Blog – indiebio

17 April 202418 April 2024

Playfulness and truth.

Four recent blogs inspired me:

Starting with how to represent truth, moving to play, and then to belonging. The TL;DR:

The advances of structuring data in mapping unlocks potential for using physical world assets in games. Using physical world assets in emergent approaches to game design is well suited to allowing players to interact with their game worlds in varied ways. Exploring playing with the physical world – morphing and changing it – through games can allow us to learn about the world not through a top-down education, but through a curiosity that does not even have to involve the truth. Through these games we can build a new sense of belonging, that builds a common language across polarised opinions, because it’s just for fun, after all.

30 December 202330 December 2023

For the love of a dog

I had a call with a good friend and promised to send him some pics of my dogs on the island. Looking through the pics, the journey to befriend Bonzo is worthy of a published story.

28 December 202328 December 2023

What is the relationship you want for the future?

This popped up on my facebook today, a memory from 2019.

23 November 202323 November 2023

Desenrascar

If there’s one phrase for me to sum up the Portuguese, or my love for them, it’s this word, Desenrascar.

14 November 202314 November 2023

Notes from Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger – part 3

Here’s the notes from the first part of her book. There isn’t a second part yet, I skipped to the end of the book because I need to ask about growing communities and needed to prepare it and the last part of the book has good bits for that.

13 November 202317 November 2023

Riga, Latvia, November 2023

Graham and I went to Riga for an Ubuntu Community Summit on the weekend, and then I did the housewife in luxury thing while he was attending an engineering sprint during the week. My notes on the summit content is in a separate post.

View from our room. The image does not do the golden dome and golden autumn leaves justice.

Riga is a beautiful city, I think Latvians put Italians to shame when it comes to style (hot take) but Latvia is also very flat and the clouds moved in for winter and I think they’ll only see sun again in many many months.

13 November 202330 November 2023

Notes from Ubuntu Community Summit – Riga, Latvia, November 2023

There were several talks I enjoyed and a few I want to see but will have to wait for the videos to be released. Then some thoughts and reflections. General impressions of Riga in a separate post.

Random pretty image of the Bastejkalna Park in Riga, Latvia

20 October 202320 October 2023

Chantal Mouffe and my game

Someone suggested my thoughts align with Chantal Mouffe and so I went down a rabbithole. Part of that, and critical thinking, is also seeing what critique exists and this quickly developed into a quagmire of who exactly has the right ideas. So I’m being a bit fast and loose here, and using the general ideas as a description of what the game is hoping to help with.

15 October 202315 October 2023

The maths olympiad

Of people not realising your potential. I don’t know why this memory pops up so often, or why now. I guess because I’m watching an artsy movie about a young person struggling with anxiety.

11 October 202311 October 2023

Notes from Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger

I mangle the quotes to tell me story. The gist is a true reflection but it’s not the exact words.

p4 – Both “our” world and the “mirror world” – the world of the conspiracy theorists, agree that post-shock states of discombobulation have been opportunistically exploited in many different contexts. Both groups have a (p24) skepticism of elite power. p53 – The words the mirror world use are essentially fantasy. But emotionally, to many people they clearly feel true. And the reason they feel true is that we are indeed living through a revolution in surveillance tech, and state and corporate actors have indeed seized outrageous powers to monitor us, often in collaboration and coordination with one another. Moreover, as a culture, we have barely begun to reckon with the transformational nature of this shift.