Pretend, for example, that you were born in Chicago and have never had the remotest desire to visit Hong Kong, which is only a name on a map for you; pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love. Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your life. And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom you cannot live. And this is how our lives are changed, and this is how we are redeemed.
What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earth quake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.
I guess what I think is that suicide is a symptom of a problem and not the problem to fix, you know what I mean? To stop suicides you have to stop people’s mental health from getting to the point where they consider it, you have to treat the disease, trying to treat the symptom itself is almost completely useless.
For instance, Japan has spent a great deal of money on anti-suicide infrastructure, doing genuinely cartoonishly things like putting rollers on bridge railings so you can’t climb over them and slide right off, putting blue lights in the subway so it’s harder to see to throw yourself in front of a train. It’s not working. Japan’s suicide rate rose again in 2022. They are not addressing the root causes and stressors in their citizen’s lives and social barriers to mental health care and psychiatric medication.
It’s the same with universities in America, many have spent an exorbitant amount of money on turning their dorms into psych ward like environments. Anti-hanging chairs that you can’t stand on, bunks you can’t hang yourself from, slanted doorknobs etc. And yet suicide is still the second leading cause of death for college students. They make no attempts to make college easier, to make pausing and resuming your studies better, to make the pressure of an academic environment feel less life or death. They make no accommodations for the individual. They just make it a little harder to hang yourself in a few rooms on campus and call it a day, say they’re being proactive in terms of mental health.
one of the things ive been thinking about lately in rpgs is like, games that let you sort of just dick around and chat and figure stuff out and still feel like they (the game) meaningfully contributed to ur experience. like in a recent session of beneath pirate flags we spent maybe an hour and a half making characters and talking about a world and then maybe another hour building one (1) setting element. and thats not because that process cant be done faster, and its not because we kept getting distracted–okay, we did keep getting distracted, but that’s sort of my point. even as we went down all these different side conversations and tangents and media references and conversations which weren’t meaningfully “productive” in the sense of “generating a story” i never felt like we weren’t playing or like we weren’t playing beneath pirate flags specifically. and i think that’s really neat!
to be totally clear, i can think of lots of games that i love that dont do this, often intentionally limiting the ways you can communicate with your coplayers. i think thats interesting too, but thinking about that as the only way we can design for chitchat and distraction presents a kind of norm/alternative structure where “free conversation” is the zero that we design from by restricting conversation, whereas i think i’m trying to a way of designing positively towards free conversation. i also don’t know why it happens in beneath pirate flags specifically. in my experience picklist-heavy games generate this feeling more often (sasha winters’s girlfriend of my girlfriend is my friend is another good example of a game that ends up sitting in this space for me a lot, i think) but i dont know if that’s because of the picklists or just correlation. maybe i just lie to fantasize about gay ppl.
anyway, yeah. something to design for in the future. neat!
i want you to look through this house. i want you to really look. please try and make sense of the space in here. especially that weird thin room with the balcony. try and really wrap your head around this.
it’s like a point and click adventure game. you have no sense of scale or distance because all the fucking photos are in portrait. there are too many mirrors and angles that straight up make no sense. it’s confusing on purpose. its so fucked.
i think this might be my least favorite space in the whole thing. it feels bad. it gives me a little headache. i hate it.
This house is an aesthetic nightmare and I want to live in it.
the solution to having hard-to-debug stuff is to just put really huge obvious placeholder text that gets cleared under normal circumstances, so it’s immediately obvious if something got fucked up
In this new Longreads essay, Megan Marz asks: why does the literary world still hold online writing at arm’s length?
While it’s become banal to observe that online life is fully enmeshed with the rest of the world, an imaginary curtain separates online writing from the rest of U.S. literature. It’s time to take that curtain down.
People like to say the internet speeds reading up, but a personal blog, read in real time, can slow a story’s pace down to the timescale of life; the thickest book in existence can be read in less calendar time. Not even the author knew when a blog would end, which is what made it feel so alive.
