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Inkwell Games bills itself as “Daily puzzles worth thinking about” and that’s a great tagline. Right now they offer two daily puzzles: Stars and Fields. Both are enjoyable but I rank Stars as a bit above Fields but as I get better at understanding the patterns of Fields it’s growing on me each day.

Like the NYT, the puzzles grow in difficulty over the week and don’t feel bad if you miss a day because they’ll let you play any of other the puzzles from that week. I highly recommend Stars as a starter, it’s like Minesweeper meets Sudoku where each row, column, and box has two stars. It seems impossible at first, but over time you get a rhythm for cracking this cryptic.

One feature both Stars and Fields have that might be controversial to puzzle purists is a “Check” button. In practice this acts sort of like a “Guess” button where you’re at a dead end and have a guess, but don’t know for sure. It happens a lot in Fields where you’re staring at a grid of numbers with no clear move. Inkwell even wrote a blog post trying to de-stigmatize looking ahead which I appreciate immensely. The purist part of your brain feels guilty guessing at first, but in some ways it teaches you to trust your gut and intuition over time. I used to always need guesses in Stars and Fields but I’ve finished dozens on both now with zero guesses. That’s improvement and the wrinkles in my brain tingle with progress.

If you’re a fan of daily puzzle games, put these in your routine. The playful aesthetic of Inkwell Games’ games always bring a smile. I’m excited to try their upcoming puzzle Snakes and roll it into my daily routine.

 

Clues By Sam is a daily puzzle game where you get to uncover a criminal conspiracy by following the clues… made by Sam… err… Johannes. It’s a little if-this-then-that logic puzzle where Pam implicates Bob as a criminal and because Bob is a plumber and there’s one innocent plumber then Sally is innocent. It starts simple but overtime but often the clues will feel like they lead to a dead end… but there’s always a way to solve the puzzle. It has a sudoku-like quality to it. Like the NYT crossword the difficulty scales up over the week and is a good way to burn 10 minutes.

Clues by Sam is great. It’s the first game in my daily puzzle routine. It makes me feel like the world’s greatest detective sometimes. Other times it makes me realize I’m not detail-oriented enough to be an investigator. The whole puzzle is a dopamine rush and a pang of sadness hits when I finish the puzzle for there are no more Clues By Sam left to solve that day. I think that’s a good sign of a good game; players wanting to come back. But lucky for me, Clues By Sam is now offering a puzzle pack of 50 puzzles. A nice way to hook people when they’re already addicted.

La Rinconada’s entire economy centers around extracting gold from Mount Ananea. Being so far away from the nearest municipality, the unregulated mining corporations (legal and illegal) are the defacto government. Workers toil under the cachorreo system, mining for 30 days straight without pay and then one day a month they get claim to as much ore as they can haul out on their person. Some prefer this deal, some get assigned to mine empty veins and make no money that month. Women –who aren’t allowed to work in the mines because of a belief they’d curse the mine– must sift and scavenge in the washes of waste rock or near the toxic cyanide and mercury contaminated tailing pools for discarded ore. It’s uncertain work in hazardous conditions. It takes around two to eight metric tons of ore to produce one ring.

La Rinconada is a lawless city. A small police station exists, but they are overrun by the illegal mining corporations and the gangs. In the mines and on dark streets, murders and robberies are a common occurrence. No banks, so people carry all their cash and gold making for easy marks. The gangs traffick humans from Peru, Bolivia, and Columbia then forced them (including minors) into prostitution. It’s generally considered not a safe place. An even harsher reality for those living there permanently.

As expected with limited government services, the water in La Rinconada is not safe to drink and unmanaged waste fills the streets and alleyways. But despite all the challenges it’s still a town where people live. There is a school and there are kids playing soccer in the streets. Women sell wares in shops and offer street meats, cocoa leaves, and warm soup to hungry miners. Grass growing in concrete type of shit. A human spirit.

While the struggle to survive at the top of the world is real for the people of La Rinconada, the town is for me an allegory of what life is like under a libertarian corporatocracy; where unregulated corporations profit from unfair worker wages, where women get cast to the fringes of society, and where organized crime rules the streets. If I described La Rinconada to you under the guise of a mining colony on the Moon, you’d tell me to ease off on the dystopian sci-fi shit. But this is what’s happening on Earth –today– in the town closest to the Moon. It’s possible that this is what mining towns have always been like, but all I see is the invisible hand of unfettered Capitalism and the true cost of gilded ballroom walls.

 

In high school I had the weird, cyclical circumstance of reading Arthur Miller’s The Crucible at least once a year at every grade level. Like Groundhog’s day but set in fictionalized 17th century Salem. While I appreciated the easy grade at the time due to uncoordinated curriculum, reading and acting out The Crucible half a dozen times in those formative years means it left an imprint on my subconscious.

There’s a scene in Act 2 when famous demonologist and witch hunter Reverend John Hale visits protagonist John Proctor. He’s there to shake him down about his poor church attendance and also insinuate his wife is a witch. Proctor defends himself (and his wife) and during his defense makes a big deal about the golden candlesticks in the small, clapboard church (that Proctor put the roof on). The local priest Reverend Samuel Parris –whose bewitched daughter started this whole inquisition– preached about the golden candlesticks for twenty weeks until he got them.

That scene about the candlesticks always stuck out to me. It’s an embodiment of Church’s hypocrisy and materialism which Proctor detests so much that he says “it hurt my prayer.” And Proctor’s right. God doesn’t give a shit about the kind of candlesticks you use. Arguably the pewter ones made by Francis Nurse were a greater act of worship. The Crucible of course is a dramatized tale, but we don’t have to look far for examples of religious figures taking material wealth from the people they’re meant to serve and to paint glamour on top of their image… then casting dispersion on the non-churchgoers and the cabal of “witches” (lebsians, probably) in the woods while your own house is not in order. It’s a morality tale about whose sin is greater.

Everyday now I watch the news and see images like this:

If America were some Pre-Colonial empire I might understand this image. If America was some oil-rich Arabian principality, I might understand this image. But I don’t understand this image. It looks painted on. Imported cheaply.

On the walls are men who (some) through their public service earned that gold border, though they probably wouldn’t care to have it otherwise. Because they understood the job was not for them, it’s for the people. In the foreground is a selfish man who lived a life of fraud, aggrandizing himself at every opportunity, basking in the golden reflections of his fraudulence.

To him this is the height of luxury and power. To me it’s an embarrassment. And in the words of John Proctor, “It hurts my prayer.”

How does Precious Plastic work? Like Project Kamp, they make open source research modules available to help you start a business recycling plastic. They offer guides on building your own machines , creating objects, running a business, and operating a space. There’s even a small marketplace where you can buy injection molds and a library of products for inspiration. It’s almost like a startup in a box but instead of burning GPUs in Iowa to fancy-autocomplete some text, you’re melting garbage into table tops, cups, bowls, phone cases, and other knickknacks. Or you can specialize in making the raw materials (plastic chips, slabs, etc) that others can use to make their dream products. Nice.

The coolest part about Precious Plastic is that it’s a distributed open model that empowers local communities to solve their own plastic problems. My favorite example of this model is this young woman in Indonesia who recycled over 70 tons of plastic in two years while making $200k/yr.

Inspiring. Anyways, setting up a Precious Plastic facility like this is on my tech-exit vision board short list.

When it comes to making decisions on how to grow or what projects to tackle, Project Kamp prioritizes environmental sustainability above nearly all other factors. That work manifests in installing solar panels, water management, repairing old buildings, waste management for dozens of people using outhouses, converting abandoned trailers into housing using recycled materials, and a lot of chopping down mimosa trees (an invasive species that starves out native oaks). It’s encouraging to watch a group of like-minded folks working to build the kind of world they want to live in.

At the time of writing, they’re on Episode #165 and while you don’t have to watch them all (it’s a lot of chopping mimosa trees), I do recommend going back in time a bit to watch the land evolve over time. I dropped in at Season 2 but the quality goes up in Season 3 and can recommend either as a starting point. From the outside looking in, Project Kamp seems like a bunch of sweet people trying hard to build something that lasts. If I was twenty years younger with no kids and still had a back, I’d probably consider applying to stay there.

 

Although I technically own the game and played it once a decade ago; I had a horrible time playing Rust. Other players called me the N-word several times, I died almost instantly, my frame rates were trash, and after three hours I put it down and never played it again. Despite that first-run experience, I’ve spent a lot of time watching Rust videos in the last month.

Rust is like a hyper-realistic version of Minecraft but way more violent. You start naked on a beach with a rock and have to farm resources, craft tools, make clothes, and build shelter. That’s where the similarities to Minecraft stop. In Rust you’re on a single island with up to 200 other people in a player-vs-player Battle Royale-like situation. Over time alliances grow into clans, shelters expand into fortified bases, and the PvP combat escalates as users craft weapons like bows, guns, and rocket launchers. And then after a set period of time, the server wipes itself and deletes everything. The story resets.

Also different than Minecraft, across the map there are a dozen or so “monuments” or zones that players need to go to complete certain tasks. Gameplay-wise, this creates a nice forcing function where players must interact over limited resources to progress in their skill trees. It also creates opportunities for PvP combat and learning a bit more about what your neighbors are doing.

The storytelling

What I’ve found enjoyable about Rust is that it has an element of built-in storytelling. Clan rivalries, limited resources, stealth activities, combat, forced interactions, in-game events, all topped with a challenging progression system. And because the server duration is longer than a human could ever possibly stay awake, you won’t know the state of your game until you log in the next day. Was your base raided while you slept in real life? Drama!

Those are great elements for a story! The somewhat predictable plot and building-tension-conflict loop makes for a good rhythm. The best Rust streamers understand how to extract and bottle this drama and tension. Below are some of my favorite story formats.

Solo Survival

Rush has clans. Sometimes large clans. When a streamer chooses to survive a wipe without teaming up it creates an instant sort of sense of tension.

Base Building

A lot of videos are about building big, impenetrable bases. These have a good engineering vibes… but if I must admit, once you create total security the drama dissipates… that’s why you start picking fights with other clans.

Eco Raids

Eco-raiding is a form of min-maxing resources by breaking into an opponent’s base without using explosives. Spending the time to level-up your skill tree to get explosives is hard and takes forever, so why not find bases where you can break-in using simple tools like hammers, spears, and molotov cocktails. There’s an element of trolling to it, exploiting offline users, but it’s there’s an element of risk to it as well. While crime doesn’t always pay, it’s fun when it does. From a digital security standpoint, it goes to show that almost everyone has an flaw to exploit in their defenses.

Art of Rust

The PvP aspects of Rust seem inevitable, but some players take it beyond the pure game economy min-maxing and make something beautiful in the game spending precious hard-to-get resources on decorative tasks. It becomes a form of ephemeral art, a mono-no-aware. There are actually art community servers that function more like Minecraft’s creative mode, if that’s your thing, but I appreciate the challenge and temporary-ness of doing it in Vanilla Rust.

Is this PvP ASMR chill stream, chat?

I don’t fully understand how PvP games can be chill, but it seems to work. It creates a relaxing ASMR feeling for me. When I played Rust a decade ago I had such an awful stressful time I never wanted to pick the game up again ever in my life, but here I am a decade later watching hours and hours Rust play to wind down my day. And I think it all comes down to Rust’s storytelling. I know big game shops think about this, but if I were creating a big AAA game right now I’d think a lot about how each level, match, or instance tells a cohesive story and how your players could package that up into content, which is then marketing for your game.

The beats Ari makes are incredible and his production skills are going to win him a Grammy some day. It’s all off the dome live in front of people while walking down the street. Ari doesn’t stop at beats. He takes it to the next level and invites strangers to hop on the mic and he tailors the beat to their personal style and preferences. It’s improv. It’s art. It’s music. It’s communion. There’s something pure about the creativity happening.

What I think I like best about ARIatHOME is this: Seeing creative people expressing their gifts gives me hope. I know I’m watching six hour livestreams edited down to a 15 minute supercut, but Ari seems to have no trouble finding people who have talent and can rap. It might be becuase New York is the birthplace of hip-hop, but the city isn’t short of people willing to step up to the mic and drop some bars right there in the middle of the street.

I also love that ARIatHOME reinforces the mythos that New York is a city full of characters. On every block Ari seems to find someone with more personality than I’ve ever seen in my whole life. Bombastic people with big attitudes, next-level fashion, and outrageous rhymes. It’s like everyone in New York City has that main character energy and Ari seems to be able to draw it out and put it on full display.

The world needs less apartment tours and more of this.