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
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
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
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
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