The Virtues in Cheating [An Essay]

[This blog dives a bit into philosophy. If that sort of thing bugs you then I would just skip this one over.]

I have recently been playing the video game "The Talos Principle: Reawakened," which is the remaster of the original game. I did not really have any plans to review it or anything, but I realized something kind of strange as I was playing through it: I was cheating a whole lot.

"The Talos Principle" is a puzzle-based video game from way back in 2014. It has an outright atheistic message about turning away from God and faith and entirely embracing the universe as a random occurrence. It does not hide this fact, and it even pushes it even heavier in the sequel. Despite my disagreements with the message that they trying to tell, I have always applauded the presentation and puzzle designs of the game. I will probably play every new version of the series that they make.

But I am not here to discuss the message of the game.

The puzzles in "The Talos Principle" all happen within an open world structure. That is to say that multiple puzzles can be found integrated into one map. Some of the tools that are used to solve these puzzles come in the form of a jammer device that can disable certain things like force fields and certain enemies, crystal platforms that can redirect light beams, and weighted cubes such as what one might find in a "Portal" game. And where these items are all intended to be used in their respective puzzle area, their ability to "do what they do" has infinite range.

What I am saying is... although you cannot take these items out of their respective puzzle area, they can still affect the environment of another puzzle if you can perhaps get a good angle on it. Yes, I know this all sounds confusing, but let me give you an example.

Since multiple puzzles take place on one map, you can sometimes see aspects of another puzzle from inside the one you are in. And if you happen to have a jamming device on you, you can sometimes aim it over at the other puzzle and disable something from there. The other puzzle might not even have a jammer as one of its intended tools. In one case, doing this actually unlocked the ending of the puzzle out right, making it unnecessary to even complete the puzzle as intended. It felt as if I had broken that part of the game. Sometimes, it feels like this may have been an intended alternate solution, but in the latter example, I got the feeling like I had done something illegal.

The reason it felt illegal was that, in order to get the angle needed to jam that force field, I had to get the positioning down to the pixel. It was really hard to do with a controller, and I just kept at it until I found the precise spot and then activated the jammer. I ran over and found that the force field blocking the sigil (the things you are trying to collect in the game) had been entirely removed, and I just strolled in and grabbed it for free. I never solved that puzzle correctly, and the game just let me do it.

There are other times where I have been able to "jailbreak" puzzle tools out of the puzzle area entirely. Sometimes this is entirely intended. You have to do this to get to certain secrets. There have been a few times I have made attempts to do this even when I felt that the game did not really want me to do it. At times, I have even been able to jump out of a puzzle the wrong way, ending me up in an area that I am not supposed to be with no way out of it. Other times, I used it to get to a secret area the wrong way. Once again, the game let me do it, oblivious that I had done anything wrong. It just worked.

From a philosophical point-of-view, this got me thinking. Was I cheating? And if I was cheating... was I really doing anything wrong? I still got the sigils, and I still found those secrets. And honestly, I made some of those areas a little bit easier by doing it this way. In fact, I can barely play this game anymore without at least trying to see if I can find new exploits.

Historically, we tend to frown and shake our heads at the idea of cheating, especially where games are concerned. If someone cheats in a competitive sport, we point our fingers and accuse them of misdeeds. But what about puzzles? If you gave me a maze where I had to start at one opening and then make my way to the exit, what is to stop me from just drawing a line around the outside of the maze to where the exit point is? Is doing so wrong? Did I really fail? Do I deserve rebuke for not adhering to the guidelines? After all, a simple solution for the maze-maker would be to close in the starting and exit areas, right? Then I would have no choice. Right?

I look back on human society, and I feel like all the smart people of the world were just glorified puzzle-solvers. They had a rough idea about how the world worked, and they would try and work within its boundaries to come up with solutions to problems. The result would often be an invention of some sort. These inventions were usually rather big and complicated... but they worked. They followed the rules of the universe perfectly, producing a result.

Over time, those same smart people tried to make these inventions smaller and more efficient, but in order to do that, they would have to find ways to work around the structure that had already been invented. They would have to cheat at the rules a little in order to do that, and later on they would have to cheat again to push it even further. There's no point in resolving a maze if you can just draw around it.. or possibly even right through it.

It was here that I began to wonder if the whole of human progress was just a bunch of cheating. It was people tired of solving the puzzle the same way, and so they looked for a way to skip over it entirely. Like the maps in "The Talos Principle," we tend to live in a world with an open structure. Everything is out there and usable. We just need to figure out the ways to connect them. Progress might just be based on cheating.

Here is another example, pertaining to war. One of the problems of war is that everyone is trying to find a way to best the opposing side. Since war tends to be more of an open structure puzzle, people are constantly looking for ways to cheat in order to win. This often comes in the form of new weapons and technology to turn the tide. The advantage never comes to the side who is trying to play fair; it comes to the side that is trying to cheat. And there are a few examples of situations where one side was trying to play fair with the expectation that the other side would do likewise. Never a good idea in war.

In science and technology, sticking only with a system that works and never trying to improve it would not seem very advantageous for progress. At some point, we have got to find a way to cheat the system in order to find a better one. Once we find that better system, making it the new standard, we won't really need to go back to the old one since it has been entirely circumvented.

But still... the idea of cheating is incredibly frowned upon. Someone might look at me after reading this and feel distrustful of me. Am I a cheater? Can I be trusted to play games with you now that I have proposed this strange philosophy? Of course, you can! I'm not advocating cheating in games. What I am advocating is that people keep an open mind as to what they can and cannot do in this world. Sometimes the rules are assumed, but they are not actually real. You may not be as bound to them as you think.

In your own life, if you happen to be dealing with some sort of puzzle or problem, question whether or not there is a way to draw around the maze rather than solving it correctly. You might not be able to. It might be something you legitimately have to solve as intended. But if there is a way to go around it, you might find that there is a bigger, more ultimate, puzzle that was staring at you all along, and then you can get working on that one. The point is, try not to get stuck on something that can be easily side-stepped.

One last thing: This is not about morals. That is a separate conversation. I expect people to be moral and not to be selfish and hurt other people. This essay is more about trying to find more efficient ways of doing things. If skipping over a puzzle means that you don't learn anything then nothing was really accomplished. I am more talking about when a puzzle has already been solved over and over, it doesn't hurt to find a way to cheat past it in the name of self-improvement. If you can do that, then there may actually be some virtues in cheating after all.

This blog was written on July 12, 2026.

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The Story of an Hour [Short Story Review]

[I spoil the main points of this story.]

"The Story of an Hour" is a short story written by Kate Chopin. It was published in 1894. It also went by the title "The Dream of an Hour," which I feel is a bit more appropriate, but that isn't what lasted.

So... I do this thing once a year where I get together with my friends right around Halloween. Each of us write appropriately themed stories and read them to each other. "The Story of an Hour" would have fit right into these tales.

The story is about a woman who has some heart trouble. Her friends and family discover that a train which her husband was on has crashed, and his name was mentioned in the list of "killed." They very carefully break the bad news to her, and she is overwrought with sadness.

But as the hour goes forth, she begins to think of her life before he has died and what it will be like without him. She begins to obsess over freedom and living for herself. It isn't that she didn't love her husband, but, in a short time, she embraces her new life and even loves it. This is actually pretty incredible, because I actually first thought she was going to commit suicide or something, but no. She absolutely embraces her destiny as a single woman.

After leaving her room a fully free woman, everyone is shocked to see her husband coming through the front door. He had never been on the train, and he did not even know that it had crashed. Here the woman screams and immediately dies of a heart attack. The doctors say it was heart disease, but the author slips in something additional. She died "of joy that kills."

Not bad. It's one of those Halloween type stories that end in a sort of punchline. I would have enjoyed hearing this one at our little gettogether, and I do, of course, recommend it.

This blog was written on July 9, 2026.

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The Necklace [Short Story Review]

[I spoil the main points of this story.]

"The Necklace" is a short story written by Guy de Maupassant. It was published in 1884. I have never heard of this guy. He's apparently a prolific French author.

This is a story about a woman named Madame Mathilde who is not satisfied with her life. She actually has a decent life with a decent husband. They are not poor, but they are also not extremely wealthy either. She is constantly fretting over how wealthy all of her acquaintances and friends are.

Her husband, who honestly barely deserves her, goes through a lot of trouble to get them invited to a fancy party, but she can't imagine going to it without a new dress. Her husband gives her a lot of money that he had been saving so she could get a new dress, but then she is still unsatisfied because she doesn't have any jewels to go with it.

Sooooo... The husband advises her to go borrow something from one of her rich friends. She does this and immediately locks on to a diamond necklace. This necklace provides the woman one hell of a good night at that party, but when she leaves, the necklace is somehow lost and cannot be found.

In order to save face, the couple goes into crippling debt to replace it with one that looks similar, although they do not tell the friend that it is a different necklace. Meanwhile, their lives are horrible. They are living like peasants now, and Madame Mathilde is working hard and soon looks like an old woman.

Now, later on, she decides to just confess to her friend what happened. Her friend is shocked but then explains that the necklace she had lent her was actually a fake and barely worth anything at all. She just liked how it looks.

And that is the punchline.

And sometimes stories like these end up with a real kicker of an ending, and in this case it works. Madame Mathilde's covetous nature ultimately led to her downfall. It is also important to note that she found value in beauty where there was very little actual worth to it. It shows that perception is not reality. We can think what we want, but reality is what it is. She really should have just been content with the actually good life she had... as well as one of the best husbands ever.

I totally recommend this story. It is a good cautionary tale. It is sad to think that there have been a lot of people like Madame Mathilde in the world since the beginning of time. And yes, I know I keep saying that the husband is great, but I do think he should have put his foot down a bit more. His desire to please her serves to show that she did not really take his love as seriously as she should have. She really just wanted the diamonds.

This blog was written on July 8, 2026.

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Bartleby, the Scrivener [Short Story Review]

"Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" is a short story written by Herman Melville. It was published in 1856.

This is the first story written by Melville that I have read in a very long time. The last one I read was called "Clarel," and I freaking hated it. It actually made me want to stop reading his stuff. I am pleased, however, that this one ended up being pretty good.

The story here is in first person, and the narrator is unnamed. That said, he is very important to the story, and I kind of realized about midway into the story that I really ought to be paying very close attention to everything he says and does. The titular character, that being Bartleby, is still very important, but not quite as much as the narrator.

The narrator is a scrivener, which means he duplicates legal documents by hand. He brings on other employees to help him with this, since a lot of documents have to be worked on with limited time. Bartleby was one of these scriveners, and he causes the main problems in this story that our narrator has to deal with.

Bartleby only wants to do his scrivening work and nothing else. If you ask him to do anything else, he will either be silent or reply with, "I prefer not to." This simple behavior gets taken to the extremes as the story progresses, and the narrator cannot figure out why.

At some point, Bartleby decides that he cannot do the scrivening anymore, but he refuses to vacate the building and is just sort of living there. If you ask him to leave, he just says that he prefers not to, and there is nothing you can do. Seriously... nothing.

Now, regardless of why Bartleby is acting this way, the real story lies in how the narrator deals with it. While reading this story, you will come to understand the entire functioning system of ego and pride in action. The good and bad within the narrator will be shown to the reader at the surface level as he tries to work out how to deal with Bartleby's strange behavior.

That is the story! Indeed, you will and should be wondering what is wrong with Bartleby, and the author does bother to explain it right at the very end. But the actual story is the psychological breakdown of the narrator, and it is fascinating.

This story is a really eye-opening breakdown about how the human mind operates when pushed against by uncomfortable situations. It is a story about psychology, but not really about anything supernatural. I admit that there is always the possibility of a supernatural conclusion in a story, but it isn't always necessary or wanted. No, this story keeps everything grounded in observable reality, and I think it is better for it. It makes everything feel like it could have happened the way it was presented.

I absolutely recommend this story. It is one of the man's best tales. Heck, I enjoyed it more than "Moby Dick," although that might be apples to oranges in this case. Still, I think if you are going to go through Melville's work, you should not skip over this one.

This blog was written on July 7, 2026.

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Bunnicula: A Rabbit-Tale of Mystery [Book Review]

"Bunnicula: A Rabbit-Tale of Mystery" is a children's book written by James and Deborah Howe. It was published in 1978.

For the longest time, people have been trying to get me to read "Bunnicula." I have sort of been rolling my eyes at the idea of a bunny vampire who sucks the juices out of vegetables, because that's what the story is about. There's no way to get around it. Honestly, it sounded really silly, and it kind of is. It also kind of works.

The story is told by the family dog Harold, which is secretly as smart as any human. He reads books and apparently write them too. He is friends with an equally smart cat named Chester. Together, they are investigating the possibility that the family's new pet rabbit is a vampire. This may actually be true, and the more you read it, the more you tend to believe it.

What is great about this book is that the authors really go out of their way to convince you about the bunny's supernatural condition... and also the fact that it might not be a particularly bad thing if all he is doing is sucking vegetables dry. It all leads up to a really interesting but still very silly mystery.

Harold and Chester are also very believable as a dog and a cat as well. Despite the fact that they are very intelligent, they still represent the well-known characteristics of their respective species. Chester's obsession with Bunnicula's alleged vampirism is hilarious, but it also leans very heavily into a dangerous territory. The real question the book offers is: "Is a vampire bunny really all that bad?" Harold seems to bring this up as a counterpoint.

Without spoiling anything else about this delightful story, I do want to say that this is a really good early age story for children. It does nothing to patronize them, and it tells a story that is very friendly while still having some shocking aspects to it. It would also be a good story for a parent to read a child. I liked it, and I do recommend it.

This blog was written on July 1, 2026.

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Young Goodman Brown [Short Story Review]

"Young Goodman Brown" is a short story written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It was first published in 1835.

For a story so old, this really does come across as a dreamlike surreal horror. It also sometimes feels like some sort of Christian allegory, especially when you take note of the titular character, a man named Goodman.

Goodman goes on a surreal journey through the woods as he learns that all the good upstanding men and women of his town seem to be secretly serving the devil. They are playing the part of good Christians in the open, but they are living in sin in reality. The interesting thing about this story is that Goodman is being seriously tempted to join in on this tradition.

As Goodman travels through the forest, he runs into a strange man who very likely is Satan or some sort of emissary for Satan. He also runs into people he has always known who are not acting the way they should. It is a surreal mess to be in, and the author does a good job introducing the reader to this strange landscape of imagery and people.

There is also a hag that shows up to bring everyone together. It's really quite surreal and horrific to see everyone you've known and love somehow involved with witches and demons as if it was entirely normal.

I don't want to say more than this. It is a good story that will give you a lot to think about, but it was really cool to see a story with such strange and magical imagery from that era. I do recommend it.

This blog was written on June 28, 2026.

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Son of Flubber [Book Review]

"Son of Flubber" is a book written by Robert Fuller. It was published in 1963 and is the novelization of the Disney movie of the same name from 1962. Honestly, it is kind of strange that the book came out a year later. That is not a common thing.

This book is the sequel to "The Absent-Minded Professor." It continues the story of the physics-breaking flubber, a substance that creates its own energy and completely defies entropy. Imagine making a bomb with this stuff! It would eventually consume the entire universe in flames! Well, that is actually almost an issue in the book, since Professor Brainard is actually trying to sell flubber to the US government. The very idea of this makes me super nervous, but the whole thing is a comedy and I should just relax.

The reason the professor is trying to sell flubber is to make money to save his financially struggling university before it falls into the hands of power-hungry insurance man Alonzo Hawk. Hawk is actually a Disney villain that has been used in multiple franchises, most notably in the Herbie movies. Come to think of it, I would not mind reading some of those books too (if they exist).

Instead of the whole bouncing rubber gag from the first story, the professor focuses turning the crazy material into both a gas and exploring its radioactive qualities. Seriously, the more I hear about this stuff, it scares me. He actually had already used it as a gas in the first book. It's how he made his Model T fly. That made sense. If you have an element that makes its own energy then you would not need much of it to lift things of any weight off of the ground. In the case of this story, he tries to use the gas to make a football player extremely light on his feet.

As far as radiation, he creates a freaking ray gun out of it. The idea was to energize clouds to force them to rain. It kind of worked, but it also broke anything made of glass all over the city. Very exciting and about as shocking as it can get.

On top of all this, there is this whole side-plot about this old girlfriend of Brainard that's trying to steal him from his wife. It gets more heated than you might think from an old story like this. It made me pretty uncomfortable.

One thing I do not like about the book (which was not a problem in the film) is that the author chose to use the first-person perspective of Biff Hawk, who was Alonzo Hawk's son. The problem is that he is not actually in all the scenes of the movie. This means the author has to constantly explain how Biff finds out about all the things that happens. This comes down to peeking into people's windows, following behind in a car chase, and even yanking a courtroom transcript. Of all the crazy things that happened in the book, I found Biff Hawk's ability to stay on top of the story to be the most unbelievable.

I do recommend this book, but I think perhaps the movie tells it a little better. I have always enjoyed the original flubber stories. They are a good way to just sort of let go of real science and have a little fun. Be happy, though, that flubber does not exist. It would have seriously broken the universe, and we would likely have all perished in some manner because of it.

This blog was written on June 26, 2026.

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