This week, we explore cavernous, winding tunnels on the moon, and take a look at the lockstitch awl.

Tool of the Week: The Lockstitch Awl

In these dark, stupid, and slop-filled times, we turn past both the digital and the analog to something much more useful and comforting: leatherworking.

Most of the tools you use for a small project are just heavier duty versions of the ones you'd use for paper crafts: leather snips and scalpels instead of scissors, for example.

I've been down all week with a bad cold after two weeks of airports, so today we'll just have something interesting: most mosses reproduce via rain orgies, toothed cauldrons, and dry winds.

95% of mosses belong to the class Bryopsida, which grows its spores in a tiny container called a sporangium. Releasing the spores too early would guarantee their failure. So the sporangium "cauldron" has a tiny lid: the operculum. When the spores are mature, the operculum falls off, opening the way for the spores to venture out in the world, looking for a damp, nutrient-rich place to root.

A spore will root into the right environment, first extending tiny green tendrils and then growing into the moss plant that most of us are familiar with. A single spore can grow a whole little genetically identical patch of plants, tipped with tiny mossy sex organs. Most moss plants in isolation will never spore again; spores are formed through fertilization (although many species can self-fertilize at the cost of some genetic diversity).

Today we talk about wage and debt drivers in game design (and how they are used for real life control by mundanely evil elites), and about the magnificent plankton-filtering feeding style of the flamingo.

Pieces of Games: The Wage Driver

A driver in game design is any aspect of the design that serves to drive the player to continue interacting with its systems. A great many games use a simple narrative driver; you keep playing because you want to find out what happens next in the story. Many creative games use an expanding potential driver: this is where you start with a limited number of options, and then by interacting with the game's systems you can "unlock" more and more complex things to build (e.g. Minecraft or Banished).

A wage driver feels a little more familiar to most of us. In a game with a wage driver, you have bills to pay, expenses that must be addressed lest some punishment be meted out by the game's systems. This is in fact the core driver of the game we talked about last time, Papers, Please; the costs of failing to pay are various afflictions befalling your family members because you couldn't afford to keep the heat on or pay a medical bill.

I'm on vacation this week, so we'll keep it snappy!

Tool of the Week: The Fuck

The Fuck, or fuck if you're using it, is a clever little tool that you use when you fuck up. If you make one of those classic terminal mistakes where you make a single typo in the middle of a complex line, never fear -- fuck is here:

Happy September, and welcome to this month's feature. We argue:

1. Most AI doomers are part of a millenarian cult that believes the coming machine god will save the world or destroy it.
2. This group calls themselves the Rationalists. Ironically, their dogma is theological (mostly borrowed from Christianity), not grounded in reality.
3. Rationalist dogma combines with the Silicon Valley sophistry of "Effective Altruism" to create a new theology whose purpose is to launder the banal evils of the new elite.
4. People often ask if this is cynical performance in order to make money, or a sincere cause of action; in fact many people believe things because of what they already want to do.
5. Belief in the apocalypse provides cover to frame delays on investment returns as responsibility rather than failure, which allows the bubble to persist (for now).
6. However, there are many "true believers"; these show some of the early warning signs of many other apocalyptic cults, and there lies potential violence.

1. Doom

A couple of weeks ago, a young engineer at Anthropic named Jacob Coxon stole global headlines when he resigned, sounded an alarm about the rapid and reckless acceleration of AI research, framing it as an existential threat to humanity:

Hello everyone! Today we introduce a new patch notes section: "Pieces of Games", where we discuss elements of game design, how they can be used in art, and how they cross over to impact the rest of our lives (often without our knowing about it). We also discuss witch hazel, a tree that blooms in the winter, provides good medicine, and propagates its seeds through explosions.

New Section: Pieces of Games

As I talked about in the first Changelog, games are pieces of art that engage with the artistic medium of logical systems. That makes them interested in human systems in the same way novels are interested in human psychology and human relationships. And like any other kind of art, games have the potential to provide insight into these areas.

In my experience, the vast majority of games so far do this naively: a given game is much more likely to encode assumption than it is to cut through it. But the potential is there, and that makes the medium worth exploring in a deconstructive way.

Hello all! Today we have a TUI Signal client, and an interesting mechanic of medieval power projection.

Tool of the Week: Gurk

I'm a huge fan of Signal and its highly security-conscious approach to communication. And admittedly, 90% of the time I use the mobile or desktop apps. But sometimes, you just don't want to climb out of the terminal -- and that's when you use gurk-rs.

Hi everyone! Today we have a music player for the terminal, and the largest revolution in human history.

Tool of the Week: Kew

Kew is a recent addition to my toolbox. I love listening to music while I work or draw, and as streaming services have gotten shittier, I've returned to buying my own music and storing it all in a ~/media folder locally (with Syncthing to sync to my other devices, but that's a topic for another time).

Today we introduce the patch notes, your weekly delivery of short, interesting tidbits each Friday between longform essays. Those essays ("features" -- see what I did there?) will be delivered on the last Friday of every month. Normally that would be today, but that feature came out last week instead.

Tool of the Week: Lazygit

Lazygit, my favorite Git interface of all time. I paid $70 for a Tower license and I still switched to this. Lazygit gives you a clear, easily navigable interface for looking at a repo, viewing commits, looking at diffs, resolving merge conflicts, and doing basically everything you can do in git. Bonus tip: once you've pushed a branch in the branches panel, hit o to jump to its PR in your default browser, or open a new one if a PR doesn't exist yet.

Fiat Money is a kind of money that directly tokenizes a threat of violence from the state, and in doing so creates an organic system of coercion against the state's victims.

All modern money can be used in this way, and modern currencies usually have some aspect of fiat to them. However, in much of the world and for most of history, money has been a simpler kind of "commodity money" (inherently valuable: gold, silver, cacao, axe heads). The kind of thing that a traveling merchant would be happy to accept as payment, because everywhere there are humans, gold is gold, and silver is silver, and axe heads cut wood.

Fiat money, by contrast, only has value in the context of a state (or other large scale power structure, as we'll see below). It is perhaps best explained by Warren Mosler:

This week we discuss Pyroclear, the most metal way to clear your terminal; the half-life of European noble families; and a look at perverse incentives and how they work.

Tool of the week: Pyroclear

I'm a heavy user of the "spaces" feature on Mac, and lately half of them have a terminal instance running fullscreen -- one for work, one for creative projects, and so on.

This week, we're going to discuss Dispositio, a tool I made for project planning in the terminal; a timely quote by Mika Waltari; and an essay about how North American languages are constructed fundamentally differently from Eurasian ones, and what that means.

Tool of the Week: Dispositio

One of my own! And since I just made a fancy new home page for it, I thought it might be a good time to share:

This week, we're going to discuss Glow, a beautiful tool for reading markdown documentation in the terminal, the curious case of eyeball planets in nearby solar systems, and the ways in which widespread LLM usage are likely to lead to programmatic stagnation.

TUI of the Week: Glow.

Made with BubbleTea (the same Go framework I used for GoGo, Furnace, and Dispositio), Glow is a beautiful TUI for browsing markdown documentation.

You simply run the tool in e.g. a Github repo, and instantly get a list of all of the markdown files in the repo, searchable, well formatted, and easy to browse. Excellent for reading documentation or just browsing through your Obsidian vault.

What's up! This week, we have a "Go in Go" project I'm working on, a strange terminal-based game platform, a fact about a place it was once possible to stand in dry air four kilometers below sea level, and a discussion about Conway's Game of Life and emergent systems.

Working on: This week, I built out a small client for playing online Go via OGS. In Go, naturally.

It's called GoGo, and you can find it on Github. If you're on Mac, you can also easily try it out via Homebrew:

Hi there! This week, we have a tool (for you terminal users), a fact about whale sharks, and a discussion about logical systems as the artistic core of the games medium. Hope you enjoy!

Tool of the Week: arttime.

95% of my professional life is spent in the terminal -- I'm writing this post in Neovim as we speak, in fact. I always keep a Mac desktop space dedicated to a full screen terminal with different panels going (music, an active game of go, etc). One of these is always arttime. I use it to run pomodoros or even just timebox a goal when I'm juggling too many projects (which is always). The start of my work day involves cycling through its rich library of ASCII art until I find something fun, typing my first task (with m), then hitting g to set a time limit. An OS alert pops when it goes off. Even when I'm not using the timer, seeing the art in my otherwise work-centric terminal panels gives me a little bump of happiness.

Hi,

Thanks for subscribing. I'm Tim Raveling, and this is the email side of The Systemist. Welcome!

I'll be sending weekly letters, with interesting information, useful tools, and systems thinking about various aspects of the world we live in.

I promise to never collect or trade in your personal human information, and to never waste your attention with advertisement. I’ll send you only things I myself find valuable, as well as news on tools, games, and other projects I’m working on.