Yesterday I exchanged emails with someone who suggested a topic for a game. It wasn't a bad idea, easily vibecodeable, so I suggested he could do it himself. He declined and then I dedicated one hour to do it. I can't say I was happy with the result, but it gets to a place where you can decide if the prototype is worth refining until you have a good game. In this case my spidey sense tells me there's not enough potential to keep on refining, but I could come home every day, write a couple of prompts as I'm cooking dinner, and create a daily game until I hit something I would actually enjoy playing.
My intention with vibecoding the game was demonstrating to my interlocutor that it was super easy. However, I noticed many gaps that were not salvageable without some knowledge. The moat is crumbling by the day, but some degree of technical knowledge is still required. I'm happy for the moat caving in, but also kinda sad it's taking me—us, so long to notice as to the chasm has narrowed enough to jump through it easily.
Yesterday I sent my cousin his wedding gift (a cash transfer). It may seem like I'm boasting, but he too complained I was too generous with my gift. I feel inadequacy (not regret) at my gesture. My cousin wrote "Don’t be ridiculous, you sent too much money" to which I felt like writing back "You're welcome, asshole", but I simply wrote back that I appreciated them, wished I could be there, yadda yadda. This is a note to myself: accept gifts graciously, big and small, appropriate and inappropriate.
At Govi's wedding I encountered a woman who asked me if I liked my gift. What gift? I asked, "the one from secret santa" she said. Ahhhh I couldn't attend the event because I went walking with my mother, and when I got back V. gave it to me: it was a horrible liquid soap dispenser. The bottom part was roughly spherical and it had a ring around it, kinda like Saturn, but the ring was slightly tilted on one side. I would have thought it came defective from the factory, as it wasn't irregular enough to be an aesthetic choice, it just seemed shoddy.
As I gathered my thoughts and formulated how to reply to her inquiry without hurting her feelings, she said "of course you loved it, we can't say we disliked a gift" and I stopped my thought process in the act. I interpreted her phrase as if she was asking me lie. I smiled and said: "Oh I loved it, very unique piece, it's in my bathroom right now, I even threw away the old one I had". She gleamed at my lie. The truth is I could only behold it about five minutes before throwing it into the bin. Those five minutes were spent assessing the stability (with a round base!?). I really wondered if was a message, a joke, or the giver really lacked any aesthetic or functional sensibility.
I am usually vocal about disliking gifts. My family is especially terrible at gifting, it gives me PTSD. Since we were kids my mother used to wrap cereal boxes as christmas gifts "so it would look like there were more gifts under the tree". As adults, my mother and my sister would gift me things that they would like for themselves. I will say "are you serious? is this gift for you or for me?", or they will give me something I appreciate but of the lowest quality. Sometimes I wonder about their thought process: "Oh Mark likes wine, but our budget is sufficient for one good bottle. Let's buy him 20 cartons of cheap wine instead".
They have resorted to asking me what I want, and I've replied with an amazon link, to which I received an uglier alternative because they clicked around and got confused. I asked my sister to return it but it sat at her house for months. The next Christmas I told them "really, don't bother, I'll be happier without gifts", but that doesn't happen. Ugh, I'm glad to have something ugly and useful, or beautiful but useless, but never something ugly and useless.
Ah, I see I'm insufferable myself and now I'm at the receiving end of unappreciated gifts. I'll appreciate every gift as a gesture of love, the material side of the gesture is disposable if I don't like it. There is seldom loss in a bad gift.
I used to admire people who got out of bed early for any activity. However, now that it's effortless the admiration has faded into nothingness. The things we can't do or have, we admire or envy. What we can do or buy becomes trivial. Many of the qualities that we have and we take for granted are things other people would covet, and many of the things we admire are perfectly within our reach.