media recommendations

These recommendations are not expressions of self, they are not the media I spend the most time thinking about or consuming, they are the media that I expect to have a consistently positive impact on those who take them.

• for the treatment of cynicism
  • The Road (2009 film)
    • Named moloch and cracked its mask
    • The book was good, but the film extracted the main therapeutic effect, refined it, increased the concentration, the fire was made bright enough to be understood and the understanding changes your relationship with the world.
• fonts
  • I like Rubik https://hubertfischer.com/work/type-rubik
• music
  • A strange owl on soundcloud sometimes brings me nice scraps of music, mostly game OST type atmospheres and themes.
  • Mammal Hands, boreal jazz, the cold beauty of old old cycles of striving. It's also worth checking out the other stuff Gondwana is producing.
  • The Fair Rain, McNeill and Heys very nice folk music, the exquisite performance of a deep love of life and history.
• reading
  • The Precipice. An examination of all of the ways the future could be lost
  • Meditations on Moloch. When we find ourselves in self-perpetuating conditions that nobody wants, who is responsible? Moloch is responsible, and we should hate Moloch very much. A study of the spirit of coordination problems
  • Terra Ignota. A historian's saga about a future society's lurking repressed toothed truths, global taboos, hiding realities of power, and as the bubble starts to pop, it just gets juicier and juicier. Describes many delightful sociotechs and names lots of useful concepts that I think will stay with us for a very long time. Your (cultural) descendants are in it, so you'd better read it.
  • The First Domestication. The beautiful story of our friendship with wolves (and then the story of our tragic falling out with them)
  • 1984. Has not expired. A teaching trauma about the existential risk of permanent governance stasis.
• games
  • The Witness was pretty continuously fun in a way that no puzzle game before it had been, and its most difficult challenges managed to explore a type of reasoning that's currently very rare in puzzle games: scientific reasoning, induction, the generation of hypotheses about the basic rules of reality and then using those theories to create solutions.
    • (my project, Crycog is another game in this genre. I'd also recommend the standard card game Eleusis, and the board game Zendo)
  • Portal 2
    • custom levels
      • If you have Portal 2 (and you should, it's great fun at a low cost), you might not know how great some of the community levels are. Even the bad ones are generally fun to mulch, but there are some really exquisite ones, crucial jewels that could not have been surfaced any other way
      • Azorae's levels are all extremely demanding genius
      • If you play coop, this one was something really special: The Order of Things 08
      • When you're ready for something diabolical play my levels
        • Devious Trap Room
        • Lofthall