I really like this episode of Three Moves Ahead on the 4X Genre. I haven’t played a ton of 4X games myself (my most recent experience being a whole bunch of Endless Legend a few months ago), so I’m only passingly familiar with most of the games they chat about (even Civ! I know, I know!), but this is still a really accessible conversation that touches on a lot of interesting elements of these games: Balance between the different phases of the game, the rare expertise required to build 4X mechanics, and the difficulty of innovating in storytelling within these games. They also talk about the often uncomfortable assumptions made in most 4X games, of an unspoiled world ready for exploitation and civilizing in the service of a conqueror (reflecting on the problematic “explore, exploit, expand, exterminate” label, too), and imagine a game in this style that could really explore things like postcolonial conflict.

It’s a fun and wide-ranging discussion and I’m looking forward to listening to more from Three Moves Ahead and Idle Thumbs.

The One-Minute Test

Via Jeremy Keith, a method of wrapping up a meeting by asking for concrete reactions in just a minute:

1. What was the big idea? (What was the most important thing you heard at the meeting?)

2. What was your big surprise? (What was the thing you saw or heard that surprised you the most?)
3. What’s your big question? (What’s the biggest unanswered question you have at this time?)

I’ve been in meetings that ended in a similar way and found it to be a really positive way to conclude. One spin on that final question that I have liked is to ask “who will you share this question with” or “where do you go next with this idea” — It’s very satisfying to generate a specific kind of next step that’s social and/or active, and it encourages a much more engaged conclusion that might not otherwise come out of some meetings.

The Spark File

Steven Johnson on keeping a bin of ideas, “hunches” and snippets of writing:

But this kind of inventory doesn’t quite convey the most interesting part of the experience, which is the feeling of reading through your own words describing new ideas as they are occurring to you for the first time. In a funny way, it feels a bit like you are brainstorming with past versions of yourself. You see your past self groping for an idea that now seems completely obvious five years later.

I get the same experience from occasionally going back to the scattered output of my years of blogging and notes-file-keeping: at various times using web sites, planner-mode, org-mode, Moleskines, Field Notes, and now here. What Steven has probably done more smartly is keep most of that in one place. In that time I’ve been a number of things, or at least two, having moved out of academics into the work I’m doing now.

Learning Vim in 2014

God help me, I’m learning another text editor. I’m not sure why; seemed like it could be interesting or engaging, which it is. I think it all started when vim was the available default over at tilde.club when I was heavily involved there. Maybe it’s a way to make up for having ditched emacs at work for now?

Ben McCormick’s excellent series is an introduction to the nuts and bolts as well as the philosophy – see his Vim as Art in particular on that score. I’m exploring the whole thing repeatedly as I make my way. I idly trolled on Twitter how learning Vim was like turning your text editor into an RTS. Now I think I really like that idea and the way it makes me think systematically about what I want to do with my editor. It’s cool.

It’s a nice bit of serendipity that I caught up with this piece on newsletters and the new market for specialized writing by Glenn Fleishman on the same day that stellar issues of two favorite subscription newsletters arrived in my inbox: 6 49: Focus Past Infinity by Charlie Loyd, and Metafoundry 30: Confusion Matrices by Deb Chachra.

And as it happens they’re both writing insightful things about clothes and their tight ties to our social and economic worlds: Charlie thinks a bit about supply chains; Deb, the pervasive rules that profoundly shape the meanings of women’s choices of clothing.

Some instability with my web host the past week or so prompted me to think about the state of the backups of my online spaces. I spent some time today getting backup scripts working on the host, and found that, based on the file dates, the last time I worked on this was about a year ago. Yay, me. After troubleshooting them for a little while I now have some functional backup scripts to tar up my web directories and my databases. Then I set about burning most of the morning getting my Synology to grab the backup from the host.¹

Because I’ll forget and no doubt have to do this again, I took a few notes:

• My go-to guide to remind me how to make passwordless ssh logins
• Setting up SSH logins on the synology
• I needed additional help to sort out permissions because the user home on the Synology needs to be adjusted.
• My backup itself was based on this remote backup description

With passwordless login to the Synology, and from the Synology to my host and backup server working, finally, I could test executing my backup scripts from the shell on the Synology. Lo and behold, it works! In the “Scheduled Tasks” section of the Synology control panel, I set up these scripts to execute the remote backup and periodically download the resulting files:

Runs twice weekly:

/usr/bin/ssh kaizen 'cd ~/backup-scripts; ./backup-mysql-databases; ./backup-files'

Runs weekly:

/usr/syno/bin/rsync -av --progress strongspace:arlington-backup/ /volume1/Archive/backup/kaizengarden

Why not run these daily? Because these sites don’t actually change all that much. Downloading the full backup weekly is plenty, if not outright overkill, since the most frequently-changed part of the site is all markdown files stored in dropbox and synced when I re-publish. Why not schedule the backup to run via cron on my host? Because this works, and I was already in the Synology shell experimenting, so it was easy to not have to log in to the web server. (And last time I worked on the backup scripts at the host, I remember some kind of problem with running them via cron; some kind path or environment thing interacting with tar, I think. So this got around that, too.)

I did the same for my stuff over at tilde.club, too. This didn’t require any backup script, since I just have a single directory there; I just rsync the whole relatively small thing into a backup folder on the synology here.

I’ve previously noted my Huffduffer action extension for Workflow, but it didn’t occur to me at the time to include the link to my profile at Huffduffer. So, there it is. If you’re a fellow duffer of huffs, I’d love to see what you’re saving there, too.

A few weeks ago we had a sudden reappearance of winter, but unseasonably warm weather has returned, and with it, the season for biking in the woods – which happen to be basically across the street.

Life’s pretty good, gang.

Pizzicletta is a Flagstaff gem, serving up some of the best pizza you’ll find anywhere.

And homemade gelato, like this basil and chocolate/sea salt duo.

I don’t get there often enough, but made it in last night to finish off a fine, warm spring day.

Starships, swords, and the faded grandeur of science fantasy

An annotated bibliograpy of sorts, of the role fantasy plays in science fiction. My recollection of ThunderCats, however, doesn’t quite match the author’s:

Surprisingly enough, one of the most successful and fully realized science fantasy properties of the late ’80s wound up being the ThunderCats cartoon. With supple, vibrant animation, a diverse cast of characters, and a mythos that wasn’t wholly prefabricated, ThunderCats came on strong, reveling in all the possibilities of both technology and magic — even though it served as the last whimper of the silver age of science fantasy.

Not surprisingly, Star Wars is the banner-carrier and ultimate downfall of outright science fantasy.

A different cluetrain

Charlie Stross asserts “some axioms about politics”:

13 - Security services are obeying the iron law of bureaucracy (4) when they metastasize, citing terrorism (6) as a justification for their expansion.

14 - The expansion of the security state is seen as desirable by the government not because of the terrorist threat (which is largely manufactured) but because of (11): the legitimacy of government (9) is becoming increasingly hard to assert in the context of (2), (12) is broadly unpopular with the electorate, but (3) means that the interests of the public (labour) are ignored by states increasingly dominated by capital (because of (1)) unless there’s a threat of civil disorder. So states are tooling up for large-scale civil unrest.

And

Some folks (especially Americans) seem to think that their AR-15s are a guarantor that they can resist tyranny. But guns are an 18th century response to 18th century threats to democracy. Capital doesn’t need to point a gun at you to remove your democratic rights: it just needs more cameras, more cops, and a legal system that is fair and just and bankrupts you if you are ever charged with public disorder and don’t plead guilty.

Silicon Valley Could Learn a Lot From Skater Culture. Just Not How to Be a Meritocracy

Kathy Sierra responding to the latest cultural model hyped as the savior of silicon valley:

The last time skateboarding was a healthy model, the Macintosh did not exist. Skateboarding was my life. And in 1983 skate culture drove a stake through my heart.

Skateboarding can teach Silicon Valley what not to do, like a message from the future warning, “Here’s what happens when a domain in which women once thrived decides women aren’t worthy.” Yes, it’s complicated and yes, the sport became more extreme, but there’s a world of difference between a sport that says, There aren’t many women and one that adds … we made sure.

In the ’80s, skate culture devolved from a vibrant, reasonably gender-balanced community into an aggressively narrow demographic of teen boys. If you think tech has sexism issues, skate culture makes tech feel like one big Oprah show.

ISAAC ASIMOV: A lifetime of learning

An illustration of a quote from Isaac Asimov about continuing to learn and create throughout one’s life. I read the Foundation books and everything else I could find by Asimov when I was younger, and recently picked up Foundation again. It’s no exaggeration that those stories about science and science fiction hugely shaped my interests and life story.

Nuts

Dr. Drang’s response to the report that feeding peanuts to infants may reduce likelihood of developing peanut allergy captures my own mix of interest, encouragement and caution. My son has a number of serious food allergies, including peanut, and it’s not easy to manage. We would certainly wish to have been able to prevent these allergies from developing, and I watch research about potential desensitization very carefully. What people living with life-threatening food allergies need are good strategies and high levels of awareness among the public, and less misunderstanding of the severity of allergies. Dr. Drang writes:

In fact, I don’t believe the reported study turns conventional wisdom on its head at all. Most of the people I’ve met who don’t have a child with peanut allergies were already certain that the problem was, if not entirely in the heads of a group of Munchausen-by-proxy parents, then certainly due to kids being raised in environments that are too clean, too safe, and too antiseptic. For these people, it’s obvious that exposure to peanuts will toughen up a kid’s immune system, and it’s about time doctors recognize that.

A critical part of the study is the screening criteria that included only infants already at a high risk because of existing egg allergy or exczema, and that 76 screened infants were excluded because they already had strong skin test reactions. So this study tells us something, but not the whole story, about one path through which this particular allergy may develop. Unfortunately, just as Dr. Drang predicted, there are already responses like the following (from a self-identified physician) on the NEJM study:

As each of my five children has progressed through school we have seen tighter and tighter policing of what you are allowed to include in your own child’s lunch box. The research of the LEAP study team is wonderful as it may mean, as I have long suspected, that all of this molly coddling of our children’s diet has not only not made things better but has in fact made things which worse.

Not helpful.

This winter in Flagstaff, a summary of some activities and events that come to mind:

1. Yay, nice snow! Let’s get a season ski rental for the preschooler and we’ll be ski people!
2. More snow over New Year, too bad, I have bronchitis.
3. Day off: solo ski day, beautiful and fun.
4. Six+ weeks of warm, dry weather make it feel like spring (meanwhile the east coast is getting utterly clobbered)
5. Work, work, work – seriously, I’m getting a lot done around here. Feels good.
6. Look, there’s hardly any winter going on in this place, so let’s go biking.
7. Biking is great! My old bike is old, so I got a new one. It’s a thing of beauty, but …
8. I have to travel back east for work, then come home and get a cold.
9. Winter is back. New bike waits in the garage.
10. Sigh. Go for coffee because wife is home from her own work travel and it’s the first day off from work and/or child care in two weeks.
11. Life is all right, gang. All right.