Sunday Notes

This Sunday morning I was catching up with my RSS feed, and I decided to write a bit about the posts that caught my eye. This kind of RSS catch up is something I do every now and then, I wish I could say this is a nice habit, but it feels more like a kind of "responsible-feeling procastination", heh...

Anyway, if you decide to follow up the links here, you should probably do that while listening to the Morning Music blog. Their selection is really nice.

On to this weekend's posts!

• Jeremy, a friend who is a CS educator in the Ohio State University in the US writes about the importance of taking summers off for educators -- As someone who is trying to understand and navigate burnout, I appreciate that a lot, although in a kind of wistful way. I wish I had more serious discussions about this with trusted parties years ago.

• Vincent Baker, creator of Apocalypse World wrote three posts in their blog this week. I love the Baker's reflections about games, and the posts are delightful. The first one is about placing games in the context of art. While the other two posts are a deep dive on the design of one of Apocalypse World's moves (with a third one incoming)

• Florence and Friends at the Bathysphere write about game creenshots, or more precisely about how important it is that screenshots are actually photos of people playing videogames and their environments, and not just the recording of a screen. I must confess that I've criticized people in the past for taking weird angled, blurry phone pics of their games in lieu of in-game screenshots, this piece made me repent a little.

Now that you've read my recommendations, please indulge me in a bit of self-reflection.

This was a funny post to write. As I was going through my feed, on a whim I decided to start taking notes, thinking about putting it on this blog. But at the same time, a thought on the back of my head was nagging at me: Is this what I want to blog about? Do I want my blog to be a collection of experiences? A series of small useful information bites? A Journal?

Why think so much about this? Writing a blog would be just the natural thing to do. Now, it feels like a shout for life. It makes me feel I still exist when I write here, but it also feels like pushing up against that waterfall. Fighting to live, maybe.

I was thinking about how It feel nice to read a blog post of someone I know personally, and then send them an e-mail about it. But then I was thinking about how that is, or is not, different from just replying to a post on social media. I'm sure someone smart and inspired could write a nice text about that.

Let me know if you do it! (But not on the comments form, I took it down because it was just a playground for spam bots).