Tip of the Tongue 005

TOTT — A snippet of what I’ve been thinking about, pockets of content for bite-sized consumption, not quite big enough to be pieces of their own. Think of this like a commonplace notebook, or a conversation starter. 10/13/17

The Ease of Distraction

She says ‘coping mechanism’ like it’s a bad thing.

When you live in a city that offers up opportunities with as much ease as a tech evangelist offers opinions, uncomfortable thoughts can easily drown in a sea of calendar events. Being constantly on the move means never having time to feel sorry for yourself, never being able to stop and think about what you’re doing (or what you’re not doing). “Look at me be successful and whole!”, shouts my calendar.

Doing things feels productive, too. There’s nothing like a sense of accomplishment to smother pain, or discomfort, or uncertainty. I’ve learned entirely new dance styles, built games with unnecessarily difficult self-imposed constraints, stayed up nights on end to build cosplay outfits for myself all in the name of distraction. Most of the time, I end up distracting myself without even noticing.

And honestly, I don’t regret it. Maybe there’s more emotional processing that I could do. Maybe I could have been connecting at a deeper level with people. But at the same time, I’ve built so many things and chased so many experiences, that maybe ‘distracting’ myself isn’t such a bad thing.

Thoughts on Game Toursim

Game Tourism is playing a game with the primary aim of exploring its world, without engaging in any active conflict…

This is the epitome of Death of the Author. Once out of the hands of the original developers, game tourists take it upon themselves to change the game at its core — to remove the conflict and the story. They break the game to enjoy it. Is it still the same game, if you take out all of the things that made it inherently what it was? Is the shell of a story still the same thing?

Somewhere out there, game creators are swearing.

This Week’s Nerd-Loves

• Mathematical games interesting to both you and a 5+-year-old child
• Background: My daughter is 6 years old now, once I wanted to think on some math (about some Young diagrams), but she…
• mathoverflow.net git git git git git - CaiusTheory
• My initial thought was overriding the git binary in my $PATH and having it strip any leading arguments that match git…
• caiustheory.com How to Do Code Reviews Like a Human (Part One)
• Lately, I’ve been reading articles about best practices for code reviews. I notice that these articles focus on finding…
• mtlynch.io

Questions, comments, corrections? Reach out and let me know!

This article was originally written and posted on Medium.