2020.08.10
But mostly, games have become a less taxing way of spending parts of big 4 hour stretches of facetime on a semi-weekly basis with my 6 year old super niece Cora. The majority has been Zelda: Breath of the Wild, because it has detailed horses in and she digs those. We've also dabbled in Mario Odyssey, which has a lot of fun things I can show her.
I picked up Animal Crossing at her prompting (someday we might visit each other's islands, or something?) but man, that just isn't my kind of game. There's no sense of motion, and while I can sort of see the Sims-like build your space charm, I don't dig the tamagotchi chore slash roulette wheel reward aspect of it.
In general I'm up for suggestions for remote fun games. She has access to a Switch and her own iPad (definitely routing for the whole Phonics game thing) but she's pretty content playing witness and telling me what to do while watching.
(I'm half tempted to try Red Dead Redemption 2, and see if you can get to a place where you're just doing horse stuff... though the game itself would be a huge time sink, and I think the ratio of horse fun to cowboy violence might be a bit out of wack for a 6 year old.)
Getting back to the games... it's funny how Animal Crossing has some of the same weirdnesses of Zelda: like crafting, and how stuff wears out and breaks. I'm still knocked over with what a richly developed land Zelda creates in, so much detail it makes Animal Cross look really primitive, but of course it's a very different energy.
Once I finish What The Golf?, I'm trying to figure out if I want to slip into game sessions as a nice way of unwinding in quarantine freetime or if I should stick with coding projects, reading, and a bit of band stuff. I get bummed that I feel more distant from games in general...
Alligators don't even alligate.
Anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture.It's a cool thought but the podcast I heard it on pointed out that the attribution is suspicious - and also we need to be careful by what we mean by "civilization" - groups considered "wild" or "savages" by "the civilized" were certainly capable of this level of empathetic care and treatment.
Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts. We are at our best when we serve others. Be civilized.
Humans just can't fathom a billion dollars. Casually we mix 'billion' and 'million' in the same sentence, but they're apples and Death Stars. And until we get our arms around that, some fundamental stuff about the American economy will elude us.