This week: The secularization/Westernization of Buddhism, IDEO, UFOs/UAPs, and #fixingfashion.

Questions on the origins of Buddhist concepts and Is secular Buddhism looked down upon in the Buddhist community?

Very interesting to read these threads on secularized/western Buddhism–which tries to “sanitize” Buddhism of its more fantastical elements. The western presentation often boils down to something like: “life is suffering, suffering is driven by desire, end desire to escape suffering”. Maybe the notion of karma remains because it’s in line with other western folk wisdom (e.g. “what goes around comes around”), but other elements like rebirth or that the Buddha had supernatural insight/powers are dismissed as nonsense. Even what it means to be “enlightened”, as one commenter notes, is different under this secularized view: “Do you imagine that enlightenment just means feeling calm?”. Maybe this kind of secularization or tampering down is a typical course for religions–thinking about secular Jews and most Christians I’ve met don’t believe angels are real–but with Buddhism in particular it has strong colonialist overtones (usually from white people and with some implication that people who do believe in the supernatural elements are backwards/ignorant for doing so–unenlightened in the sense of “the Enlightenment”).

I don’t necessarily mind secular Buddhism as a concept (the problem is more the industry around it and its extractive/appropriative nature) but it’s this attempt to re-write the historical image of the Buddha to conform to those beliefs–such that there exists an “authentic Buddhism” that does away with the elements you don’t like–that is upsetting.

Surviving IDEO, George Aye

I worked at IDEO almost a decade ago–it was my first “real” job out of college, and so I didn’t have any prior office experience to compare things to, but it was clear that there was a lot of kool-aid to drink and a lot of people drank it. I joined as part of a new team that was separate from the company’s typical design consulting work (we were brought into help out with specific technical needs here and there) and so I was fortunate enough to be insulated from a lot of the broader office politics, pettiness, and discrimination outlined in this piece. Given the general lack of self-awareness the place has–e.g. speaking really highly of its practice as world-transformative but basically doing little but intensify capitalism’s entrenchment in all aspects of our lives¹ (I remember quite a bit of the work was basically creating new luxury offerings for financial institutions)–what’s outlined here is sadly not very surprising.

Related to this topic: I recommend “It’s Not You, It’s the System” by Janani Balasubramanian. This piece was helpful for me in deciding whether or not to quit IDEO.

How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously, Gideon Lewis-Kraus

As a kid I liked the idea of extraterrestrial life and thought things like Fermi’s Paradox and the Drake Equation were really fascinating (although the Drake Equation seemed almost arbitrary/impractical). A number of games I played growing up also built stories around aliens, like Dinosaur Safari (aliens going back in time to document dinosaurs) and The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time (an “ancient aliens”-style game set in the mythical cities of Atlantis, El Dorado, and Shangri-La that, though the story was based around aliens, taught quite a bit about the actual ancient cultures these cities were inspired by). But aside from reading about these topics here and there I never got very deep into UFOs and the like. It felt like a cliff’s edge into unsubstantiated and woo conspiracy theories. At the same time, it seemed reasonable that there would be some phenomena that is difficult to explain, and that in itself was interesting without needing to jump to the conclusion of aliens. This article explores that latter space, and also goes over a campaign meant to consign UFOs and an interest in them into the former conspiratorial category (read: “crazy”), effectively making the topic untouchable if you want to be considered legitimate. I’m skeptical that anything really earth-shattering will come out of June’s UAP report but who knows, maybe something interesting will happen.

#fixingfashion videos

A really well-produced and comprehensive series on how to take care of your clothes, repair them, and modify them:

• How to take care of your clothes
• How to upgrade your clothes and keep them longer
• How to repair your clothes

A bunch of my clothing recently got several rips, and repairing them has been a nice way to keep my hands busy on long meetings.

Here’s the most recent repair I did–you can see the smaller yellow patches where I underestimated how large patches actually need to be relative to the size of the hole. The edges of those patches ended up tearing, leading to the substantially larger sashiko patch there now.

Very busy with some other things so not much progress as of late. I’ve mostly been modeling more assets for the world map, which has forced me to think more thoroughly on what each city might look like. I don’t feel totally ready to commit to anything I’ve made yet though.

Modeling and texturing are very time consuming processes, even with the low-res look I’m going for. I’m convinced that 99% of the time spent working on the game will be modeling and texturing.

I find modeling very meditative and enjoyable, though for the map the things I’ve been modeling are much bigger (e.g. buildings and cities), and for some reason that’s a lot more daunting. It might be because larger objects need more details to look convincing. Modeling smaller objects is a lot nicer.

One thing that hasn’t helped is that Blender (2.92) constantly crashes. I’m not sure what the cause is because it doesn’t save a crash log.

Texturing is the slowest part of the process. Building the textures can be time-consuming: collecting the images, processing them and then assembling them into a single texture, editing parts to be seamless, etc. Most if not all of this can’t really be automated or streamlined much further than they already are. One thing I’m trying to keep in mind is that because of the low-res style I can usually get away with low-resolution textures, which makes searching for appropriate ones a lot quicker (in particular: stacking islands together–kind of baffling that this isn’t a part of Blender).

I’m also still learning workflow tips for faster UV editing. Blender’s built-in UV editing tools are also kind of lacking, but I learned of TexTools which has helped make some aspects of it a lot quicker.

I’m also experimenting with how much I want to rely on free 3d models from elsewhere. For the megaflora on the map (see below) I’m using this model of a borage flower (organic shapes are harder for me to do quickly) but processing and editing it to better fit into the game also takes a decent amount of time.

This city, inspired by the Ganden Sumtsenling Monastery that I visited many years ago, was so tedious to texture, mostly because I was selecting and positioning faces in a really clumsy way:

This pagoda was pretty quick to model, mostly because the UV editing is relatively simple, but also because I’d started using TexTools:

I’ll spend some time watching videos on more UV editing tips to see if I can make the process less tedious.

I also wrote a bit about some of the thinking behind the game for the Are.na blog.

This week: This week was very busy so I didn’t have much time to read. In addition to an uptick in work obligations we spent most of our spare time uprooting as much knotweed as we could. Throughout the process I very much appreciated how useful my trowel was, which I used mostly as a lever and not as a shovel. In that spirit I have a few selections of interesting agriculture tools/equipment (for harvest specifically).

This kind of violent mechanical vibration is common, and the idea that the most efficient way to harvest from a tree is to just shake the shit out of it is kind of funny:

For olive trees I’ve also seen these weed-whacker-like devices used:

There’s also this gnarly looking machine:

There’s a whole YouTube microgenre for mechanized harvesters:

Hand tools are way more interesting:

As a bonus, I was shared this CDC document on farmer ergonomics (h/t Eli). It includes not only advice on movements that reduce repetitive stress injuries but also equipment like the berry rake above and this harvest cart:

The last week has mostly been a lot of waffling about game mechanics. Should characters have skills/attributes? Should there be any combat, and if so, what should it be like? Are there any “skill games” (like the hacking mini-games that are so prevalent in games)? I originally threw around the idea of there being these kinds of mini-games for different character skills, like repairing machinery or cooking food.

I’m leaning towards just sticking to the dialogue system as the main “mechanic” and seeing how far I can stretch that. If there’s any combat, it could be interesting to use the dialogue system for that–in games like Final Fantasy 7, combat is basically through a set of menus, which isn’t all that different than the dialogue system I’ve set up. Or combat happening through dialogue choices as skill checks, like in Disco Elysium (h/t Matt). This is just an example–in practice, there will be very little combat if any in the game. Other skill games/mini-games could take place through the dialogue system too. I like this approach because it gives me a constraint (and so makes the task of coming up with mechanics a bit less daunting) and also lets me hone the dialogue system further.

I’m not totally confident in that decision; I have a weird premature regret about not including other mechanics because I’m worried the play experience will feel lacking. At the same time, I know that plenty of games that are basically just dialogue are really, really good. There are a couple of systems, like law and organizational resource management, I want to include in the game, but these don’t necessarily translate into new mechanics (i.e. they can probably be expressed through the dialogue system). I think I just have to stick with this decision for now and be open-minded about something changing later.

One reason I’m hesitant about introducing more mechanics is that the branching narrative will already introduce a lot of complexity, requiring a lot more dialogue and scenes and what not for each branching path. It might be too much as-is: I’ve also spent some time trying to think through the world and narrative to have a better feel for how much branching and different scenes there’ll be, and it’s shaping up to be a lot.

I also started laying out the geography of the world. The various regions are developed according to a few priorities: the aesthetic priority/what feeling that landscape evokes; its implications on the geopolitics and history of the world; how geologically feasible they are. For the latter point everything is inspired by real formations/environments, but the spatial arrangement needs to be feasible, like where should the mountain ranges be? What biomes should be near them?

To help answer these questions I read a bit about how mountains, rivers, and so on work. There were several helpful guides on mountain formation, rivers and watersheds, general advice on the map design and vegetation. This channel has several videos on not only these topics but also on mineral deposits, wind, and more.

This procedural map generator also helped give some base material to shape.

I figure once I have a map it will make sorting out additional details a bit easier. I can ask it questions or think through how the existing factions and cities would maneuver through the world instead of coming up with ideas out of thin air and then trying to make them all fit together. For example: placing one city (Baita City) on a major river that empties out into a bay (Bao Bay) which is the location of another major city. If trade occurs mostly along the coast of the land, then Bao Bay can unilaterally blockade Baita City, so Baita City might want to develop a land route to the other major city. But perhaps the only viable path is expensive or dangerous to develop so Baita City can’t do so until some new technology makes it feasible. But once that happens it dramatically shifts the relationship between Baita City and Bao Bay. Similarly, the character and culture of a settlement is going to be influenced by its geography so this also helps me have a stronger idea of what the cities look and feel like.

Here’s what I have so far:

I need to work out the two smaller islands, fill in more details of the mainland, and add in settlements. I had a pretty good workflow going using Blender’s vertex coloring to paint on different terrain textures, but for some reason the vertex color limit is set to 8 (really annoying), so I have to figure out a different approach now.

This part of the process is such an emotional roller coaster, at times overwhelming from the possibilities/uncertainty, daunting from all the work different decisions imply, frightening because of all the ways things could go wrong, anxiety-inducing from the possibility of foreclosing certain mechanics or world/narrative features by committing to choices, or satisfying when pieces start to click together. In any case, it’s not something that I can rush. The world’s regions, factions, and narrative arc are coming together…but very slowly.

This week: Food and revolution, food and injustice, types of academic papers, and Chinese animated cinema.

The Belly of the Revolution: Agriculture, Energy, and the Future of Communism, Jasper Bernes

Another great essay by Jasper Bernes, partly continuing the line of thought in his essay on logistics with a turn towards questions around agriculture and, to pull on what feels like the main thread, food security (to use an NGO phrase…maybe more accurate to call it “food sovereignty”, but I think that means something slightly different than what’s discussed here). A lot of the essay reinforces what I learned and came to appreciate while researching fertilizer. Its core is the same general problem found everywhere: the means of individual and community survival/reproduction are disjoint spatially and in terms of control. Echoing the essay on logistics, Bernes notes that any revolution which is not totally simultaneous across the planet will–if can’t meet its own needs–have to continue engaging with remaining capitalist countries to a degree of some dependency, and thus remain vulnerable to blockades, embargoes, and the like. If food shortages become an issue, then people become increasingly desperate, making an already risky and frightening project even more so, shifting the calculus for some that they would (probably understandably) rather abandon the revolution for material security. To prevent this happening, the leadership or whatever analogue there is may resort to increasingly violent coercion to prevent that or to pressure food producers to work harder. Thus food independence or food “security” is a necessary condition for any such movement.

Food injustice has deep roots: let’s start with America’s apple pie, Raj Patel

A tour of the history of various foods and their relationship to colonialism, racism, and labor movements. It’s always startling to me how much of food is taken for granted as-is; I still remember how weird it felt to realize that chilis, for example, which feel so foundational to so many culinary traditions, were introduced relatively recently on those traditions’ histories. Or how much violence is part of the history of sweet things–which I can’t help but think of whenever I see the exorbitant amounts of sugar used on baking shows.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a food show that really incorporates these histories. The closest I can think of is the podcast Gastropod (which is fantastic). But nothing like a food travel show or one of the many cooking/food shows on Netflix. I did want to pitch a show tentatively called “Planet Food” which would take this on, with episodes like:

• Bananas: about “banana republics”, the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) and its US-backed war in Guatemala; bananas as a vulnerable monoculture and how synthetic banana flavor is actually from a now-extinct variety.
• Corn: a lot to cover here: its importance as a indigenous crop, now a massive crop for livestock and high fructose corn syrup, the latter which emerged out of constant gluts and need for new corn-based products, which then lets you go into the problem of agricultural overproduction more generally.
• Preservation/fermentation: as alternatives to refrigeration: brines/pickles, fish sauce, curing, smoking, etc.
• Fish: overfishing as a common problem studied in economics, fish farms and those conditions, “chilean sea bass” as a case of food “branding”, the amount of human trafficking in fishing, and the net as a key technology in fishing (I’m forgetting where I originally read this, but I believe it was nylon nets that were a major change in fishing net technology).
• Not sure what the title of this one would be, but about how dissociated fruits/vegetables/etc are from their plants, centering around an exercise where people have to draw the plant that a given fruit/vegetable/etc is from.

h/t Halah

“Types of Paper”

I’m enjoying the “types of paper” meme–industry/field-specific memes are a quick way to get a feel for that industry/fields concerns/values/culture and these are kind of an enhanced version of that. If I wanted to review an unfamiliar field’s research on a topic I would honestly probably want to start with the matching types-of-paper meme to quickly get situated.

New Gods: Nezha Reborn

I watched the new Nezha movie (I actually haven’t seen the first one yet) and I don’t know if I would call it a “good” movie but it did indulge a fantasy of this kind of movie existing when I was growing up. I really only knew about Nezha through Uproar in Heaven/大闹天宫 which I loved growing up. An aside: a few years back I wanted to watch it again and could only find this weird new edited version. The original one wasn’t digitized or something, but after digging I managed to find a fan restoration and now I keep a copy on all my backup drives (it’s also on YouTube). The intro music is still as great as I remember.

Not too long ago I also watched Jiang Ziya by the same studio with my parents. It wasn’t very good–the animation style is great, but we all found the movie too long and very confusing. Interestingly both the first Nezha film and this one are supposed to be anchors in a “Fengshen Cinematic Universe” (i.e. films based on Investiture of the Gods/封神演义). On the animation style: the past Chinese 3d animated films I’d seen all looks like their technology and technique lagged like 5-10 years behind Pixar, but these set of films all have carved out a compelling style that also look (to my untrained eye) technically impressive.

I wonder when/if Chinese cinema will start breaking into either US mainstream or subcultures. Korean cinema has been really high quality for a long time but only as of the past couple years started breaching wider US audiences. Hong Kong cinema has also been a staple of the more art-house film crowd but not much breakthrough to wider US audiences (best I can think of is Infernal Affairs which was “translated” into The Departed). To my knowledge Japanese cinema has also struggled to achieve a larger US audience, even with anime’s now mainstream appeal (if not mainstream, then much wider than when I was growing up). The difference I see with Chinese cinema is the amount of money Chinese studios can throw behind projects and the massive captive audience they have (only a few foreign movies are allowed to screen in China each year). To my knowledge this is why we’ve seen movies like that Jason Statham shark movie with Li Bingbing and I’ve definitely noticed the increase in Tencent and Alibaba logos at the front of many new movies. QQ was also the messenger of choice in one Marvel movie (see below, I can’t remember which one). I wonder if amid rising sinophobia this will become a target of conservative/nationalist backlash or not (something something propaganda).