The List

So, here is the list! Can you feel the suspense? Probably not.

Things I want to post about (in no particular order)

What does it mean to have a balanced game? Does that mean something different for single player games than multiplayer? How can you try to balance a game?

How do games effect our cognition? Can we set them up in ways that will more likely alter someone's thinking in a certain way? If so, how can we make games that make us better thinkers?

In what ways is our perception of the world an illusion? What can we do about this?

What does it mean to create a true artificial intelligence?

How is the business world tackling the problems of cognitive biases?

Dynamical Systems. What?

Art: its changing our perspective of things. Thats pretty neat. Whats going on there?

Buddhism. Some cool ideas? Probably.

Memes. Holy shit that is some cool stuff.

TED Talks, because those are always cool

Posts from the game developers conference! (Hopefully!)

How does my typing this stuff RIGHT NOW effect the way I think?

Why the business world is weird.

My lengthy housing search that has enough twists and turns in it to be made into an epic poem. Too bad all those awesome epic poem writing dudes are long dead or else I would be all like: Hey dude who wrote beowulf, I bet you can make a cool poem about it. Make it have crazy demons and shit. And he would be like, it needs more sexy times and I would be like, I know!

Why my list has degenerated in prose the longer it gets (AND NOW IT HAS COME FULL CIRCLE! AND THEN AGAIN IN ONE LINE!)

The effect of commutes on society and the lives of those that take part in them.

How radio helps our culture. (And why CBC metro morning is excellent)

Our finitary predicament (Thanks John!)

And more, as I think of them.

My first post

Hello world! I am making a blog! Finally!

I have been meaning to start to do some mind dumps of all the things I think about, since I figure if I find them interesting, I bet someone else out there will too. I will try to only dump my good ideas and thoughts on here, but no guarantees!

First off, introductions! I am me, Simon Cook, you are someone out there in the world (hopefully) or maybe some search engine crawler, and I would like to introduce you to some text!

I am a 4th year undergrad at UofT studying computer science and cognitive science, and I plan one day to be a video game developer. I like thinking about how our minds work, how our minds work when playing video games, how our video games work when playing our minds (aha!), and other such stuff. Oh yeah, and less complicated things (or are they?) like food, shelter, love, life, happiness, music, culture, art, and all those things that make up my life.

I will be updating this frequently as I work off my list of "things I have been wanting to post on the internet but never have" including... A list! Of things I have been wanting to post on the internet but never have. So now you know what to expect! Aren't I a nice guy taking away some uncertainty in your world? Not really, since I also made it more complex since you now have another thing to think about.

And so you have it, a taste of things to come!