🕹️ The Nouns of February 28, 2025

1. BUTTON MASHING

2. A HORSE IN A HOSPITAL

3. RABBITHOLE (BUT NOT BOURBON OR ALICE IN WONDERLAND)

Button Mashing

There is an entire genre of video games that I am objectively bad at.

I’m not great at video games in general.

But ‘fighting’ games are really not my thing.

If you’re unfamiliar, these are usually two player games where you pick a character, and beat the crap out of each other to see who is left standing.

Street Fighter. Mortal Kombat. Tekken. Super Smash Bros.

But fighting games aren’t what they seem.

On the outside, they are stupid, violent, aggressive, and chaotic.

In reality, they’re chess.

Though seemingly random, every single punch, kick, laser blast, or ripping-out-of-your-opponent’s-spine in the game is connected to a specific combination of buttons that must be pressed in the right order, at the right time, with precision. More importantly, they must be executed with the appropriate strategy to get the upper hand on your opponent with a completely different set of moves that you must understand to counter appropriately and defeat.

Chess.

I was terrible at these games as a kid because I didn’t have the patience or consistency (or care) to learn the button combinations.

So I used the other strategy:

Button mashing.

Where dedication, hard work, and discipline got the best players to execute perfectly timed moves, I would just smash as many buttons as possible and hope something cool would happen.

And you know what? It did.

With shocking consistency.

What I came to realize is that the players who knew what they were doing depended on their opponent being predictable.

But when you’re just smashing all the buttons at once, you’re anything but predictable.

And their strategy falls apart.

While they’re waiting for you to do the logical or optimized next move, you’re doing something so stupid and out of left field that they are entirely unprepared.

And sometimes, for a while, it works.

This is my best explanation of what is happening in US politics right now.

rabbithole.chat

As seems to be the theme of the last 18 months, I burned too much time the other day playing around with a new AI thing. Cool research visualization thing.

You’re better off playing with it than reading this: