[a pleasurable headache] critical periods
A link-only edition this week. It's been a fairly turbulent week with a sudden health scare/shock in the family meaning the majority of the week has been spent waiting, and hoping for, good news.
Onward...
Links
The Best Action Scenes of 2023
Once again, Jonah Jeng is doing the lord's work and listing the best action scenes of 2023 for MUBI's Notebook column.
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How to quit capitalism.
Joan Westerberg on the consciousness shift required to look beyond the systems that cage us.
"The first layer to peel back is the assumption that greed and selfishness are innate human traits that any system must accommodate. In reality, people naturally demonstrate cooperation, compassion, and social responsibility — capitalist competition is what brings out individualistic instincts. Our altruistic nature surfaces when we design systems that appeal to humanity’s ethical core rather than its transactional periphery."
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Can game design help you beat The Traitors?
The Traitors is the reality show for people who hate reality shows. I love it. The second series is currently being televised here, with the final three episodes airing next week.
In this article at Eurogamer former contestant (and game designer) Ivan Brett talks about the mechanics of the show and how the format will need to freshen up moving forward. They also ask if by understanding said mechanics - can a player 'beat' the game?
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Maybe, just maybe, psychedelics are the “master key” for unlocking everything from blindness to stroke to anorexia
The key is resetting the mind to a childlike state.
"It turned out when we tried all the other psychedelics we had in our in our pocket, like LSD and ketamine and ibogaine and psilocybin, they all opened this critical period as well — even though they don’t have these pro-social properties. That was our first clue that it wasn’t about the social. It was about the opening of critical periods and that what generalizes across psychedelics is the ability to reopen a critical period."
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The Quiet Death of Ello’s Big Dreams
GoodbyeEllo.
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All the garbage I found on Substack in 1 hour
Substack continues to have, and profit from, a Nazi problem.
"Similarly, the Fascio Newsletter, another Substack I found effortlessly via Bing, is about what they call “Third position politics,” and which is more accurately called neo-fascism. Their entire Substack can be filed as a classic of the “no we’re not fascists, we’re just really really really interested in fascism, and also we agree with a lot of fascism” genre. Their swathe of authors make it difficult to tell exactly how many subscribers they have, but a Substack popup prompting me to subscribe says they have “Over 1,000 subscribers.” They are (of course!) monetized. (The individual writers who comprise Fascio have “2K+ subscribers” each — whether this is individual or as a collective is unclear.)"
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I'm off to hope for better weeks to come. See you in two!