my journey to one million dollars pt. 2

down with moo deng

We’re talking about progress

We’re already 15/1,000,000th of the way there to my goal of making one million dollars. I’ve proven that through the power of making your friends feel guilty you CAN become a manifestation millionaire.

So much so now that the goal is one million dollars a month. That requires only 200,000 people. Just think of what I could do with one million dollars a month—think about how much Taco Bell I could buy.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can go from making $0/month to making $15/month, buy my ebook “Money: Give it to Me.” Available for a donation of $69 dollars.

today in history

On the day I’m writing this, 9.24, an LDS president named Wilford Woodruff wrote some kind of opinion about polygamy, but you didn’t come here for that kind of history. You want that personal history. You want my relationship to the LDS church. You’re never going to get this! It’s a mystery. I’m mysterious. That said, I grew up near Freedom, ID/WY, and I encourage you to read the history section to find out why it’s called that.

But the ultimate today in history is that today in history I was reminded that this cool Mormon document explaining wet dreams exists—a document in which nut is referred to as “life-giving substance,” and the writer explains that god carefully calibrated dongs to only go off at factory-specified moments.

I love lore.

Depression Corner

I’ve been really fixated on the notion of “escape” this week. I was partially set off by this after a “Thomas you need to touch grass” conversation with a friend of mine.

“Nature” has never done that much for me. I like fresh air, taking a walk, but pretty vistas and treelines don’t do that much for me. I like oceanscapes? I like Turner paintings. I guess I prefer interpretable rather than overwhelming. But that’s not what I’m going on about.

There’s an undeniable force in adult life—feeling so completely adrift and powerless that it’s necessary to seek communion with a perception of the “natural.” I get it, people deserve their escapes, but I see a lot of multi-day extreme pseudo-survivalism tinge to a lot of this behavior and it is curious to me. I’m advocating for a “touch concrete” movement.

What the hell am I talking about?

I think that most people are developing or already have a process addiction of some kind. If you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s basically when we get addicted to a behavior. You commonly hear people talk about porn addiction, internet and smartphone addiction, or addiction to video games. Gambling is another one. Eating. And so on.

I’m just a guy, but from my armchair, when I’m analyzing my own addictions (of course I have them) I can see two major reasons for these addictions becoming widespread.

One, the technology that powers these addictions and makes them accessible is some of the most potent juice our lizard brains have ever been hit with and there’s nothing quite like it; or, two, that the material world that we inhabit is so emptied of meaning that we require technological supplementation to not go batshit crazy.

Why not both? Part of what drives me insane about the appeal to nature is that the concept of “nature” is simply another process addiction we’ve manufactured for ourselves. To get to a hike, I have to plan, research times, drive a not-insignificant distance, and then follow a trail of some kind to established vistas, where I then “be” in nature. It follows the pattern of a quest, a hunt, and the reward is scenery and birds and shit. There is a “right way” to do it. I don’t want instructions on how to sublimate with a bird!

What is interesting to me is not some juvenile demonization of hiking (it’s not for me) but how there’s this moral valence that is applied to our activities and addictions. Hiking is better than video games, which is better than masturbating. The implication is that somehow, through process addiction or hobby activity, we can attack the underlying problems that our way of living is presenting to us. As if hiking a mountain undoes the violence we have done to our lived environments and our neighbors.

The reality is that the horror world we have made, normalized, and now live in will require us to confront it in order to change it. We are unable to process addict our way out of what’s troubling us. It will hurt, it will be painful. But the alternative is complete extinction, or the transformation of ourselves into something monstrous. We cannot hike our way out of it, nor will communion with mother rock somehow lead us away, especially if we continue to look to an imagined “natural world” to save us, Avatar-style.

Anyway, that’s my argument for a more expansive welfare state, and speaking of process addictions:

have you heard about board games

All the board game websites that would pay me to write for them have gone out of business (RIP Dicebreaker) so now you’re in here with ME.

I design games, and a design fixation of mine is the zero-player game, which is a game that is determined by its initial state. So there’s some input, and then the simulation/game plays itself. Conway’s Game of Life is the most immediate example of this. Many of my designs are trying to dance around the question of “what if there was a system running before you got there and now you have to alter it.” Imagine you come upon a river. What do you do with it?

The challenge with zero-player games is that they are purposeless. My last question sounds nonsensical because I haven’t given any objectives. Most designs start with objective first, but many deisgners that I admire do not. For example, Franz-Benno Delonge made games where the objective space is discovered through play. Using my river analogy, he designed a game called Dos Rios, where you try and generate goods for points using two rivers that dynamically respond to how players interact with them. You don’t really know how to win until everyone has started altering the landscape. Christophe Boelinger has players generate the play state and then figure out how to play it on the fly. Living Planet has you generate an entire ruleset before you can start, Earth Reborn (aka mutant boobs) does a similar thing. In Rise & Fall you generate a landscape collectively without really knowing how to control it. Archipelago asks: how much capitalist abuse can you handle before having a tantrum?

Purposeless things, or at least games that start that way, interfere with the addictive part of playing games. You’re not getting the dopamine hits in the way you’re used to. I make widgets, I get points. They force you to ask questions about what you want, what seems fun to you. In a world awash in entertainments and cultural productions that didactically tell you HOW THEY’RE SUPPOSED TO BE USED, I think there’s something worthwhile exploring here. And, you can only get there by asking yourself a zillion questions along the way.

cuteness weaponizing and subsequent cuteness disarmament

I lied in the subtitle, I still love Moo Deng, but I’m not a fan of whatever zoo is holding onto her, weird vibes. Seems prison-y. I’m restricting myself to content where she bites the zoo-people.