You’re reading the 1st installment of Scarecrow Weekly, where I’ll be sharing interesting things I’ve been doing, thinking, reading, and experiencing lately – in short, not short enough for an article, but something that did make a difference. Each issue of Scarecrow Weekly will be divided into roughly three elements: 🏃 – Some things I’ve been working on lately 🤔 – Books I’ve been reading lately, and bits and pieces of thoughts I’ve been thinking about 📒 – Excerpts from interesting articles, podcasts, and videos 🏃 It was around March/April this year that I contacted Zeee about a game because I wanted to learn about game I contacted Zeee in March/April this year because I wanted to learn about game development, and I got a lot of useful advice, but unfortunately I always procrastinated and never started my first game project. Recently, I received a reply from Zeee, in short, he told me not to worry too much and to make a simple game with paper first! I happened to have the astrological dice I used to learn astrology on my desk, so I used them as a starting point for a simple fill-in-the-blanks game with astrological and cosmic elements (it took about half a day). I organized the rules on Notion. On the weekend, I took advantage of my part-time job to ask my coworkers and some friends to try out the game, and one of my friends, who is particularly fond of board games, said he found it very interesting. After playing the game, I found that the game relies on luck quite a lot, although you can control the situation by “moving the sun and moon” and “playing the hand at the critical moment”, but the room for maneuver is still relatively small. Sometimes the opposing player will take up a dozen squares with two rolls of the dice, but if you are unlucky, you may only have one or two. If it’s just for fun among friends, this kind of randomness is actually quite interesting. One minute the other player is congratulating himself on his extraordinary luck, and the next minute he draws a “Cherry Bomb” …… I found that the “unknown” and “randomness” seem to take up a large part of the game’s fun. Despite the randomness, there are still choices that players can make each turn, such as whether to roll the dice or draw a card, or whether to play a card straight after drawing it or keep it, so at least there’s a strong sense of involvement. (A thought occurs to me: there seem to be a lot of addictive board games designed this way?) There are also obvious shortcomings, such as the fact that a game takes a long time to play, and the constant occupying and dismantling of squares makes it difficult to fill the squares at some point and then adjudicate the end of the game (hence the inclusion of an event card that can adjudicate the end of the game, but conservatively set it up to be rolled to get “Pluto” to end the game, which has minimal impact, I guess) -) Now that I think about it, it doesn’t seem like my friend and I have ever played a full game …… The game itself is hard to end, and adding additional events might end the game unexpectedly, and maybe other mechanics could be added, but it might make the game too complicated – in short It’s a bit hard to grasp. That’s probably the first game I designed, I wonder what you think? 🤔 The Impact of a Second Language When Understanding Concepts Tried to read a couple of books in English this year, the first would be John Walker’s Hacker’s Diet, which is an ebook in English and doesn’t seem to have been published, so you should be able to find the official website by searching directly. The second one is Steal Like An Artist, which doesn’t have many words, the author claims to be a writer who draws, and the content is a bit inspiring. Then I read a book called How To Deal With Idiots, the title of which makes me feel a bit arrogant, but after reading part of it I found the author’s style of language and some of his ideas really interesting. Now I’m reading Atomic Habits, which is the first English book I’ve read on paper. Because it’s on paper, I’ll annotate it with a pen; because it’s in English, I’ll naturally annotate it in English. However, when organizing after reading, I would still write notes in Chinese, and it was while writing notes that I discovered some subtle differences. I have been trying to practice the Feynman Learning Method, that is, to rewrite in my own words what I have read and learned. Since most of the input is in Chinese, when I use the Feynman Method to take notes again, it is inevitable that I will use similar descriptions as the author, and if I realize this and then deliberately change to another way of expression, it seems unnecessary. I found that when I was reading in English and then organizing my notes in Chinese, I was able to organize my own language to elaborate on the ideas in the book in a very natural way. Perhaps, to test whether you really understand a concept, saying it in your own words may not be 100% effective, but if you can say it clearly in another language, then you probably do understand it. How to Deal With Idiots Read an interesting book called How to Deal With Idiots. The author spends a lot of ink rationalizing the idea that ‘thinking someone is just stupid’. Morality seems to think that ‘no one should treat another human being like a douchebag’, and the author points out that this is a double standard – technically, morality is supposed to hold everyone to an equal standard, but by asking people to tolerate douchebags who piss them off, morality is advocating taking a step back from their own behavior and condoning douchebags’ intolerance of their own angry selves. of their own behavior.