Aaron San Filippo

This checks out. I've lost count of the university game design students that have come to me for help (or with resumes applying for jobs) with a set of skills that are miles off of where they need to be for entry level work, and who're also shocked at the comptetetive landscape.https://twitter.com/robbytaku/status/1512248842854486057 …

This is freaking amazinghttps://twitter.com/iznaut/status/1512506572311863303 …

Indie game devs, especially those of you running studios or making games solo: what's your best advice for personal time management? How do you minimize context switching, maximize your output, not let important things fall through the cracks? Lend me your wisdom!

I’m grateful for the people in my life who help me be better, I try to recognize and acknowledge when my actions cause harm, I try to help those around me be better, and I try to forgive when people hurt me. And that’s all I feel I expect of everyone else around me too.

I can't tell anyone how to live. People need to do what's needed to protect themselves and their communities. But this is my personal philosophy, (which, admittedly is a privileged one to hold, as someone who’s not in a vulnerable position):

We may subscribe to restorative justice in some sort of abstract sense, but we don’t hesitate to apply purity tests to our own lives and communities.

It doesn’t matter how long ago it was. It doesn’t matter if they’ve apologized. It doesn’t matter if they’ve changed. They are tagged as a Bad One, it seems the only acceptable course of action is to remove them from our lives in the name of reducing harm.

Who are the Bad ones? The people who have done things beyond some arbitrary threshold of harm that we find unacceptable. It’s different for everyone. Certainly speeding and eating meat doesn't cross the threshold for most of us (though for some, maybe it does.)

But it seems like the world right now wants to see people as either Bad People or Good People. Spaces are only safe when we eject the Bad Ones, out of our communities, out of our lives.

I believe the world becomes a better, safer, happier, more just place when more people are part of these communities and systems that are focused on growth.

We are all works in progress. But we really only progress as humans when we’re close with people that care about our mutual safety and improvement and who model behavior that’s better than ours, and when we are part of systems that incentivize that improvement.

In the best case, we learn about our harmful actions from those who care about us (and who care about those around us), and we learn to do better. In the worst case, the systems we’re in and the people around us drag us down, we lose empathy, we perpetuate patterns of harm.

We accept these behaviors in each other, for the most part, because we do them too and because the actual harm (or chance of harm) seems fairly small. Sometimes it's not small; we wake up over time.

I eat meat and use lots of power, knowing it's the worst consumer behavior helping to drive climate change. I’ve rarely met a person who doesn’t (at least in some small ways ) act in ways that they know have the potential to harm those around them, in some form or another.

I want to get home sooner, so I go 70mph instead of 55, even knowing that higher speeds have a probability of causing deadly accidents. I have a margarita and drive , knowing I’m well under the legal limit but also know that I’m not operating at optimal alertness.