Episode 582: The Law of Communal Dynamics

Real Life 

Time changed again. Why? Didn’t we, as a society, vote on not doing this anymore? Every clock reset feels like an act of collective gaslighting.

Ben spent his week teaching classes at the Art-a-thon, where he also led a chaotic round of Werewolves featuring the now-immortal line: “I am a delicious villager.” The kids apparently took that declaration at face value.

Steven was also at the Art-a-thon, diving into unfamiliar crafts (the kind that require more glue than dignity). Between Halloween, Disney runs, and too much coffee, his week sounded like a montage of exhaustion set to “Hakuna Matata.”

Meanwhile, Devon escaped into Weapons—a new dark comedy-horror streaming on HBO. It’s clever, weird, and surprisingly funny for something that involves, well, weapons. IMDb link here. Steven immediately brought up Good Boy—another horror film with an entirely different kind of twist. That one’s here. Ben closed his week out by jumping into the Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown demo, a roguelike that lets players reimagine Voyager’s storylines with ship management and branching plots. It’s on Steam. Boldly go, repeatedly die, try again.

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Future or Now 

Ben’s been pondering the next phase of human-computer interaction. There are two paths, he says: cyborgs and rooms. The industry is obsessed with the former—wearables, implants, the dream of merging with our devices. But Ben argues the real frontier is communal computing: Dynamicland.

Dynamicland was a physical space in Oakland where people worked inside the computer. Tables, walls, and objects became part of a shared computational environment. Programs weren’t hidden behind screens—they existed in the room with you. From 2017 until COVID, it was a place where anyone could walk in, code with their hands, and collaborate in the real world. It’s computing as a public utility, like a library—but for imagination.

Meanwhile, Steven shared a video called “Giving a PC Program Control of My Muscles to Become the Fastest in the World,” which feels like the opposite of communal computing. Instead of the room becoming the computer, you do. Devon called it cheating, but maybe it’s just evolution—painful, electric evolution.

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Book Club 

This week’s story was The Game of Smash and Recovery 

by Kelly Link—an emotional, cryptic sci-fi tale that left the hosts divided.

Steven liked that the story existed at all, even if he couldn’t quite parse it. Devon wasn’t sure if he liked it—he wants narratives that make sense on the first read. Ben, meanwhile, appreciated how readable it was and actually liked the story, proving once again that literary comprehension may be inversely proportional to caffeine intake.

Next week’s pick: In the Forests of Memory by E. Lily Yu.

Until then—reset your clocks, embrace communal computing, and remember: somewhere out there, a delicious villager is waiting.