haha wow

The Creepy Shopkeeper: we have anything your heart desires… for a price! Heheheh…

Me, placing my hand on an Object: shhhhh

[leitmotif shifts to a minor key]

Me, snatching my hand back: nope!

Creepy Shopkeep: What

Me, placing my hand on another Object: hmmm

[leitmotif shifts to major key]

Me: I’ll take this one!

The idea that system matters is reducible to recognising that toys have affordances; while there is of course no "wrong" way to play with a toy, no amount of open-mindedness will readily fit a bicycle through a basketball hoop.

It puts a line under one of the main objections to the "why not just freeform it?" thing; if folks are discussing how to make or modify a toy to achieve a particular set of affordances, blundering into the conversation going "why bother with toys when you can Use Your Imagination?" is unlikely to be well received!

Baby birds are fed by their parents dropping food into their mouths. For some birds these can be small bugs or seeds; for others, their parents grind it up into goo in their gizzards and vomit goo into their mouths. (Some even feed them milk that they make inside their own throats). Most birds have a crop, which is a sort of pouch at the top of their eosophagus where they can hold way more food than what can fit in their stomach at once; they shove a whole bunch of food into their faces and swallow it slowly over time. Normally, a parent would put as much food as they could into these annoying brats' mouths to fill up their crop.