have you read this article? and more metablogging

go and read this article by alice max, published many years ago, about her story where she conquers a minecraft economy

It is partially what inspired me to take up blogging again, along with my friend Christian Stoltzfus' blog where he chronicles his expatriation to China, and subsequent starting of a family, etc. It's the perfect introduction to realizing that I just want to hear about my friends, that's it. I can't find it at the moment. Oh well.

This article is about a person who 'loves knowable systems'. I especially love this idea because I, myself, also believe that I love knowable systems. I remember as a child, trying to install Ubuntu on my laptop as a 7 year old. It was truthfully, the only exceptional computer thing I did as a kid, but it was enough to get my dad's pride. I assumed this was a good thing, and as such, continued working with computers. I thought it was interesting to think of my laptop not as a tangible item that was just a black box, but rather as something slightly more nuanced. I had no idea just how nuanced this thing was. all i knew at the time was that windows took up some space in it, and i had successfully backed windows into a corner and taken up some of the space with linux

and i never looked back. my laptop was broken from that day on; it never quite worked the same. i remember thinking to myself "why is all this unused space not part of any partition" and adjusted it. i think at the time, i was too naive to understand that the mechanism of paging required some empty space, so the OS could logically split up data allocations. i had no idea about any of this, i just knew that sometimes my laptop would crash when i ran any high memory application (because, when the OS triggered the need to perform a memory swap during 100%+ usage, it caused my entire computer to crash). miraculously, it did not crash at my friend josh grosso's birthday, who i miss very much.

meet the characters. they become our friends.

• Emma - builder queen, friend
• Samantha - market catalyst
• Victoria - scheme architect
• Zel - Zel's Emporium CEO
• Lily - wool producer
• Charlotte - outlaw
• Jill, Frank - speculators

Please, go read the article. These characters are worth knowing. Alice describes a general approach she takes to solving any system, that I think is a helpful framework to do any actual systems thinking through. I like it a lot!

The sneak peek that you've been waiting for - we learn about a story where speculators, producers, market makers, and market forces make a dynamic, living market for wool costs between just a handful of players. It's remarkable how dynamic in-game economies can become, if a player even symbolizes a large market share.

How privileged we are to live in in age where we can model large scale ideas like this, and see them play out in microcosmic, relatively harmless environments.

I want a way to tie this in to the drum I've been banging about the importance of the internet being a complex interconnected web of human information. I think a blog post talking about a blog post is the perfect antidote to a world where Retweeting became very easy. Slacktivism was a buzzword that I remember from college - something describing the phenomenon of people feeling good about themselves and like they were making a difference akin to real-world field workers by just posting on Instagram. Sure, it is good to raise awareness. However, to what extent can we tolerate this self-image dissonance?

Writing this post took a lot out of me. I am a different person for having done it. I am a person closer to being someone I would admire! I considered leaving it as a draft and not doing it. Ultimately, I reasoned that this random blog post about Minecraft economies is meaningful enough to me (at this point, has been almost actualized into my internal 'canon') that I would want anyone who was interested in my person to know that I am interested in things like this.

In the words of one of my closest friends, @Agaard - 'I am interested in a good analysis. I don't care what it's about.' 

Some folks just want to see the world be analyzed, I guess.