I'm on day 4 of writing on write.as and already feeling that push to avoid breaking my streak. I think that's what I need to keep moving forward.
It was actually not easy for me to pick a spot to start blogging again. I spent a few days customizing some Ghost blog before I realized I just had to start writing and figure out the customization stuff later. This has always been my weakness.
The minimal choices in Write.as are nice for that. I write about what I'm thinking about today and click the publish button. There isn't a lot of drafting or picking what to work on. One could customize the CSS but I'm intentionally avoiding it for the moment.
Maybe the lack of distribution is helping me write? I don't feel like I need to filter for x and y since no one reads this (even though someone could).
Write.as so far:
Good, minimal interface for writing. No distractions.
Straight markdown is OK, I prefer a really good WYSIWYG editor but those are few and far between.
I used the beta interface for writing in Ghost for a few days too and really liked how easy it was to get WYSIWYG (and embedding!) without a massive toolbar to pick everything.
No embeds, which is shit for when I want to write about a tweet I saw or a youtube video.
Not really easy to upload photos or post from a phone. I don't do this a lot right now, but would like a place for photos that are less performative than instagram.
Tomorrow maybe we'll talk about trackbacks.
Totally unfinished thought about progress and humans and physical space and actual SPACE:
What if cultural resets (the founding of America, an existing country after a revolution, a community after a devastating disease) are critical for the progress of new ideas for humankind?
New foundations are frequently the birth of radical new ideas, often because of some constraint that established communities don't have. The difference between a community that is happy enough with the status quo and doesn't want to change, versus one where new cultural norms and ideas of what is valuable are fighting for the top spot.
Perhaps we can make progress in some areas (certain areas of technological change seem to fit well within capitalism), but without any unclaimed land where some malcontents can go start a new colony, are we (humans) limited in how radical new ideas on cultural organization will take root?
It seems like we have a ways to go before we can even start to think about colonizing new plots of land that are not Earth — and let's be serious, any Mars or Moon colony is not likely to be a self-sustaining community without the support from some gigantic government.
Are we stuck in this particular area until we get off this rock? Or are there cracks where new cultures can still form?
One of those things that you have to do a lot of as a small startup is switching between planning and execution modes... sometimes too quickly.
Recently we started working on advocacy tools that 5 Calls could provide to other groups, giving them the same sort of mobilization that we are able to generate for our own topics.
As we're making this switch over from campaign tools to advocacy tools and thinking about what is compelling for other orgs, there's a lot of planning for what a product actually looks like (and that's different from what we actually use for the 5calls.org issues, for a few reasons) and because we're later to the game than I would have liked, we need to figure that shit out relatively quickly.
So a lot of thinking goes into what the product is, and I try to organize as best I can into what is MVP-worthy versus what is something we can build down the line.
The weird part is that we found someone to pilot this new product with very fast, almost before I was even sufficiently happy with the definition for what it was going to be, so swapping over to build, build, build mode was sudden.
Now that the MVP is done, I realize how much I forget about the planning part when I'm busy putting all the pieces together. It's time to revisit the plans and see what we did and what might be next.
Perhaps some one with more discipline can do both modes at the same time. I find switching between the two very taxing, so I do as much of one as I can before I need to switch to another to move the product forward.
I imagine this is easier with a dedicated product side and engineering side! Hopefully in the future we'll have that luxury, but for now I have to make sure I'm covering both with some regularity.
Fascinating account of what it looks like on the backend of Tesla's software stack. The whole thread.
I can't imagine they've fixed many of this situations considering the incredible crunch to get the Model 3 out the door over the last year. That means they're well overdue for something to break in a bad way.
One comment stands out above the rest: They've forgotten about the part of “move fast and break things” where you figure out what worked and do it right.
Multiplayer is what most Goldeneye fans remember when they think about what stuck them to the game for such a long time, but for me it was all the little challenges that added replayability to every level along the way.
Here's one of the ways to unlock cheats in the game:
Clark: Finishing the level faster than the target time unlocked a cheat. The harder the target time, the more awesome the cheat mode: Turbo mode, Bond invisible, invincibility, unlimited ammo — essentially keys to enter God Mode, a means to explore the game in unimaginable ways. Personally, the challenge itself got me addicted: It was a very dynamic game for speedrunning, and the target times were a clear invitation to prove yourself. Facility 00 Agent’s target of 2:05 was the legendary measuring stick.
“Cheats” were something you couldn't use to actually make progress in the game, but they were both a point of pride – you beat the level under this very short time! – and a way to have fun or add extra challenge around levels you'd already played a hundred times before.
My memories of the game are mostly around being able to get this extra fun or unique content from a game that doesn't take all that long to beat the first time around. Though to be perfectly honest, it was more difficult than most especially when it came to finding objectives on what was then a set of very large maps. Nowadays, games with objectives that you have to find are usually circled on a map or have an arrow pointing at them (get off my lawn, I guess).
This sort of difficulty only appeals to a certain type of person, of course, but as a teenager with far too much time on my hands when I first picked up Goldeneye, I definitely fit the mold perfectly.
