Posts

Practice

I’ve been thinking about what it means to practice, or to have a practice, lately. This might be indulgent, but the cool thing about having a blog is that it’s a space to be self-indulgent.

To have a practice can mean many different things. A doctor may have a practice, meaning that they offer their services to people as a business. A band may have a practice, meaning that they have an established time and place where they meet to play music. Law firms could have a practice of wearing suits in order to appear professional and attract clients. At the core of this concept is the idea of repetition. You have a practice by doing something over and over again. I have quite a few practices, and over a lifetime have practiced enough things that there are some practices that I have left to the wayside, like an old coat you leave in the back of the closet. Unlike an old coat, which I may outgrow with time, many of the things that I’ve practiced are things that I can return to whenever I feel the pull. The things I spent so much time practicing when I was younger stay in my mind.

Making Minesweeper

I’ve been thinking about the game Minesweeper lately and decided that I would take a stab at writing the game from scratch. This started out as a relatively straightforward project, but I hit some snags and learned some cool things along the way that I thought would be interesting to write about. If you’re less interested in reading about the development process and more interested in reading the code, go visit the project’s GitHub repository, where you can find all of the code. I put some extra effort in to document the code and write some simple tests, so if you’re comfortable with python it should be pretty easy to follow! If you’re more interested in the story of how this was developed, for whatever reason, continue reading!

What if Things Just Got Better?

We’re in interesting times. Things are changing rapidly, and the response I’ve seen has been an angry and fatalistic doomerism that I find ill-fit to the moment. “Things will get worse before they get better” is a common phrase I’m hearing parroted. It’s a frustrating phrase to hear because of the possibilities it precludes, and the surrender that it implies.

What if things just got better?

I’m not saying everything will get better, or that the current moment is looking optimistic – things are looking bad. I’m saying that, in this moment, we would benefit ourselves to imagine alternative futures. Futures where opportunities arise to improve life with and for the people we are sharing this moment with. What if we’re watching the reorganization of our society and were able to use this moment of profound change to articulate and enact a new vision, one that allows us to accept these changes and push towards a better future? What if the stock market crashing was not the beginning of a depression, but instead the opportunity for our society to move away from corporate and monopoly dominated, market-driven economics and toward something more just and humanistic? What if the dismantling of the federal government wasn’t the end of our society? What if the status quo is a ball in play, and what if the challenge of this moment is to find opportunities to steal the ball? What if we are watching the final pages of the capitalist era playing out in real time? This is a moment that begs us to decide what’s next.