mvu.one

Finally got through Picturing the Mind: Consciousness through the Lens of Evolution!

It was a really light and fun read, and is full of interesting facts and opinions and info on past research about things like:

• Consciousness in animals (and plants [and sponges]))
• What separates humans from other animals [and sponges]
• How human symbolic language may have evolved
• Autism and savant-ism
• There's a chapter titled "Blushing Homo-Erectus"
• Robot sentience and cyborgs

I had originally picked it up because I was working on a storyline involving robot sentience after being inspired by the novel Blindsight (which explores the concept of the "philosophical zombie"). I thought it might be good to do at least a little research on the philosophies and sciences of consciousness before starting, but didn't really know where to begin as consciousness a bit of a broad field. I happened to see this book listed on hacknernews with zero comments and knee-jerk purchased it.

This was an excellent place to begin! It's extremely accessible, with each topic taking only a single page, ending with open-ended questions about the things we might not know yet, and being accompanied by a wacky abstract illustration and/or poem. It was like a picture book for grown-ups.

Having each topic only a page long means you only get high-level overviews of each topic with a couple of "this person said X" or "it is believed that Y", but they're all accompanied by references in the appendix, allowing the reader to quickly get through less interesting topics while deep diving the things they're interested in. Everything moved at a quick and jolly pace kept up-beat by the accompanying artwork.

I don't think I could honestly say I know terribly much more about consciousness than when I started the book, but I'm now much more confident in what I'm looking for and where to look, and I thank the authors for that.

I wish there were more beginner books for complex topics designed in this format. The ability to read a light-hearted high-level overview of something before diving into technical details or papers, or just decide "this topic isn't interesting to me" and move on to a different topic would be great for self-learners exploring complex math, science, or philosophical topics.

I've realized over the last year that I've had a significant decline in mental sharpness compared to my highschool/university days.

My job provides me with ample challenging problems to solve, but often these problems are in similar domains and solvable using what I want to intuitively call "linear problem solving". (I've not looked this up yet, there's likely a proper term for it.)

As an example, imagine knowing numbers and learning for the first time how to add 1+1 and 1+2. Thinking linearly, you could expand that to figure out chains of addition, the commutative properties of addition, adding large numbers, etc.
What I feel I've lost is the ability to go beyond linear thinking and understanding the rules and implications of addition enough to intuitively make the leap to subtraction or multiplication.

This was a power I definitely had in undergrad when I was frequently learning and working with mathematical concepts. I was by no means a mathematical genius (or even terribly proficient at my studies) but there were frequent "aha" moments where concepts would just "click" and the bigger picture would reveal itself.

Now, even when I try to pick up mathematical (or other highly technical) concepts my brain just doesn't spin up fast enough to keep up.

The best way I can think to describe it is switching gears on a bike -- I know what second gear feels like, but when I try to shift up the chain just won't catch and simply rattles around stuck in first gear.

As I'm moving through the previously mentioned 10-minute physics tutorials this lack of a second gear has been very noticeable. The content in each video is simple enough, but the logical leaps between videos evade me. After each video I try (and fail) to complete the next video's goal without the next tutorial. I can easily extend the lessons in each video within the framework that video provides, but fail to escape the bounds of basic understanding until I watch the next tutorial and slap my forehead at how obvious the next step I missed was.

A specific case was trying to move from "ball on a hoop (05)" to "triple pendulum (06)". After learning the ball on a hoop constraint "hack" the tutorials implement, I simply tried building a pendulum by coding 3 balls constricted to hoops, with each hoop being centered around the previous ball. Linear thinking.
The actual way to extend the concepts was to change the constraint method from "constrain ball to hoop" to "constrain length of string" which properly accounts for velocities of sub-pendulums acting on parents, which my solution stupidly did not cover.

What's worse is when the author gets into equations. These aren't terribly hard equations, this is stuff I know how to do, yet my eyes glaze over as soon as they land on anything typeset in LaTeX and it all stays undigested.

As I very much want to make games and shaders and digital art, I believe it is imperative that I regain my ability to "shift up", fully understand concepts, and solve problems non-linearly once again. I just need to solve the problem of "how"...

Finished a campaign of King's Dilemma, and what a great legacy board game it was!

The game is fairly basic on the surface: your group plays a council of nobles advising the King, and each round you deliberate over an event and vote. Each outcome will move some resources up or down on a track (with each player aiming to finish the game with resources in specific locations), and may add short-term or permanent changes to the gameplay mechanics.

What started innocently enough -- free the chained lady, investigate some clues, join forces with another nation -- quickly devolved into making horribly corrupt and morally reprehensible decisions to further our houses.

The council has voted AYE to sacrificing several prisoners to be melted alive in experiments to alchemically create gold.

It was remarkable how truly awful we became to move a couple resources up or down while vying for first place each game.

There's definitely weak points, but they're not big enough to ruin the experience:

• some entire games had nothing interesting happen in the story
• some players didn't always pay enough attention to the story to know what was going on (it's very wordy!)
• setup got a little complicated / annoying by the end with so many things to remember to do. A checklist would have been useful in hindsignt
• I wasn't a fan of the ending sequence process. It was novel, but didn't have as much punch as it could have

I really enjoyed playing it through to the end. While I don't think I'd ever play a second campaign, the game will definitely sit in my top boardgames list for a long time.

My whole life I've loved the first day back to school. The slightly cool September breeze, the electric energy of excitement and nervousness, the fresh school supplies and just an overall feeling of high potential.

I've long since passed my epiphanic "I never have to go to school again" moment, but working at a university I still get to experience the nervous anticipation vicariously through students during their "frosh days" as they galavant around a campus that still seems a labyrinth on scavanger hunts and nerf-gun wars.

In two weeks' time they'll be struggling through workloads and drama and life in general, but today the world is new.

I work mostly remote these days, but I'd never miss the first day of the fall term just to soak in the excitement.

I've just finished with Digimon Survive after completing the Moral and True endings.

Despite a lackluster battle system and some points where the story got too repetitive or awkward or slow, I really enjoyed my time with the first playthrough -- Enough to watch 2 more endings online (in ultra-fast-forward) and play through the true ending myself.

The true ending featured some additional party members I ended up really liking, but dragged on far too long.

While I'm glad I played the extra ending for closure and for the warm fuzzies in the final scene, the true route really lacked any additional character development in chapters 10-13 -- in a story about the characters developing.

Since the whole visual-novel half of the game is built around talking to people and raising affinities, this results in several additional hours of repeatedly telling Kaito he's a good brother and telling Aoi she "has really grown" while being force-fed a bunch of not-really-canon digimon lore.

The 3 non-true endings are definitely the more interesting routes, though they have a lot of overlap (and don't feature my favorite character!).

But enough about the story, I came here for the Digimon!

There's quite a few Digimon to collect via recruitment in random battles and via your party 'mons evolving. Those attached to humans evolve with the story or once your affinity with that human is high enough, while recruited digimon are evolved with items

The recruiting mechanic is absolutely stupid, but once I started using a guide it was fun collecting and evolving lots of 'mons. I used another guide to minimize overlap, as many of your party's fixed final forms can be obtained through random recruits.

I did find it odd that many party and story digimon could be obtained through random encounters (+ evolving). It's a bit awkward when the story has a powerful digimon appear and threaten the fabric of reality... and you've already got the same 'mon in your party.

Likewise, it's a bit weird to have WarGreymon show up in a random battle and be recruitable by responding correctly to a query about nap preferences... There's lots of questionable decisions on the recruit mechanic.

Complaining aside, if you grew up loving digimon and enjoy the occasional visual novel, this is one of the best-looking visual novels I've played. While the story is about as deep as a kids-show about digital monsters, it's worth at least one playthough for nostalgia's sake.

I've just returned from a brief 4-day vacation to find my mind in shambles. This always tends to happen -- I keep so many small threads of ideas and plans and micro-projects going on a regular basis that brief inattention turns the whole thing into a useless knot.

When in this state I find my mind begins to wander and reach out like hundreds of tentacles, grasping for any interesting avenue to do something. Should I take a university course? Build a DIY virtual pet with a Raspberry Pi? Work on designing that board game I always meant to build? So many new threads to begin! Of course, those old ones are hopelessly entagled and must be abandoned.

And so the cycle of the chronically occupied continues.

On my list of interesting roads I'd like to stroll down is the video series from 10 Minute Physics, by one Matthias Müller. According to the HackerNews thread I found the link on he's a very smart guy who developed some useful computer physics concepts which I'm very interested to learn about.

The tutorials are each done in a single HTML file which is handy. The first few videos are fairly basic implementations of bouncing balls, but it looks like it gets pretty meaty 6-7 videos in!

Browsing the internet recently I saw an artistic rendition of the silhouette of Spike from Cowboy Bebop.

Suddenly a realization came crashing home -- the most memorable game / comic characters I can think of are all recognizable by their outline alone!

Feeling like I had stumbled across a secret, I shared my observation with my wife who informed me this is very common knowledge amongst designers. I likely could have picked it up by reading any guide on character design...

That said, the things you discover yourself always stick the longest -- I'll be keeping this in mind from now on while doodling characters for my ideas!

My brother recently expressed interest in remotely watching me play some of my older games (after a weekend of PS2 gaming together). I grabbed an HDMI-capture dongle for the dual purpose of recording gameplay (for personal use) and enabling him to watch.

Now the dilemma: what platform do I use for streaming? I'm not entirely keen on Twitch/Youtube because I'm hippie trash, so I've been looking at open source alternatives like Owncast instead.

It is taking all my willpower to restrain myself from using this an excuse to learn Elixir and build my own shitty streaming platform...

I'm a sucker for nostalgia. As such, I've been very excited for the Digimon Survive game that recently released.

So excited that I not only accidentally pre-ordered a physical copy twice, but spent time playing some older Digimon titles while I awaited the fated day to arrive.

I must say, the series hasn't generated many good games. I recall Digimon World [PS1] being nigh indecipherable as a child, and that holds true now. It seems that the games were always caught between being a tamagatchi-style monster-raising affair and a coherent RPG, while never really landing on either. In my excitement I revisited Cyber Sleuth and Digimon World DS, which stand as the highest-rated entries in the franchise.

Cyber Sleuth had rave reviews from Digi-fans, but I couldn't play for more than 2 hours without cringing myself into a fetal position. The story, character design and dialogue was offensively bad, and the digimon raising system wasn't strong enough to make up for it. (No gameplay system would have been, I fear)

The DS game on the other hand had a great Digimon raising system with a cute little farm on the DS top-screen, and clear evolution routes. The story was just about the driest thing I've ever played, however. Essentially just a basic excuse to go and battle with your Digimon. I can usually stomach random RPG battles but this game bored me to tears.

Despite this I've got high hopes for Digimon Survive! The game thankfully takes a very different direction than its predecessors and I've already managed to put in a handful of hours without throwing away the cartridge in disgust.

I guess this technically makes it the best Digimon game I've played to date!

Seniority can be inferred by the number of large fuck-ups a person has made (and retained their position).

Being trusted enough to be given enough rope to hang by, then doing a little accidental hanging before getting yourself free is a guarantee a person has learned some valuable lessons.