And for a related rabbit hole where people actually went all the to the bottom, there's of course the full implementation of Tetris in GoL which was nerd-sniped by a CodeGolf challenge

https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build-a-w...

Sometimes you see something that makes you wonder how it is that you get to exist in the same world as people with the drive and intelligence to do truly awesome ( in the original sense) thing like this. I am proud of myself when the compiler works on the first try.

I think it's awesome that they can do this amazing fun esoteric stuff, but at the same time a small part of me thinks maybe they need to be doing something more meaningful in the real world.

This small part is what makes broken people. Whoever reads this, go have fun! :)

You know what? I think I will.

the only thing that's meaningful is having fun, everything else is a waste of time

I wonder, what would that be, that thing that is more meaningful?

I would make the case that, zoomed out far enough, nothing at all is meaningful, so you might as well make beautiful things, and this is a delightfully beautiful thing.