[FRIAM] lurking

[uǝlƃ ☤>$]

Holy fire hose, Batman!

I'm too ignorant and incompetent to adequately synthesize last weekend's blast of fecundity. But I did spot a thread (tapestry?) that I'd like to highlight. I'm going to list *my* bullets first. Then I'll try to decorate it with text.

• gaming & play
  - not infinite but hyper-, or meta-, games of games
  - does accretion raise or lower degrees of freedom?

• digitization ⇒ virtualization
  - parallelism theorem

• corrosive memes & reconstruction with destruction
  - "corrosive" annealing → rigid crystal
  - explosive bursts → escape from local optima

• preservation & provenance

• ideal vs practical - universities to games to a formalized polity
  - corruption ← idealism
  - meta-games ← abuse
  - formal idea ⊂ dirty real

Y'all left so many little bones laying all over the floor, so many bones to pick. But rather than acting like a social vampire, obsessing over all the nits that need picking, I figured I'd try to follow this one thread through the whole mess. From SteveS' challenge to Marcus on whether hyper- and meta-games are still games, to Manny's corrupted ideal of the Highlands, to Jon and Jochen's attempt to look under the provenance rug, Doug's transhumanist assertion, and EricS and SteveS' formalization of the polity, the fire hose presents to me the theme of the ideal swimming in a sea of the dirty real.

The interesting games are those wherewith (incl. wherein) *more* games can be devised. All our formalizations are battle plans that don't survive contact with the enemy, including both Packer's 4 Americas and any given video game, however "nonlinear" or "open world". And to target Jochen's and Jon's disagreement directly, it *seems* fine to try to eliminate abuse, corruption, corrosive, and destructive memes. But, to a large extent, those forces are, if not welcome in themselves, inscrutably intertwined with all the other forces. It's the same machine that produces both good and bad. And that machine lives in this world, not some ideal world formalized by a (provably) myopic subset of that world.

So, as cringy as is to appeal to Musk as a "great man", forgetting the armies of actual great people that came before ... and as cringy as it is to see Pepe the Frog and wonder whether it's a racist meme or just juvy gamer silliness ... or as cringy as it may be for some dork to be proud of their Poker prowess, this is the world. And it's reflectively both horrifying and miraculous that many of us can't enjoy that world in all its repulsive glory. Ha! Maybe it's not a thread, after all, but mere imputation on my part. >8^D