if anyone is wondering why I've been MIA (they're not) it's bc I got sucked into one of those cookie-clicker type games (shan't name bc that's an infohazard) & have been working very hard to optimize something utterly meaningless w/ the caffeinated energy of an obsessive engineer
these games are like crack to me; every time I find a new one get completely lost in it for several days, absolutely no productivity. I'd love to say it's intentional but that would be a fucking lie; it's compulsive, I've tried to stop myself but it keeps happening. my weakeness.
I get nerdsniped; these games present an increasingly complex management interface for a control system, w/ opportunities for automation, quantifiable efficiency, & a very tight feedback loop for Number Go Up
what real-world system can compete? mb trading. but certainly not work
the quirky themes are appreciated but absolutely immaterial, I'd gladly throw myself just as hard into a super-dry real world system with a comparable feedback loop. the thing is, I hate waiting, I hate context switching. I just want to hyperfocus on a system & Make It Better
but. thats not how real life works, unless you're a highly coddled white collar worker embedded within an organization which exists to enable such a workflow. these exist, but at the moment I'm not one of those; and tbh, idk if I ever could be; I'm not a full person like this
I become an addict, jiving for my next hit of Number Went Up; I easily abandon other responsibilities, ignore bodily needs, discomforts, and hyperoptimize The Numbers like a man possessed
maybe its for the best that the real world isn't quite as satisfying as these perfect games
on a more positive note, I occasionally generate cool artifacts on my dives. one of the previous instances of this, I built an automation tool for the game, letting me optimize an aspect of the workflow and achieve Even Faster Numbering
this time I'm exploring something new
if this game was a real-world system I was tuning at work, I'd have already instrumented it with metrics, dashboards, alerts, forecasts and the like; why not do it for this as well? much easier to make Number Go Up if you can see its trajectory charted out.
when you can SEE the journey of a number over time, you can harness your physical intuitions for it; after all, Number Go Up & To The Right sure looks like projectile motion, don't it
the more Numbers you add the more subconscious insights you can generate
while using these tools for a clicker game would be the epitome of intellectual autostimulation, it's quite likely the tools built for doing this would come in handy for more meaningful systems; how you do anything is how you do everything, and the world is made of Number Go Up
staring at dashboards lets me really FEEL the beating heart of a system, understand its dynamics, patterns, failure modes, sticking points. identify the appropriate intervention points and get higher resolution feedback on the impact of any given change