Thus far, while I have sometimes used my own experiences as examples or perspective for various subjects, nothing I have posted on here was especially personal. Everything was focused on some other concept or person besides myself. But some recent chatter on Twitter inspired me to say a bit more about my name, which has more story and thought behind it than some.

Thorne is my assigned-at-birth first name. Though, as I’ve seen my trans comrades experience dead naming more and more, I’m glad that I took the route that I did, my reason for keeping it was far more simple: I love it. It’s unique. It’s bold and strong. It enables me to make weird puns about Poison power ballads and (as I’ve discovered more recently) being a defender of the DSA.

There are only two problems I’ve ever run into with it. The first has largely blown over and something that honestly, today, if someone used against me, I would laugh at and own: bullies growing up calling me “Horny Thorney.”

The other is that I studied abroad in Japan when I was fifteen. I’m still close with my host family, and we have spent time together since. But my name is not linguistically easy for the native Japanese speaker. The closest katakana approximation effectively equates to “So”-“Oh”-“On” all run into one syllable. Japanese tends to have short, choppy syllables, usually only ending with a consonant sound if it is an “n” or if they are, as is common colloquially, dropping a “u” at the end of a word (e.g. most Japanese people pronounce “desu” as “dess.”)

Given this, I decided to replace my middle dead name…? dead middle name…? whatever you want to call it that would be something easier for them to call me. However, I was concerned that picking something blatantly Japanese would open me up to accusations of being a weaboo or a cultural appropriator.

I have a deep and respectful appreciation for Japanese culture, and part of my username (“enso”) is a reference to a Japanese symbol of Zen Buddhism. My parents are atheists, and I was raised in a non-religious household. This left me in search of something to fill the spiritual void, and studying abroad Japan exposed me the opportunity to go and meditate under the guidance of monks who would slap me with wooden sticks called keisaku if my meditation was not up to par.

That said, I’m still a white girl, and being, say, Thorne Sakura Melcher, as much as I love cherry blossoms, would not feel my place in a number of ways. Naomi offered a balance of being something that was fairly common among white women while still providing them something that is also familiar to Japanese ears.

Melcher is also an assigned-at-birth name, though obviously that is a lot more common with last names of people who a trans. Almost everyone I encounter gets the pronunciation wrong, viewing it as a less ridiculous version of the Bobs Burgers family name, Belcher. However, it is a corrupted form of “Melchior,” which many will recognize as one of the names traditionally associated—but only centuries after the Bible—with the three magi who visited Jesus. The “ch” is a hard “k” sound, making it pronounced like “Melker.”

If you’re still reading to this point, I don’t have any kind of witting concluding statements that brilliantly sum up how everything that went into my name meant something, but thank you for indulging my momentary descent into something far more self-centered. 

The idea that one should “punch up” is not especially controversial. Any long-time fan of YouTube darling h3h3 will hear Ethan Klein refer to the concept on a number of occasions, especially in context of how their rapidly rising fame over the last few years have made it difficult to “punch up” and thus why they have drifted further from the reaction videos that used to be one of their channel’s staple. The Papa—that’s Papa John for the uninitiated—has blessed them with enough self-awareness to understand the importance of this. They also were wrongly targeted by—and fortunately won—a copyright infringement and defamation lawsuit from a creepy predator of a man whose video they dunked.

Ethan, as clever a comedian as he may be, also serves as an example of how the political left/right punching can be misunderstood. But first, it’s important to understand the person he is. Unlike some of the other anti-PC YouTubers, Ethan has expressed time and time again a desire to be progressive. He’s, with some awkwardness but clearly good faith, spoken out on subjects like transgender issues. His wife, Hila, has spoken about how important feminism is to her, which Ethan seems to highly respect.

The problem is that Ethan politicizes what is ultimately more anger than anything—anger that often even comes from a place quite possibly to his right. Ethan mistakes social justice as being a “far left” topic, when in reality it is an active subject among all of the greater left-wing and involves everyone from centrist Clinton worshippers to Anarcho-Communists.

That’s not to say it’s best to view these actions through the lens of “punching right,” though. If they are, it is not much, and they are punching more down than anything. Ethan often recognizes that he is the much maligned “cis white male,” though he does not understand how attacks along those lines are often punching down.

As a queer trans woman myself, I know how much the world can wear you down as society finds new and exciting ways to devalue and dehumanize you for who you are. The anger that “SJWs” manifest is often hard for people who don’t experience that first-hand to understand. That’s not to say that a lot of the most extreme anger coming from people under the banner of social justice is productive. Anger can be channeled into productive ways. Discomfort is productive. Used well, anger can make someone reflect on their actions.

One of the reasons I’m perhaps more patient than most with Ethan is that on some level, even if I cringe at my good faith naivety, I feel I can relate to him. For a period of time, back when I was deeply depressed and desperately trying my darnedest to be happy as a guy, I ran a subreddit focused on the “ShitRedditSays” community that angrily mocked redditors for their displays of bigotry. My perspective was not that they were wrong to do so, but that they were bad progressives, so to speak. However, I was wrong to be so critical. SRS affords people a community where they can punch up viciously without experiencing anyone punching back down at them.

Of course, that is an isolated space for people to express that anger and not a place where that anger regularly interacts with the real world. It’s understandable when someone is met with hostility that they react with defensiveness and attempts (however righteous or not) at justification. Things get messy. However, while some extreme tactics are genuinely deserving of condemnation, it’s important to realize this anger is from desire to “punch up,” and it is crucial to have that awareness when evaluating these sorts of behaviors.

This is the exact reason why the attempts to equivocate stuff like “white people are the fucking worst” with actual racism directed at people of color is so off-base: in the context of directional punching, the former is punching up and the latter is punching down. The key takeaway here is that while social justice can rightly be viewed as a left-wing phenomenon, the nature of identity politics is such that one almost always winds up commenting either “down” to a marginalized group or “up” to the group that is not marginalized.

The irony of all of this misunderstanding, of course, is that the “far left” is attacked for being so “extreme” that it alienates “moderates” (read: people who were mostly going to vote Republican one way or another anyway) and thus is effectively throwing marginalized groups under the bus. This is insincere bullshit coming from neoliberal talking heads designed to stall any meaningful progress, not for marginalized groups but anyone but the ultra-wealthy.

A lot of Ethan’s self-professed beliefs outside of social justice in particular sound somewhat reminiscent of the folks at Chapo Trap House. His aesthetic isn’t far from the typical Dirtbag Leftist either. Given most of the hosts are cis white men, they routinely have to deal with misplaced left-punching criticism under the guise of poorly applied social justice principles. When Ethan maligns the “far left cult of outrage,” he fails to realize that sort of “cultish” behavior is often used to punch left more than to punch right.

This left-punching from largely Democrat-voting people is one of the biggest impediments to the progress that so many people on the Left want to see realized. Something that should be as obvious as guaranteed, quality healthcare for everyone is framed as “too idealistic” in a time when people are pushing for a repeal of Obamacare because of ballooning healthcare costs that something like Medicare For All could ameliorate. Ensuring minimum wage is fair and livable gets turned into “wishing for a pony.”

The dangers of punching left are thus wholly quite different than punching down—they’re macro, they’re societal. Punching left keeps us from moving forward in ways we should as a society to make sure that we should take care of everyone. Punching down in many contexts is little more than bullying that is exploiting the struggle of someone’s lesser place in life against them.

When in doubt, try to interpret something vertically, rather than horizontally, as the immediate negative impact of the latter is far greater. So often when you see someone being “ridiculous,” you’re seeing them at their worst. While it’s great to goof on someone like Peter Daou who is having a meltdown and playing the victim despite having his mediocre WordPress site endorsed by Clinton, the last thing someone posting about how “men are trash” needs is a lecture about how that’s sexist when the reason she is saying so in the first place is likely to be from a lot of punches down from men.

There’s nothing wrong with humor or criticism, but when analyzing your own actions or making decisions, the lens of directional punching provides a useful tool to evaluate the morality of your actions. By focusing on punching up and punching left—and making that upward when there’s any doubt—one has the weight of justice behind their memetic antics.

Much to my chagrin, a tweet that mostly got overlooked at first gained the attention of a cluster of conservative armchair pundits who reveled in the opportunity to make shallow criticisms of my point: that right libertarianism’s biggest flaw is that it overlooks that capitalism itself violates the non-aggression principle by coercing people into participating to survive. Ultimately, I decided to delete the tweet because it was causing more trouble than anything, but this point is important.

Of course, the easiest jab a few used was the fact that I, myself, am an executive of a startup that has benefitted a lot from venture capitalist investment, and thus there is an apparent absurdity or a hypocrisy to my statements. And my experience with the VC world goes even deeper than can be gleaned from my Twitter biography as well. However, this is merely just a beefed up version of the tired old “if you hate capitalism so much, why do you buy things?” By living in a capitalist society, we are inevitably compelled to participate in capitalism—the very point I was making with the tweet—and there is nothing hypocritical or ironic about trying to use capitalism to your advantage despite being a critic of it.

A couple of the responses insinuated that the implication was that this makes “the laws of nature” coercive, implying that this view is too reductivist to be valuable. This is a false equivalency. For starters, it is almost impossible to escape “the system.” You’re still under the jurisdiction of some authority—one that probably levies taxes—and, as many of the participants in the “sovereign citizen movement” have found, it is quite easy to find yourself on the wrong end of the law despite maintaining your non-participation in it. Libertarians love to talk about how taxes are collected via force since you face coercive action from the legal and justice system for non-compliance. However, an eviction or an arrest because you had to steal to even be able to eat is fundamentally the same thing. The condemnation and call out of folks—largely people of color, predictably and depressingly—searching for food in the wake of Harvey shows how deeply rooted this mindset is in our society.

Contrary to the perception of a lot of these AnCap fedora fashion models, nature itself operates in a fundamentally different way. The seminal Ishmael trilogy from Daniel Quinn makes a distinction between two types of societies: “Leavers” and “Takers.” Prehistoric societies are largely the former. All modern civilizations are the latter. In the more naturalistic, hunter-gather Leaver societies, there is no ownership of natural resources, and one does not hoard resources at the expense of others. Takers seek to put the control of resources under lock and key in order to—you guessed it—force participation in Taker society (i.e. capitalism). If a Leaver comes across a fruit tree in the wild, she plucks a piece of fruit to eat and moves on. If a Taker comes across a fruit tree in the wild, he claims it as his own, guards it, and sells the fruit to others. 

A key point of Quinn’s philosophy is that Taker culture inevitably tends to conquer Leaver culture. The history of colonialism is a broken record version of this. The so-called “white man’s burden” is better seen as the greed of the Taker mentality that took root in Europe. That’s not to say Taker culture is wholly white, as arguably some medieval Asian societies such as Japan and China fall into that category as well. But the indigenous people of a substantial part of the world experienced subjugation under the destructive march of Taker culture.

The simplistic take here is that one should seek to be a Leaver. However, that not only simply is not practical in a capitalistic society due to the reasons described above but it also kneecaps one’s power to change the status quo. The ability to survive and thrive outside the system is limited, and thus people are strongly coerced into participation in violation of the nonaggression principle. This is unlikely to change in an Anarchist-Capitalist society given the fact that any system heavily based on capitalism is going to lead to people operating intensely as Takers.

Ultimately, the likely downfall of Taker culture will be the rise of automation and the development of a post-scarcity society. When everything you could ever need is readily and inexpensively available, then the need to keep it under lock and key plummets. The desire to hoard evaporates. This would lead to a more Leaver-like culture akin to the “laws of nature” that it is so easy for people with polisci majors from Wikipedia University to pretend mimics capitalism. The only difference is that nature often does have issues of scarcity, leading to problems such as famine, which is ultimately one of the initial drives towards participation in Taker culture in the first place.

This is also not to lift up some ideal of a “noble savage” or to say that Taker culture is wholly without merit. Leftist commentator Peter Coffin correctly points out in one of his YouTube documentaries that a lot of our technological innovations were fueled by socialist programs, though it is worth noting that those socialist programs still occurred in the context of a Taker society. The cost in human life and suffering is immense, but Taker culture led us to transcend ourselves. “Progressivism” as a broad political ideal likely would not exist without a framework for that progress to occur. However, is a modern human deeply happier than our prehistoric counterparts? Of course, it is impossible to say, but it is without question that we are far more stressed.

Regardless, the crucial thing to appreciate, at least for the near term, is that leveraging capitalism to your benefit is not only necessary to ensure survival but is the only way to gain the means to oppose its abuses. When most resources are allocated through capitalism, and resources are needed to fix the system, working to master the system in its current state beneficial. The startup world is one of the few comparatively accessible places to gain a lot of leverage. Therefore, it is fair to say that capitalism is coercive in a way that violates the non-aggression principle, and it is not ironic or hypocritical to do so while heavily leveraging capitalism to your benefit.

In America, we often idolize the individual. The ideal of success is the “self-made man,” who, through his hard work and talents, pulls himself up by the bootstraps. My use of gendered language there is intentional. However, in practice, careers are usually anything but—teams work together to produce something greater and better than any one individual could produce. This is especially true in software, where coordination and communication are crucial to produce a product that is reliable, consistent, and maintainable. An utter failure to understand this is the core fallacy of the Google Manifesto.

When discussing the subject of diversity, whether in the context of recent events or not, often the focus goes back to the individual: “Shouldn’t you just hire the best person for the job?” The innuendo usually devolves into the notion that the whole process is discriminatory towards quality talent. However, research on the subject suggests that diverse teams lead to better outcomes, both along racial and gendered lines.

The reasons are straightforward. Diversity in talent leads to a greater diversity of ideas as well as criticisms of those ideas. So often the anti-diversity crowd frames the initiatives as a way to silence people and staunch discussion. In practice, the reverse happens: by having the diversity there, a far greater depth of discussion is possible in the first place.

Of course, when certain groups dominate, they are not used to having their ideas challenged. Diversity brings in that challenge—that further need to justify the merits of an idea or approach. While anti-diversity advocates try to frame the discussion around the supposed mediocrity of diversity hires, the entire act, whether subconscious or otherwise, is born out of a fear that their own mediocrity (or fears of mediocrity induced by impostor syndrome) might be elucidated.

The ways we judge merit professionally are also imprecise. The fact that someone has worked prestigious jobs in the past or went to a prestigious school does not necessarily mean that they are a “better” employee than someone who has not. The anti-diversity crowd often clings to these metrics of value and sees encroachment on them as proof of their fallacious arguments that diversity is a blind goal. However it is often by virtue of birth alone that a lot of these more straightforward pathways to success are even possible.

Those pathways themselves seem to be a significant source of the anti-diversity angst. Working at Google comes with prestige. When someone had to overcome even more to work there or to attain whatever significant goal, it is easy to feel as if that lessens the worth of your own success. However, it comes from a privileged fixation on the praise without an empathetic appreciation for the pain that preceded it. This is why so often “diversity hire” is almost used as if it were a slur—it’s a way to undercut the successes of others because they make you feel insecure about your own.

The sort of people who would back the Google Manifesto are nothing more than the adult equivalent of children who knock over someone else’s block tower out of jealousy. Rather than focusing on honing their talents and making sure that they can compete at their best with the people they feel are gunning for their jobs, they viciously attack others. The best individual talent in the world is worthless if they are the type of person to constantly undermine and devalue the work of their colleagues.

The best thing you can do is keep learning and challenging yourself—something that happens more readily in a diverse environment. This extends far beyond how many programming languages you know or how advanced an algorithm you can implement. Learn to be more emotionally aware. Learn how to more effectively communicate. Learn how to see someone’s success through more than a lens of jealousy. This growth and introspection supports not only the best outcome for you but also your company, this industry, and humanity. 

We have reached a point where the debate over whether or not the Trump administration colluded with Russia is over and it is merely a matter of how much. Many are quick to—and already were quick to every time each new tidbit comes out—condemn Glenn Greenwald, for his prior outspoken demands for more proof with the accusations of Russian collusion. Some take it further and imply an involvement. However, Greenwald was right to do so all along and many of the points he brings up are important to consider.

There is something subtle in the moral of The Boy Who Cried Wolf that is often missed. In this case, the boy was lying, but ultimately, whether or not he was lying or mistaken, the same thing would result: the townspeople would not pay attention when the threat was clear and present. The single most helpful thing Trump has gotten in this scandal is continued press attention for months. The Trump-Russia connection transformed from more of a scandal to a meme.

We are at a point as a society where the virality of a meme is far more powerful than rational assessments of a situation. More and more, people get their perspectives from social media over the traditional news, which means the ideas that get shared the most get seen the most and, inevitably, get adopted the most. Whether an idea is actually good is important. But the ideas need to be packaged in ways that can be organically spread.

Though the Trump-Russia scandal is over accusations orders of power worse more than the contents of the Clinton email scandal, it represents a similar memeification of a political scandal that enabled Trump. In this case, by the time the full details of the investigation were released, the Left was largely reduced to the meme you still occasionally today, “But her emails…” Of course, her emails were nothing compared to all of the reasons why Trump should not be president. But by reducing the Left’s perspective on the issue to a meme that is so dismissive, it ensured that the meme—as viral as it was—would actively work against winning over hearts and minds.

This effect is especially important to consider as scandals evolve. Greenwald mounted much of his skepticism during the time when most of the focus was on the hacking of the DNC servers. Article after article talked about the Russian connection to the hacking and the distribution of the documents to WikiLeaks. As Greenwald himself said at the time: it’s a plausible narrative. But it is one that is risky to make without proof.

Had the Left not mounted such a strong offense in response to the Russian hacking accusations, then the information coming out now would resonate more strongly—the scandal would be less memeified in a way that works against new information from resonating with people. Much like with semantic satiation—where repeating the same word over and over makes it feel like nonsense—we experience memetic satiation, where ideas we are exposed to over and over in a short period fail to resonate with us.

Many have said that we live in a “post-truth” era and have talked about the various consequences of it. The reality was we were never in a “truth” era at all, and the process of selling ideas is ultimately only tangential to the quality of the ideas themselves. However, for much of human history, selling “truth” was easy. The conglomeration of mass media happened because people trusted large news organizations. However, that bubble burst. What we are seeing now is better thought of a post-authority era.

This is reflected in the fact that, across the board, we’re seeing a surge of success for candidates on both the Left and Right that are populist and anti-status quo. Though Sanders and Corbyn are politically antithetical to Trump, this unites them, and both they and their supporters have used memes to their advantage. “Make America Great Again!” may be an empty promise versus a Labour’s more accurate “For Many, Not the Few,” but they are both passionate, easily digestible statements that excite people to learn more.

Though many question Greenwald’s political or even national—with some people quick to point out that Greenwald worked with Snowden, as a last resort, wound up in Russia—allegiances, his open-minded, cautious skepticism is exactly what the Left needed. Greenwald was trying to save us from ourselves, and more people should have listened. We are no longer in an era where the establishment can save us from ourselves. We must be the ones to learn how to effectively win the war of ideas.

When Soylent, the nutritionally complete meal replacement, first debuted, I was incredibly skeptical. I love food. A lot. And the idea of devoting any of the allotment of calories I can healthily consume in a given day to something so comparatively bland and boring seemed silly. However, I recently decided to try it and quickly became an enthusiastic convert. I can’t imagine going for long without real food, but I could never imagine doing the same now with Soylent either.

I embarked on this experiment with my girlfriend, and we originally planned to just replace breakfast with Soylent. We ordered two boxes, one of Cacao and one of Nectar. The flavoring in the latter, frankly, is disgusting. The lemon notes to it taste more like Lemon Pledge than something belonging in food. However, Cacao tastes like a creamy bottle of chocolate milk. I have yet to try the other flavors, though I have a box of the new Vanilla caffeinated variety on the way.

When one tries any sort of nutritional or health product, it is important to be mindful of the placebo effect. Expecting something to make you feel better will often make it do just that. However, the first bottle left me feeling energetic and satisfied, so we decided to do a second for lunch that day. We have replaced every single breakfast and lunch since, while still allowing for a rather sizable dinner of “real” food.

The results are profound already. I’m down a few pounds. We have spent a lot less time deciding meals, cooking, cleaning up, etc. Waste for these meals is reduced to a single, recyclable bottle. We have saved a lot of money. Even after heavy dinners like pizza, I found myself not feeling the usual bloated fatigue that often comes from consuming unhealthy food.

In a couple of instances, I drank a bottle of Soylent on a completely empty, audibly growingly stomach, worried that it would not be enough to satisfy me. In both cases, not only did it quell the rumbling of my stomach, but it made me feel psychologically satiated as well. It took over four hours before I even had a substantial appetite again.

But what about my love of food? As much as I’ve come to love Soylent Cacao, it certainly is no perfectly medium-rare steak or hearty bowl of curry rice. However, a few weeks ago, I had a realization that prompted me to reconsider Soylent in the first place: by trying to make every meal special, I was ensuring that few meals actually were. I took food for granted.

The real meals I have eaten in the past week are among the most I have ever enjoyed. Never have I felt desperate for real food, but I savor each bite several times more. Before, it was often hard for me to remember what I had eaten more than a couple of days before, despite the fact the food we were eating was anything but boring. But meals blurred together. Now, I have vivid memories of each meal. By whittling down my experiences with food, each becomes more profound.

Soylent is not for everyone, nor could I ever imagine ever giving up real food completely. However, it is easy to underestimate how much food complicates your life and how much Soylent can simplify it. I encounter a lot of people reacting to Soylent with skepticism and/or revulsion, and as someone who used to be staunchly among them, I have to now say flat out: I was wrong. 

Last Friday marked the release of Crash Bandicoot: N Sane Trilogy, a remake of the original trilogy of games for the first Playstation. The trend of re-releasing old games is anything but new. The Playstation Store has whole sections devoted to it, and most of them simply function by running the original game code as-is, sometimes with improved textures and/or models if you're lucky, and these days usually trophy support as well (or achievements when this phenomenon occurs on other platforms). I have, admittedly, spent a considerable amount of money supporting this trend. And, while I would rather see games made available in this way than not at all on modern consoles, the approach Crash took is the “right” approach.

Ground-up remakes are not a new concept. SquareEnix quite famously took a similar approach in remaking Final Fantasy IV (originally II in the US) and V as well as Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. But traditionally, game companies have avoided this approach, as the resources required are many orders of power higher. N Sane has no lines of code from the original game and, though each environment and animation is recreated with meticulous detail, it was all from the ground up anew.

In SquareEnix’s case, none of the remakes were given nearly as much attention by not just the press but the company itself. They were afterthoughts, and even technically speaking, they were not attempting to create something cutting edge. Re:chain of Memories reused the engine and assets from the other Playstation 2 Kingdom Hearts titles, and the 3D Final Fantasy remakes originally debuted on the Nintendo DS. Their graphics were not much better than the almost decade older Playstation 1 Final Fantasy trilogy.

Of course, in Crash’s case, the lack of any new games minus a couple of mobile kart racing titles meant that demand was higher than ever, and recouping costs becomes more of a safe bet than franchises with titles saturating the market already. Crash also used to be a tentpole of Sony’s advertising, giving it more teeth than cult classic titles given new life through enhanced re-releases like the Dark Cloud duology. However, the massive sales success demonstrates it is an effective tactic for reviving dead franchises. Hopefully Activision keeps this in mind with “classic” Spryo (i.e. not Skylanders) and whoever holds the Tomba intellectual property does the same. This is an easy way to revive hibernating fanbases.

Admittedly, the games proved to be a bit of a frustration at first, to the point I disliked them. The fact that they were so exact a recreation of the originals meant I relied heavily on muscle memory. Even if the levels themselves are the same, the controls and, perhaps more profoundly, the physics are different. Ultimately, these actually make the game better, though for someone like me who completed (not beat, completed—stuff like gems and relics included) the second and third games many times over meant it was hard to “unlearn what I had learned.”

However, this uncanny valley-level recreation works for stuff of this sort. As excited as I am for the remake of Final Fantasy VII, SquareEnix’s deviation from this philosophy has me somewhat disappointed. I’m sure the game will be great. I’m sure it will have many things about it that the original lacks I will enjoy. But it will never replace the original. The high adrenaline action will undoubtedly be fun, but some part of me will always love carefully planning out attacks in a boss fight for each character. Of course, this also ensures that it will not have to compete quite as much with the original, which may be something that guided their direction.

After spending most of the weekend playing the game, I just don’t see myself going back to the originals. The adjustment to the old controls would, without question, prove frustrating once again, and there is not anything other than the extra life sound—it just doesn’t have nearly as much punch—that the originals provide that I miss.

Though Crash will need to innovate beyond what the originals did gameplay-wise, something it had unsuccessfully attempted once before, the project also ensures they have the tools needed to make new content in the vein of the old, something done to great success with the new expansion packs to some old strategy games like Age of Empires II. Even better would be level creation tools.

Regardless of where the Crash franchise itself goes from here, the success of this release should serve as a template for others. The demand for old content is there, but the more time invested in modernizing it, the more likely it will be to succeed. This is especially important for games from the Playstation 1 era, where a fresh coat of paint does little to hide a game’s age. Hopefully we will someday view this as a seminal moment not just for Crash but for the industry. 

Few things inspire as intense a divisiveness and passion as politics. Perhaps religion and phone choice come close, though none is perhaps as immediately relevant to politics as, of all things, video games. In most competitive areas of human existence, there is no one all encompassing strategy that perfectly prepares you for what your competitors might attempt. As society and its problems evolve, so do the strategies necessary to win in the political arena. It’s clear that the strategies the Democrats are employing have failed. In particular, the party should look to Nintendo to understand how to turn around their slow slide into powerlessness.

The DNC and GOP, for decades, operated roughly akin to the rivalry between the Xbox and Playstation: though power has swung more to the GOP than it has in awhile, for the most part, neither has had long periods of dominance. The balance of power has shifted back and forth constantly. However, the problem is, over time, especially after the Clinton era, Democrats have focused more and more on trying to compete toe-to-toe with Republicans on the issues they deem important. Most policy-making and campaign platforms have started by asking what the Republican position is and, from there, to only stray so far. The theory is it is important to not alienate the moderates.

Nintendo once operated in much the same fashion as Xbox and Playstation. Of course, they were largely responsible for resurrecting the industry after a major crash in the early-to-mid 80s. Though games for the Nintendo 64 were severely limited in space by comparison to the Playstation 1 due to the lack of an optical drive, it was a substantially more powerful machine. However, after a disappointing performance with the GameCube, Nintendo began to rethink their approach. A book came out in 2005 that, by Nintendo’s own admission, had an immense impact on their executive culture, Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. 

The core theory of the book is that one can compete in “blue oceans” or “red oceans,” the insinuation being that the latter is fraught with blood. Rather than compete directly with your opponent, it is better to focus on establishing how you are compelling in entirely different ways than your competitors. Instead of trying to make something similar to an Xbox 360, Nintendo created something radically different in the form of the Wii. The 2016 election was the reddest ocean the political arena had seen in awhile. Clinton’s ads and talking points focused, at record low levels, on actual policy, instead focusing on the ways she wasn’t Trump.

Red oceans in politics are leading to red victories. For the Left to win in America, we need to pivot towards the blue. The reason why folks such as Corbyn and Sanders were such a surprise to the establishment is that they were “Blue Ocean” candidates. They were deeply focused on offering a genuinely compelling alternative rather than simply attacking their opponents. Yes, the “for the many, not the few” slogan cut to the heart of the Tories’ philosophies, but it did so in a way that not just drew boundaries but placed an enormous gulf between the two of them. Their message was far more substantive than anything the Democrats have provided in decades.

That’s not to say this strategy is foolproof. The Wii U had underwhelming sales and almost killed Nintendo. But in this case, the failure happened because of ways the tech world differs a lot from politics. Nintendo was trying to offer something completely different than what audiences had ever seen before. All a “Blue Ocean” politician has to do is actually focus on issues that excite people that aren’t usually brought up: free tuition, single payer, drug law reform, or even, dare I say it, universal basic income.

The primary motivation against doing so is that politicians who rock the boat too much, especially in ways that are unfriendly to big business or the military-industrial complex, miss out on much needed campaign-funding. But the constant upsets recently in the political world demonstrate how brute force spending has become less and less effective a campaign metric. After all, perfectly pruned centrist darling, Jon Ossoff, had a whopping six times the spending of Karen Handel and still lost.

When the debate becomes about whether or not you will raise taxes, “classic” Democrats have already lost. However, when a candidate can sell a compelling vision for why they aren’t promising lower taxes that amounts to tangibly more than maintaining the status quo, people hop aboard. The so called “centrists” might better be thought as independents. Time and time again shows that they are willing to stand behind policies from either party that are anything but moderate as long as they are packaged and presented in a way that is a compelling solution to the problems they see in the country.

As Mr. Ossoff did, you can promise to lower taxes and balance the budget all day long, but the conservatives who that will impress will, for the most part, simply vote Republican. Instead the narrative on the Left has to focus on our identity and not the ways we differ from the Right. We have to define our own narrative rather than simply respond to theirs. We have to tell a story and convey a vision that is uniquely inspiring and wholly our own.

Photograph by Dan Kitwood / Getty

Last year was a difficult time for the American progressive. All of the momentum, hope, and excitement built by the Bernie Sanders campaign was dashed as the primaries wore on, and to make matters worse, Trump, the antithesis of progress and social justice, wound up the ultimate winner of the election. The Brexit vote only served to solidify the feeling that 2016 marked a turn back towards principles like conservativism and nationalism that marked a stark departure from the Obama Era before it.

However, the results of the recent election in the United Kingdom not only staunched that loss of progressive power worldwide but issued a rallying call. All of the criticisms levied against Bernie Sanders—that he was too extreme, too unrealistic, too unappealing for moderates—were lobbed at Corbyn as well. The man who highly visible liberals from J.K. Rowling to Obama himself thought would destroy the left-wing’s presence in Westminster in fact was the one to save it.

Much attention was focused on the Millenial voters who came out in record numbers to make Corbyn’s success a reality. For once, our generation played the hero, not the cause, in the establishment’s narrative of world events. This is key, as most are quick to accept the idea that these sort of ideas are popular with young people but historically are reluctant to think young people will actually show up to make that popularity heard.

A confounding variable in many people’s minds, no doubt, is the historical tendency of generations to move to the right in adulthood. I’ve had many folks try to temper my enthusiasm for progressivism by pointing out this fact. However, this shift is happening to a much smaller degree than in previous generations. The reasons for this aren’t surprising.

The system’s sins are finally catching up with itself, and the impact is disproportionately felt by the young. Even stories of big success like mine are filled with stories of past frustration over how much we had struggled in the face of a system that was entirely ill-equipped for us. As the Trumpistas shout “Make America Great Again!” so many Millenials want to make it great for the first time, recognizing that it was never truly great for anything but affluent, white men.

Of course, some detractors have tried to focus on the fact that that is what people like Sanders and Corbyn are: fairly affluent white men. But this is using not just identity politics but politics as a whole in a perverse fashion. Political positions do not exist for the careers of the people who occupy them. They exist for the people they are supposed to benefit. While there are examples where the absence of diversity can feel deeply insulting, such as a room of men making decisions about women’s healthcare, ultimately it is more far more important in these instances to focus on the millions of people of diverse demographics who will benefit than the politician themselves.

This is why, even as a woman, I had no hesitation supporting Bernie: he had the platform that, from as far as I can tell, would benefit women the most, even if supporting him would disadvantage a singular woman in the form of Clinton. To focus on the significance of her womanhood as millions of women around the country struggle with numerous issues that she has not worried about for most of her adult life, if anything, alienated her from a lot of both Millenial women and older moderate women. Though it can be inspiring to see women in roles of high power, ultimately the glass ceiling has to be shattered from the bottom.

This mentality, not a “desire to impress boys” like some said (which is doubly ironic given that women who support Sanders are disproportionately queer), is going to prevent Clinton and her successors, whether merely ideological or biological as well (I’m looking at you, Chelsea), from achieving success on the national level. The Third Way has shown to be a path towards accumulation of wealth in the hands of the 1%. Neoliberalism is in its death throes, and the DNC will be taken down with it unless it accepts this.

We are in a time when the system is seen as so broken by most that they will also turn to those that are its harshest critics. This is what enabled Trump, even if he is an abomination produced by that very broken system, to rise to power. Though both Sanders and Corbyn have spent decades in their countries' respective legislative bodies, they have always been some of its vocal members against the mainstream current. Words on a legislative floor are, these days, worth far more than words on the campaign trail. This divide is backed up by the fact that Sanders has spent his time since the election continuing to fight for the people, while Clinton has focused almost entirely on one subject: why her loss to Trump was not her fault. Of course, this only serves to dig the establishment Democrats' hole deeper.

Regardless of who is in our elections in the coming years, though, these events in England, even if they were an ocean away, in our increasingly globalized world, are so important for the Left in America to take to heart. Success will come on the backs of grassroots candidates whose actions back up their rhetoric and who aren’t afraid to mean it when they say they are liberal. 

Every major product announcement is about more than the product itself: it also is a signal towards the priorities and goals of the company. In this way, companies like Apple that make a big song and dance of their releases can communicate things by omission. The neglect of proper updates to the Mac Pro, a controversial update to the MacBook Pro, and many of Apple’s software decisions had left professionals feeling like Apple had begun to turn their back on them. Back in March, Tim Cook admitted the company made mistakes, and the WWDC keynote seems to prove that commitment, even if it will take until December for the company to deliver.

Of course, the move is bound to attract its fair share of critics. The all-in-one form factor has always failed to gain traction in the professional space, since IT departments generally preferred the more easy-to-service traditional desktops. However, the success of the Surface Workstation opened the door for a move to look a little less bold and one that—even if Microsoft beat them to the punch—at least feels decidedly more Apple.

The price also puts it well outside of even most of the “prosumer” market that makes up a lot of the high-end technology market. Though Apple has touted that the iMac Pro will be cheaper than the equivalent PC, even your typical insane gaming rig is going to have nowhere near those stats. This is truly a professional machine in the deepest sense possible. The power that it provides simply isn’t from having bleeding edge hardware, it’s from packing it full of it.

Though I’ve owned various Mac laptops over the years as well as one of the older Mac Pros (that shared the same case as the PowerMac G5), I’ve always strayed away from the iMac personally simply due to the fact that, if I’m going to invest in a desktop, I want upgradability. But this circumvents the problem entirely by providing something with specs so ridiculous that the ultimately the motivating factor for an upgrade wouldn’t be lack of power or space but instead features.

Even more excitingly, though, this deepens my confidence that my recent switch back to the Mac world after many years of being almost exclusively PC (minus a year of owning a MacBook Air I barely used) is not in vain, as Apple is ensuring it does not lose sight of the professional community that gave it a lot of its gains outside of the mobile and music space over the past couple of decades.

Around the time of the Intel switch a little over a decade ago, the idea of a Mac as a serious machine for tech folks was considered laughable. Only through the addition of Boot Camp did people begin to take Macs seriously. Around that time, I was working as an intern in the rather monolithic Emory University IT department, and there was a proliferation of Macs in that department for the first time.

Ten years later, the development world is full of Macs. We’re at a point where Windows Ruby developers usually compelled to install a Linux virtual machine simply because so many Ruby gems are built consistently for anything but the Unix version, simply because Macs have proliferated so much in the Ruby development space.

Though, with most languages and frameworks, the platform differences are a lot more manageable, outside of the .NET world, the MacBook Pro is a ubiquitous sight. That’s why many of the changes in the last generation—the thinner form factor and the switch to only Type-C ports—had a lot of the professional world concerned, as it seemed to focus on sleekness and style over improvements in power.

The decision to drop the other ports will likely ultimately benefit the tech industry by incentivizing movement towards a new, common standard to replace the old USB Type-A ports that have been a mainstay of both Macs and PCs for the better part of two decades. Of course, a laptop with the power of the iMac Pro would be impractical, given issues of power consumption and simple hardware space, but it renews hope that we can see some big steps forward with the refreshed MacBook Pro form factor not just in sexiness but power.

Admittedly, some of Apple’s MacBook Pro woes are not particularly their fault. Intel has struggled to offer upgrades to their CPUs that are as compelling in recent years due to the fact that we are finally reaching a point where it is difficult to make transistors even smaller simply due to the laws of physics—the transistors are only a few silicon atoms thick now.

This also leads me to wonder if we’ll see a “Pro” iPhone now, given we have Pro versions of the other two pieces of “i” hardware. There are rumors of a higher-end iPhone to celebrate the 10th anniversary, so one might expect to see the Pro moniker there. Whether or not it would be capable of converting this Android fangirl remains to be seen.

Regardless of whether or not I wind up justifying shelling out mountain of cash for one, though, the big takeaway from WWDC for me was nothing about iOS or a Siri speaker, it was that Apple is committed to ensuring that they will retain the developer community they fought so hard to win. 

Over time, a meme that has continually grown is that of the “life hack.” These neat little tricks—some effective, some poorly thought out—are supposed to score us those precious extra seconds throughout the day. That’s not to knock their usefulness: having a toolkit of knowledge for preventing life’s little annoyances is beneficial. However, in a more technical sense, “hacking” falls into one of two definitions: a quick, dirty trick that really shouldn’t be used, or a much more brilliant breach of a secure system.

The latter, thanks to malicious hackers, comes with rather sinister associations, even though services such as security penetration testing are crucial for judging the security of more complex systems. If there is any sort of “hacking” you should do with your life, it should be more in this vein: tactical, clever, and responsive.

Though my primary productive passion in life is software development (and technology in a broader sense), I have long had a love of creative writing. For years—from the time I was a teenager—I struggled to complete a full novel draft, even though I found things such as short stories effortless. A lot of resources for aspiring authors said your first manuscript will likely never be published. For over a decade, I insisted to myself that standard did not apply to me. Ultimately, though, whether it did did not matter. Eventually, I took it to heart and set out to write a book not only that I would be comfortable not getting published but I explicitly had no interest in publishing it. Within a few weeks, I had a manuscript.

I succeeded not in spite of the fact I set out to fail but precisely because of that fact. By removing that self-judgment from the equation, I was able to better focus on the now. When you fixate on the difficulty of a task before you, it’s easy to let your morale falter. When working on a side skill, you have the freedom to set the difficulty: you can play the game on easy until you better understand the nuances. You are the one who decides when you are setting out to prove something more than just to yourself.

The goal is not to start caring at some point. Rather, the goal is to care the right way from the outset. If a dream is important enough to attempt to realize, the probability of failure is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what you can do right now, here in the moment, to bring yourself closer to those goals. The idea of “living in the moment” isn’t a barrier to productivity like many superficial perceptions of the idea might make it seem. Contrarily, it is the very thing that enables you to focus on what is productive.

A little less than a year later, a few months ago, I set out again to write a novel. This time, I used a concept for awhile that I intended to publish. A few times, unlike last year, I had to fight the urge to be too hypercritical of my own work, but there was a familiar groove, a level of heightened but calm productivity that I had never experienced before my throwaway novel the year before. Focusing your care in the right places is difficult and takes practice, but that practice becomes self-sustaining.

The people who accomplish what seems to be impossible by and large aren’t the ones who are naive to think that they can make the impossible possible, they’re the ones who minimize how much they let that sort of thinking influence them.

This is a true “life hack.” Will it save you any time? Fuck no! At least not in the short term. But it is the sort of hack that is more than a couple of rungs above the word as used in the phrase “hack doctor”—it requires developing a deeper understanding the nature a complex system. In this case? Your life. The reward isn’t time saved but instead a greater level of accomplishment.

A lot of experts who pitch the mystical secrets of success talk about the importance of learning from failure. It’s a cliche, but they’re not wrong. What most don’t say is to seek it out. Go create a failure. It’ll be a great learning experience and equip you better for building something that isn’t.