A Chaotic Gift

Stalwart of the Game, Oscar Strik, is the first and only player to send me a present to celebrate the birth of my son, specifically this blog letter about chaos. Here’s an extract:

As humans, we see recurring patterns in the world, or we make them ourselves. By accident or design, things are ordered, and things are good when they are ordered in the right way. This ‘right’ way, of course, is down to the judgment of the observer. Chaos, then, is the absence of an order, or at least an observable order... Something that is ordered in a bad way is not chaotic, it’s merely waiting to be fixed. Chaos is the absence of any order whatsoever, a throwback to a primal state that has not felt the beneficent hand of the one that orders.

You can read the whole thing over at Sub Specie, and I will be replying in the next few weeks as soon as the carnage settles down a little. It’s an open blog letter, so other replies are also welcome!