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Sun May 24 10:00:01 UTC 2026 ======================================== Slept from one to seven. Mostly cloudy. Patchy fog in the morning. Showers likely and a slight chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs around 70. Southwest winds up to 5 mph. Chance of rain 70 percent. Finished reading The Tainted Cup. Good. I'll read the next one. Ran MacBook backup. Started watching season four of True Detective. After Jodie Foster's character turns off the Ferris Bueller DVD (Twist & Shout), John Carpenter's The Thing appears on the shelf of movies hear her head. Continuity error or intentional extra emphasis? Took out trash. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/has-the-new-york-times-become-a-games-company/ > ZIMMERMAN: My teachers in art school were what I would call high modernists. So, they were really all about the pure visual qualities of painting. They would say things like, “There are no ideas in art. Fine art is about line, color, and composition, and that fine art was not about narrative, or even psychology, certainly not making statements about culture. They were all students of Joseph Albers. Joseph Albers was a German artist who came to the United States and taught at Yale University. He wrote this amazing book called Interaction of Color. Imagine that you have two little tall rectangles of color. Let’s say that they were both kind of like a pinkish yellow or something like that. Can you put those two strips on two different backgrounds, two larger rectangles, so that they looked as different as possible? Wow, here it looks like a lemon yellow and there it looks almost a reddish pink. I can’t believe that that’s the same little strip. But because of the relativity of color, the interaction of color, we could make them look very different. So, that was what I was being taught that art was about. Meanwhile, I would organize a carload of art students go up to New York City and people were doing completely nothing to do with what we were studying. This was in the late 80s, early 90s, the AIDS crisis was going on, conceptual art, political art was the rage. I was looking at artists like Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, feminist artists, artists that were critiquing with media, the Guerrilla Girls, doing performance art in the Museum of Modern Art. It was a really exciting time, had nothing to do this high modernism. It was post-modernism. And so, why am I going into all of this? Because as a game designer, today, I actually want to hold onto both of those roots of my heritage. On the one hand, a lot of my career as a game designer, then later as a writer, working with Katie Salen to write Rules of Play, starting to teach game design with Frank Lantz at N.Y.U., and now I’ve been teaching for 30 years, I really was interested in, okay, what would be the line, color, and composition of games? If we were going to talk about the essential formal structures of games, what would they be? What would be the sort of, systems thinking, structural thinking, what’s the relationship between rules that we write and the play that happens, and I think that’s really important to understand what is unique and interesting about this medium or this cultural form in which I’m working. Servings: grains 3/4, vegetables+fruit 5/5, dairy+meat 2/4, nuts+beans 1/0.5 Lunch: Japanese curry Afternoon snack: Dinner:

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