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A quick one before I’m away
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 4:40 pm on 6/2/2005
Before I fly up to Portland for the weekend, I want to make a blog post. I am not sure why this fairly inessential item is on my goal list for before I rush out of town, but there it is. I don’t have time to do anything but a quick rundown of what I’ve been thinking about lately; if alla y’all can maybe make notes in the comments about what sorts of things I might pursue to further these lines of thinking, I’d love it a whole lot.
What I’ve been thinking of posting about:
* Lots about the Brian Eno book, including the notion that music is as much as force for keeping people apart as it is for “bringing people together”
* Paul Graham’s essay on startups, ideas for them, and work, vis a vis my own quest to really learn how to work on unpleasant things (or accept that nothing I’m interested in will ever make me successful)
* My God this new Sleater-Kinney record is phenomenal
* The game-design textbook Rules of Play, which A) reads like a textbook, and B) has such a huge amount of meta-talk in its first section, defining this and that and finally defining the word “schema” (so they can tell you that they’re about to define some more things in terms of those things’ essential info, not all the info) that I only just got to the interesting stuff after 80 pages. It seemed utterly like padding until I thought about how Swerdloff and I wrote to each other after graduation that nobody in college, or any time before college, had ever bothered to actually, explicitly teach us any methodologies that would actually help us learn. They just assigned the reading and the papers.
There’s learning by doing, there’s learning by being told, and there’s forms of learning in the middle, but for a class of people I seem to be in, learning works best when it’s nearer the being-told point on the continuum, or in the middle. Nearer the purely-doing axis tends to just piss me off, especially when someone around me is in a position to provide some info that might be helpful. So I became really grateful to Rules of Play at that point, for “padding” itself with meta-stuff that some folks out there probably needed.