3. oct ‘25

🤸 What I’ve been up to: mostly house stuff

Before (furnished by landlord)

After (furnished by us)

🤸 What I’ve been up to: other happenings

• Make with Notion 2025 — our yearly conference — was lots of fun.
• It’s a joy and privilege to have such a dedicated community of people who pay attention to all the features you build and the subtle design details you thought nobody would notice 🙂.
• We also hosted an after-party for the Notion Ambassadors community! (Photos above on the right.)
• Selected talks: Alan Kay x Ivan, Agents at Notion.

• I attended two weddings of some of my favorite people — congrats to Eileen & Trey and Stephen & Erin. ❤️

• I attended the Lighthaven summer conference circuit: Manifest, LessOnline, Summer Camp, Metagames.
• Highlights
• Getting to catch Patrick McKenzie (patio11) for multiple talks. (He recently did a great podcast on writing and journalism institutions with Clara Collier of Asterisk).
• Meeting Emmett Shear, hearing his takes on AI alignment, taste-as-loss-functions, China vs US, and more.
• Game design talk on Patrick’s Parablox (similar content to this recorded talk).
• Reflections
• The most interesting moments at conferences often come from hanging out with speakers after their talks, where they speak extemporaneously to a smaller audience. Sometimes they'll ask, "Anyone from the press here? No? Ok good” before dropping some neat intel.
• I’ve been spending less time attending talks overall and more time just chatting with people nowadays, moving away from the “I paid $$ for this conference and must make every second count!” mentality in favor of “let’s just have a good time and find cool conversations.”
• At Metagames, Patrick Traynor of Patrick’s Parablox discussed how much of the puzzle video game emerged naturally after “discovering” and combining a few mechanics and then just exploring that design space. I really liked this lens of thinking of games as primarily “systems” (rulesets, mechanics) + “packaging” (graphics, music, gameplay levels).
• Patrick’s Parablox combined 2d puzzler + blocks pushing + recursion, and from that design system emerged a world of possibilities. (Video)
• Slay the Spire was the first roguelike deckbuilder that was packaged in an elegant way, and that inspired many more remixes.
→ roguelike + deckbuilder + team + co-op = Across The Obelisk. → roguelike + deckbuilder + poker + multiplier system = Balatro.
• I’d love to make a video & board game one day, and so I’ve started jotting down interesting gameplay systems and mechanics to remix in the future!

“Sometimes I think game design is about finding the interesting corners of the universe where “just do a thing” works. SET works because of its weird and interesting features as a mathematical object. Other times I think the role of the game designer is to point at a random corner of the universe and then just keep saying, “you aren’t looking hard enough” (Frank Lantz, Why I Love SET).

• I signed my fourth angel check: Conduit Labs. Let me know if you know anybody interested in this space of brain-computer augmentation and thought-to-text and happy to make intros. 🙂

• I attended Outsidelands again. Highlight was Anderson Paak & The Free Nationals.

• I watched the Runway AI Film festival. My favorite was Total Pixel Space.

✍️ What I’ve been writing

• I wrote several thousand words of nonsense On philosophy, covering thoughts on my favorite lenses, Kant’s categorial imperative, are we in a simulation, effective altruism, taste, and various other topics.

• I updated Advice for students with a section on using LLMs.

• I wrote On music improvisation as part of a rabbit-hole-a-thon, an event where you spend a few hours researching a topic and forming a talk.

✌️Thanks for reading!