Spreadsheets & Slot Machines

Have you ever hit a point, playing a video game, where you get bored of the game itself? I don't mean the story gets boring, or the game getting to hard it loses fun. When the actual mechanics of the game loses its je ne sais quoi and play become rote, and, well, mechanical. 

This is how it happens for me: my mental model of the game abstracts away almost everything and the whole game devolves into an optimization problem. At first, I'll feel clever, like I "solved" the game. But the game hasn't ended, so what have I solved for? I've solved for the how, how to min-max my way to the fastest most efficient win condition. For me, I've come to to refer to this as seeing the spreadsheet behind the game (it's particularly strong phenomenon in strategy games, which is a bummer because I used to love strategy games).

On the other side of this spectrum would be games of purely random numbers with no place for human influence, like slot machines. Which I've noticed seems to be the core mechanic of–and I don't want to overgeneralize–about 99% of the mobile game market, god help us all.

Oh ugh now I get crypto

 It’s a fiat currency. 

Maybe “fiat” accompli?

Facebook content report reportedly lacks content

Facebook released their Widely Viewed Content Report yesterday. My advice, take it with a grain of salt. Or better yet, take it with a overstuffed warehouse full of salt via Charlie Warzel's write-up in Galaxy Brain:

The quarterly snapshots distort timescales and obscure the context, which is crucial for understanding what on earth is really happening with a piece of content.

Also, the list of the most popular domains people are sharing I thought was interesting: 

As a window into what people actually do with Facebook, what do we have? There's memes, music, news which, fair, everyone watches YouTube. Next up, it's off-platform transactions and fundraising in Amazon, Unicef, and GoFundMe. 

Cool(ing) World

NASA is listening to Mars, and finally getting a picture of its interior:

Its crust is split into two or three layers of volcanic chocolate. The mantle below has a surprisingly sizable and rigid toffee-like filling. And the planet’s core is surprisingly light — less nougaty center, more syrupy heart.

I also love this simple explanation of plate tectonics:

A planet’s major volcanic and tectonic activity is essentially powered by the movement of heat from a planet’s inner sanctum to its outermost shell. 

It’s just cooling off! That’s how planets cools off. This swirling detritus around a sun coalesces and compacts into an “infernal engine” at the bottom of a gravity well. The heavy stuff sinks but not all the way, the light stuff floats but not all the way. And all that heat radiates back up and bakes the surface dry. Or, if there’s liquid there, the surface churns atop the rolling boil of the mantle. 

Sam Richardson is the best part of the The Tomorrow War trailer.

He is FANTASTIQUE