1. This Newsletter started out with a serious intention of offering insights and modes of exploration into Character. But after CxD #148 featured capybaras, all I got in response was a deluge of messages asking for more capybaras. In good conscience, I must satisfy the requests of my readership. A certain @patillamonster will no doubt be satisfied.
2. In the last issue, we encountered the premise that we should not fool ourselves, and we are the easiest person to fool. I later found this gem of insight, especially in the context of our political cancer :
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Think you can’t do something? Think you need a big team to do the big thing? Bullshit. Read this profound profile of a regular fellow who had a vision about what a video game should be, and then taught himself everything about making games. It has sold millions of copies and is one of the most delightful thing you’ll ever play.
To appreciate his work, you first have to understand the scale of the task he undertook. Modern video-game development is an absurd thing, an enormous creative endeavor that requires millions of dollars. Publishers employ hundreds of developers, producers, artists, animators, designers, writers, and actors to work punishingly long days for several years at a time, some working on the most minuscule of details to create immersive worlds. There are game artists who draw rocks all day, separate audio designers who record the many different sounds made when you throw those rocks, gameplay designers who determine how much damage those rocks will do when they strike an enemy in the head.
Blockbusters of this scope take a few familiar shapes. Grand Theft Auto, Madden, Call of Duty—guns, sports, more guns. Then there’s Stardew Valley—a humble, intimate farming adventure about the monotony of domestic life, in which you spend dozens of hours parenting cabbages. Eric was a team of one. It took him four and a half years to design, program, animate, draw, compose, record, and write everything in the game, working 12-hour days, seven days a week. His budget was the part-time wage he made as an evening usher at the local stage theater. Games like Minecraft may have paved the way for the democratization of indie-game development, yet despite the tectonic shift in the scene, entirely solo projects like Stardew Valley—financially unviable and creatively overwhelming—are still very rare. And of course they are. Even putting money aside, the demands of making intimate art of this scale are enough to break a person: obsession, isolation, ambition. But as just one man, Eric Barone tested the limits of video-game ambition and unintentionally created something that resonated with an audience of millions.
Read Valley Forged: How One Man Made the Indie Video Game Sensation Stardew Valley
How do you balance focus and drive and intensity, with relaxation, connection, and ease? It’s habitual to become either idle and intimidated and fearful and avoid fulfilling your calling, or obsessive and endlessly goal-oriented so that you’re never in the moment. A balanced character has the wisdom to swim easily in the middle channel of genuine effort and the capacity to integrate nourishment throughout their days.
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I’ve really enjoyed Queen’s Gambit, a wildly imaginative and evocative character study of a woman who was orphaned at a young age and developed serious addictions to help her deal with aloneness and her genius for chess. It’s reminiscent of Mad Men, and eschews easy tropes and clichés.
There is no right way to live: but some ways cause unnecessary hurt and destruction. How healthy and wise are the support systems you depend on? What would happen without them? Recommendation: don’t fall into the trap of easy answers, vilifying your habits; rather, examine them closely and consider how they support your visions of a wild and happy life of freedom and joy. What gives you joy? What stands in the way? Do you need fewer cocktails at night or are you not enjoying enough of them? What does the cocktails-as-support-system metaphor invoke in your life?
5. “As a species, we are very good in acquiring more power, but we are not good at all in translating power into happiness.”
— Yuval Noah Harari
From the brilliant conversation with the author of Sapiens. Listen here.
6. Absolutely delightful interview, including tears of Joy. Thanks for the recommendation, Momma!