Doing something from strength or weakness

There's this email that some rando sent to a webcomic artist that I like. Here's the tweet. Transcription because the internet doesn't last:

Tweet from @TinySnekComics:

I don't think I ever shared this but I just wanted to grace the world with the greatest/worst unsolicited email I've ever received

Email contents:

Hello,

I don't know you, just stumbled on your comic. I like the artwork itself, it has a style that's enjoyable and cute.

After reading one comic after another, I didn't feel any of them were funny.

DON'T give up, I would like to see you get better.

Consider spending more time on the writing itself or team up with a writer or comedian to make your comic reach its potential.

Sincerely,

someone who wishes you the best.

(end transcription)

I think Someone Who Wishes You The Best (hereafter SWWYTB) really thinks they're doing the right thing. They think that by contorting their words enough, they can make their message "nice." (I base this opinion on years of thinking that myself as a child.)

This has been coming up a lot recently, and I don't know why. So many instances of people feeling X, doing Y negative thing, and trying to justify it as "actually trying to do good." (Hell, I do this too. See: righteous fury in the bike lane.)

It's possible to offer constructive criticism, of course! It just would look different than this. So obviously SWWYTB is giving unwanted criticism (negative thing) and bending themself into knots in order to say "but no, I'm doing an ok thing." I imagine it's redirected from some other part of life that's not feeling good.

(Maybe relatedly: procrastination as emotion management.)

Not quite relatedly: a friend recently described Mr. Rogers as being so effective because he was one of the few people to recognize publicly that children have emotions as complex and valid as adults, they just sometimes can't express them quite right, and kids (or anyone!) love being validated like that. I love that characterization. Maybe Mr. Rogers came to mind because he would be the kind of person who could offer constructive criticism, if he knew it was warranted and wanted, and it would be taken well.

So how do we distinguish between SWWYTB and Mr. Rogers? I'm tempted to say Mr. Rogers would be doing the thing (offering feedback or whatever) from a place of strength, while SWWYTB writes this from a place of weakness. Someone else recently described a similar thing as "it's from a place of integrity." Either way it sounds like hippie talk, but I don't know a better way to say it, and it would be a valuable shorthand: "look, he's arguing with you about X, but it's really just place-of-weakness." It would make it easier for the people who are not place-of-weaknessing; it might in rare cases even make it easier for people who are place-of-weaknessing!

"The Jungle" in games

Richard Garfield at one point talked about a part of Magic he loved, and that filtered into why he made Keyforge. It was this sense of being in "the jungle" - that you were all exploring the space in the game together, and you didn't all have it figured out. It keeps coming up for me: this is maybe the thing I love most in games.

Things that are "the jungle":

- printing some plain old busted cards like Black Lotus or Ancestral Recall because, what the heck, nobody will have more than one or two of them anyway.
- a weird mixed lore, like the early cards that had quotes from Coleridge, Shakespeare, and the 1001 Arabian Nights, in addition to Urza and Mishra. (Urza and Mishra were characters created in the Magic universe.)
- diverse art, like a world where Stasis and Chaos Orb existed alongside Shivan Dragon and Serra Angel
- every so often running into cards you've never seen
- every so often running into decks you've never seen. Full English Breakfast was a revelation to me. (non magic player note: this was a wacky deck that incorporated a few cards into a ridiculous combo that could win the game out of nowhere)
- uses for cards you've never seen (see: /r/badmtgcombos)
- chaos drafts. This is where you "draft" (start with a random pool of cards, take turns selecting cards, and build your deck out of those cards) with a bunch of random packs from Magic's past. (usually, when drafting, you all use the same type of pack, which means you can kind of "metagame" because you have a pretty good idea of what cards everyone's going to get.)

Things that are the opposite of "the jungle":

- metagames. Knowing that probably 30% of people are going to be playing Deck A while 20% are playing Deck B, so even if your Deck C is great, you shouldn't play it if it does poorly against Decks A and B.
- honestly, high-level constructed competition. It's going to be really hard to create a competitive scene without metagames. (maybe, "high-level competition" at all.)
- most strategic board games. These games feel "Spikey" - like you all know what are the moves you _can_ make, and you only win if you happen to exactly judge when to make the right moves.
- winning by slivers. Poker is not "the jungle", because you can only win by grinding out a 1% edge over the competition, over and over again. In "jungley" games, you usually win or lose big.

Games that feel jungley to me:

ok yes Keyforge, Spelunkey, "Would You Rather" driven by @wyr_bot, Drawful, Dominion, Ascension, Betrayal at the house on the hill, D&D, Bughouse, most passive games like Antimatter Dimensions, most computer RPGs, Minecraft

Games that do not feel jungley:

Agricola, Settlers, Eclipse, chess, most FPS games like Halo

Games that feel jungley when you're playing at home but not in competitions:

Magic, Smash Bros, RTS games like Starcraft, Dominion

I wonder what Magic player archetype this makes me. I guess Timmy, because I like playing in order to feel the excitement of "what a cool card!" or "what a great play!" With a touch of Vorthos (cool flavor is cool) and Jonny (I like expressing myself through my play)

y'all middle class: many of your favorite things depend on constrained environments, they're gonna get worse, and that's ok

Things are expensive

Skiing is way more expensive than it used to be.
Anecdote: I recently went to Heavenly in Lake Tahoe. The rack rate for a 1-day lift ticket is something like $160. 1-day ski rentals were $59 from the resort. And it was crowded as anything, from the 20-minute lift lines to the 2-hour wait for a shuttle back home.
Mitigating factors and more accurate comparisons: we should compare Heavenly's $160 to the $60-80 in Breckenridge/Keystone/ABasin ~10 years ago; we should compare the old days' $10 rentals to the $30 in-town rentals.

Going to a pro sports game is way more expensive than it used to be.
Anecdote: Friends and I went to a Golden State Warriors game last year. For the uppermost-deck tickets, on a random Wednesday, it was $120.
Mitigating factors and better comparisons: basketball always costs a little more than baseball; the Warriors are better than the Cavs were 8 years ago and even than the Indians 20 years ago; lots of people in SF and the Bay have money.

Traffic is worse than it used to be.
Anecdote: I dunno, it is, right?

Fancy College (defined as "going to a school with a good name") is crazy more expensive than it used to be, and we've even got data for that.

I remember enjoying these things as a child in a comfortable professional family 20 years ago. What's changing? Granted, a ton is changing, but I think one big factor is that the "Middle Class" is growing a lot. (the definition of "middle class" depends on the circumstances.)

The "sports-going middle class" that can afford sports games is growing a lot. The "skiing middle class" is growing a lot. The "driving middle class" is growing a lot, and certainly the "fancy college middle class" is growing like crazy (especially internationally!)

However, the supply of these things isn't growing as much. There have not been many new sports teams or amazing ski areas. You can't build enough roads to adequately compensate for traffic. And you can't "build more fancy colleges" very easily; sure, you could start Angry Dan's Angry University, but until people start recognizing ADAU as a good school, it won't be considered a decent substitute for Harvard/Yale/MIT/Whatever.

This is good!

This probably feels bad if you were used to being in the Sports-Going or Driving or Fancy-College Middle Class. But this reflects the weird fact that we used to have this huge underclass that wasn't able to do these things. Now that underclass is a little smaller and the "Middle Class" is a little bigger. This is good.

What should we do, given this?

- for some things (fancy colleges), we should try whatever we can to increase supply. This probably means starting to accept colleges that aren't Harvard/Yale/MIT as "top tier", and increasing the quality of all of them at every level. I notice this starting to happen. I think if I were a Corporate Executive, I could probably hire a ton of great people by just recruiting heavily at "second tier" universities.
- for some things (cars), we should try to reduce demand. Tax cars until they remain a luxury for the rich, and give the Middle Class some kind of public transit that lets them live an equivalently good life.
- for the other things... I don't know, up to you, but I'm certainly going to look for more and more ways that I can get entertainment that don't depend on a scarce asset like sports or skiing.

Side note

So many luxuries are only luxuries based on other people not having them! This is so f'ed! I write this from an airport lounge, which is literally just this: pay us (or get a certain credit card? which is obv the route I took) and we can get you away from the riffraff. (plus free beer.)

Anyway this particular subset of luxuries is completely destined to fail and/or increase prices spectacularly as more people can afford them, so don't get too comfortable :P