Naïvité

This week I hosted Emilio, a dear friend from Berlin. Work has been spotty, and instead of attempting any form of deep work, I performed light inconsequential tasks. One of these tasks was to add Open Graph tags to my games.

Peeking into the codebases of these games I cannot help but want to refactor some things which were done haphazardly. In fact, I did tweak some stuff here and there. Some stuff, however, is just not worth it. For example, the color game was written in CoffeeScript, which I don’t want to touch with a ten feet pole, so in order to change anything, I would need to invest a very significant amount of time.

But the pain is not only technical, it is in terms of concepts and interactions. KernType is not a game about kerning, for example, it is a game about letter spacing. A game about kerning would be entirely different. Same thing for Color, the concepts presented would be more accurate if the color wheel presented was perceptually uniform instead of an HSL disc.

But I also know that if I had tried to make a perceptually uniform color disc my project would have stalled completely, because I lacked the technical and theoretical knowledge to do it. There is something in naïvité which allows us to actually begin a journey and complete it with whatever means necessary.

Should Hernán Cortés would have known that he would be facing an empire with an army of 100,000 warriors, he and his 350 soldiers would have surely turned on their backs. Should Columbus know the true size of the earth, he would not have set sail. A degree of ignorance along with a dose of good provenance seems to be necessary to get anything accomplished.

Today I also updated the backers page for June. It’s been a year since I first started collecting donations, and it’s made a significant impact on my bottom line. Thank you for your donations.