Flexistentialist

1. A lot of dudes. Just a ton of fucking people from beginning to end of the process.

2. Ancient people weren't stupid, they just figured shit out the same way we do: fuck around until you find out.

3. We're gonna plan this out and it's gonna take ten fucking years, and you will cope.

4. Sticks and string are surprisingly versatile and can be used for a variety of purposes, like moving stuff and making sure things are even and go in the spot you wanted to put them in!

This is what it looks like when a community stands up to power. When ICE came for workers, this Minnesota neighborhood said: not today. On a freezing day in Minnesota, ICE agents showed up at a construction site in Chanhassen, intent on making arrests.

Two workers fled upward, trapped on the roof of a half-built house as temperatures plunged below zero. No heat. No shelter. Just wind, ice, and federal agents waiting them out.

And then the community showed up.

Neighbors, workers, organizers — people who understood instinctively that letting someone freeze to make a political point is cruelty, not law enforcement. They brought blankets. Hot drinks. Food. They stood outside in the cold for hours, refusing to leave, refusing to let this end quietly.

While ICE agents lingered below, the crowd did what the state would not: they protected human life. They checked on the workers. They shouted encouragement. They made sure those men were not alone on that roof, isolated and expendable in the eyes of a system that treats immigrant labor as disposable until it decides to punish it.

This is what solidarity looks like in practice. Not slogans. Not hashtags. People physically placing their bodies and time between vulnerable workers and a federal agency that has perfected the art of intimidation.

After nearly two hours, ICE left. The workers came down. One was treated by medics. Both survived the cold. No one was dragged away in handcuffs that day.

It’s worth sitting with that for a moment.

In an era when we’re constantly told resistance is futile, that enforcement is inevitable, that there’s nothing regular people can do — a small group of neighbors proved otherwise. They didn’t need weapons or power. They needed resolve, warmth, and the refusal to look away.

This wasn’t about “open borders” or abstract policy debates. It was about whether we accept a country where men are forced to choose between freezing to death or being detained. It was about whether we let federal agents use weather as a weapon. It was about whether community still means something.

Too often, ICE operates in the shadows — early mornings, isolated workplaces, silence as strategy. What happened in Chanhassen broke that script. It showed what happens when enforcement meets witnesses, when fear meets collective presence.

This is the lesson: solidarity works. It slows cruelty. It saves lives. And it reminds those in power that their authority is not absolute when people decide, together, that enough is enough.

Suppose, in the course of solving a puzzle in a video game, you put down the controller in order to make some notes and try to work out the solution on paper before picking up the controller to enact it. Was making those notes part of playing the game?

Suppose that instead of pausing to make notes, you text a friend and collaboratively work out the puzzle's solution with them. During the span of that text conversation, are neither of you playing the game? Are both of you playing the game?

Suppose that rather than having a one-on-one text conversation about the puzzle, you post a screenshot to a forum and receive opinions from ten strangers. How many people are playing the game?

Suppose that the puzzle's developer-intended solution is part of an extrinsic ARG. Does the fact that your forum conversation was anticipated by the developer change your answer regarding how many people are playing the game? Why or why not?

What are your feelings re: player-hostile design in video games vs. player-hostile design in TTRPGs?

Player-hostile design in the sense we're discussing here is actually very rare in tabletop RPGs. Most tabletop RPGs which are described as "player hostile" merely prescribe a particular set of adversarial relations between players. (Remember, the GM is a player.) It's hard to make generalisations about tabletop RPGs where the text itself is hostile to the act of being played in the same way that the text of ergodic literature is hostile to the act of being read simply because there are so few of them. Normality, certainly. Arguably some portions of Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist. There's not a lot of competition there.

the deliberately unplayable joke game, as discussed;

the worldbuilding bible for the author's original setting, with some perfunctory mechanics stapled to it because nobody will pay for a standalone worldbuilding bible unless you're George R R Martin;

the essay about game design which includes game mechanics purely for the purpose of demonstrating its own thesis;

the game-as-art-project where the formal structure of the rules is the art object, and any consideration of actual play is strictly secondary to their function;

the lyric game where the process of reading the rules in the order in which they're presented frames an allegorical narrative entirely separate from any narrative which might be explored in play.

The idea is that it is easy to make a bicycle rideable, and it is very easy to make it entirely unrideable, but riding the perfect line between the two is an art form.

At various big events, like Bike Kill in Brooklyn, though there are regional variants all over, idiots will bring their unrideable bikes, and other idiots will try to ride them. The winner is the bike that has the lowest number of successful riders, greater than 0.

The variants I’ve seen can be wild, clever contraptions like bikes with reversed steering, hinged frames, a tall bike with two riders and independent front and rear drivetrains (I was involved in this abomination), etc.

A winner I saw that was hilarious was just a regular bike where sections of the top tube and down tube were replaced with big steel springs (motorcycle coil springs, maybe?). It could sort of maintain shape, but flopped chaotically while being ridden. One guy was able to coax a ride out of it, but it was shockingly difficult.

The oils in soap (good, clean, refreshing) are different types of oils than the oils in my skin and hair (gross, greasy, stinky). By some process of mysterious natural forces beyond my comprehension, mixing the two while in the shower makes the gross oil come off easier, and I can simply rinse it off myself and it goes down the drain.