i fear this week's meetup might have an unusually large amount of "guy who is very into theoretical tabletop game design but has never playtested their products which have lovely readable manuals" energy, but i like the topic a lot and am having an unsually hard time killing my darlings :')

It felt productive. My day job (running a policy nonprofit) involves a lot of vibes/reacting to Current Thing and not a great deal of rigorously solving hard problems, and the exercise usefully... crystallized? a vague, vibes-based framework that I follow when I do strategy planning - set timers, generate plans, set probabilities, check surprise, go meta, iterate, etc. It's nice to have that operationalized!

I played the first third or so of this game when it first came out, and haven't touched it since then. We did two rounds of the exercise, interspersed with 30 minutes of playing Baba is You levels the regular way to build up more intuition (most attendees were either new to the game or haven't played it for years). Some people paired up and some people did the exercise individually.

I did Tiny Pond for the first workshop independently, and found it very difficult - despite running through the strategizing and metastrategizing twice, I was still very stuck.

I did The River for the second workshop (after running through the first few levels of Baba is You again). This time I paired up with someone else, and we were able to get to the correct solution after the first round of strategizing.

Thanks for writing this up, my meetup group just ran a meetup on this. I've told the folks here to give their experiences with the workshop here, because we used pen and paper instead of the google doc.

good point! two other low-context meetups happen by default every year, the spring and fall ACX megameetups. I also do try to do a few silly meetups a year that are low context.

I put four questions into the survey that formed a loop.

what omg this is the coolest thing ever. kudos!

...and of course the comfiest things of all are tri blend t shirts, which contain a mix of both polyester and rayon. you can multi track drift poisons!

While true, bamboo rayon also isn't the best for human health or the environment, so it really is a pick your poison kind of deal. Here's a short write up from Patagonia about why they don't use it in their products, and of course a lot of Patagonia's things are polyester or polyester blends. (The terms viscose and rayon are generally interchangeable.)

It doesn't seem obvious to me which is worse between wearing polyester and bamboo rayon, health wise, but I do personally find rayon much more comfy.

1. you'll know if you actually clicked through to the reading 😏
2. no, i meant this metaphorically! srinivasan is fairly outgroup, so it's interesting to see her engage with hanson's tweets.

this is lovely and so sweet <3