Although I did not anticipate I would be doing this, at Recurse I have been doing a deep dive into the rust programming language.   I have been coding the cryptopals solutions in rust, and I am exponentially faster. What took me 6 hours last week now takes me 1 hour.  I am still doing many things the unrusticrutian way, but I am slowly refactoring.

There is a great community of Rust programmers and enthusiasts at Recurse and it is really helping improve my code (and code readability – thanks for the linting tips y’all). I am using this for Solidity linting, because my nvim inter makes me do all the work manually!

I have been looking around for an open source Rust project to contribute to.  I was thinking of tower, which is a web and networking framework.  But yesterday. J at Recurse, who has been really helpful in all things Rust, posted a blog post and a link to Dalek, a cryptolibrary.  The blog post is a fantastic meditation on drop and memory management and how to understand libraries and contribute to a codebase.  I also got this great suggestion for rust debugging. I am now looking for a good rust unit testing lib – any suggestions?

I sort of have this feeling that crypto and cryptographic work is to today what the web was to the 90s (and 00s).  But I also had a feeling that facebook was a fad, so I should probably not be trusted.  In any case, I am loving my blockchain work, cryptopals and algorithms reviews so much I think I am going to work on this library, or maybe a rust library for signal.

PrayerCoin is moving along, every day I look at it and spend an hour meditating on what I need to add.  I have expanded the ecosystem with Ritual and Liturgy Contracts.  I am adding functionality whereby you can donate a cryptokitties to a prayer and make a ritual. Donate is the wrong word – the word is at the tip of my tongue and I cannot get it.

I had a great short discussion with Noah about games and blockchain.  All the logic for blockchain games are around pips not the board.  The cryptokitty has all the logic and then we bring it to the game space.  This is different from say the magic circle of Huizinga.  The circle is everywhere and no where. It has infinite circumference and zero area like a Sierpinski Carpet. These games are more like world building than traditional games.  Why is it a game?  My definition would be that the rules structure the game and the magic circle, rather than a board or physical location of a magic circle.

But if the power is in the pips and not the board what does this mean for game design?