thetangent.space

Weekly digest 63

theTangentSpace — Sun, 10 May 2026 21:52:26 GMT

Happenings

Looks like I’m going to be running an extra-curricular “advanced” maths club next year at school for some of my top students, something I did last year and really enjoyed. So I’ve started to prepare some notes and resources for that, this time experimenting with typst, an alternative to LaTeX. So far I’m really enjoying using it; the basic markup is quite markdown-like, and I love how much simpler a lot of the math symbols are to type (for example, you type a fraction with a/b and not \frac{a}{b}!^[1] And \mathbb{R} is just RR!). The package ecosystem seems like it has everything I’ll need.
Got some kind of chest infection, making me quite fatigued and waking up very chesty.
Pleasant weekend, spent time with friends and family.

Links

Not today I’m afraid, not browsed much except for reading about typst.

Playing

Plodding through Chrono Trigger and Shadow Of The Colossus. I want to like SotC more than I do. It’s beautiful, it’s bold in its design, the Colossi are stunning… but it’s frustrating. I don’t mind the long treks to find the Colossi (it’s usually enjoyable, only had one instance of being unable to find the way), but the actual encounters with the Colossi are sometimes very annoying. The controls can be frustrating, the swimming is tedious in the water-based encounters, and sometimes it’s just really not clear what you’re meant to be doing, or it looks like you’re meant to proceed in one way but it’s a dead end. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the encounters have been epic and had the intended effect, but just a few have been a pain in the butt and put a bit of a downer on the whole thing.

Reading

Same as before, bit of The Score here, bit Republic there.

“But what about my quotient objects!?” cries the algebraic topologist. Chill out, it’s just G slash H, which okay it’s a few more keystrokes, but it’s very cognitively easy to type, and doesn’t require any use of the shift key. ↩︎

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Cal Newport's anti-brain rot rules

theTangentSpace — Mon, 04 May 2026 12:29:12 GMT

YouTube recommended me a segment from Cal Newport’s podcast lately with five rules for combating brain rot.^[1] Here’s a quick summary with some comments, minus Newport’s overly nerdy procedures for doing these things.

Read long-form writing every day. Not on a screen (except e-readers). Fiction or non-fiction; ideally a mix. Start small if necessary, but aim for integrating “hard” books into your rotation at least semi-regularly.
Write more, and don’t delegate writing to AI. As the cliche goes, “writing is thinking”. Even small writing tasks — such as an email — will help to prevent that skill from atrophying.
Go for “thinking walks”. I think any walk without your phone (or with your phone tucked away in a bag) is fine; it doesn’t have to be a “thinking walk”. You’ll do that naturally anyway. And if not, it’s probably quite a meditative walk and good for you anyway.
Leave your phone plugged in. Have a place in the home where you phone lives, so you have to get up and walk to it if you need to use it. It’s not that the phone is inaccessible or unusable. It’s about breaking the “always on/always on you” cycle that leads to twitchy phone anxiety or mindless media consumption.
Get a skill or hobby that requires focus and discipline. Could be a sport, a craft, an instrument, etc. As well as retraining focus, it also gives you something fun to do that’s not looking at your phone.

I like these rules because they’re simple, obvious, and accessible. Other than “read every day”, there’s no demand to follow a particular daily routine. There’s no rule for quitting certain apps or devices. You don’t have to buy a dumb phone.

I’m pretty good at 1 and 2. I could do 3 more often; too often I have a podcast or something while walking. 4 is the big one I’d like to make a habit. On days where I do this, my phone time is right down.^[2] But even on days that start well, it only takes one slip up to end up with business-as-usual, such as pocketing the phone to leave the house or using it as a music player and then not replacing it.

These five simple rules are better than a lot of Newport’s previous offerings on this topic, which were typically too full of systems and rules that just weren’t practical for a lot of people. I’m going to see how far these get me to stop stroking my phone so much, not least because I want to set a good example to my children.

Behold how subtly I am keen to let you know I am not the kind of nerd who regularly listens to Cal Newport’s podcast. ↩︎
I don’t say “screen time” here because I don’t think screen time is the problem per se. When I’m on my computer I’m usually doing something intentional. I’m also pretty intentional with my gaming. It’s the phone which leads to unintentional behaviours and “brain rot”. ↩︎

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Weekly digest 62

theTangentSpace — Sun, 03 May 2026 22:54:15 GMT

Happenings

Doesn’t feel like much has happened this week. Took the kids for a walk in the woods yesterday, a bit of cooking today. A new pizza place opened in my small town doing proper neapolitan-style pizza, and they do have some vegan offerings (a minor miracle). We tried it on Friday, it was excellent.

On this site

The Sun and the Air had an idea for inlining footnotes, and I liked it so much I added it to this site (I also emailed him a version that works on Bearblog). It’s a script that moves footnotes up to their references in the main body of the text. If you’re reading a post without JavaScript e.g. in RSS reader, it’ll remain as a regular footnote. You can try it here.^[1] If you’d like this on your site too, the script is right there in the page source. You’ll just have to tweak it to how your site formats footnotes.

Having never properly examined the page source of my actual site on the web (as opposed to locally), I never noticed Cloudflare (which hosts my site currently) is inserting a script into my pages. Supposedly, all it does is obfuscate my email address from bots (though since it’s minified JavaScript it’s hard to tell). I could turn this feature off, as I don’t really like the idea of Cloudflare adding stuff to my pages (and I do take some measures to obfuscate email anyway using just HTML+CSS), but at the same time, I don’t get any spam to thetangent.space, so perhaps I’ll just leave it there.

Playing

Not a lot, a small amount of progress in Chrono Trigger.

Reading

I finished The Right To Oblivion and started the next book in Jared Henderson’s technology reading list, The Score by C. Thi Nguyen. This is so far a much easier read, and very interesting, analysing how and why scoring systems tend to create good incentives in games, but perverse incentives in real life. It was such a chill and breezy read that I found time to pick up The Republic again, which I started last year but never quite got around to finishing.

Boo! ↩︎

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[book] What is privacy and why is it good?

theTangentSpace — Sat, 02 May 2026 22:11:00 GMT

The modern world is awash with privacy discourse. We’re constantly informed that “We (and the 967 partners we intend to share your activities with) respect your privacy”. Bringing new gadgets into the home often raises concerns concerns about data collection. And we have periodic debates about corporate surveillance and government policies that are supposed to protect chidren. However, rarely do we discuss what exactly we mean by privacy and why it is a good thing. This month I’ve been reading The Right To Oblivion by philosopher Lowry Pressly, which attempts to do just this.

Part of the problem is that privacy seems to have different meanings to different people. For some online privacy enthusiasts, privacy seems to mean total anonymity. For Facebook, privacy means controlling who gets to see what on your profile, while many privacy advocates would say being on Facebook at all is a threat to privacy. For others, advocating for privacy raises suspicion — that valuing privacy must mean one has something to hide. Advocates usually counter this by pointing to people who have legitimate things to hide, such as marginalised people (e.g. a gay child of homophobic parents), people living under oppressive governments, and investigative journalists.

What these views all have in common is that privacy is about restricting and controlling who has access to certain information about you. Pressly wants to challenge this conception of privacy, not least because on the “information control” model privacy really does have more value if you have things to hide. However, Pressly’s purpose is to defend the view that privacy is a valuable good for all well-lived lives and decent societies.

The book thus begins with a conceptual analysis of privacy. In philosophy, conceptual analysis is drilling down into exactly what we mean by a concept and distinguishing it from similar concepts. It can be rather dry and academic, but in this case we have the motivation of some real moral distinctions. For example, privacy vs. secrecy: it really does matter to me whether reading my wife’s text messages is off-limits because to read them would disrespect her privacy, or because she’s hiding secrets from me.

Pressly problematises the concept and ethics of privacy with a thought experiment he calls Voyeur. Imagine a hotel manager spies on his guest (this is based on the real life case of Gerald Foos). He does not witness anything incriminating, embarrassing, or secret. The guest just reads for a bit then goes to sleep. The manager doesn’t tell anyone or act on what he has learned in any way — perhaps he even forgets about it. Either way, the guest never finds out and experiences no consequences as a result of this event. The question, then, is why is this bad? We all feel some kind of wrong has been done here, but no one has been harmed in an obvious way. So what’s the issue?

Pressly’s solution is layered like an onion. For him, rather than protecting us from the consequences of specific information getting out or being used to harm us, privacy protects a state he calls oblivion, while oblivion itself protects several other values that are essential for a good life and a good society. Oblivion is not about witholding certain personal information. Rather, it is a state in which that personal information effectively doesn’t exist; there is only ambiguity. What goes on in the houses across the street, for example. My neighbours don’t go to any particular lengths to conceal what they are doing, and I don’t try to find out what they’re doing. As far as I’m concerned, there is nothing to learn here. Or perhaps as another example, when someone goes to use the loo, we generally do not try to find out what they are doing, or even allow the event to pass through our imagination. It is rather as if they have simply disappeared for a few minutes. No information about what they are doing — even false information — is created.

To use the bathroom example again (not one of Pressly’s, but it helped me to get my head around the idea). If I (for some strange reason) attempted to find out what they were up to, or even tried to imagine it, we would feel like this were a privacy violation, even if I didn’t succeed in gaining any information. This is also why being asked a personal question feels like a privacy violation, even if we don’t answer it, or give a false answer. The very act of acting like there is information to be learned here violates the state of oblivion.

Now to why Pressly thinks oblivion is a good thing that we all ought to have in our lives. He gives other benefits, but these are the ones that stand out to me:

It is a break from being biographed

Beyond the basic biological facts someone might know about us, our identities are constituted of biographical facts and judgements. When we have oblivion, we are free from our actions generating new biographical facts and judgements. I can, for example, put on some scruffy clothes, without “Sam is the kind of guy who wears scruffy clothes” becoming part of my biography in the minds of people (both acquintances and strangers) who see me.^[1]

When in public, we have to confront our existing biographical dimension and decide whether our actions today will affirm or deny that biography. Will I live up to the expectations of other people based on the judgements they have formed about me, or defy them? Either way, this is a burden we sometimes need respite from, which oblivion provides.

It is against fixity and for potentiality

Relatedly, Pressly is very keen on the idea of opposing “fixity” and embracing potentiality. When in public, our biographical dimension binds us in some sense — our public expects us to be a certain way. Oblivion give us space to change, space to try new things, space to be ourselves — or someone completely different.

This is also why Pressly is a strong advocate of the so-called “right to be forgotten”. This is the right to have old information about us removed from the web, for example, old social media posts and profiles. If others — especially new acquaintances — can easily search and make judgements about who we were many years ago, we lose the potential to define how we present who we are now to others. This the right to oblivion, projected into the past.

It builds social trust

Without privacy and oblivion, everything about us can be known, and hence we have no reason to trust one another. In a society with a healthy respect for privacy and oblivion, we are forced to trust the good character of people even when they are unknowable to us.

It creates depth

If everything about a person is known or knowable, then they have no hidden depth. A society without a healthy amount of oblivion available is one of flat persons and characters.

We experience this about our inner lives too — we don’t and can’t know everything about ourselves, and hence we are capable of learning more about and surprising ourselves.

Objections

I agree with Pressly that privacy is a good for all, and that oblivion is a good for all. However, I’m not entirely sure that the protection of oblivion completely captures the concept of privacy, or at least that the concept of oblivion needs some development to bring it up to that level. My objections are closely related, so forgive me if it seems that I repeat myself a little.

Firstly, oblivion as Pressly describes it seems to be an essentially binary state. The way we use the word privacy in everyday speech, however, seems to permit there to be degrees of privacy. And if the good of privacy is to protect oblivion (which I seem to either have or not), then what good is having partial privacy? I am thinking in particular about, say, when I am with only my wife at home. Clearly I don’t have as much privacy as when I completely alone, but it seems wrong to say that I don’t have privacy. However, by the way Pressly decribes it, I don’t seem to have the state of oblivion, since my wife is aware of me and expanding her biographical view of me. So what good is my partial privacy doing here?

This partial privacy thing goes further. I have some things which are private to some groups of people but not others. For example, my personal social life is mostly private to my work colleagues, but obviously and necessarily not private to my personal social circle. This blog, even, is not private to my readers (obviously), but I generally don’t share that it exists with my real-life acquaintances. In these cases, it feels like the way I use the term privacy has more to do with the “information control” model Pressly critiques rather than the “oblivion” model he advocates.

Possible responses to these objections I can see are that Pressly may simply say in some of these cases I’m making a conceptual error. My blog isn’t private from my work colleagues — rather, it’s a secret. Maybe, but that does seem to capture the relation of my social life to my work colleagues. My social life isn’t really secret; it’s just not shared. Perhaps a more promising response is to reframe oblivion not as a general state but as a relation between individuals and/or groups. My wife and I don’t have oblivion about each other when we’re alone together, but the rest of the world is oblivious to us. This has potential, but it does seem to have more in common with the “information control” model than perhaps Pressly would like, since now privacy becomes not about saying “yes” or “no” to certain bits of info being shared about us with different people, but “yes” or “no” about whether people will be oblivious about us in different contexts.

Anyway, this post is getting long enough. It’s a good book, plenty to think about and sharpen one’s ideas about what privacy is and what it’s good for. As Pressly mentions at several points, there is a significant philosophical literature on privacy, so it wouldn’t be wise to base all one’s ideas of privacy on this one book. But this is as good a place to start as any, and I did find real value in the concept of oblivion even if I’m not convinced it provides an exhaustive account of what privacy does for us.

I totally am though. ↩︎

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Weekly digest 61

theTangentSpace — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 22:19:28 GMT

Didn’t have the metaphorical bandwidth to post last week, but here we are again.

Happenings

Met up with an old friend from Liverpool and his new (to me) partner. It was a lovely day; despite having barely spoken a word for years we got on very well and had plenty to chat about still.
Bit of gardening in the sun.
Mr One still not giving us the best sleep.
Finally got the last parents’ evening of the year out of the way. It was the nice one, too — my best class, very short meetings (“your kid is excellent, have a nice evening!”).
Had a fun chat with my sister (all around legend and avid reader of the Tangent Space), in which she sent me a sequence of men’s fashion photos to rate and discuss, to help me figure out what clothes I even like these days (I need to update my wardrobe a bit…).

Links

Probably most readers here are now familiar with Bubbles, but the my IRL folks who read aren’t deep into the new old cool world of blogging and won’t have seen it yet. It’s a website that is a bit like Reddit except all the posts are automatically aggregated from thousands of small independent personal sites. You vote on the ones you like, and can comment. This is huge for blog discovery, I’m already finding plenty of posts I like.
Swedish Library accidentally stayed open and everything was fine
Budget friendly tech isn’t what it used to be. This post about what Apple nerds consider “budget” resonated with me because I was looking for a new bag this week and reading/watching lots of bag reviews. The EDC community^[1] is also significantly inflating the expectation of what a “budget” bag is — which seems to be anything below £150 (!). Also, the markup on adding a few more inches of fabric to get a roomier version of the same bag is insane (like £70 price difference sometimes).^[2] Anyway, I bought a “budget” bag on the second-hand market and still thought it was quite expensive.
If you’ve been on Bubbles, you’ll already have seen Your Blog Is A Radio Station but it’s a good post in the “blogger blogs about why blogging is cool” genre.
Why Does Everyone Think 1984 Agrees With Them?. Jacob Geller with another banger.

Playing

Still happily chugging along with Chrono Trigger. I got my first game over, which since it was against the game’s final boss (?) triggered one of the the game’s several endings — in this case, the bad one: “But… the future refused to change”.

I also managed to get what seems to be a reasonably playable version of Morrowind to work on my Miyoo Flip. This was pretty delightful, as I had to go into the loft to dig out the old Windows CD-Roms for the game, use an external optical drive plus the open source engine OpenMW to install the game on my laptop (I have done this before a few years ago on a previous Linux laptop), then copy the game files onto the SD card of my Miyoo Flip, which is also running OpenMW. Something about installing a CD-Rom I’d bought in the mid 00s onto a 2025 budget handheld the size of a GameBoy SP really pleased me. Also, Morrowind is one of my all time favourites.

A few weeks ago I linked to parseword and said I probably wouldn’t be playing it much. Actually, I got really into it. The clue quality is good, and I like that each clue has an Easter egg to uncover by highlighting a particular combination of words.

Reading

Slowly working my way through the last few pages of The Right To Oblivion. I’d like to post about this one, it’s been very interesting.

For normal people, that’s “everyday carry” — imagine a bunch of (mostly) men nerding out about the stuff they put in their pocket/bag each day in order to be “prepared”. They argue about whether you should have one bag for everything or multiple bags for different occasions, ideal bag size, and so on. They tend to fall into two camps: the urban EDCer who carries a laptop, umbrella, and multiple tech charging gadgets, and the other kind, who carries a gun. I say all this flippantly, but also as exactly the sort of person who may one day make a blog post about my own everyday carry. ↩︎
This is similar to how the car industry pushes SUVs because they can charge vastly more cash for not that much more car. ↩︎

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Weekly digest 60

theTangentSpace — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:11:13 GMT

Easter break ends today. What a bummer!

Happenings

Went out to a country park with my family, my parents, and my sister’s family on Easter monday.
I got a Miyoo Flip! This cute little GameBoy Advance SP-inspired console will play any game up to the PS1 era from an SD card. It also can play some more modern games via PortMaster. The first thing I did was install SpruceOS, then remove the thousands of games it comes preloaded with from the card — I find the overwhelming and distracting. I just want to play one game at a time, really.
Went for a picnic + playdate with one of Mr Four’s friends and his mum. It was nice, the weather was like summer.
Visited my in-laws and took them for a walk around the canal near their home.
Had my friend round for a bit. We played games with Mr Four while having a nice chat.
Went into work for a couple of days to tidy my classroom and process old wads of paper (mostly old student work and tests).
Mr One has stopped having night time tantrums, but his bedtime is still dreadful. He fights sleep for 2-3 hours every night and has done for about 3 weeks, which means we don’t get proper evenings to unwind without the kids.
I made pizza. It was pretty good, though one of them turned out too oily — sundried tomato and pesto. The flavours were good though, and I reckon a lot could be mitigated by draining off and absorbing some of the oil with kitchen roll.
Mr Four had his first swimming lesson. He loved it and did very well.

On this site

I wrote a post about Neovim note-taking for the April vim blogging carnival. I also wrote a guide to the sonata form in classical music, complete with examples and an exercise. I hope someone gets something out of it — when I learned about this concept in around 2017 it significantly improved my appreciation of classical music.

Links

It’s Time To Grow Up. If you watch the new Harry Potter or ever buy Harry Potter products, you are putting money in the pocket of one of the world’s most notable billionaire anti-trans activists, who directly funds anti-trans groups and has founded a trans-exclusionary rape crisis centre. Thankfully, it’s a children’s book, and you can live without it.
My favourite 2-player games. I have a couple of these but discovered some more I’m desperate to play now. Tak looks super interesting!
qpwgraph. This is a cool app. For a call this week, I wanted to put my PC’s audio out and microphone through the call. This Qt app is a virtual patchbay for PipeWire where you can just draw connections between audio sources and sinks.
The Snake That Ate Itself. What 100% Claude-generated code means for Claude Code.
Dandelion Honey. My wife and I were talking about making this last year, but we missed the season. It looks fun and tasty, especially as a vegan who doesn’t eat honey.

Playing

I moved Chrono Trigger and my save from my phone over to the Miyoo Flip, where it feels right at home.

Reading

As with last week, disrupted evenings have made keeping up with reading hard. I am behind on the schedule for the reading list I’m doing this year. But I am enjoying the book (The Right To Oblivion by Lowry Pressly), and it is giving me plenty to think about, which is what counts. Essentially, it is answering the question “why is privacy valuable?”. And it rejects the idea that privacy is protecting information that you would not like getting out — that’s secrecy. Rather, privacy is about having spaces in your life where you don’t have to be accountable to anyone or present anything to the world.

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Note-taking with Neovim's obsidian plugin

theTangentSpace — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 22:34:15 GMT

This post is for Hyde’s April vim carnival.

Note-taking apps were all the rage until AI took the tech-influencer-industrial complex by storm with a new vision of computer-assisted cognition. These days the hype around “personal knowledge management” (PKM) — smart notes, second brains, and slip boxes — seems to have died down somewhat. But of course, these apps and methodologies still have their place, and many people still use them (some with AI-assistance).

I don’t really have a PKM system. What I do have is a notes folder with hundreds of notes. A bit of everything really. Recipes, friends’ birthdays, personal journal writings, quotes, lists, and the occasional more “intellectual” note thinking through an idea or argument. Certainly not a system. To write and review these notes, I primarily use Neovim with the obsidian.nvim plugin.

Obsidian needs no introduction in the world of PKM, but if you’re not of that world, it’s a (proprietary) app that helps you build, manage, and review a folder (“vault”) of plain-text notes on your computer. It also lets you create hyperlinks between the notes. Never let anyone convince you Obsidian is more complicated than this. You write notes which are files on your computer, and you can create links between the notes. It also has a good search function to find notes again. Everything else — from its huge plugin ecosystem to the various dogmas of how one should actually organise one’s notes (links only? folders? tags? ID numbers? short notes? essays?) — is purely optional.

You can probably tell I have quite a minimalist approach to Obsidian, and that’s partly because really, I use obsidian.nvim, a plugin for Neovim. The way I describe it is it helps you write plain-text notes (with links) in a format that is compatible with Obsidian. In other words, whether or not you actually use Obsidian doesn’t really matter. But if you ever do, your obsidian.nvim notes will work seamlessly.

There is benefit to this method. Neovim is, well, Neovim. If you are already married to Neovim, then you obviously want to use it to write ~~everything~~ your notes. But you might occasionally want to dip in to the full Obsidian app to access a fancy-schmancy feature or plugin. Or you may want the pleasant formatting of reading notes in Obsidian, but want to jump into Neovim to write or edit. Perhaps you synchronise your notes across multiple devices, and Obsidian may be a more convenient option on some of these (the mobile Obsidian app is literally the desktop app with a more compact UI — I’m actually using it to write this post).

So what is obsidian.nvim like? Pretty good. It doesn’t try to do everything Obsidian does — for example, there is no point in the plugin offering search functionality, because there is already about five popular search plugins for Neovim. But it makes easy the core feature of Obsidian — writing notes and linking between them. When you start typing a link, it attempts to offer suggested completions for the note you’re linking to. If you type a link to a non-existent note then it creates the note. It also lets you insert note templates from the same templates folder as your Obsidian vault (it was originally me who contributed this feature, though none of my original messy code survives). It also implements a “smart action” operation that does the “obvious” thing based on cursor position — follow a link, look up a tag, check a box, fold a heading.

Another advantage to using obsidian.nvim is if you’re using Neovim, you’re already used to extending and scripting Neovim on the fly, so adding extra helper functions to your note-taking workflow is easy. As an example, I added a function that prompts me to pick a folder (first using telescope, now snacks) when I create a new note. Obsidian is also extensible, but it’s more faff and involves npm, and you’d have to learn a whole new API, whereas you already know Neovim’s API, right?

The original plugin by epwalsh is no longer maintained, but the community fork is going strong (it’s also less opinionated now, so if you tried the original but we’re put off by it automatically formatting your notes in certain ways, it’s worth another look). They’re working on a language server to integrate with the plugin too, though I’m not sure what it will be used for.

A final benefit of using obsidian.nvim over Obsidian is a kind of enforced minimalism. Obsidian has many great plugins, but there is also a great temptation for some to try and get it to do everything. Maybe your note-taking app shouldn’t also try to be your calendar or your kanban board. Maybe those pursuits are just distractions. On the other hand, if you use Neovim, you will never get distracted making tweaks to the functionality instead of actually writing… right?

Thank you for subscribing to my RSS feed. If you'd like to get in touch, even if just to say hi, please write to sayhi@thetangent.space. I'll be genuinely delighted to hear from you.

Weekly digest 59

theTangentSpace — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 23:10:09 GMT

I am enjoying my Easter break from teaching very much.

Happenings

Today is Easter Sunday. I spent the day with my family, my parents, and my sister’s family. Super lovely day; our three little ones get a little better at playing with each other every time. I helped my wife design a treasure hunt for the kids to play.
Caught up with a friend on Thursday. I played the board game Clank! for the first time. Cool game! You build a deck that gives you resources to traverse a dungeon looking for treasure, but many actions will make a “Clank!”, putting you at greater risk of being attacked by the dragon.
Nice activities with the kids — Easter cupcake baking, taking them for a swim (Mr One’s first), feeding ducks (again Mr One’s first).
Parents had the littles on Friday night. Wife and I planned to go out to eat, but both felt we had nothing to wear, so we got take-out instead.
Decluttering has also been taking place. Within the last few years our lives have changed a lot — new jobs, moving across the country, and having kids. During that time we held on to a lot of stuff because we just didn’t know what our lives were going to look like. Now we know more what we’re working with, turns out there’s a lot we just don’t need anymore.
Mr One has been sleeping dreadfully. Tantrums before bed, and late-night tantrums. It’s exhausting.

Links

A Potential Termination Event. The global food system is super fragile, despite currently producing abundant food. Failure in one part of the system, such as energy supply, or ecological breakdown, could have catastrophic cascading effects, due to high degrees of capital concentration at various levels within the supply chain. Our politicians aren’t doing much thanks to the lobbying power of these highly concentrated firms.
I’m Kenyan. I Don’t Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me. I’d read that the cadence of chatbot writing resembles the English of formerly colonised peoples because the labour that goes into honing the model’s output is done by workers in the global south. This is a different viewpoint; the Kenyan education system and the way LLMs work produce similar styles because they’re essentially selecting for similar characteristics.
brennan.day. This is one of the best, most active personal sites on the web at the moment. Brennan is a writer who clearly has a lot to say, and he’s doing it from his own personal site rather than using a platform like Substack, which is very cool. Check out his stuff.
writerdeckOS. It’s an operating system that provides tools for writing and nothing else.
Top 20 game stories of all time. A cool list from a creator I follow. Several games I love here, and several that are still on the “to-play” list.

Watching

I watched The Plastic Detox on Netflix, about the worrying effects of microplastics on human health. Seems like one of the paradoxes of modernity. In earlier times, underconsumption was harmful to our health. During the industrial revolution, production was harmful to health. Now in modernity, many aspects of our consumption are harmful to our health.

Playing

Still playing Chrono Trigger emulated on my phone, and the Shadow Of The Colossus remake. I’ve not had much time for these activities because of Mr One’s restlessness in the evenings.

Reading

Same deal. Not had much chance to read due to restless toddler. I have started The Right To Oblivion by Lowry Pressly, and it’s great. This first chapter has been a fascinating exploration of the history of the concept of privacy.

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Weekly digest 58

theTangentSpace — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 23:47:18 GMT

It’s an old-style weekly digest. In the end I didn’t end up liking the “micro-posts-as-digest” format I trialed for a few weeks. The resulting posts were hard to read, and I didn’t like posting on Mastodon and having to consider whether the post would make sense in this context.

Happenings

I’d hoped sickness season would be over, but we all got sick last week, including me.
It’s Easter break now, which will just end up being some much needed recovery I think.
One goal this Easter is to get the record player back up and running. We put it away because we didn’t want little children messing with the player or the discs. But we think we can trust them enough now. The tricky part is we don’t have a proper hifi cabinet, so it’s trying to find a place to house it for now.
I started teaching my child chess today. At the moment we’re just playing pawns vs pawns. He’s never played a strategy game before in his life (he’s 4), so there’s a lot of new concepts even with just pawns on the board.

Links

parseword.com. The new game from the creator of Wordle. It’s basically a cryptic crossword clue, but you have to actually parse the clue by clicking on each word or group and performing the required mutation until you land on the answer. I’m undecided as to whether this is more or less difficult than just solving the clue in your head. An alternative to minutecryptic.com, anyway.
V-Rally 3 on the Game Boy Advance Smokes DLSS 5 on X2 5090s. DLSS is essentially replacing every frame of a game with an AI-rendered frame, in real time. It looks weird and uncanny, and not as pleasing as the work of a skilled human graphic artist, as this video demonstrates with the example of V-rally 3 on the GBA.
Linkdump No 100 from Andreas at 82mhz. A milestone for his link collection series.

Watching

I watched Into The Spiderverse while I was sick. It was pretty cool.

Playing

Still playing Chrono Trigger emulated on my phone. I’m also playing through Shadow Of The Colossus (2018, remake of 2005). I can see why the original had such an impact.

Reading

I fell behind on my online book-club reading while sick. Just didn’t have the energy. But I wasn’t mad about our current book anyway, so I’ve just picked up next month’s with The Right To Oblivion by Lowry Pressly.

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Changing tastes in games

theTangentSpace — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 21:28:44 GMT

Inspired by Brainbaking and JoelChrono, I’ve been making my own top 25 games post, writing a few notes on why I love each game so much. It’s tough to choose my favourite games — let alone rank them — but I’m enjoying it; I’ve played and loved games all my life. But’s been interesting to see how my tastes have changed as I’ve got older.

The first and most surface-level change is the amount of time I have for (most) games. This happens to a lot of gamers as they get older and have more responsibilities. Games can be one of the most time-intensive media, and playtime is often considered a selling point, a sign of value-for-money. But this is based on the assumption that the transaction simply an exchange of cash for minutes of pleasure.

John Stuart Mill characterised pleasures as being either “higher”, or “lower”, with higher pleasures being intellectually and morally satisfying, and lower pleasures merely feeling good. For Mill, these pleasures are different in kind. While both have value, the higher pleasures have more value, and such a kind of value as to not even be commensurable with lower pleasure — essentially, you can’t substitute a night at the opera with a sufficiently large amount of cocaine.

It’s fair to say games span the range of these higher and lower pleasures, but it’s more about how than what you play — the same game may be enjoyed by one person as a higher pleasure and another as a lower pleasure, or even as such by the same person at different times. It feels to me that lower pleasures are increased by duration, but higher pleasures are not. For example, a longer massage is (to a point) more pleasurable than a short massage, but a long poem is not necessarily more intellectually satisfying than a short poem.

This shift toward shorter-playing games points toward games that are higher pleasures for me. Essentially, I want to be able to look back on the (still substantial!) time spent with a game be able to earnestly say it was time well-spent, that I’ve come out of it with some broadened perspective or experience I can reflect on for time to come. Another way to put it is I want to be appreciating the game as much as I am enjoying the dopamine its lights, sounds, and rewards elicit. To me, this generally means games with rich narratives, but doesn’t exclude games where the satisfaction comes from the mechanics and design alone. But we’ll get back to that.

Looking back at my Steam Library, most of the games with a large number of play-hours I can’t honestly say were worth it all. 400 hours on Tales Of Maj’Eyal? That’s 16 days of my life. Did I like the game? Clearly, yes. Do I think it’s worth giving 400 hours of my life to? I could have watched hundreds of movies, read dozens of books, seen friends 100 times, or experienced/learned/created who knows who-knows-what. And no, there’s no deep satisfaction that comes from having experienced this many hours of TOME. It’s merely a fun, well-designed game. TOME is far from the only offending game in this category.

These long-playing obsessions were kind of the norm for me until my mid-20s. These days I’m cautious about games that have the potential to go this way. For example, I did give Slay The Spire a go, but could see it was a recipe for a (hugely compelling) timesuck, so I uninstalled it after a couple of weeks of fun.

A quote of unknown origin, though popularly attributed to 19th century chess-player Paul Morphy, goes

To be able to play chess is the sign of a gentleman.

To be able to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.

No doubt, a love of chess can be a higher pleasure^[1], but there does feel to be some truth to adage. A life devoted to the mastery of chess misses out on many other “higher” pleasures, and it’s not like there is some moral purpose to chess.

Appreciating a game’s mechanics and “game design” can be similar. There can be a great satisfaction in appreciating the design of the game, and understanding how to master its systems and strategy. But as with chess, there comes a point where playing and mastering further doesn’t increase appreciation. I have probably 200-300 hours spread across both Binding Of Isaac games (mostly from 2011-2012). Content creator NorthernLion has thousands of hours, and the top players on Steam apparently have tens of thousands of hours. The Binding of Isaac has a lot of content, and its mechanics are deep. But I do think there comes a point where the uncovering of content and further mastery of the mechanics are not really deepening one’s appreciation and satisfaction for the game. At that point, further play essentially becomes a lower pleasure.

None of this is to say I’m opposed to playing games as a lower pleasure, or that I’m judging people for what they choose to play (although if I’m honest, guy (definitely a guy) who has apparently played 80,000 hours of BoI — I am judging you). All I’m saying is I’m generally no longer willing or able to play games that consume my life, and want the time I spend playing a game to be “well-spent”, and this influences which games I’d consider my favourites^[2], and also influences which games I tend to pick up. These days I go for games with narratives that have something interesting to say that I can follow up with essays or long-form analysis podcasts, or else mechanics that open up new ways of thinking, and absolutely nothing that demands over 100 hours of my time.

Or maybe it’s just that chess is an approved pleasure of the upper classes and I’ve internalised their ideology like a good little prole. ↩︎
Though when the top 25 list eventually materialises, some of these time-sink games from my younger years will have made it in just because they were so significant to me at the time. ↩︎

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