> I made two free games which were later licensed to be used and remixed in this project.

Seems indeed to be the case. Blow designed (I guess) the mashup and "composition" if you will, but the puzzles themselves have all been designed and licensed by others, so seems the title of the HN submission and article is wrong. Blow didn't design these puzzles at all.

https://bsky.app/profile/draknek.bsky.social/post/3m7qyfe7b7...

If I'd stop consuming stuff from people/organizations I disagree with politically, I literally would have to move into a cave and start my own hunter-collector society from scratch. Is this really how others make decisions in their daily lives?

So naturally if someone has different political beliefs, or has went too "commercial" people suddenly have to change course. Being a good game/book/song won't have anything to do with it

It's not "how I make decisions" but more just something that affects my taste for things.

I personally can’t watch Roman Polanski’s art, the classic and easy example. You can be a great movie producer, pedophilia and rapes are big no-no to me. But not to everyone apparently.

For the non vocal people believing in pseudoscience and fascist propaganda, I can close my eyes more easily. I don’t want to know. I can guess sometimes but I won’t check. As soon as they become vocal, it kills the art for me. I can’t enjoy art from people against my values, me, and my friends and family.

One of the important elements here is the extent to which materially it matters. If I buy a book Lovecraft wrote a hundred years ago the money isn't going to end up diverted to support the "patriots" who want to intimidate my neighbours, whereas when I buy a Harry Potter box set for a relative you can bet that Rowling's share will help fund "Gender Critical" movements trying to make life worse for some of my friends and colleagues...

For books particularly I can totally buy Death of the Author, what I think I read might be entirely different from what the author says they intended, which further nobody can prove is what they actually intended. For that last for example I do not for one moment believe Vernor Vinge that he "Didn't know" what Rabbit is in "Rainbow's End". It's an AI. Maybe Vinge doesn't intend the book as a Singularitarian Catastrophe (you can argue the book thinks it's about avoiding such a catastrophe) but I don't see any way to interpret it where Rabbit isn't a super-human AI.

The latter is the actual Death of the author, the former is usually called Death of the author by people who want to separate themselves from the authors they know they can be judged for supporting.

Also, AIUI Death of the Author is not about whether their beliefs mattered to understand the intended meaning, but instead whether "intended meaning" is even a thing anyway. No need to understand it if it doesn't exist. I prefer in other contexts not to try to guess intentions when I can instead look at the effects and it seems to me our law and practice agree.

Notice for example that while proving attempted murder requires that you wanted the victim to die, murder does not. The fact that they are dead satisfies this aspect of the crime, you aren't innocent of murder just because you didn't intend that the victim would die.

You might be; from the UK's Crown Prosecution Service guidance website[1]: "Involuntary Manslaughter. Where an unlawful killing is done without an intention to kill or to cause grievous bodily harm, the suspect is to be charged with manslaughter not murder.". From Wikipedia[2]: "In English law, manslaughter is a less serious offence than murder."

[1] https://www.cps.gov.uk/prosecution-guidance/homicide-murder-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manslaughter#England_and_Wales

The GBH (Grievous Bodily Harm) is crucial there. The intent only needs to be GBH which is way easier to prove, for example weapon use. The prosecutors don't need to prove intent to kill, the death is evidence that you killed somebody (except in the rare cases they can't produce a corpse, for which they have to do more work)

The death is evidence that you killed somebody, but you can still be "innocent of murder" (and guilty of manslaughter instead. In the UK). That's why there are so many varieties of manslaughter, to determine how culpable the person is, whether they were negligent, whether they were comitting another crime, etc.

It might if the game has a more-than-perfunctory story, because authors often incorporate their political or religious beliefs into their stories. (This is usually a good thing: most of the novels that people love would be nothing if stripped of those themes.)

Everybody knows who the Evil Scott Adams is, because he's such an unrepentant attention starved troll who is notorious not only for making a sock puppet to praise and flatter himself as a genius on internet forums, but for his obsessive unvarnished hateful bigotry, racism ("blacks are a hate group"), misogyny, conspiracy theories, anti-health-care-for-poor-people ideology, and Trump boot licking, and he obsessively infuses his MAGA religion into everything he says and does. Enough said.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the Good Scott Adams, a pioneer of the Adventure game genre, who is devotedly Christian, but in the kind, uplifting, well meaning, Jimmy Carter kind of way. He's a really nice guy, who did lots of quality groundbreaking work!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams_(game_designer)

He didn't infuse his original games in the 70's and 80's with ham fisted Christian themes or any kind of bigotry. And he did a Bible based game in 2013, but it was clearly labeled as such, not trying to sneak religion in through the back door.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Scott_Adams_Adventure_...

https://web.archive.org/web/20130408091921/http://www.msadam...

He showed up to do an AMA on Hacker News:

https://madned.substack.com/p/the-further-text-adventures-of...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29330015

Somebody asked him about his faith, and he sincerely talked about his religion, but didn't evangelize or anything like that, he just talked about himself when asked.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29330732

cenazoic on Nov 24, 2021 | prev | next [–]

To piggyback on MPSimmons’ question, have you played any of the interactive fiction from the 1995 revival on?

I read in your interview that you consider your company Clopas as a ‘company of Christians’, rather than a ‘Christian company’, and that you make games “[which] God can use in His glory to uplift people..”

Can you discuss more about what ‘uplift’ means to you, and how it’s reflected in your games? What’s an example of a non-uplifting game/mechanic?

I’m not a Christian, but I find this idea a fascinating one. My mind first goes to something like RDR2, which while perhaps not uplifting in the traditional sense, reminded me of the awe of natural beauty (or God’s creation, if you prefer). Or do you mean more like - the game somehow inspires the player to be a better person, for various definitions of ‘better’?

Thanks for taking the time today!

ScottAdams on Nov 24, 2021 | parent | next [–]

You raise execellent questions. Thanks for asking!

To me uplift means to leave the player in a better state than when they started.

To bring them closer to God's Glory and plan for their life. To see the Universe and as an incredible place to be and to see Life as an incredible gift from our most awesome and loving Creator.

I am looking forward to an eternity of exploration, discovery and insprired creation due to the agency of my savior and friend Jesus.

ScottAdams on Nov 24, 2021 | parent | prev | next [–]

I did miss your first part of your questions and appologize. In most cases I have not played most IF that is out there. Though Myst stands out as an incredible exception to that. But it of course was mostly non-verbal and delight to eyes.

Part of the reason of not playing many is a reticence to accidentally steal a puzzle idea (via absortion as it were) and the other is simply I have way more fun writing, coding and designing :)

> Additionally, in recent years it has become increasingly clear that Jon’s beliefs/priorities and mine are not aligned. He’s adversarial to people talking about privilege and representation, is dismissive of diversity efforts, has dabbled in covid trutherism, and is pro-MAGA.

Here the post after just for a full picture

> I believe Trump is a self serving authoritarian who's dismantling democracy, trying to make trans people illegal, and wanting to set up concentration camps for immigrants - whereas Jon in February called him "the best President we have had in my entire life".

And I didn't include the whole thing, because it doesn't change my point which is that IMO BSky people are insufferable. A game is released (which in part includes their work if I understand it right) and they can't help themselves and make this about Trump.

I'm sure I'd have the same opinion if I saw what's happening in Truth Social. These echo chambers are not good.

They "can't help" make the conversation about Trump because they have a public image to maintain.

If your image and following are on BSky, then it's not an echo chamber to address the crowd in kind with its nature. That's just good branding.

Yes, but we're here to talk about Jonathan Blow and his new game.

You can argue his politics are relevant. Your opinion on Bluesky, not so much.

But, politics have become much more extreme. Imagine your wife or friends parents being deported. It’s absolutely sensical to not support people that are loud about hurting your loved ones.

Elsewhere in the arstechnica comments you linked

> But, uh... this isn't a "Linus Torvalds is a jerk" sort of situation. "Controversial" undersells just how outlandish and inappropriate Blow's views are. Blow is a full-bore fascist sympathizer who also doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession.

What's going on on these platforms? Is there any serious evidence to the strong claims?

[1]: https://www.redditmedia.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1jh275...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DRT4vNEUIAEJgP3.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DRT4vNAVAAAT8JP.jpg

They might be misguided or misinformed, but the underlying fact is that women are not as well represented in stem. Just because the reason it's more likely to be misogyny rather than any biological inclination, doesn't make it an outrageous statement in my opinion.

It completely neglects the actual history of the field of computing, even just the 20th century, where the field was filled with women.

It’s only once it became a prestigious field that women suddenly developed a “biological” inclination against it.

1) It was way before it became prestigious.

And

2) An explanation of this needs to account for a great and rapid shift in favor of women, as far as proportion-of-practitioners, that was happening at exactly the same time as the opposite shift in programming, in both law and medicine.

I don’t know what the actual reason is but “it got prestigious so women got pushed out” makes no sense to me, based on the timeline of events in full context. It was very much not prestigious in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, certainly far less so than law and medicine at that time (still isn’t as prestigious as those, outside tech circles—you can see it in people’s faces. It’s high-paid but lower-“class” than those, to this day)

Related, I think math went through a similar transition.

Something interesting that I think a lot of younger people don't appreciate: back in the day, unless your name was Hemingway, it was considered unmanly to touch a keyboard. Anything that involved a typewriter or anything else with a keyboard was distaff by definition, just so much secretarial work. Maybe a journalist's job, if you were feeling generous.

Sounds stupid as hell, and it was, but that's a big reason why women played an outsized part in the growth of computing. First as the 'calculators' in WWII, then as Baudot terminals started to take over, as keyboard operators.

Don't make the mistake of assuming they were all Grace Hoppers or Margaret Hamiltons or Adele Goldbergs, because that simply wasn't the case. Many of them might have been, though, in a less stereotype-driven world.

This is "controversial" in that it's a position that is not well supported by evidence and he has repeatedly used his platform in the past to make unsupported claims to the contrary.

Never forget that the social neglect is not exactly healthy, and programming isn't actually that prestigious and externally rewarding, except for maybe the compensation that you can currently earn in some places.

Adding that for example in math or other sciences, we are much closer to gender parity.

edit: speaking industry-wide. of course there are "not all men" type spaces in local communities.

There are a great number of studies of the social aspects of gender differences in work but I don't have a single authoritative source for you.

It is much easier to put in the hours of gaming when you're not repeatedly called for your rape or have someone trying to stalk you or similar aggressive behaviors towards people perceived as female in these spaces. I pretended to be a woman in gaming spaces for some time just to see if these women had a point and the level of harassment I experienced is way more than even my most unmoderated cod xbox days. It's a simple voice modulator in chat.

He clearly has right leaning and libertarian views, and seems to be not very articulate or sensitive in how he discusses them so I can see why people might read into that more than they should maybe.

You can say whatever the hell you want. Or you could spend 3 minutes actually looking at public information to see if you're wrong.

You’re relying on blatant social media mischaracterizations over real actions.

He actually employs women at parity. You feel like this is unwelcoming.

One of those statements is data. The other is fanfic.

Now faced with evidence contrary to your beliefs, you're claiming you didn't say that. When presented with proof, It's ok to just admit that you were wrong.

Anyway, call it "defensive" all you want. It doesn't change the historical thread: You argued, at best, his views made the workplace unwelcoming; the data shows he hires women at parity. You're just backpedaling because the reality didn't match your narrative vibes.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016726812...

Plus: Jon never said it's the "primary" factor, as you claim. He said it's a large factor, that doesn't apply at the individual level, but on average. Which is entirely factual and supported by copious amounts of research.

Just because people like you want to be offended by science, doesn't make it wrong, or controversial.

The very first sentence of the article you linked to says, "Occupational choices remain strongly segregated by gender, for reasons not yet fully understood."

So claiming that its for biological reasons is bullshit. You have no idea whether it is or not. And neither does Blow.

Well, you "haven't read literature on the topic"[1] so maybe leave the speculation at the door or go out and read some literature to cite rather than presenting "ideas [you]'ve picked up that [you] can agree with" as "established"?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46315540

"not fully understood" -> "so we studied it" -> "here's what we found"

Besides that obvious point, the sentence you quoted says "not yet fully understood," not "we have no idea." Those aren't the same thing. We actually have substantial evidence pointing in a clear direction.

- The most egalitarian countries show the largest gaps, not the smallest. - Women exposed to elevated androgens in utero become more things-oriented despite being raised normally as girls. - Male and female monkeys show the same toy preferences we do. Nobody's socializing rhesus monkeys into gender roles. - A 1.28 standard deviation gap in every culture that emerges in infancy and grows as societies get freer is not what socialization looks like.

You're treating "not fully understood" as "both hypotheses are equally supported."

They aren't.

The evidence overwhelmingly favors a substantial biological component. Just because you don't like the implications of that, doesn't make it false.

Seethe harder.

Think harder kid.

You may believe that, but: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9898904/

That study found that when you test 14 monkeys alone in cages where they can’t actually move the toys, you don’t see the same sex differences as when 135 monkeys are tested in social groups with freely movable toys.

The authors themselves say the social context may be necessary for expression. That’s not evidence against biological contribution, but evidence that behavior requires context to manifest.

You don’t disprove hunger by noting that people don’t eat when there’s no food available.

So at that point you're not pointing to a specific confounder, you're basically saying "maybe there's something else." Sure, logically you can always say that. But if the evidence keeps stacking up in one direction and the only reply is "could be something," that's just refusing to update your view.

When the data consistently shows gaps widening as social strictures loosen, and your response is to blame an invisible, unmeasurable "conditioning," you aren't doing science at all. But you are insulating your belief from any possible counter-evidence.

Note that this outcome goes both ways. We can neither confirm that biology is the main driver nor confirm that it isn't. Life is not as certain as you want it to be.

All of the evidence is solidly on one side, so you’ve retreated to “we can neither confirm nor deny.”

I guess that’s progress?

You have to twist logic pretty fucking hard to find a reason for him to put 88 in his username. He's a guy who thinks he's way more clever than he is and gets upset when it gets pointed out to him.

But we live in a world where the least charitable interpretation of anything comes first, so shrug

Does that make a difference? You could levy the exact same argument about the other two in their respective countries in their respective times. Doesn’t make it OK.

Neither was slavery. Was that OK too? And to clarify (though it’s worrying this point needs to be made), I mean morally.

> throwing around certain bad words like fascist

Fascism has a very clear definition. It describes a particular set of behaviours and actions, all of which you can compare to reality and determine if it’s happening or not. It’s an objective word. If anyone is trying to “dismiss” anything, it’s the people pretending it’s subjective because they support its outcome.

Why is that? IMO it's because fascist slogans always tend to drift away from their actual meaning, towards things that are socially acceptable to say.

Back in Hitler's time, Hitler didn't give speeches about "Let's kill all the Jews" - he'd rather give speeches about "Let's clean up Germany" even though he clearly wanted to kill all the Jews. When Hitler says "Let's clean up Germany" and the crowd goes wild, you know they're going wild because they're wild about the idea of killing the Jews, not because they're wild about the idea of mopping the floor. At least I assume you would know that now, with the benefit of hindsight. You'd have to be living under a rock not to. And that's not a euphemism for "Let's kill all the Jews" specifically. It's a general euphemism for all the bad things he wanted to do with all the people. It's not like there's one euphemism for "Let's kill the Jews" and a different euphemism for "Let's gas the Jews" and a different euphemism for "Let's kill the gays". It's more like all the euphemisms point to all of the underlying true thoughts, all at once. One loose region of semantic space points to another loose region of semantic space.

You can see how Hitler could have started out saying what he actually meant, but to avoid scrutiny he'd drift towards more innocuous words, but anyone who's been following his whole campaign would know what was meant. It's a bit like Cockney rhyming slang - the pointer drifts until it has no surface-level relation to the pointee, but just because it's not surface-level obvious, doesn't mean it's unknowable (as people who pretend not to recognize the statements often claim).

And if I'm in Germany in 1932 and I'm following politics, and my friend says "I support cleaning up Germany" I'm going to do a double-take. I'm going to suspect he's not talking about mopping the floor and picking up litter. Though, if I'm in Germany in 1932 and I'm ignoring politics, I might reasonably assume that he is talking about those things and get quite confused why my other friend thinks he's a fascist.

In modern fascist dialogue, "men and women have differences" is a pointer to the semantic space containing statements like "women belong in the kitchen", which itself is pointer to the semantic space containing statements like "women should do what men tell them". You can see how this came about because saying "women should do what men tell them" would be unpopular, then fascists justified it with logic like "well women are biologically submissive and men are biologically dominant" and it over time it got watered down to stuff like "men are biologically different from women"

I of course get where you're coming from, but don't you think it is intellectually dishonest to try and police certain "obviously true statements"? Isn't it similar to banning kitchen knifes because they can be used to kill? Doesn't it put under suspicion a lot of people who are simply following their intellectual curiosity?

I would argue that the ideas you seem to be advertising can lead to similar societal catastrophes as the ones you're trying to prevent from reoccurring.

For sure, the misguided idea that men and women are absolutely, 100% the same, and that any other outcome than some equal distribution between males and females means there must be mysoginy and patriarchy at work (which I don't say you're proclaiming directly), has lead to a lot of real problems in the past decades. And that includes aggressive propaganda against males in general, and against some actually valuable male virtues as well as female virtues, in some circles.

Or if someone says "make America great again", today. I mean who doesn't want America to be great?

From the perspective of a pre-abolitionist society, it evidently was, but that's not a political issue you're gonna have to deal with in 2025. Consider yourself lucky.

> Fascism has a very clear definition.

First of all, that isn't true. Secondly, even if it was true, it wouldn't matter. You are using the word as a though-terminating cliché. That doesn't work in the long run, you'll just get ignored. As a result, you can pat yourself on the back for calling out fascism while all the behaviors and actions that you believe to be fascist are mainstreamed and affecting people's lives. If I was you, I'd be more worried about criticizing those behaviors and actions on their merits (or lack thereof), rather than trying to tie them to some textbook definition fascism and dismissing them wholesale.

I sincerely doubt the slaves would agree with you. Just because one group was economically and societally OK with it, doesn’t make it morally OK.

> but that's not a political issue you're gonna have to deal with in 2025.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century

Again, I doubt the slaves would agree with you.

> Consider yourself lucky.

That’s a really strange comment. What does that mean?

> First of all, that isn't true.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fascism

Seems pretty clear to me.

> You are using the word as a though-terminating cliché.

Of course I’m not, I barely use the word. Pay attention to the person you’re replying to. What you’re doing is putting me in a box of other people you’ve seen online and making a bunch of wrong assumptions. You’re not engaging with the arguments, you’re fighting against a straw man in your imagination.

That is wrong, slaves were happy to be alive instead of killed in most societies. It wasn't "slavery or freedom" it was "slavery or death" in most cases. America is an exception there, but in most areas with slavery it was done to criminals that otherwise would have gotten the death penalty.

Christianity forbade enslaving Christians, so we just killed our criminals for the past thousand years, but before Christianity we practiced slavery as punishment of crime everywhere as people thought that was better than killing them.

I sincerely doubt a vegan would agree that eating meat is OK, but as a society, we agree that eating meat is OK. It might not be OK tomorrow, it might not be OK by some moral standard, but that's besides my point.

> That’s a really strange comment. What does that mean?

It means fighting for abolition then was a much tougher fight than the fight you have today.

> Of course I’m not, I barely use the word.

I may have misinterpreted your position to the effect of "look in the textbook, Trump is a fascist by definition". Indeed, I have seen "other people online" argue to that effect, and they weren't made of straw. If that's not the case, I apologize, but the point stands even if you're not the kind of person it should be aimed at.

...do you not also consider yourself lucky about this? Weird phrasing.

The reason the advice is "do not flip the bozo bit" is because the default is to flip it. It's what people do naturally. If you're running around getting bozo bits flipped, you better know what you're doing.

It may well have been morally OK to most people (see: moral relativism), and since you're implying it wouldn't have been OK to you, it's worth pointing out that you probably wouldn't have done anything about it in the relevant time periods.

If you're an American you don't even need to try that hard to make moral relativism visceral: was the displacement (and far worse) of Native American tribes "OK"? I'd say no, but it isn't morally urgent enough to me or the 99%+ of Americans who are unwilling to pack their bags and return the entirety of two continents to the native descendants.

Am I supposed to take this seriously?

Frankly, if that's all one has to offer, I cannot take anyone's negative opinion on this guy seriously.

Even your pseudoquote here gives me nothing to work with.

"It" doesn't help? Seriously? What am I supposed to make with this vague out of context snippet?

Presenting it through a community called "SubredditDrama" is poisoning the well[1]. I am not going to entertain that smear tactic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well

They have no standards, no oversight, no formal methodology, so naturally it attracts gossip-oriented people who want to stir up drama for fun.

"This is true, the gaming press is super left-wing, but on the other hand they have almost no impact now. I would say that the social pressure keeping "indies" in line mostly comes from them being socially fearful in the normal way. (It doesn't help that all males currently under the age of 40 were raised to be supercucks.)" https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1854708962462982465

(Feb 2025 for context)"Are you kidding? He is the best President we have had in my entire life, by far. It's a miracle. I just hope it doesn't abruptly go bad." https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1887599339037663629

"Interest is not the same as ability. I believe it is likely that the sexes have different interests on average, and that biological factors play a large part in this. This is *NOT REMOTELY* a controversial opinion except on Weird Far Left Twitter 2017." https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DRT4vNEUIAEJgP3.jpg

"There's a weird disconnect in this vaccine mandate debate: many are still pretending that Covid-19 is of natural origin, which gives such mandates a different feel than they otherwise have." https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1447601578123296769

Are we seriously going to pretend that men and women—on average—do not differ in their general interests, and furthermore get mad at people for pointing that out?

And I'm not fond of the current administration, but it's a bit extreme to write someone off as a person for liking who is president. You would be writing off literally half of the entire country, and no, that's not something to feel virtuous about, that's just nonsense.

Frankly I think I would rather have a conversation with someone like him instead of someone who would get disproportionately upset at those points.

There's clearly something about making a successful game (or book) that just makes you completely lose touch with reality after that.

> If a state entity does an oopsie in a lab, then forces its citizens to undergo an experimental treatment because of the oopsie, while suppressing news of side effects, and also denying that the oopsie is anyone's fault ... that's just abusive?

Unfortunately Blow was unwilling to come out and state his position here, relying instead on innuendo, so we have to kind of guess what he was trying to say. I interpret him as making four claims here:

1. The COVID-19 pandemic originated in a lab leak.

2. Some Chinese people were forced to accept experimental vaccinations.

3. The government of the PRC suppressed news of the side effects of the vaccines.

4. The government of the PRC worked to prevent investigations into the cause of the pandemic.

Claim #4 is plainly true; the WHO and several other countries have protested this at great length.

Claim #2 probably depends on your threshold for "experimental" and "forces". https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sinopharm_BIBP_CO... explains that emergency vaccination was available in China in July 02020, and there are plausible claims that Chinese state employees and students traveling abroad were required to take it. This was before results were in from clinical trials, which I think qualifies for most people's definition of "experimental"; the WHO wouldn't add it to its list of authorized emergency vaccines until May of the next year.

Claim #3 seems almost guaranteed to be true, but I don't have direct evidence. The government of the PRC routinely suppresses news, and there are numerous well-documented instances of this happening in connection with COVID, and there are always some subjects in clinical trials of vaccines who have major health problems such as death which may or may not be caused by the vaccine. BBIBP-CorV seems to have been, in the end, pretty safe, but it seems inconceivable that there weren't at least some news of people dying or having terrible health problems after receiving it which were deleted from Weibo or other media ("suppressed"), and that these deletions were carried out because of state policy of the PRC.

Claim #1 seems like the most debatable one, but even that isn't an open-and-shut case. At the time, the lab-leak case was fairly weak, and it certainly hasn't been proven, but it hasn't been disproven either; see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r... for an extensive summary of the debate. Because of the truth of Claim #4 it seems unlikely that it will ever be disproven.

More generally, I find deplorable the polarization on partisan political grounds of fields like puzzle games, genetics, and quantum physics. Artistic development, understanding the world, and extending technology are necessarily collaborative endeavors, and rejecting Blow's games because he criticizes the Chinese government seems akin to refusing to use the Schrödinger equation because Schrödinger sexually victimized teenage girls.

I think you are taking a very charitable view here - the tweet immediately before the one you quote is clearly talking about the US vaccine mandate (not China).

> There's a weird disconnect in this vaccine mandate debate: many are still pretending that Covid-19 is of natural origin, which gives such mandates a different feel than they otherwise have.

Contrary to your assertion, this is not clearly talking about vaccine mandates in any particular place. And the tweet I quoted previously is claiming (or hinting) that the same "state entity" had caused the pandemic and mandated the "experimental treatment". I'm not familiar with any versions of the lab-leak hypothesis that claimed that covid escaped from a US lab, so I don't think it's a reasonable inference that he's talking about the US vaccine mandate.

On the other hand, he seems to have worked pretty hard to avoid clearly stating any of his positions here, so who knows what he really thinks? Or thought?

Their covid vaccine program was voluntary up until they tried to establish a mandate in July of '22 (a lot of commentators seem to be confused on this point, as there are mandates for childhood vaccines in China - but these never extended to covid vaccines)

But please, answer my question: do you disagree that the discourse of Trump's administration, where immigrants and minorities are "the enemy" and every measure is allowed against them, is not fascism?

To quote one of their golden boys Pete Hegseth's book *first* chapter:

> The other side—the Left—is not our friend. We are not “esteemed colleagues,” nor mere political opponents. We are foes. Either we win, or they win—we agree on nothing else.

> The United States has the top economy and military in the world, but our cultural and educational institutions—America’s soul—have succumbed to leftist rot.

Sure, let's examine this. Do you disagree that most organisations are extremely dominated by the left? Something like 90% of people in academia, media, schools, (until recently) corporate leadership, various government institutions etc vote democrat. Do you disagree that in the past 20 years or so, the right has been heavily censored online and in the work place by the left? These are all facts, he is not wrong here. When one side has spent 20 years pushing out the other, taking over institutions, censoring them and calling them fascist/nazi, don't be surprised when they are viewed as the enemy.

I also know exactly what you're thinking, the reasoning you use to justify this:

1. It's not censorship, it's preventing disinformation and "hate". This argument doesn't hold when "disinformation" is political opinions of roughly 50% of the country

2. Academia and institutions lean left because Republicans are simply less intelligent than Democrats. "Truth has a liberal bias". You think kind of arrogance from the left is conductive to a good dialogue and friendly relations?

I am of the opinion that Trump is nowhere near bad enough to choose the latter option; we should preserve democracy I think and allow that the majority of voters are not wrong or "too far" right. Yet a whole lot of people seem to be of the opposite opinion.

It’s like people haven’t even touched a history book sometimes.

You can also look at the parallels to Trump and his continued assault on the democratic norms in the US government. For example assuming powers that are those of Congress, trying to control what states can do via executive order, a thankfully rebuffed attempt at gerrymandering even the Republicans shied away from and so on.

If one believes democracy is important one must also believe that we need checks and balances within government such that democracy is maintained in the face of bad actors. Trump is not the only elected person in government after all and democracy requires free and fair elections to continue when his presidency ends.

Also nothing about a democratic result means that any side needs to be happy about it or that anyone is or should be protected from criticism.

It wasn't, but as I said, if the majority of voters do wish to commit mass murder, that is actually not trivially ignorable.

> You can also look at the parallels to Trump and his continued assault on the democratic norms in the US government. For example assuming powers that are those of Congress, trying to control what states can do via executive order, a thankfully rebuffed attempt at gerrymandering even the Republicans shied away from and so on.

Congress is our representatives. They are philosophically us. The majority of them do not want to impeach Trump for these things. Also the majority of voters reelected Trump knowing how he is. The way things are going is how the people want it (if you believe in democracy and the philosophy of representatives).

> If one believes democracy is important one must also believe that we need checks and balances within government such that democracy is maintained in the face of bad actors. Trump is not the only elected person in government after all and democracy requires free and fair elections to continue when his presidency ends.

There has been absolutely nothing to suggest that democracy, as in the literal sense of voting to determine representation, is at risk from inside the political apparatus. I don't consider Jan6 anything of that sort btw.

> Also nothing about a democratic result means that any side needs to be happy about it or that anyone is or should be protected from criticism

Sure, but the crux of the issue is that the left is going beyond criticism. The vocal left continuously claims that the elected government, and crucially those people who voted for it, are in some outgroup (nazis, fascists, bigots et al) that does not deserve to have democratic power in the country by their very nature. They weild the 'paradox of tolerance' as a bludgeon to disenfranchise half the country. It's unhealthy for democracy, both in itself and because when a group feels under (politically) existential attack they will do heinous things to survive.

The second paragraph in the submitted article has a link to the women claim. I hadn’t seen it before. I have also never personally seen any overt fascist sympathising but then again I don’t follow Blow closely. From what I’ve seen from him, though, doesn’t seem hard to believe. He has very strong opinions on a lot of things he knows little about (and belittles those who disagree with his uninformed opinion), is enamoured with Elon Musk, and is always going on (dismissively, divisively, and dehumanisingly) about “The Left”.

He also has very poor and obvious fallacious arguments filled with bad faith assumptions. He believes in God and (if I recall correctly) his justification was (paraphrasing) “a lot of smart people are not atheists” (weasel words, appeal to authority) then went on to rant about “Reddit atheism” (ad hominem) or whatever. That was on his own stream, by the way, so no chance it was taken out of context when I saw it.

1: https://www.resetera.com/threads/jonathan-blow-the-witness-b...

I even explicitly said I never encountered that claim before. As such, I’m not going to do very stupid armchair expert thing I’m criticising and comment on it. The points I made are on the things I know and reflected on, not on superficial information received three minutes ago.

It _boggles_ my mind that someone might find it controversial that there are on average differences between the sexes in terms of behaviour and interests. And to throw extremely strong accusations like "fascist" for a totally reasonable assumption or observation like that, I don't have words for that, I think those people have been smoking too much pot.

That’s not why they’re calling him fascist, but because of things like being a Trump supporter. You’re conflating arguments.

> Blow is a full-bore fascist sympathizer who also doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession.

The latter part being argued with a post where he merely opines that the sexes have different interests.

The quote does not support your point.

You even decry the lack of factual evidence in the critic’s case, but for some reason said nothing about Blow doing the same first.

That’s what looks silly to me. You’re not treating them the same.

Which I’m not doing.

“It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.”

I'm impressed with how well you summarized my thoughts about him. I vaguely recall having this impression about him after I read his technical article (can't remember the topic) and decided that I don't think I need to read more from someone that comes through as an asshole. This was around the time The Witness came out, I'm quite happy that I didn't have to witness (hah!) what sounds like his further slide into the madness.

I think he is the latest victim of the Notch-Rowling slide into rightism. It happens when a relatively benign conservatives have opinions that get the internet mob riled up, bullies them, cancels them and thus makes them dig deeper into their righitst believes and moving more and more into hating said mob, extending that hate to the people the mob pretends to represent, etc. It's a bit sad really. I hope he'll come out of it some day, but in my experience he doesn't have the humility of accepting when he's wrong.

I say that as someone who him angry myself when I live-commented once in one of his streams where I had a rare disagreement. He did become quite angry at that time, and I was quite startled by that.

Now, my impression is that he's turned down his abrasiveness and developed a much more well meaning stance on things over the years. Recently I've found him more on the side of "here's how most people are doing this, I don't like this, maybe I don't think it's sustainable or how you get good results, but anyway here's what I like to do instead, make of it what you want".

I'm not a US citizen, but being enthusiastic about other people losing their freedom and freedoms is obscene.

There are people in this thread comparing Trump to Hitler. I don't think Trump is the US finest president but those of my family who weren't slaves for the Germans were slaughtered.

The fact that people throw comparisons that are false on some massive scale around and it's completely normalized is an example why losing touch with reality is not only a problem of the right

By extension, anyone who believes these things is a fascist or a nazi. And that gives them the moral rationale to be ok with wanting them imprisoned or k*lled.

Isn't he pretty far on the autistic spectrum? It can be very difficult for that kind of personality to re-evaluate something, once they think they have reached a "logical conclusion".

I'm not making excuses, just agreeing that the chances of him changing seem low.

I don't know, but I doubt it. He's too well adjusted at being social (his hobbies have him interact with people on the regular, and he's streaming on twitch, and doing public speaking at conferences) for me to think that.

Can it really be considered “relatively benign” when an extremely famous public figure is calling for people who disagree with them to be shot?

I can't speak for Blow, but that definitely seems to accurately describe the arc Rowling has taken over the last 7-8 years.

>drives them to support much more extreme views, like what you are describing, that they otherwise might not have.

The view I mentioned was the one that got Notch (one of the public figures mentioned by GP) the reaction from the internet in the first place. A bit disingenuous to say this was a moderate conservative talking point before he got sent spiraling into a far right abyss by an angry progressive mob.

I'm not saying these people were rays of sunshine before, I'm saying they could be talked to without them foaming at the mouth and you face palming at how unhinged they were. I was using the meaning of benign attached to tumors.

I am not an expert either, if that episode occurred later than I remember, it could have been as you say.

I think this is letting people off the hook. We're talking about adults in their 40s and 50s here. When people like that 'suddenly' endorse extreme views it's because they had held them back and feel enabled to say them now, an adult isn't going to become an extremist because someone was mean to them online.

I'm 20 years younger than Blow and even at my age I can tell I'm settled enough psychologically that adopting radically different views would require a lot of internal effort. Views don't exist in a vacuum, to believe radical things you have to radically alter all the other things you belief. I really don't think we should people like this like children without agency.

What a bizarre time we are living in when "men aren't women" and "women should have single-sex spaces and rape crisis centres" are considered extreme views.

Beware anyone who claims to represent "all" of some large diverse group, such as "Women" or "Floridians".

"Women should have single sex spaces" turns out to be used to justify, "It's OK to be hateful and even violent against women in these spaces so long as your excuse is that you believe they're not actually women" which is bullshit.

Years ago, when I wasn't too tired to spend all day and half the night dancing, I went to Bang Face Weekender - basically imagine a huge multi-room club night except for days and days. I keep the socials for it available because hey, it's a nice memory. This sort of "Single sex spaces" bullshit caused a problem for the last-but-one Bang Face because a new-to-this Security outfit somehow decided it's their job to go remove people who in their view weren't women from a toilet for women. These women weren't causing any problems for anybody else, but because they presumably had the wrong genitals or for some other reason were "suspect" to that Security team, Security dragged them out of a toilet cubicle and threw them out of the site. Other clubbers were of course horrified, and the event runners had to apologise to everybody - because regardless of how many X chromosomes you have, or whether you do or don't have a womb, dragging people out of the toilets because you've got weird ideas about what is or isn't a woman is batshit.

As for Bang Face last year, what happened is that security staff kicked a group of males out from the women's toilets. I agree that this isn't an ideal outcome, much better would have been if these men had respected that women's spaces are not for them, and stayed out in the first place. The fact that their removal was treated as some sort of scandal shows how far we've lost sight of the rights of women and girls to have single-sex provisions.

And yet this fact about your belief makes you so uncomfortable that you find yourself trying to pretend that somehow it's the opposite of what you believe.

Seems like the puzzles are novel, but the mechanics are not?

For example in the Witness, which I consider one of the best puzzle games ever made, you get a fairly simple core mechanic, but the game builds upon it in very interesting ways. It feels like a journey of learning and always challenges you in some novel way at each step. There are also several revelations along the way, where you discover new layers on top of the core puzzles.

I would expect that this new game will feature similarly careful design.

It's also not a game that's very demanding from a technical performance perspective, and really has very limited numbers of active entities / animations, so why should I care about his opinions on game architecture or anything else?

And programming is just pressing buttons on a keyboard.

I tried to play it on iOS and found the controls clunky. Interacting with some of the puzzles was difficult with my thumbs in the way.

I think 3D FPS is generally a terrible interface to puzzles. This is 2D though so maybe it will be better.

That said I’ll probably buy this game if it comes out next year.

https://jacklance.github.io/games.html

He also used the same thread to mention his own grant fund while not acknowledging that Thekla (Blow’s company) also has (or had at some point) a similar scheme [1]

Meanwhile the various accusations about Blow’s politics beliefs are mysteriously missing, or at least seem to be large extrapolations from other Twitter comments also not cited. Is there something in the thread I missed?

[1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/thekla-raises-grant-money-for-...

He sort of went mask off during COVID, so I believe it. I also believe Blow is a smart dude and would try to erase that history right before a PR rally for his game.

I'm not even on Twitter but I hear about such events in the gamedev scene for years.

It doesn’t seem untrue, though given the environment at the time justified, but that comment was extrapolated to “He’s a hard-right anti vaxxer”. No citations of my own though, so this is just memory.

Either way, this is why I try to stay off Twitter.

> The funding for underrepresented creators was a condition of my involvement in this project, so doesn't represent his values so much as mine. He was at least willing to do it though, which I'm not sure he would be today. (https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@draknek/115713018435458495)

> ...his company was the public face of that grant, my involvement in it isn't common knowledge. (https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@draknek/115713113473398888)

Seems like this was all sorted out by early 2019 - and nearly 7 years have passed since! Plenty of time for a person to change from somebody you'd be happy to associate with to somebody you might not.

> Some people have mentioned they couldn't tell from this thread whether these games are used with permission. For clarity, yes, we agreed to this in mid 2016 and signed a contract in late 2018/early 2019. (https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@draknek/115707937686651789)

Interesting, and thanks for the sources. I was under the impression that it was the same fund as that announced in 2010 [1] but the date in [2] plus the apparent timeline does align.

"I'm not sure he would be today" is a strawman and just Hazelden's own current views of Blow, but I doubt there's going to be a direct quote (or even better, a new grant from Thekla) to back it up. But yes, 7 years is a long time and the political landscape has changed "somewhat".

[1] http://the-witness.net/news/2010/03/announcing-indie-fund/

[2] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-witness-studio-offering-us...