But as my own kids have gotten older, my wife and I have decided to first introduce them to gaming with computers, instead of consoles.
Here are some of the reasons we prefer computers over consoles:
Gaming can be a creative endeavor but the device you are using matters. With consoles, you can only do things that have been programmed into the platform or game by the developers. Some games might have a creative or sandbox mode but only if the developer added it intentionally.
Computers make it easy to take a screenshot and email it to a friend, or record a screen capture and upload it to Youtube. They allow more input devices like microphones, keyboards, and drawing tablets (in addition to controllers). Web-based games let you view source and access developer tools by default, but even “native” computer games tend to be more open than their console counterparts, by offering mods, special builds, and downloadable assets (like user-created characters and save files).
A computer is a general-purpose device that happens to run games. It’s that general-purpose-ness that expands what’s possible, and that’s something I value a lot.
Time spent gaming on a computer is time spent practicing cross-functional computer skills. During an average gaming session, my kids might be doing things like typing, searching the web, downloading mods, navigating a filesystem, and troubleshooting simple audio or wifi issues. They use hotkeys, learn how to mitigate “lag,” and practice basic password management.
Some games open the door to advanced computer skills. Minecraft, Algodoo, The Powder Toy, and others include an in-game console, for running commands or simple scripts. This becomes a gateway to more ambitious customization like developing resource packs and mods, which uses graphic design and programming skills.
Multiplayer gaming on a computer exposes you to the basics of networking and hosting. My kids know how to look up their IP addresses so they can invite their siblings to a LAN game of Minecraft or Terarria. By using our family Minecraft server, they’ve learned about latency and server overload (there was an “incident” where a kid detonated a massive sphere of TNT, bringing the server to its knees 🤣).
You can learn a LOT about networking by troubleshooting lag. Who is lagging? Is it everyone, or just one person? Who is hosting the game—is it on a local computer or a server? Is the game lagging for the host? We ended up making a whiteboard lesson to discuss these questions, and it was like Networking 101 for elementary school kids.
Computer skills are something you’ll use your whole life. I’m typing this post on a computer. Even if my kids don’t go into a computer-related field, I want them to be comfortable using computers and troubleshooting issues on their own, instead of feeling helpless around technology.
When you’re gaming on a computer, the internet is right there as a resource for gaming tips and research. Every major game has a wiki and a subreddit, filled with moderated, user-contributed content. The wikis expose kids to new and interesting ways to play that would be difficult to discover on their own (challenges, advanced achievements, mods, etc). They start to recognize the names of prolific contributors and think about contributing themselves. They’re not just playing a game… they’re joining a community.
The first gaming community my kids joined was Scratch and I can’t think of a better first exposure to social media. Unlike TikTok or Instagram, there were no algorithms, no attention harvesting, no ads, active moderation, and minimal clickbait.
All popular games have online communities. Some are safer than others, but if your kids are playing age-appropriate games, the communities are probably safer than whatever the TikTok or Instagram algorithm would deliver. Of course, it’s good idea to vet the community first!
With console gaming, you’re often playing by yourself in your own little world. That’s fine (especially for very young children), but a little exposure to topical online communities is good preparation for the adult communities we eventually join (be they professional, research-based, open-source, etc).
You can play Minecraft on both consoles and computers (like many games these days).
Consoles use a version called Minecraft: Bedrock Edition; computers support Minecraft: Java Edition. The gameplay is similar, but Java Edition (the computer one) supports modding, custom skins, custom textures, custom shaders, historical installations, and more.
Bedrock Edition tries to add this kind of flexibility through their DLC marketplace, but the marketplace is limited to registered businesses that have a formal partnership with Mojang. If you want to create your own skins or textures, you’re out of luck.
This isn’t just a Minecraft thing. A lot of the games we like (Terraria, Stardew Valley, Factorio, No Man’s Sky) are available for both computers and consoles, but the computer version supports mods and the console version doesn’t. The platform matters.
I’ve talked a lot about why we like computers for gaming but consoles are better at lot of things:
Similar to smartphones, gaming consoles are polished, user-friendly, walled gardens that guide you down a pre-destined path. Gaming on computers are more like “the web.” Open. Expansive. Chaotic.
And while I praised the creativity and community features of computers, there are cases where console developers worked hard to build those features directly into their games, like Super Mario Maker, Gamebuilder Garage, and Nintendo Labo. So it can definitely be done.
I’m not anti-console. We’ll likely get a console at some point. But for now, we’re finding that computers are the best tool for creating the experience we want our kids to have while playing games.
]]>Even years later, the comment above stuck with me:
y’all have so much time on your hands, I desperately want some.
They were probably joking, but it couldn’t have been further from the truth.
They didn’t know that I recorded that video at 1:30AM the night before, or that I’d been up that late working on it three nights in a row. They didn’t know that I had a sore throat and knew I needed the rest, but stayed up to work on it anyway. They didn’t see my overflowing email inbox or my Elder’s Quorum interview backlog. They didn’t see the hours I was putting in daily, raising 5 kids and maintaining a 70-yr-old house.
I bring this up, not because I want credit or pity. It’s because I want my future self to remember that I didn’t have time for this but I made it anyway.
In fact, looking back at my other projects, I’ve never had time for any of them:
Basically, every time I wanted to make something non-trivial, life stood in the way. I’ve had to let house projects languish, retire existing projects (many which still had potential, but were high-maintenance), or interrupt momentum in one area to pursue an opportunity in another.
And while it’s tempting to feel resentful, the truth is that this is just what life looks like when you’re a capable adult. Your time is valuable so it gets put to good use.
There’s never going to be time to build something great, because it’s hard to do great work without giving it your undivided attention, and undividing your attention always has a cost. The trick is to become ok with that.
Note: this post was influenced by Rachel Smith’s “I could spend the rest of my life clearing the decks, if I’m not careful” and “4000 Weeks”, by Oliver Burkeman. Read them both!
]]>The Goddess of Everything Else - This video is an animated fictional short story by Scott Alexander about human nature. I watched it and couldn’t stop thinking about the implications. What if we could overcome our built-in programming to kill and conquer? What kind of future would be possible? It feels like human nature is at the core of so many issues today (climate change, overpopulation, racism, war, etc.) and this video gave me a reason to be optimistic.
A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox - I was touched by how well this article describes the loneliness of obsession (something I’ve also blogged about). “It is crazy-beautiful to have a stranger arrive in your inbox, and they are excited by exactly the same things as you! You start dropping the most obscure references, and they’re like, yeah, read that, love it. The first handful of times it happened, Johanna asked me what was wrong. I was crying in the kitchen.” The internet, for all its flaws, makes it possible to find your people and that’s a very special thing.
AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects - This is the article that convinced me I needed to learn how to use AI tools to enhance my coding. Importantly, it gave me a reason to feel excited about AI instead of apprehensive. It’s not unusual for me to tap AI for some help with coding these days and I attribute most of that to this article.
Buy Wisely - The way this article describes buying things was so refreshing… like I actually found someone else who thinks like me when buying things (constantly assessing things by expected cost per use, durability, repairability, timelessness and resale value). I don’t really recommend this buying philosophy. The approach has its benefits but it’s so time-consuming (even paralyzing sometimes). This is why I like the Wirecutter so much—they have done all the painstaking research already, and I can just trust them or read the details if I want to. Steph’s quote, “My aim is to have fewer but better things.” is exactly my philosophy on owning things and if you agree, there’s a “Buy It for Life” subreddit you might like.
The Tyranny of the Marginal User - This post clearly explains why web software degrades to a least-common-denominator form. All dating apps become Tinder, all news sites become Buzzfeed, all social media becomes Tiktok, etc. It’s like natural selection. This kind of made me realize that RSS (and similar protocols) will never go fully mainstream, which is kind of sad, but hopefully they can continue to thrive in the background for the people who love and use them.
Hyperlink Academy - What if there was an online space where a remote group of people with a common interest could work together on pushing some idea forward? Something like the online equivalent of spinning up a tiny research lab. I feel like that’s what Hyperlink academy wants to be. I don’t know how well they’ll end up executing on it but the idea sounds wonderful. Hat tip: The Overedge Catalog, which contains a lot of other interesting organizations.
Squeeze the hell out of the system you have - A post about how engineers and developers should put off adding complexity for as long as possible. I couldn’t agree more. It applies to so many things—build processes, horizontal scaling, microservices, serverless, performance, and more. It’s amazing how often complexity is adopted by enthusiastic engineers who are excited to try new things. I attribute a lot of it to misaligned incentives between owners and employees. Also, I’ve got to say that this is like the perfect technical blog post. It has a punchy title, solid real-world examples, a valuable takeaway, and it’s short! A thing of beauty.
]]>This year marked a slow return to some side-projects after a general haitus in 2022. I used AI to help me build the first two projects listed above, but the others were all me. “Let’s Get Creative” was the biggest and most satisfying thing I made.
I could also list things I made in the physical world but I haven’t done much of that, outside of house maintenance. I did do a lot of cooking this year and I while I don’t have much to show for it now, I’d like to believe that I learned some useful skills. I’m confident that any cooking skills I pick up will remain relevant far longer than my ReactJS skills.
New opportunities await. Here’s to 2024. ⛵️
]]>I like that Substack is getting more people blogging. Blogging lets you sit down with a topic and refine your thinking around it. We need more of that.
I like the business model of Substack. Direct pay seems to create better incentives than an advertising-based business model. Subscriptions are focused and topical. Quality is high. I feel like paying customers can only stomach so much clickbait before they stop sending you money.
Substack’s business model encourages authors to write freemium-style. The free content attracts new readers and the premium content supports the author (funded by their biggest fans). Freemium has flaws but it creates a lot of positive consumer surplus.
For example, every Substack comes with an RSS feed. All free content is available in the feed and all premium content is teased in the feed as well (usually with a title and preview snippet). Apparently there are also unique feed urls containing free and premium content for paid subscribers (though I haven’t tested this myself).
Facebook used to have RSS feeds but it ended up removing them because RSS undermined their ad-based business model. With Substack, RSS helps the business model instead of hurting it.
I do have a few concerns about Substack’s popularity. Journalistic integrity is less enforced than traditional media. Media fragmentation can result in filter-bubbles which seems kind of harmful.
And of course, Substack is still floating on venture capital so it’s hard to tell how things will change when they are forced to become profitable. Remember Medium? They got a lot of praise for bringing blogging to the masses and disrupting ad-based publishing… until they ran out of money and needed to set up site-wide paywalls. 🫤
But overall, I feel pretty happy about the current state of things. Everyone has a Substack and it’s great.
This post is part of a series about online media and RSS:
As an author:
As a consumer:
I’ve learned that RSS support is surprisingly good, even today. I think there’s this narrative that RSS usage has been dwindling due to the death of Google Reader and the rise of large social media platforms but I don’t believe it. RSS support is built into platforms like Squarespace, Wordpress, and Substack—tools which are more capable and popular than ever before. Here’s a bunch of other services with built-in RSS support:
…not to mention the entire podcast industry, which is basically built on RSS.
All of this to say, RSS is alive and doing well. There’s no reason that you couldn’t double-down on it too.
This post is part of a series about online media and RSS:
* For anyone unfamiliar with RSS, this video and this website both give a nice overview.
Also, as a note, I’m using the term “RSS” loosely to mean “the RSS-like family of feed protocols” including RSS, Atom, and JSONFeed.
]]>“I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
I often see eating used as a metaphor for reading. We “consume” content and “digest” what we learned.
I like the analogy. Just as eating feeds the body, reading feeds the mind.
Bad media (divisive news media, trashy content, etc) is like junk food. It’s probably ok in moderation but it’s addictive. We reach for it to cope with the stresses of life and we can’t stop scrolling. Over time, the costs accumulate but instead of bloating our bodies, it poisons our minds.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The internet provides an “all-you-can-eat” buffet and what we eat is up to us. If we are selective, we can assemble a diverse, healthy, and nutritious diet. But it’s not easy—the paradox of choice is real. It’s no wonder that we end up on social media, where we can outsource the decision-making to the algorithm.
All algorithms are optimized for something and in the case of social media, that something is engagement. The result is an addictive combination of clickbait headlines, natural disasters, anger, division and negativity. It’s no wonder that the rising generation is battling a mental health epidemic.
So what do we do? We reject the algorithm and curate manually, and we do it with an RSS feed reader.
“Life is the sum total of what we pay attention to. Who is in control of that attention, and how we can wrest it back, is a central question of our age.”
—Ezra Klein (source)
We’re living at a time where many people are reconsidering their social media usage and I am convinced that embracing RSS is a better decision than trying a new social network (like Threads / Bluesky) or a federated social network like Mastodon. Here are some of my reasons why:
The main challenge with RSS is the effort it takes to find and curate your feeds. But honestly, I think this effort is a good thing. It forces you to ask, “who do I want to be around? Who are my people?” If you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, then why would you want to leave it to chance?
In a recent podcast episode titled “Is there a sane way to use the internet?,” PJ Vogt said, “‘How you think’ will be shaped by the platforms you use, even when you’re not using them.”
We can choose to soak our minds in the brine of popular culture, allowing our thoughts to be consumed by social media drama, clickbait news, and advertising. Or we can take control of our environments and design them to serve us.
This post is part of a series about online media and RSS:
If you had asked me at the time why I felt so bad, I could have given you all sorts of reasons why things would only get worse, both for me personally and for the world at large. The reasons were valid and I had evidence to support them.
But focusing on those reasons was a choice that I was making and it wasn’t a choice that was serving me. At one point, I felt like I couldn’t bring myself to genuinely smile. It was taking a toll on me and my family. I needed to be happier.
I decided to change my news diet. I removed social media apps from my phone and installed newsfeed blockers to make social media less compelling. Using my feed reader, I subscribed to authors who had a positive vision of the future and builders who were working on making that vision a reality. Through these people I discovered more people. I read their books and listened to their podcasts.
It was like moving to a new city—a place with vitality, energy, and enthusiasm. I was surrounded by scientists, researchers, and engineers who were working together and building a better future.* The despair I felt was replaced with hope.
I share this story because I know I’m not the only one who has struggled with this stuff. Regardless of whether you follow traditional news or use social media, you’re eventually going to find yourself drowning in a sea of negativity as publishers use fear to fight for your attention. This is bound to get even worse next year as the election cycle takes over.
Please know: you don’t have to participate in any of it. Doomerism helps nobody and the idea that you have some societal obligation to follow breaking news is both flawed and harmful (to everyone except media companies). It’s ok to leave all of it behind.
In the physical world, moving to a new city is difficult. The best most vibrant cities are in high demand and expensive to live in.
The online world is different. You can move anywhere you want, anytime you want, for free. Find your people—people who inspire you and drive you to be better. People who make you happy.
They’re out there. You just have to look for them.
This post is part of a series about online media and RSS:
* If you’re curious about who I subscribed to, here are some examples: Gates Notes, Our World In Data, José Luis Ricón, The Roots of Progress, Steph Ango, CleanTechnica, Tom Macwright, Noahpinion, Sustainabilty by Numbers, and Devon Zuegel.
Feel free to email or comment below if you have recommendations for other people you think I should subscribe to.
]]>Let’s Get Creative is a collection of high-quality, free, online, creativity tools. The website is intended to be a safe, bookmarkable, creativity resource for kids and adults.
When the pandemic hit, we found ourselves with three bored school-aged kids at home. We were desperate to find productive-ish things they could do on their school Chromebooks without a lot of supervision. I started collecting links to creativity tools and I published a list on this blog back in March 2020.
The kids went back to school of course but I couldn’t stop thinking about creativity tools. I wrote about them a lot and I kept collecting links whenever I came across them (often sharing them in my links posts).
I’m not sure why I like them so much. I think they just live at the intersection of a lot of my interests. They use cool front-end web technologies. They encourage exploration and experimentation. They give you superpowers and an opportunity to exercise your agency. In a world of streaming services and bed-rotting, I’ve developed a strong belief that the future belongs to creators:
Anyways, throughout this process I’ve become something of a creativity tools snob. The ones on Lets Get Creative are among the best, so I thought that building a nice site to feature them would be a valuable contribution to the internet.
The idea for this site started out simple but quickly became much more ambitious. Sure, a single HTML file would work but I felt like the projects deserved a proper showcase, with a design that truly captured their creative essence. I started to dream up interactive features and before I knew it I was knee deep in JavaScript frameworks, fighting build errors and wrangling 3rd party libraries.
My motivation tanked. Weeks went by with me staring into the abyss. Eventually, I asked myself, “Why am I not excited to work on this anymore?”
I found my answer. I had been building out this ambitious interactive header carousel thing but something was wrong. What was it? Was the feature a distraction? Was it tacky? Was it not worth the complexity? Whatever it was, my gut didn’t like it and I just couldn’t move forward. I ended up tearing out that code, trying something a bit simpler, and the motivation came roaring back. I learned a valuable lesson: sometimes your lack of motivation is trying to tell you something.
But I digress. The site finally feels right, so we’re going live even though the code is still a mess. I aspire to tidy it up some more post-launch. 😅
One of the goals of this project was to make it easy for anyone to contribute their own creativity tools. If you have a tool you’d like to share, there’s a nice CONTRIBUTING doc that shows you what to do (it’s really just editing this one JSON file).
Besides that, you can also help me clean up my code if you want. Just check out the open issues.
]]>How to do great work - Part-way into reading this, I realized that this was no normal Paul Graham essay. It felt like a sort of magnum opus… the best parts of his other essays, plus some new content, all pulled together into a mega-guide on doing great work. It was both long and insight-dense. He probably could have added a bunch of filler, published this as a book, and sold a million copies. Required reading for ambitious people, in my opinion.
Thrive - An “open source” computer game where you start as a cell, hunt for resources, grow, evolve, and survive. The game is under development and has ambitious goals (“progress through every crucial transformative step towards cell cohesion, terrestrial conquest, sentience, settlements, and space travel”). The first stage is playable and reasonably fun—I’ve played it a bit with the kids. It feels like a great game for building intuition around biology and evolution.
Subscribe Wherever You Get Your Content - A vision of the future where all internet content is distributed like podcasts. It sounds wonderful. The post also made me realize how sad I would be if Spotify screwed up the podcast ecosystem. Many of the social media giants (Facebook, Twitter, etc) used to have RSS feeds for their content, before they walled them off. Apple could have done that with podcasts (which originated with the iPod) but they didn’t, to their enormous credit. Spotify is trying to undo that and I hope they fail.
Marginalia Search - A search engine for finding small, obscure, non-commercial websites. I used the “random” feature and found this little text animation tool and this Russian page about Japanese emoticons. The search engine also made me grateful for Neocities (there’s clearly a lot of people using it to build quirky little things)! Warms my heart.
Dopamine Fasting - This video inspired me to take a vacation day to do nothing but sitting, thinking, and writing. I really enjoyed it and I hope to do it again in the future (though I’ll probably treat it more like a writing retreat than a “dopamine fast”—I think the “no food” rule was more distracting than helpful).
GB Studio - “A quick and easy to use drag and drop retro game creator for your favourite handheld video game system.” This looks like so much fun. A nostalgia machine.
Beneath the Surface - A short podcast series by Stripe Press about infrastructure. I just finished it and enjoyed it a lot! I’m realizing that I like pretty much everything put out by Stripe Press.
You should take more screenshots - An argument for using screenshots for digital preservation. I’ve kept screenshots for many of the websites I’ve made (see my bryanbraun.com redesign post for one example) and this post inspired me to go back and collect some more (especially for past client projects). It’s best to collect these soon… the longer you wait the more difficult it’ll be to capture them.
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