Sunday links

Adding “what if I had a small invitation-only restaurant” to my burn-out bucket list, it’s the logical next step from hosting dinner parties: “Hori is possibly the only restaurant in New York that operates with the Japanese system of ichigensan okotowari — which means first-time diners must be guests of a regular.”

I’ve never played Hollow Knight but this piece on its long-awaited sequel has a quote that perfectly captures the kind of creative process and creative partnership I yearn for: “Ideas turn into something that exist in the game almost immediately before your eyes, and that’s very satisfying. And that allows you to go off on those tangents and meet weird characters because someone’s off-handedly mentioned a weird character as an idea and the other person’s laughed, and that’s enough”

Weirdly related, to me: Why Did a $10 Billion Startup Let Me Vibe-Code for Them—and Why Did I Love It? There’s something about the way AI yes-ands your ideas and helps to realize half-baked versions of them quickly which makes it tantalizingly close to that sort idealized creative partnership. But lacking an actual creative spark and fundamental humanity, it’s also vexingly, impossibly far {via, also}

I am a die-hard Connections pre-solver because my goal is to get the purple category first, I have a folder full of screenshots that make me seem like a psychopath. So this puzzle engineer’s meditation on pre-solving was a thoroughly enjoyable read as it considered the motivations of different types of players, the puzzle designer’s goal, different approaches to addressing the issue, and the way it intersects with features like leaderboards. The final conclusion - leaderboards with friends, is also something I independently arrived in thinking about possible new features my own word game (because designing anti-cheat mechanisms to prevent fake score submissions seemed so far out of scope as to be on a different planet altogether).

A short post by designer and writer Frank Chimero about his summer sabbatical, Time is On My Side, but which to me gets to deeper truths about life, what we believe is expected of us (often subconsciously), and how that starts to shake loose when we have nothing but the infinite abyss of the present to stare into. When we can quieten our mind, set aside all of the voices, only then can we begin to hear our truest desires. {via}