Jenneral HQ

Video Games I Like

I’m not a super hardcore gamer, but I’ve probably played more games than most people you know. I only picked the hobby up at 16 – way too late to develop any sort of intuitive control for any kind of controller or joystick, but games absolutely fascinate me as an art form and a method of storytelling. I keep my eye on the IGF and play my way through the finalists and honourable mentions that look interesting every year, and pick my way through itch.io offerings on an regularish basis as well – although I’ve been playing less in recent years, so these recs are going to be a bit dated. Besides desktop games, I also love my trusty old 3DS 🙂

In games, I most value artistic beauty (I’m particular about art style though and tend to dislike pixel graphics), well written narrative/dialogue, and, well, being fun to play. I don’t enjoy PVP games, and most 1st and 3rd person POV games make me overwhelmed and nauseous.

For those reasons, I suspect my game recs would work well for lots of people as a list of games that you can play together with your girlfriend.

Games are PC unless otherwise marked.

Unitary Advantage Windows: Scale, Schelling Points, and City Size

A simple, wrong model of human settlements is that they have a “tech tree” of amenities. As your population grows, you unlock more of them. Here’s an example with made up numbers:

pop 500: 1 elementary school, 1 convenience store
pop 5000: 1 bank, 1 Tim Hortons
pop 50,000: 1 movie theatre, 1 community centre
pop 500,000: 1 good independent record store, 1 local airport that no one uses
pop 5,000,000: 1 fancypants museum with Greek revival architecture and a wing dedicated to large dinosaur skeleton reconstructions, 1 large amusement park complex

As your settlement grows, the tech you unlock at lower populations proliferate. At a medium city of 500k, you might have 80 cafes, 35 elementary schools, 18 grocery stores, and 7 DMVs (the first one of each amenity being “unlocked” at a lower population, and then increasing every so often as the population grows). One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that there are often benefits of having specifically one of a specific entity, for reasons that rhyme with the concepts of schelling points, natural monopolies, and network effects.

My Apartment Art Commission Process

When I know that I’m going to be moving out from an apartment soon, I commission a digital artist to draw it for me. Then I print it out and I have a cool art piece. If you love your current place but you don’t think you’ll spend the rest of your life there, you should consider doing the same.

Digital artists are much cheaper than I think they should be. I’ve paid artists between $200-$500 CAD for my commissions¹, generally spread across one or two additional housemates. (You should expect to pay more – I limit my own commissions to the common areas since my bedrooms tend to be very plain, and solely used for sleep and other private activities. Also inflation exists.)

You can also consider hiring artists from developing countries if you want your dollar to go further, but I don’t have any advice on how to seek those folks out specifically.

You’ll be looking at around 10 hours of effort on your end, frontloaded but spread out across 2-4 months. I detail my process below.