I can’t tell if you’re trolling. But if you aren’t, here’s something cool you might enjoy.

If an object has two sides, you can colour each side a different colour. Think of a dinner plate. That has two sides and an edge that goes all the way around. You could use a marker to colour the front side red, stopping anywhere you hit an edge. Then you could use another marker to colour the back side blue, because the backside wouldn’t be coloured yet.

It sounds like I’m explaining this in a dumb, very obvious way. I am. Not because I think anyone reading this is dumb. But because the shape in the photo does something that is not obvious.

Look at the shape above and imagine it without all the keys sticking out. Imagine it is smooth enough to draw on with a marker. It’s pretty easy to see where any edges are. Imagine colouring one side of the shape red, avoiding where the edge is. If you keep colouring as much as you can, without crossing an edge, once you’re done you’ll find that there’s no place left to colour with the blue marker. You’ll have coloured the whole shape. It only has one side and that one side snakes and twists around to be its own backside as well.

If you’re looking to learn more, the shape is called a Möbius strip.

I’ve made a couple of baby blankets and those are so satisfying. And I’ve been making touques for all the kids in my life and those are really fun projects too.

This is fabulous! Making pieces tiny enough for pets must be so satisfying. You can get so many projects finished so quickly.

That’s a great point. I suppose one could tell how healthy the relationship is between developer and publisher by looking at how many dev companies on the roster have created a second great game. Of course, that’s tough even with a great publisher, so maybe that’s not realistic.

Wow. I’ve always trusted games published by Annapurna to be something exciting, new, and high quality. I’m devastated to hear that this publishing company is floundering.

I found a technique that worked well for me. I want to share with you and others, but I don’t want to come across as judging you in anyway. It’s hard to find great candidates of any sort. And I wouldn’t necessarily recommend my technique to every company, because it’s just not reasonable in all cases.

I’ve found that the best way to get a good mix of people hired onto the team is to do more than hope that it happens.

I had to get out to workshops, conferences, and meetups. Local universities had groups that I got in touch with. I had to make connections with the communities that I was looking to hire from. It was a lot of hard work.

But once you’ve developed those connections, candidates roll in with surprising regularity for a long time. After two years I had a team of 10 great devs with a 50/50 split between genders and a huge range of background and cultures. It was the most fun team to work with and we made awesome stuff.

I play a lot of board games. And I own a lot of board games. Not all of my games get played very much, so I like to track each play and over time see which games are forgotten gems or which games I’d be best to just trade away.

In the board game community, you might come across people talking about the “Friendless” metric of their collection. It’s a totally made up measurement, invented by a person with the user name Friendless. In that way, it’s like the Elo rating in chess and other games. I find it’s useful to know when I’m “done” with something that doesn’t really have an end, like playing board games. You can always play one more game.

Friendless hypothesized that if you play a game 10 times, you’ve gained 90% of its remaining utility. So after 10 plays, you consumed 90% of the game play that game provides. After another 10 plays, you’re at 99%. By the time you reach 30 plays, you’ve consumed 99.9% of the game.

You can do the same with games. Maybe the number of plays changes a bit. Maybe it’s not the number of plays, but the number of hours. I would say that games of Civ are like games of any other board game: 10 = 90% utility gained. Matches in COD, probably not the same.

That is incredibly cute! Thanks

I love it!

Well done! I really like the colours and the pattern. Does the bottom hem have a sawtooth kind of edge? Is it made of diamonds or did you fill in the gaps with triangles?

That is super cute! Is it green because sloths sometimes play host to algae?