Thank you for writing this. I liked the opinions on the books I was already familiar with, and it’s given me some ideas for future reads.

The invisible pink unicorn is the traditional atheist approach.

I loved VVVVVV. It was such a satisfying game.

Zeronet worked pretty similarly to how op describes. It was really clunky and barely usable when I checked out out, years ago. I thought it been abandoned. It turns out, relying on household grade internet upload speeds and having data spread across hundreds of peers that needs to be hashed and added to as people post is kind of inefficient.

The battle system and the bad desync issues on any multiplayer game longer than short-medium.

We definitely had those too. Shorter games were pretty doable, and to be honest all we had time for anyway.

I really liked the first one, despite its flaws. My cousin and I played hours of it. Excited to see what comes next.

The books Walkaway (Cory Doctorow) and Accelerando (Charles Stross) both give me nostalgia for a time when the future seemed like an exciting challenge instead of an unbearable one.

I don’t think that’s really possible. I saw what happened when twitter users started trying Mastodon. There was a ton of confusion, and almost none of it was about terminology. The confusion was stuff like “Why doesn’t search work like Twitter’s” or “I can’t see this person’s posts”. Trying to dumb it down only works when the details don’t really matter.