Ciro once commented that the best game is an infinitely hard one, where you can progress infinitely. To which his great friend J. replied:Or more broadly, one may argue that the perfect video game is life itself, or difficult life goals like making money, becoming famous or changing the world.

Thinking about it, "infinitely hard" is perhaps not a very precise term, as it could be interpreted as impossible. And if you have mathematical proof that something is impossible, it would be "pointless" to try, trying would be equivalent to pure meditation.

Maybe a better way to put it would be in terms of a difficulty curve. Real life also involves a lot of waiting, either for some experiment to finish running, of for you mental energy to restore a bit.

But so be it, you get the idea.

But this is basically what Ciro feels on every video game. It happens too often on PVE games that things are is either:

Not to mention the incredible breach of suspension of disbelief of most PvE games where enemies are unbelievably stupid. E.g., why doesn't Bowser just build one fucking wall 15 tiles high to prevent Mario from coming through to his castle? And then put a gate and a hundred guards in front of it? TODO there was a YouTube video of this, I think it was Toad pointing it out to Mario that it is quite weird that Bowser is so stupid, it almost feels like he wants to be beaten.

Every vector space is defined over a field.

E.g. in ${\mathbb{R}}^3$, the underlying field is $\mathbb{R}$, the real numbers. And in ${\mathbb{C}}^2$ the underlying field is $\mathbb{C}$, the complex numbers.

Any field can be used, including finite field. But the underlying thing has to be a field, because the definitions of a vector need all field properties to hold to make sense.

Elements of the underlying field of a vector space are known as scalar.

Magic is the best card game of all time. Ciro Santilli agrees with this fact, and this has nothing to do with the nostalgia factor of having played it while being a teenager.

It is also the one with the most cumbersome name possible, containing even a bloody colon punctuation in it!

However, besides that, Magic has another major flaw: the cards of old formats (Legacy and Modern), which are the only really interesting ones, are fucking expensive: Section "Magic: The Gathering is too expensive".

Like in mathematics, the most beautiful decks are those that do crazy things:All of this comes to a certain extent from the deep asymmetry that permeates the game.

It is also really interesting to watch as new sets as spoiled and try to guess if certain cards will have any impact on the Modern or Legacy metagame.

Here are some cool decks:

If Ciro were to ever overcome his cheapness and play the legacy forma (which will never happen), he would likely play one of the following decks when trying to be able to win at all:Both of this decks focus on cheating a huge creature into play in one go, and both have combo protection methods (discard for turbo depths, and counterspells for sneak and show). Ciro believes that those decks reflect his personality well, notably Ciro Santilli's self perceived creative personality. Related decks that don't appeal as much to Ciro:And above all, Ciro would never play a fair deck. Grinding victories is not for him. He'd rather quickly decide win/lose status and move on.

Competitive commander is also interesting, although matches tend to be much more random so the format is harder to digest, see for example this channel; Playing With Power MTG channel.

In Ciro's mind, Urza's block is the most epic of all, followed by the masques block. Those sets had a ridiculous power level and epic art, and they happened just before Ciro Santilli started playing during Invasion, which had an extremely low power level in comparison. So Ciro saw some cards from those slightly older formats floating around, but not many, and they felt so mystical and awesome.

ChannelFireball is one of the best Legacy resources out there, but they have too much crap filling in between legacy videos unfortunately.

The following creators share many of Ciro's interests and output large quantities of interesting content covering all memes/overpowered combos of new sets:

Ciro was pleased when he learnt that Steve Wozniak plays magic the gathering.

Magic's competitive play became a mess in the late 2010's. They had a clear tournament structure, but they decided to start changing things every 6 months, and give tournaments meaningless names like "Mythic championship", and it just became impossible to follow what is what.

The mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Card_frame#Original_frame is the best, much more epic all others (notably since 2003 update) ware bullshit, good overview medium.com/@raphaelaleixo/the-graphic-design-for-magic-the-gathering-card-frames-b3b6da4cd003

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hk3IOQiisg Crazy MTG Scandals That Changed The Game by Nikachu (2021). Good list:

An easy to prove theorem that follows from a harder to prove theorem.