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To See The Need - from mieum and bentsai

Just read the latest post from mieum which turn references a post from bentsai:

For the Love of Gemini, by mieum

Embracing constraints, by bentsai

mieum mentions the response that talking about gemini tends to get, and it reminded me of a conversation I hhad with a friend. I'm trying to be more active in the maintenance of my friendships, and the pandemic forced one of my good friends to move across the country, someone who I had always hoped to have a deeper relationship with, and so we've started to have biweekly or so phone calls, lasting more than an hour.

Last night my friend was talking about the Playdate launch event, which I didn't watch or mentallyt engage with not because I'm not interested in the Playdate but because I spent all of my Weird Gadget Points on the Pocket C.H.I.P I'm typing this on. The Playdate is a very small handheld game console developed by Panic and designed by Teenage Engineering, makers of the cult favorite OP-1 synthesizer. Games for the Playdate are written in LUA; the screen is black and white and not backlit (although it is allegedly very beautiful); there are like two buttons, a D-pad and a no shit honest to god crank. It costs one hundred and eighty united states dollars.

play.date

Look - you *know*, just having read the previous paragraph, if this is something that you want. You don't really need to see the spec sheet or even see the games that are lined up, even though they do look very cool. This hinges very decisively on whether or not you can *see the need* for such a thing. And my friend noted that it was kind of infuriating to read commentary about the Playdate that was not asking whether a first time hardware maker could fulfill orders, or what sort of app store experience people could expect, but that was just openly dismissive of the entire thing. You can play LUA games on the phone you already own and carry around - games that are in color! For $180 you can buy any number of retro gaming devices that can play any number of new and old games.

These are all reasonable questions about the Playdate, but they're not really *answerable* ones. It's actually easier in some sense to focus on the questions that are self-evidently besides the point. For Gemini, this would be akin to "how can I see the Domino's pizza tracker without the modern internet?" Well, you can't, and that's not what Gemini is meant to do.

But mieum mentions people who are upset not just by the concept of Gemini but the application: it's just *people* here. And that's a little harder to answer. I LOVE that it's just people here, living lives that are maybe a bit more scrutable to me than Matt Yglesias or Chrissy Teigen. But I don't know how to explain that to someone else. It's something that you have to already see the need for.