at home. It was better than the smartphone era since it was only at home but it wasn’t much better since I ended up being at home a lot. It wasn’t a happy, ignorant addiction; I was kicking and screaming against it the entire time.
That’s not to say that the dumb phone is entirely pain free; I use a Light Phone III and it’s surprisingly bad at setting notifications. You can block specific numbers or you can turn the entire sound on and off and that’s it. Through an supported hack (and I think I heard that the modding route I used has been turned off) I’ve set it up to mute automatically at night. But the first Fair Phone had a slider to let you airplane mode for up a few hours and then have it automatically turn on again (perfect for movies or hanging out with friends) and even my Nokia dumbphone had a way to only mute text messages while leaving calls on; it was hidden behind a menu dive but it could do it and I often used that and I miss that capability on the Light Phone, but the good part is having a way to get in touch without going online, like if someone’s late too meeting up or something.
I’m back on the wagon with GTD but this could work with almost any system even ones that are incompatible with GTD, like time boxing. But no fair making a long list of films and then being like “okay it’s on a TODO list so I can watch it”; Screenland is a hostile land and my idea of what I want to do needs to be specific to each particular visit there.
That has been the biggest mindset-shift here. I’ve gone from living in Screenland and making uncomfortable and unsettling expeditions into reality when I really had to eat or sleep, to living in reality and making perilous expeditions into the world of screens with a map drawn up before hand. (“Map” being a metaphor for the list written on paper.)
The terms of this “peace treaty” also means that I can do anything I want on screen for as long as I want with no guilt or anxiety. I’ve tried desperate measures in the past, like giving my iPad’s app limits password to a friend so I physically couldn’t use Safari longer than an hour a day. Then whenever I actually had to use Safari for work stuff or to pay bills or whatever it was a breathless, anxious affair. When I switched to using this Android tablet (because of it’s more comfortable screen—it doesn’t glow! At all! It needs a lamp or the sun in order for me to see the text) that wasn’t possible anymore because Android doesn’t do app limits. I mean it has the feature but it’s pointless since it’s like “Okay your fifteen minutes are up! Do you want to turn off the limit” and you can just turn off the limit and it’s not actually a limit. That’s why I needed to come up with this entire mindset shift instead of relying on software solutions.
I’m also trying to become comfortable with not looking up every li’l weird trivia question that comes into my head. When I’ve tried similar approaches in the past my “to do on web” list has quickly grown and I’ve just been adding overhead because to look up things like “how many squirrels are in Central Park”, instead of just a quick web search I’ve had to write it down on paper, then later look my paper list up and read it, and then after I’ve learned it I’ve had to mark it off, and it’s just a lot of steps and a lot of fiddliness for little value. So “embrace ignorance” was my motto for the first few days of this new approach. I’m trying to find a good balance there.
Now, how to actually stop myself from doing things that aren’t on the list? That is an unsolved problem! Send advice! So far I’ve been doing pretty good (I’m writing this first version of this essay after one week into this peace treaty), but maybe that’s a fluke and I’m gonna end up having to head back to the zafu. It helps that I know that I can do anything I want online just as long as I do it according to the terms of the peace treaty.
It helps even more that I’ve been feeling so curious about how I feel about being offline. That has not always been easy—it’s been like being kicked out of the matrix, lost my way out from the “world soul”.
Whenever I’ve traveled the past few years I’ve tried to not bring internet with me (partly for “digital detox” reasons but also because one of the points of traveling is to experience life differently than at home and if I see the same RSS feeds and the same day to day virtual locations then it’s not that much of a journey) and the worse I’ve been feeling lately about my screen addiction, the more I’ve dreaded returning home to internet. But with this new approach it feels like that all the time. That was painful at first, painful but interesting. Maybe this new “disconnectedness” feeling was the third and biggest benefit of turning off notifications.
So in practice there has been a lot less screentime. I’ve been reading paper novels, embroidering, and trying to hang out with friends.
I’m motivated by the idea that the world of screen is illusory. It doesn’t really quench my thirst for connection. It seems to, in the moment, but in the long run just stokes the flames. That’s not a slag on the friends I’ve made online. I’m still gonna keep on talking to you.♥︎ Probably not any less, either. Talking to friends isn’t exactly what I’d call “wasting time online”. It’s just that it’s going to be when we both really want to as opposed to compulsively or unhealthily.
Texts • Gtd • Aesthetics • Psychology
When we talk about solving climate change (ration energy, leave the fossils in the ground, any DACCS and BioCCS should be funded directly instead of as an excuse to burn more fossils, fix market capitalism’s bugs or replace it outright, tax the rich, get money out of politics) what they hear is akin to as if we would’ve said “Oh, why do you need doors or windows? Just walk through the walls with ghost powers” or “Why do you need stairs? Just stride up the clouds”.
That is how deep their programming goes.
They’re living in a completely cart-before-horse world where the economy as it currently works today is seen as the prereq for any kind of changes. Even though it’s in reality the other way around; we can’t have an economy if there are no people because everyone died and starved and burned from climate change.
The truth is that big changes are possible and have been possible.
When my parents were little we had never been to the moon and here in Sweden we literally drove on the other side of the road. There was a huge traffic reform. And they lived through energy rationing. Actual here let’s divide up how much energy everyone gets to use because we actually realize there is an actual shortage.
When I was little music only came on records and tape and I lived through mp3, GNU, Debian, Wikipedia. And fridges and hairspray were eating up the ozone layer. And Berlin was split by a wall.
Even most of all y’all reading this has lived through the pandemic era when streets where empty once more.
I should’ve had some intro about how this is just such a common pattern when I try to talk about climate to almost anyone. It just happens again and again that the person I’m talking to, almost whoever they are, are like “that’s not possible because the economy” when in reality the economy is not going to be possible because climate change.
I want my anti-smartphone books to be red-hot and flaming Molotov cocktails thrown uncompromisingly at the algo silo surveillance mental ice age. 🔥🍾
I want The Interior Castle. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (and The Treasury of the Dharma Eye). Days of War, Nights of Love. A Pattern Language. Desolation Angels.
Books printed on pure dynamite that straight out scream how the growth treadmill to deadworld is lies and poison. Is illusion. Sickening treacle.
I don’t want no weaksauce “it’s unreasonable to have fewer than ninety Facebook friends”. I want to pipe Facebook and WhatsApp and Line and Instagram and all the rest to /dev/null/smithereens. Rumspringa is over. The soma is bitter. Time to get sober.
Screens aren’t the problem. Or screens aren’t the only problem. The gilded pittrap of dark pattern algo silo vendor lock-in Huis Clos is the problem. Books that fall short of condemning that whole broken infernal machine are better used as bricks thrown through the glass labyrinth.
I have three different devices with either Google Play or Apple Appstore.
I have three different devices with an NFC reader.
There is zero overlap between these two categories; i.e. I do not own one single device that has both appstore and NFC. (Beyond the six that have either, I have a couple of devices with neither.)
The Swedish police’s new electronic ID that’s about to launch requires both.
This is an empathy exercise, but don’t worry: you’re gonna get to hate someone along the way if you want to. Or if you love them, that’s okay too. The exercise doesn’t hinge on your hatred of them.
Okay, so bring to mind someone you really had a problem with in the past. A school bully or something. Let’s add some twists to that: now they have a lawn sign of your most opposite political party. And they step on kitten tails too. In short, a real jerk. I’m gonna call them “Jones” in the following story.
One morning a li’l earlier than you’d like, it’s before breakfast, before anything, there’s a ring on your door. You open groggily.
Outside are a bunch of police and they put you in the car. Not gently.
It takes a while until they let you know on what charges you’re arrested. Convicted, even. Actually it’s not even until you’re on the firing row that they’ll let you know your supposed crime:
Apparently, Jones (or the political leadership he voted in) killed someone overseas. And that country has an “for each one of us who dies, one of them needs to die” policy. And you won that lottery. Congratulations.
Now that story makes zero sense. It’s an absurd, bad, and awful story. Because the “for each of us who dies one of you needs to die” approach does not make sense.
And the war between Trump and Khameini makes no sense. Here we have leaders who only a small minority of the population in “their” respective country actually approve of, and they’re perpetually “retaliating” by killing “one of them”. Or “ten of them”.
I’ve been reading 1960s news (my grandpa saved a bunch of news yearbooks) as an alternative to internet and so far the most striking—and this goes for other books I’ve lead from fifties through nineties was that it was from a world of hope, a world that could change.
Yeah, there were doomy pockets like the 1962 Cuba crisis or the 1979 Détente collapse but in the day-to-day the world was a changing world; civil rights, gay rights, the rise of feminism, new inventions that actually helped people.
I thank the heavens each day that the freon crisis happened during this era when people actually knew how to fix things. If it had happened now we’d all been fried and it’d’ve been bye bye ozone layer.
But it doesn’t have to be this way! The world could change and it still can!
Okay, the way we fixed the freon crisis was not good. HFCs, which was the alternative, are such a big problem that phasing away from them, which we now globally are doing thankfully, is the biggest single climate win of all time.
A “win” that wouldn’t’ve been needed if we had solved freons in a better way in the first place which could have saved many lives.
I’ve asked for climate change to permeate every story in news media but oh wow, what a monkey’s paw.
…was that all the thing we humans do that are greenhouse reckless are called out.
For example, whenever there’s a beef subsidy or like a sale on beef, they should have called out how bad that is. How the Earth’s 1⅗ billion bovines, almost ⅖ of our mammalian biomass, a creature with remarkable, unprecedented trophic inefficiency (240 times worse than beans) that humans selectively bred out of aurochs; where each individual emits 50% more methane than an aurochs did and 8000% more methane than a non-ruminant mammal of equivalent size does, and where the sheer number of them are hundreds of times more than there ever were aurochs at their peak (a few million), and uses up somewhere between fifty to a hundred times more land than eating beans.
Or when the rich are being celebrated, instead show how they emit 30 times more CO2e than a normal person; to clarify, that’s only for the top 1%. Normal rich people; the richest person in your neighborhood. The billionaires emit one million times more.
When politicians come up, show how bad their climate track record is and how their future proposals would wreck the world even more. When new “energy deals” are being struck like new oil plants or gas pipelines, show how bad that is. Show how the fossil fuel industry influence and lobby for specific decisions and topics.
When there’s a war, bring up how there’s usually a huge component of contested fossil fuel supplies or transportation or food supplies or climate-related starvation. Venezuela or Iraq, it’s oil directly. The “rare earths” deal Trump extorted out of Ukraine was primarily about fossil fuels, and fossil fuels was also why he wanted Greenland. The whole reason Russia decided to try to steal Ukraine in the first place was fossil fuels and food supplies. They started out by seizing control of 80% Ukraine’s offshore oil and gas fields. Other wars are about pipelines, straits, and other ways to transport or access fossil fuels. Even the Gaza war has a fossil fuel component.
It’s pretty much all other topics too: when they go after CRT, BLM, immigrants, or LGBT+, those groups have deliberately made targets by the fossil fuel industry as distractions from their planet-wreckery.
So you can tell I was frustrated by a lack of climate stuff in the news. Almost all topics were things that directly exarcebated climate change but that aspect was almost never brought up.
I wanted climate in the news and we got climate in the news.
We have page up and page down of catastrophes like heatwaves, the aforementioned wars and famines, storms, record breaking colds and winters that paradoxically also driven by greenhouse gasses since as the Earth globally gets warmer the air can hold more water vapor which when it does get cold, which happens more often since as the arctic heats up the lowered temperature gradient causes cold winds to leak out from there.
But not peep one about why this is happening. “Whoops, there’s another wildfire, what a mystery, how could that have happened?” is more the vibe we’re getting.
Instead states like Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Texas, Florida and Alabama have laws on the books undermining climate education, and in Europe public service media like the BBC have promoted false balance on climate change or like other European countries’ public media (like here in Sweden), have provided platforms for far-right, climate-denying, fossil-industry funded parties and topics.
Here’s an idea for an original board game about 160000 samurai fighting it out.
Each samurai is roughly the size of a lentil. Hideyori’s samurai are made of wood and Tokugawa’s samurai are made out of metal. The metal pieces should not be magnets themselves but magnets should attract them to more easily separate the two types.
Ideally, there’s an easy integer weight relationship between them (for example the wood pieces being exactly ten times lighter than the metal pieces). Same weight is also okay but that’s going to be hard to fit with the following contstraint: the volume should be approximately the same. Wood is way lighter than metal normally.
Lentil shaped is actually a pretty good shape because we don’t want them to roll all over the apartment but we do want them to not snag too much, to “flow” like sand can do.
It’s also great if one side has flatter wider disc-ier pieces and the other has more cubey polyedral “taller and narrower” pieces. Like a very beveled/rounded cube might be perfect.
The mounted board is 90×90 cm (approx three by three foot). It doesn’t have hexes or anything like that, but clearly mark the two starting zones and the midline. At this scale each piece represents one single Samurai controlling maybe a six or seven meter area or so.
Players move the pieces with a tiny li’l toy rake. The side with the flatter discier pieces has a rake with tall, gappy teeth that are less likely to catch the more cubey pieces, and the side with those cubey pieces has a more finely-toothed rake that is offset from the table so that the flatter discier pieces will pass under it.
Players can rake in real time until either player shouts “Stop!”. Then that player can scoop up pieces. Fill and level a 25 ml scoop.
Separate the contents with a magnet or the rakes. (Maybe the weight/material differences are unnecessary with the two weird rake shapes.) You can weight them and using the weight differences you can figure out which side has the fewest and loses that “scoop skirmish”. They loose all those samurai and the winning side loses half. Return the survivors to where they were.
This means that you want to scoop as close to half and half as possible, without going under half. If you have two thirds of the samurai in the scoop you are trading one for one. And if it’s even more lopsided you’re losing out.
After each scoop skirmish, weigh all the samurai who are dead. When a total of 40 000 or more have died (adding both sides together), the game is over.
You get one point for every samurai you killed and a 15 000 point bonus if half your surviving samurai have crossed the midline. Both players can claim that bonus in the same game, that’s fine. Most points win the game.
If the game wasn’t over, both players place their hand in like, uh, a “ready zone” or something and when they see that the opponent also has placed their hand there, they can reach for the rake that they’ve put down in the “rakke zone”, pick it up again, and start playing. Do that same “ready zone” / “rake zone” protocol when the game starts too.
Ship the game with the weird rakes, with a regulation-sized scoop, and with two “cemetary bowls” to store the dead samurai. Magnets and scale sold separately. If anyone wants to manufacture this for real, whether it’s bigger run to sell or just single copies, feel free to drop me a line. Or don’t; if you just wanna go ahead that’s fine too. Your time is yours. This text is CC-BY-SA.
Kind of a harrowing game that gives a glimpse of the massive scale of Sekigahara.
Paper Magic is notoriously untimeable with its ten APNAP windows per turn, plus two more APNAP widows for every spell or ability, including for triggered abilities.
That’s why this is a variant. For the kitchen table. Not Comp REL.
You slam the clock once per turn cycle: after you’ve sent your attackers into the red zone.
Then blocks, cleaning up, your EOT, all that happens on your opponents time. So if they want to fetch during your EOT that’s fine because you’ve already slammed the clock so they’re doing it on their own turn.
For all rules and purposes they don’t count as AP until their untap phase starts.
Instants and activated abilities. If you want to respond on their time with a Counterspell or Giant Growth, just do it right away, don’t touch the clock, just cast the spell. But if you want to think about whether or not you want to do that, shout “okay, that goes on the stack” or “okay as soon as I get prio” or something like that while you simultaneously slap the clock so your time starts ticking down. Then once you’ve cast that spell, or decided to decline and said “it resolves”, slam the clock back.
The default in Shout ‘n Slap Magic is that you don’t get a second main phase. If you insist on one, which you have the right to do even if you don’t have abilities that make more sense in the second main like Raid, Morbid, or Survivor, shout “second main” and slap the clock right after combat is done before EOT. Slam it back after second main in done.
Same deal here, if you want to do stuff on the opponent’s upkeep you’ve got to shout ‘n slap for it. That needs to be your clock ticking as you port down all their lands.
Since you’re sending your attackers on your time and immediately slamming, if they want to Icy Manipulator or otherwise pre-combat prevent your stuff from attacking (or the opposite, force them to attack), they can retcon that and if they do you can also retcon your other attackers. Like you send two bears, they tap down one, you can then “unattack” the other too if you so wish. This isn’t a takeback, it’s, uh, let’s call it “shortcutting on assumed defaults”.
Get a clock that you can pause easily. Maybe Oracle checks and rules lookups should be on your own time (I haven’t decided yet) but huge amounts of post-block combat tricks from the attacker shouldn’t be on the defender’s time. When in doubt pause the clock or slap it to your time.
But you know the right wing has one idea:
rich get richer.
In their backyard grows three cherry trees.
These threes have nothing in common.
These trees do not get along.
But as the right wing craft their policies
in order to get voters, philosophers, and pundits on board
with making the rich richer,
they can always, always find
the perfect cherry to pick.
They have money →
They have media →
They have the throne →
The ymake money
And if it was JUST the Koch brothers
or Manchin
or the Trump family
or Putin
we could defeat them.
But the system’s sickness is such
that whomever in the deep caves
under the Misty Mountains
happens to find
the Exploitation Loophole of Power
will float to the top.
This is called emergence.
Oh, they are evil all right.
Don’t get me wrong on that.
They have mauvaise foi.
“I have a fiduciary duty
to plunder the Earth and the public coffers.”
I’ve mentioned a couple of times that a commensurate carbon tax would have to be infinite or larger than infinite (and that rationing is a better solution).
Here’s the situation. I’ll use Sweden as the example just to get numbers but similar applies to all lands and realms.
Our plan was to go from 21 Mt CO2e in 2010, through 6.3 Mt CO2e in 2030, down to zero, and then into net negative.
Showing someone just shown the first two points on that line and asking them for a solution they might be like “oh, okay, you want to go 21 Mt emissions down to 6.3 Mt? Let’s use a carbon tax! A commensurate number would be somewhere around 11.55 SEK per liter.”
Now, two problems with this. First, what we did was nowhere near 11 SEK per liter. We did 3.27 SEK. That’s among the highest in the world and still nowhere near enough just for the 6.3 Mt CO2e by year 2030 goal.
As bad as that problem is, second problem is the bigger.
Because as we want to move to zero, and through zero to negative. We didn’t show them whe whole problem. We’re not just trying to make the numbers small. We need to make the numbers go away and even flip.
Now, my original thinking on this was:
Price = Demand / Supply.
At low supply (like a 6.3 Mt emission year 2030 goal compared to a 21 Mt emission year 2010 reality), price goes up. You’re dividing the demand by a lower number.
At a zero supply like a 0 Mt emission goal, you’d have to divide by zero which breaks math. (For a tax where absolute values is what matters, it’d have to be infinite.) It breaks math even more at a negative supply. You’d… pay people to emit? So stupid. It’s a singularity pinch. The tax is beyond infinite.
Turns out that’s not really how they do it with these Pigouvian taxes. They use marginal abatement cost curves.
You want the tax high enough that it can often be cheaper to solve the problem in a way that doesn’t require buying the problematic good. I.e. you want to set the tax high enough so people are like “okay, never mind drilling for this project, solar is cheaper”.
So they put all the possible “abatements” (like switching to solar) on a big old curve and used that to guide the tax value. That’s where the 11.55 SEK number above would come from (and that’s before the flat-per-liter energy tax and VAT).
But we need to go to zero and net negative. Net negative even if everyone everywhere 100% stopped emitting (above what the carbon cycle normally can handle) means some sorta CDR. DACCS (direct air capture) or bio-CCS. Sweden has gone all in on the latter with a current contract to jam 0.9 Mt annually into the floor of the North Sea.
0.9 Mt is still only like less than one fifteenth of what just the Swedish transport section today emits, let alone all industries total. So the sequestering corporations are building out the bandwidth to jam things down there (it requires pressurized tanker boats to ship things there).
If the world doesn’t stop drilling & burning, even if we could figure out a way to jam things down there fast enough, the North Sea floor storage site would be full in just over two years. (At the current 1.5 Mt bandwidth—Sweden bought 0.9 Mt of that—it’d take over fifty thousand years to fill it up. But. Looking at what the world emits total in a year it’s almost half of what can total fit down there. The fifty thou years number is only there as a result of how slowly they can currently squeeze things down there.)
So I’m thinking maybe my original “naive” mental model wasn’t so wrong. Maybe I’m a bit Dunning-Kruger here but the more I think about this, it seems more that the marginal abatement cost curve model is what’s naive.
It’s based on carbon storage deposit amounts so big that we might not ever figure out how to do them. I’m all for CDR to the extent that it’s possible, but it’s not an infinite sponge.
We need to actually stop drilling and leave the fossil fuels in the ground!
Solar, hydro, wind, and bioCCS are all great as a consolation to not wreck our qualities-of-life too horribly when we leave it in the ground, but they’re not and can never be an excuse to not leave in the ground.
That’s what I mean with zero or even negative “supply”. Our “supply” of how much we can afford to drill and burn really is limited, even with CDR tech like bioCSS. Our actual physical supply of oil and LNG is way bigger than what we can afford to actually burn up because the bottleneck is CO2e PPM. That’s why “peak oil” spiels are wrong. It’s already way more pinched than that.
On the NES version of Clu-Clu Land, Bubbles goes to a rave between levels as the background screen rapidly cycles. That might’ve looked okay on CRT but does not look good on OLED or LCD.
Clu-Clu Land is my favorite game but I never heard of it back in the day (go figure; we played Devil World, Ice Climber, Little Sampson, all kinds of deep cuts but not this). The version I fell in love with was the 2DS Virtual Console release. It features a much slower and more pleasant background color pulse between levels.
TL;DR: Look for a sequence of A9 04 85 55 A9 01 at address 0x435 (that offset is for a file that does include the header) and change the $04 to $0f if you want to make the backgrounds cycle more slowly the way modern VC and AC releases of Clu-Clu Land do.
Disappointed in how the version from NES romsets was so stroboscopic, I wanted to dump out the VC version so I could play it on Retroid.
My 2DS is so broken and requires a lot of tries to boot but I finally managed to start Godmode9 on it and get the ROM from it. But it was just as stroboscopic!
After looking around, it turned out that there was a separate .patch file that the VC version applies dynamically:
;Format Sample
;[xxxx] ;User-defined Name (Max:31 chars)
;Mode = 1 ;1:Fixcode; 2:Fixvalue; 3:Mask; 4:Palette; 5:Double Frame Buffer
;Type = 0 ;Normal: 0:Begin 1:End; Mode2: Value Type
;Address = x1F8000 ;ROM Address
;Fixcode = 0 ;Mode1: Fixed Rom Code; Mode2: Fixed Value
;DelayFrame = 0 ;Delay Frame
;FadeFrame = 0 ;Fade Frame 0:Off
;DarkEnable0 = 0 ;0:Off, 1:On (for Normal Mode)
;ReduceEnable0 = 0 ;0:Off, 1:On (for Normal Mode)
;MotionBEnable0 = 0 ;0:Off, 1:Black Fade, 2:White Fade, 3:Frame Blend (for Normal Mode)
;Dark0 = 10 ;0~10 (for Normal Mode)
;ReduceColorR0 = 0 ;0~31 (for Normal Mode)
;ReduceColorG0 = 0 ;0~31 (for Normal Mode)
;ReduceColorB0 = 0 ;0~31 (for Normal Mode)
;MotionBlur0 = 31 ;0~31 (for Normal Mode)
;DarkEnable1 = 0 ;0:Off, 1:On (for Green Mode)
;ReduceEnable1 = 0 ;0:Off, 1:On (for Green Mode)
;MotionBEnable1 = 0 ;0:Off, 1:Black Fade, 2:White Fade, 3:Frame Blend (for Green Mode)
;Dark1 = 10 ;0~10 (for Green Mode)
;ReduceColorR1 = 0 ;0~31 (for Green Mode)
;ReduceColorG1 = 0 ;0~31 (for Green Mode)
;ReduceColorB1 = 0 ;0~31 (for Green Mode)
;MotionBlur1 = 31 ;0~31 (for Green Mode)
;PaletteX = c31,31,31 ;X:0~15, cR,G,B (0~31)
;$A55F:A5 55 LDA $0055 = #$00 A:21
;$A561:D0 12 BNE $A575 A:00
;$A563:A9 04 LDA #$04 A:00
;$A565:85 55 STA $0055 = #$00 A:04
;$A567:A9 01 LDA #$01 A:04
;$A569:45 A7 EOR $00A7 = #$01 A:01
;$A56B:85 A7 STA $00A7 = #$01 A:00
;
;00000435h: A9 04 85 55 A9 01
[FPA]
Mode = 1
Address = 0x435
Fixcode = a6: A9 0f 85 55 A9 01
Clu-Clu Land also has a well-known score bug where you get 30 points when you’re supposed to get 3000 points.
According to The Cutting Room Floor, 0x0571’s value of $80 should be $08 to fix the bug. (That offset is 0x0561 headerless, as their page correctly indicates, but I’m working with a headered file here.) But the version on the 2DS actually had $80! So I’m wondering if maybe it went from $08 to $80 rather than the other way around? I did set it to $08 as per TCRF but I’ll keep a look out the next time I play the game and update this page once I know either way.
If I get back on the GTD wagon there’s a lesson I want to take with me and really hammer home.
When I’m off GTD the bad thing that happens is that I get an idea for an essay or something and I have to go do it right away because there’s no “bookmark” for it so I get driven by the latest and loudest. Fun, but it happes at the expense of working on bigger projects and if I have more than one new idea at once that feels physically bad from the stress that I can’t “catch” them all.
When I’m on GTD I would “capture” all those ideas into an ever growing system. That way, when I sit down to work I can pick and choose from the things I most want to get done. That works great.
It’s fine that not everything on that huge list is getting done. I’m getting an overview, which helps me pick what matters the most.
It’s fine.
It’s fine until it’s not fine. Usually for me that happens after about three years worth of backlog-growing.
Moving things off the project list into “someday, maybe” or “never” lists helps a little, but doing that too much in some sort of “take numbers six through twenty-five on your list and make an avoid-at-all-costs list so you instead can focus on the top five” hasn’t worked for me either. Heaven knows that I gave that approach a fair shake.
I haven’t figured out a solution yet. Maybe some sort of very elaborate someday-maybe system with org-mode outlines and categories and whatever. Something that’s easy to jam things into and it’s sorted and tidy and browsable. And I would never have to look at it again. I would want to hack together something that shows me those entries in a random order so each weekly review I could look at as many of them as I could stomach. That’s just the first idea, I came up with. Probably not the best. I’m gonna have to keep thinking on this one.
Banding was an incredibly powerful and underrated creature keyword in Magic that ended up a bit dysergic together with evasion abilities on cards like Mesa Pegasus. If Mesa Pegasus and Benalish Hero attack in a band, the flying becomes pointless. (Flying + Banding still pretty good on blocks though.) Because if the enemy can trip up the Hero on the ground with a Wall of Brambles or something, well, RIP the pegasus too.
Similarly, the Capital can attack all of us through one of us. That’s why intersectional solidarity is scary. No social movement has successfully overcome its backlash. Labor rights, reproductive rights, BIPOC rights and queer rights are all down.
But if Mesa Pegasus and Hurloon Minotaur join up (the Hero can come along too), then it’s bye-bye Brambles. The Minotaur would’ve just bounced with the Wall of Brambles normally but the Pegasus helps it go over the top, and the Brambles can’t take down a band that has a three-toughness minotaur (or even Dire Wolves with [Grizzly Bears][GB] to both take on one damage each).
Everyone on the banding side come through unscathed, doing a better job than they could alone. That’s why intersectional solidarity is the solution. ¡Les puebles unides jamás serán vencides!
[GB]: https://scryfall.com/card/10e/268/grizzly-bears “Grizzly Bears”
Economics really undervalue future damage. The reason they do that is this:
Imagine I’ve used the time looker-forward tube and seen that a broken staircase step will cause a $10000 Steinway piano to fall down the stairs and break in the year 2126.
Repairing the step will cost $10.
The time-discounting economics say that if I instead invest the $10 in meme stonks, and it compounds to $10000 and 50¢ in the year 2126, I can buy a new piano and have enough left over for a pack of chewing gum too. Ergo we need to time-discount the future disaster’s value to see if it’s worth the $10 today. And this has become mainstream in economics. This is how things are actually priced.
You’ve correctly compounded the opportunity cost. One of the flaws in this is that you haven’t compounded the catastrophe cost. If you think you can buy a piano for $10000 in 2126 or a pack of gum for 50¢ then.
If a stitch in time saves nine, you can’t just compound the one stitch.
Clean water and breathable air are priceless.
Right now the rule is that you can use substitute cards for double-faced and meld cards. The rule is also that if a card gets marked during play (perhaps someone spills water), the head judge can issue a substitute card. There’s a third rule for “pringle” foils but I’m not sure exactly how that one works.
But if you show up with a card that’s already worn (“marked” through wear and play), you don’t get a substitute card, you get punished.
Sleeves are super expensive. Not so much for the wallet today but for the environment (and hospitals) of tomorrow. The environmental impact in plastic pollution of a sleeve is about half a cent per year which compounded over the five hundred years it’ll last adds up to six figures.
Allow substitute cards for all cards not just DFC. You’d still have to bring the real card.
Right now there’s a rule that decks need to be sufficiently randomized after each game action that shuffles your deck like a fetch or tutor. Yes, at the feature table if you crack two fetches you are expected to shuffle after each.
Shuffling a normal deck takes seven through ten good mashes. (A “Battle of Wits” deck takes much more.) A good mash is one where the interleaving sections are roughly equal amounts of 1 cards and 2 cards. If they’re all 1 cards, that’s a Faro shuffle which is cheating. A bad mash is one where I miss entirely or half the deck or get huge clumps where almost every clump is 15 cards or so. So when I mash or riffle shuffle, I don’t count these bad mashes.
You’re also expected to finish your mid-game shuffles in under forty seconds.
You get punished for not shuffling and you get punished for shuffling.
There’s such an underappreciation for what sufficiently random actually entails and how difficult it is to achieve that. It means that all permutations are equally likely.
At lower levels of play it’s usually courteous and encouraged to “shortcut”. Fetch now, shuffle during downtime. Usually, but not always. Some people get mad and at the feature table (watching the pro tour on TV) I’ve seen judges insist on shuffling right away. Sometimes even at FNM that happens.
My “fix” here would be to formalize and extend this shortcut. Legalize having the deck in a “dirty” state (90° sideways and placed offset). You can fetch or tutor from a dirty state but if you cast a card draw spell drawing multiple cards, you have to shuffle the deck to put it back into the “clean” state.
If I really got my wish through and this is gonna sound so far beyond the pale to what’s legal today, I’d also allow to have one random card pulled from the deck (cut a few times and have the opponent pull the card—much faster than sufficiently randomizing the entire deck) and placed on top of the deck, in a “clean” portrait orentation astride the sideways/landscape “dirty” deck, for cards that lets you look at the top card. Like when you want to combine multiple fetches with Lantern of Insight, for example.
If there’s ever a format where they have cards that “look at the second-most card from your library” type cards then we can extend the rule to have up to four “clean” cards on a “dirty” deck. Hopefully that won’t be necessary. Five or more feels like “ugh just shuffle instead”.
Until this rule is fixed here’s my temporary “solution”. Before the game and after fetching myself, shuffle normally i.e. thoroughly. But for opponent’s fetches, a mindset shift: It is now no longer my job to randomize the deck. I only need to destroy any information gleaned by them while they fetched. Three full cuts (not in the middle but rather randomly at roughly a 25:75 split), followed by a kenchi and then one mash. Fast, and while it does not ensure that all permutations are equally likely it makes it so that the cards they saw were on top, or on the bottom, or clumped, or separated could now be anywhere. The three full cuts is the best part. It moves the “top” and “bottom” to a now random location.
Right now a card like Mutable Explorer can’t put a real Mutavault card into play. You have to buy or make a token version.
These cards would’ve been a great way to get to play with older cards that might be a li’l under- or overpowered right now in a recosted way or a new, different flavor. Like maybe it’s not worth it to put your iconic War Mammoths into play but a sorcery that puts three of them into play at once might be fun. Or use a real Ancestral Recall as the prepared counter for Emeritus of Ideation.
Absolutely do always allow homemade tokens or just glass beads and print cheap token versions like the Mutavault token. But also allow cards to be usable as tokens or counters if they are differentiated some way like with a different sleeve for example.
Let’s postulate a scenario where I, an open borders lunatic with one immigrant parent and one Swedish parent, could’ve been convinced that Sweden should keep some limit on the amount of people who gets to stay temporarily, and/or some limit on the amount of those who gets to move full citizenships.
I’m not saying it’d be easy to convince me of that. Arguments would have to get pretty tender, like “Okay, we are gonna try to let everyone in later, we just need to get everything ready first and build up a good social safetynet robust enough to handle the influx safely so we can help everyone”. So the point of this essay isn’t gonna be that I’ve gotten on board with “limits on immigration” because I haven’t and that’s not what this is. So put an pin in that worry.
The scenario where you’ve managed to convince me about a limit on either or both of those two “gates” being a good idea is just a hypothetical for the sake a point I’m trying to make:
Even then, 99% of the policy suggestions I see from the far right (and from S in their current “stram migration” hellscape era) are about making the lives of people worse. In the name of limiting migration they instead propose and implement hassling and harassing human beings at various stages through those two sluice gates. In the name of integration they keep furthering segregration.
Personer med dubbla medborgarskap ska kunna fråntas sitt svenska medborgarskap om de döms för brott som allvarligt skadar Sveriges vitala intressen, enligt ett beslut som nu fattats i riksdagen.
So even citizens can never truly feel Swedish. How can we build a shared community when there’s this foundational inequality?
S is now talking about an “integrationsskuld”; an idea trying to convey a racist idea that we “let in too many” immigrants and they messed it up for everyone and now we’ve got to clean up. But if that were true (and again, that’d be a hard sell for me given how that same decade coincided with catastrophic privatization reforms causing massive corruption and furthering segregation in health care and education), it doesn’t make sense how all their political proposals serve to instead further segregation, alienation, and distrust.
Except of course to the extent it binds the outgroup. “Vote for our rich-get-richer policies and we’ll protect you from the muslims, Mexicans, and queers,” just like Mussolini drew it up.
Tidö är som vanligt köpta av fossilindustrin:
De svenska lastbilstillverkarna Scania och Volvo genomför en omfattade lobbykampanj för att sänka EU:s krav—och har fått direkt hjälp av den svenska regeringen, kan DN avslöja.
Det är så så så svårt att komma ihåg att den här avgrundsdjupa grymheten är en emergent konsekvens av ett buggigt transaktionellt system snarare än avsiktlig för det isar i märgen av hur demonisk den framstår.
På grund av deras lobbyism kommer andelen fossilbolmande lastbilar öka från 69% till 84% och utsläppsänkningssmålen kommer inte nås.
Att Kristersson har sina oljekletiga händer med i spelet förvånr väl ingen men för oss som närmast har ett bingokort över dom vanligaste klimatförsinkande gojorna kom det faktiskt en ny variant här. “Ni måste låta oss sälja oljedrivna bilar annars blir det andra som säljer elbilar”. Uj. Den gubben hade vi inte sett förut. Ännu svårköptare än det vanliga “…annars blir det andra som säljer oljedrivna bilar”. 🤦🏻♀️
DN gav också av nån anledning dom här två företagen spaltutrymme för ett försvarstal. Men till syvende och sist handlar det om att dom kommer sälja mer dieselfordon än vad dom skulle ha fått sälja om inte lagen som dom själva skrev hade införts.
Okay maybe this is platforming heresy but when I was little I hated the “coyote time” in platforming games. Still do. It’s there in order to make the game more welcoming and forgiving and I applaud that sentiment but what happened was: “Oh. I can’t reach the other side. Because I’m jumping too early. Because the game expects me to not jump until I’ve actually left the ledge.” So counterintuitive. It had the opposite effect and felt unwelcoming, punishing, scary, and frustrating.
Now, the solution isn’t necessarily to remove coyote time but ask yourself as game dev and level designer the following two questions:
Can the player make the jump without relying on coyote time?
If yes, you’re good, your game is great, no more questions. If no, then make the gap narrower by moving the other side closer and it’s time for the next question.
Is the game now too easy?
The answer is not necessarily yes. Not even probably yes. I mean, to players who don’t know about coyote time and are just enjoying the game intuitively. The idea here is for the game to be challenging while still being intuitive. The challenge should be “oh wow, is my reaction speed or sense of rhythm tight enough to make the jumps I want” rather than “oh wow, do I the player know about secret things like coyote time”.
But if it is yes, decrease coyote time slightly. Despite this essay being called “against coyote time”, coyote time can actually be a very good, even important thing, but if what you are pushing when you are increasing gaps is the distance to the other side of the ledge rather than the coyote time on the close side of the ledge I feel that you are shaving the wrong thing, the wrong side of the gap.
Coyote time should be a fallback, not a prereq, is what I’m saying.
In other words, or maybe in the same words but I just wanna repeat myself for clarity here: if you are making an easy, welcoming game where jumping the gaps isn’t meant to be the main challenge, be both:
And if you want to make the gaps be a main challenge element to require precise jumping, don’t just shave off ground on the other side widening the gap. Instead, primarily shave off coyote time on the close side. Not to zero, but don’t require heavy abuse of coyote time to make the jumps.
Here is why modern platforming games err on the side of more coyote time rather than less: there’s a different gamefeel in “ooooh I didn’t quit reach it, I fell down near the other side, I jumped too soon” vs “what the heck I fell down on this side? What happened to my jump, didn’t I jump?!”, some sort of principle of least surprise logic. The player is satisfyingly doing the thing, in this case jumping (maybe with a good satisyfing boiyoiyoingy sound) and failing which okay failing is part of the challenge so try again and make it the next time, is the idea. Too short of a coyote time and it feels like an ice level, like you’re slipping off.
I’m not disputing that. But. I remember so vividly when I first was playing Super Mario Bros. (I got into video games when I was nine years old which a li’l later than many of my generational peers and a lot later than the kids today.) I remember so strongly how this felt starting out. “I’m running towards the ledge it’s scary I don’t want to run over so I’d better press jump before I’ve ran over the edge of the ledge whaaaat I didn’t make it to the other side?!” I fell into so so so so so many pit traps.
Whenever I watch a game design lecture on jump physics and they’re showing how much coyote time they have and how good that is I’m shaking my head and like “no that was the most frustrating part of your game!” Not the fact that I can run out a li’l past the ledge, that was good, but the fact that I have to. That is what gives me the heebie jeebies. It doesn’t feel exciting, it doesn’t feel forward momentum, it doesn’t feel good, it feels like I have to go against nature and not get a good sense of “take off” from underneath my character’s feet.
PresGas writes in:
After all this time, THIS may be the reason why I never could make certain jumps because I didn’t even consider?!? I’m trying to think about how many games I just stopped playing because I couldn’t move further along…