Nerd Notes, August
Alright Nerds, so here’s what you’re gonna wanna do: get some friends together - ideally some friends who really dig books - and go to your favorite local bookstore or library - ideally one that’s pretty big, and bonus points if you can find a used bookstore not just because used book stores are cool but also because they tend to have a more varied selection of books, and I swear that matters.
Then, once you’re at the bookstore, you’re gonna wanna break up into pairs or even the occasional group of three.
Then, for each group, one person is going to whip out their mobile device and navigate here, they’re going to click on “Join Session” and then they’re going to put in the code NERDS!
…and you’re off to the races. Send people off to find books, tell their partner the story or explanation for why they’ve chosen that book, and keep drawing cards. The goal is to find the most cards.
If you’re doing this with 1 other person (I’ve been told it’s a good date activity), then play to your heart’s content (or until you run into a bug, which can be a thing that happens).
If you do actually have a group together, agree on a certain amount of time for everyone to play and pick a spot to meet up when the time runs out; I’d recommend 45 minutes-ish. When you all get back together, ask people to share the most surprising, hilarious, or meaningful thing they learned about their partner.
That’s Read Me Like A Book, the card game I’ve been dabbling with since February of this year. We tested it out in the Strand in NYC last month, and there were a few technical hiccups but people really liked the game itself. One participant messaged me a week later to see if I could setup a session for him to play with his kids when they went to their local library, which made me deliriously happy.
Things that might go wrong
Fair warning: it’s still pretty buggy, and every time I test it I discover new bugs. Some things that I think I’ve fixed but might pop up for you:
- the camera capture is finicky sometimes. If it doesn’t work the first time, try again.
- when you draw your second round of cards, sometimes the game logic breaks and forgets that it should increment up the number of cards you can hold after every round.
- right now on untimed rounds (which this one is), there isn’t a way to indicate that you have finished playing…there also isn’t a way to save your cards at the end (coming soon?). If you want to play a timed round, let me know - I can probably figure out how to set one up for you!
Other stuff...
- I'm going to mention this in the upcoming version of Pursuit of Play (which is going to get renamed between now and when I hit the publish button...I'm leaning toward All Played Out), but there's a lot of travel involved in my Grand Plan for the year. I intend to foot the bill for it, but if your company or a friend's company happens to be located in one of those places and wants to fly in someone to run a design sprint or support their team on site with product discovery or prototyping for a generously reduced daily rate then introduce us! The flights will be the single biggest cost in this project, so if I can defray those costs it will go a looooong way.
- A couple things I've been thinking about lately, which I want to develop into something a bit more substantial but are still just connected but kind of nebulous: the technological frontier for AI right now is moving much faster than regulation or legislation could possibly keep up with, so at some point when that movement slows down there's going to be a messy game of catchup that's going to take place. And there's this phenomenon where everyone seems to always want to use the frontier models for everything...and I'm increasingly interested in where older models were perfectly fine. This might be particularly because I still think locally run models are the dream, and getting consumer hardware that runs a model will always lag behind the frontier.
- Two fun reads on this that I've been thinking about a lot:
Ethan Ding
Daron Acemoglu
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