Marginalia are marks made in the margins of a book or other document. I want to use this section to highlight the things I encounter online, to give my comments and to participate in the Indie Web community.
When I prepare myself mentally for Mondays, I imagine a very specific scenario that could happen. When I go over all the times I worried about Mondays, the imagined scenario never occurred. Most of the time it was not nearly as bad and in some cases, it was almost as bad, but never did the specific scenario I thought of happen.
People post things online because they want them to be read. Otherwise, they could just keep them to themselves. I fear the scenario where no new contributions are made to the shared knowledge accumulated online. Are we steering towards stagnation?
We fear monsters in movies because they threaten our protagonists or because they are truly dangerous. But sometimes, we just fear them because they are different from what we think is normal. If you drop the scary music and most stylistic choices to present them as more threatening than they are, they would still feel intimidating to us.
For me, there are two lessons here. First, we should play games we actually enjoy, and not games where we feel some kind of obligation to play them. Second, it is okay to walk away from games when we feel we've gotten everything we wanted out of them. Is our experience less valid when we spend 50 hours in an open-world game having fun, but abandoning the game afterwards, versus someone who rushed through the story in 20 hours, just to finish it?
Even before AI, most people didn't identify deeply with their jobs. If they have to do something else now, they will accept it ("whatever pays the bills"). The frustration sets in later, after the realization that their work is worth much less going forward.
Most of the thinking happens after the argument, I suppose. And the argument often has the most impact on the bystanders, if any are present.
It's worrying how easy it is for the government to undermine the right to privacy. My biggest fear is that these practices become normalized among citizens, because they are introduced slowly, bit by bit.
If developers want to make hard games, we should let them. If they want to make easy games, we should also let them. But it depends on the vision of the developers. With AAA titles, they often want to reach the biggest possible audience, which can overshadow the artistic intent. Who knows what they truly strived for? A game fails for me if I have the feeling that my inputs don't matter, because what's the point of making it a video game then?
Valve supporting these developers and technologies is good to see. If you want to stay in the Steam ecosystem, this just means having more options to enjoy your games. They are trying to increase the reach of Steam, and at the same time, allow developers to port their games to SteamOS.
We should play more without having a target. We should walk more to think more. We should not let "value capture" divert us from what is actually important.