My friend Arlo has decided to make a game a day over the course of April. They're calling it "Play-pril". The theme they have chosen/drawn for today is "FOOL". I don't know if I'll take part in any other days, but something came to me for today so I thought I'd contribute. I should note: this has not been playtested in any way. Consider it a game poem[1], in that it is as much designed for contemplation as it is for play.

Liar's Shuffle

A game for 2 players and a deck of playing cards

One player is the Liar, and the other is the Decider.

The Liar takes the top card from the deck without showing it to the Decider. What happens next depends upon the suit:
- If it is a DIAMOND: they must convince the Decider that it is a black card. This will be a lie.
- If it is a HEART: they must convince the Decider that it is a red card. This will be the truth.
- If it is a SPADE: they must convince the Decider that it is a red card. This will be a lie.
- If it is a CLUBS: they must convince the Decider that it is a black card. This will be the truth.

The Decider then decides what colour they think the card is.

The card is now revealed. If the Decider got it right, it goes on the SUCCESS PILE. If the Decider got it wrong, it goes on the FAILURE PILE.

A new card is drawn, and the process repeats.

The game continues until the deck of cards has been exhausted. If the SUCCESS PILE is now larger than the FAILURE PILE, then the Liar loses and the Decider wins. If the FAILURE PILE is now larger than the SUCCESS PILE, then the Decider loses and the Liar wins.

Trash talking and mind games are very much encouraged. The Liar can choose when they wish to draw another card - the game might well be better run interspersed with other activities, such as making and eating dinner, gossiping, playing other games, going for a walk, or engaging in sexual intercourse.

This game can be seen as a very slow and ineffective way to shuffle a deck of cards.

1: Previous game poems on my previous blog include Monogamy, a game for lovers, a game for walking home and Twelve Games About Counting

So, I have been talking to the crew at A MAZE Berlin about coming over to do a Downpour workshop there (spoilers!). And earlier this week I got an email saying "hey, there's some news you should be aware of, totally fine if you want to pull out as a result". Here's the news, I don't want to do the delicate task of trying to recap it:

Statement on Code of Conduct Violations at A MAZE. / SHEFFIELD | A MAZE. | Games and Playful Media

International arthouse label in the field of games and playful media.

Games and Playful Media1XN

And, like, this kind of shit is hard for everyone to deal with. Often the difficulty of dealing with it, or the trauma from it being dealt with badly, totally outweighs the original harm done. So, I just want to make a few statements which reflect my view of the situation:

• Whilst I was not there, I had heard about what happened in Sheffield from people who were. It seemed like a bad situation which upset a lot of people unnecessarily and harmed A MAZE's reputation.
• I was not entirely surprised - it tracked with what I'd heard about the difficulties of organising the event in coordination with A MAZE, and it did not seem out of keeping with Thorsten's previous behaviour.
• I did not expect any consequences as a result - I assumed people would be sour on A MAZE as a result, but that the folks in Sheffield would run events without A MAZE, and that A MAZE would continue on as if nothing had happened. It would be a bad situation, and no resolution. This happens.
• To then see this statement, where action is being taken to try to address the harm that is being caused, and handled in what I can see from my outside perspective seems like sensitivity and care... it's great news. It's surprising news, it's more than I expected.
• I have a ton of time for the team who have had to be dealing with (I can only assume) a lot of stress from this situation on top of the considerable stress of organising a festival. The announcement hints at some difficult internal organisational change around leadership - I wish them the best at that, and I hope the organisation comes out much stronger, and with less of a single point of failure.
• Which means: I am happier to be attending (and running a workshop at!) A MAZE Berlin this year than I was before I got this news.
• And, like... I do like A MAZE a lot. It's friendly, generous, well funded. It's aimed at people making games from an experimental or artistic perspective. It's a good time which I enjoy having with my friends and colleagues. It's a pull away from the money focus of most other games events, and it's a pull towards Europe and away from America.

So I guess my takeaway message is: don't let this news put you off A MAZE. Don't punish organisations for actually attempting to deal with this stuff rather than taking the easier course of putting on blinkers and going along regardless. And thank you to all the people doing stressful work behind the scenes to try to solve things – a group of people, which, going off the statement alone, seems like it might include Thorsten.

I've been in a crash recently, so I figured it was probably worth putting a bit of money into a subscription to Visible. They're a startup who are trying to do the fitness band experience, but for people with energy limiting illnesses for whom optimising their physical fitness consists of managing walks to the shops not runs along a marathon. When I feel good I can get a little careless with thinking through my level of activity. And then I crash and regret it - so hopefully this subscription will help me manage my level of activity a bit more closely.

I'm not gonna review the app or the experience using it just yet - I've not used it for long enough - but using it is bringing me back to the early days of trying to get similar kinds of data from fitness trackers. I bought a Polar chest strap & wrote a little app to collect the data & graph it. Specifically, I was interested in this measure "HRV". This stands for Heart Rate Variability, and it's a ratio between the low frequency and the high frequency variations in timing between the beats of the heart. These variations become more regular at times of high stress, and looser at times of low stress (when the parasympathetic nervous system is activated). And when I say stress here I don't just mean work stress, but more: high stress is activation of the sympathetic nervous system, fight or flight mode. And low stress is activation of the parasympathetic nervous systems, rest and digest mode. (Can both modes be activated at the same time? Yes, the body is very complicated).

And Visible tracks this - I'm not sure if it uses the heartrate tracker to do so? Hopefully! It can read these things out, although the UI doesn't expose it on a continuous basis. Anyway, Visible tracks this, at least using the iPhone camera as an ersatz heart rate monitor, and it can be used as a measure of how well rested you are, compared in similar situation and similar times of day.

Anyway, that's not what I wanted to talk about today. What I've actually been thinking about is what the POTS[1] specialist I managed to see a few months ago said. Which is that POTS should not be seen as a condition characterised by a increase in heart rate upon standing, while blood pressure remains constant, as the clinical criteria say. But a condition where standing causes blood pressure to vary erratically on very short timescales, and the rise in heart rate is merely a byproduct of that. Now in both cases, it's the body struggling to maintain equilibrium in the face of having to pump blood all the way down to the floor and back, but it's characterised differently.

Now, the question is: why do we use the first definition and not the second one [2]. Well, he said that the big reason is that it's easy to measure heart rate (eg with a stethoscope), and easy to measure blood pressure on the scale of a few minutes (eg with an arm cuff), but hard to measure blood pressure changes on the scale of milliseconds. To do that, you need the special £25k machine that they have in the hospital, which clips on your finger and makes a nice wiggly graph of blood pressure changes. And that's fair enough, I can understand that dynamic.

But I've been on this wearable sensor chain of thought just now. And so I wonder - how does that expensive machine work? It's not invasive, it's just a thing that clips onto your finger and I think shines a light onto your finger. Much like a pulse oximeter, and those can be had for like a tenner. Is there some fancy tech involved? Could you find a way to make a... well, maybe not medically approved, but a consumer grade reliable blood pressure variability monitor?

Anyway, a little bit of digging suggests (but does not confirm) the technique "photoplethysmography", which is what's used for getting blood oxygenation readings.[3] It detects changes in blood vessel size when the heart beats, and therefore can be used to get an indication of blood pressure. And indeed there's a growing category of "cuffless blood pressure" monitors, in exactly this kind of consumer market.

So now I have some questions:

• how good are these cuffless BP devices? is it worth getting one? can I read the data from it?
• is the sensor data good enough in order to find this kind of sub-second variability in blood pressure that this specialist described to me? this suggests it might be, theoretically
• can the sensor data be corrected such that these readings will be any good for a wearable sensor, in times when the person using it will not be at rest? my understanding (eg from the above link) is that this is hard
• I mean for that matter, how hard is it to pull out the BP signal from the raw PPG data? when I go looking for this I see all kinds of stuff about random forest feature extraction and gray wolf optimisation[3], which suggests that it is hard. But also a subject where I maybe could contribute some muscle if I wanted to.
• can I find a paper which goes into more detail about the relationship between POTS and this kind of BP variability? what's the right jargon for the wiggliness he showed me? how mainstream is this view? what impact does this have on hypothesized underlying mechanisms for POTS?
• for that matter, this wiggliness in heart rate over short periods of time seems pretty reminiscent of that variation in heart beat timing in HRV. I saw a little bit of stuff in looking this up that suggested that it might also be indicative of SNS/PNS activation, maybe in a way that's clearer than HRV? Maybe this would have broader use for people who are not POTS-y?
• would this direction of work be materially useful in providing clearer diagnoses for POTS patients who do not currently get access to the £25k machine? would this work help perhaps give an indication of varying degrees of POTS-y-ness over time, and therefore help guide sufferers in knowing how bad they have it of a morning? generally I see value in letting people see this kind of data for their own experiences, and then maybe generating new hypotheses based on that.
• would this kind of work help strengthen the community-minded spirit that I so often see in sufferers of these kinds of badly diagnosed energy limiting illnesses? there's a real solidarity within these communities, galvanised by the surge of sufferers of long COVID. is this something that would one day be in Visible? or is this an example of the kind of deeper, nerdier, less easily explained stuff that could be in a version of Visible that wasn't made by a revenue-optimising startup? how do I feel about a startup aiming specifically at this community?

Lots of questions! I don't have good answers to them, and I think I have enough videogames to make that I don't think I'm likely to devote much time immediately to answering them. But a question shared is a question halved, so here's a chain of thought that someone else might want to carry forward.

[1: Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia. Which is basically what I have. I summarise it as "I get stupid if I'm upright too much".]

[2: It should be noted that you don't actually have to press up against the skin to do this - you can actually detect heart rate from distant video footage by analysing it to reveal minute variations in skin tone as the heart beats. Yep, you could do this with, like, a news interview with a politician. Weird and creepy tech!]

[3: My cog sci background means I have heard of random forests, but "gray wolf optimisation" is new to me and seems like an unnecessarily badass name for an algorithm.]

I don't write about politics much on here. It feels stressful to do, I don't want to misrepresent something, and pulling at one thing brings up a whole load of other issues.

But, maybe here's a little tangle of connected things I can briefly spin through.

The government wants to claw back money for the budget, and they're sticking to not raising taxes to do so, even as it becomes increasingly impossible for them to do so. One of the measures they're taking is to cut down on the people receiving Personal Independence Payments. This seems pretty fucked, as someone whose health sometimes prevents me from working, and who very much feel my fortune to have gotten ill at a time in my life where I have a financial buffer and a well paid career which I can do lying down and working inconsistent hours. I could easily be depending on the charity of family to survive, scraping money together from these kinds of benefits.

But aside from my own feelings of fear and anger (told you this stuff was stressful to write about), I want to point you at an article where some people who might lose out on PIP are interviewed:

‘I can’t sleep, I’m so scared’: disabled people face benefit cuts domino effect

Three people tell how knock-on impact of losing Pip on carer’s allowance and other benefits will affect their families

The GuardianFrances Ryan

You can see that each is in a complicated situation, but that a common thread is that thing of being a carer for a family member. They talk about how, if these cuts do happen & they lose PIP, they might fail to cope or need expensive council-provided care.

Now, the thing here is that PIP is funded by central government, and care is funded by local government. In fact, the majority of local government expenditure is goes to adult and child social care. So, we have a situation here where the central government are going to try to cut expenditure. But maybe those costs are instead going to shift to local government instead[1].

And the thing is, that council tax actually mainly goes to paying for care is not an obvious political fact. Here's a survey from Wales:

When respondents were asked to name services funded by council tax, the most commonly named services were bin or refuse collection (50%), police (42%) and roads or road maintenance (31%).

So people see money going out for council tax, and they see potholes in the street, and they wonder where the money is going. (around 4% of local authority expenditure goes on roads and transport)

Which was why I had a contrary take on the framing of this story:

Of 43 councils that replied to a Guardian request for data, all but eight were spending more on Send pupils’ transport than on their revenue roads budget, which is used for maintenance rather than capital improvements.

I thought it was an entirely reasonable bit to include. This is where the money goes! It's not where you thought it went!

Anyway, that brings me back round to another story I've seen recently:

Potholes: Publish progress or lose cash, Starmer tells England councils

A red, amber and green rating system is being produced for English councils on pothole maintenance.

BBC NewsMitchell Labiak & Michael RaceBusiness reporters, BBC News

Central government going - we need to make a visible improvement in people's lives. We need to Fix The Potholes. We're gonna give councils a bit of extra money so they can do this. But in return, we need them to keep track of how many they've fixed, we need reporting, we need to administer this stuff. We need some centralised control of the situation.

And I've been saying central government here, but these are political decisions being made by the current Labour government, led by Kier Starmer. A Labour government which put out a paper about how they wanted to change the relationship with local government. What's the first section? "Empowering communities to release Britain’s untapped strengths". Wait, that doesn't mean anything. Let's try a more specific bullet point from within it: "Use central government to cut costs for local authorities and free up resources for prevention, for example by ending Section 21 ‘no fault evictions’ that create huge temporary accommodation pressures on councils." Or how about this sentence: "Over the last fourteen years, councils of all political stripes have been left shelling out millions to plaster over the government’s mismanagement.". I get that government is hard it's just... I mean, it does seem a little bit like spoons on your wedding day, that's all I'm saying.

Anyway. Seems like a lot of people will suffer. It also seems like it's not going to actually save all that much money, overall. Just shift what part of government is paying, and under what circumstances. Income tax (which you pay more of when you earn more) won't go up, but council tax (which you pay based on what your house would have been worth in 1991) will instead. Or maybe councils will cut further those few things they're legally allowed to fail to do. Close a few more libraries. Just seems bad!

[1: Ok ok, that link only says 1/3 of the money will shift around, but it's unclear to me how that's calculated- if it's just a direct transfer for who pays for existing care, or if it includes increased demand for care because unpaid carers go back to work, or if it includes things like councils paying for emergency accommodation for people made homeless by the drop in income.]

Update from the end of the day: lol no, the OBR has said that the projections are bullshit, maybe for the reasons stated above. So now they're gonna cut some more things. Seems like a vicious cycle, but what do I know?

Going to try to write this like I do on Letterboxd, a series of observations not so smoothed into essay form.

the main thought i have is about how the one shot, the moving through buildings, the complex sets or locations... it gives a sense of the characters all being embedded within larger systems. the sense of... not powerlessness, the characters often have agency within those systems, but they can't transcend those systems, they can rarely even change those systems. this comes out most strongly in the first ep, i think, where there's so much procedural stuff about getting him booked in, all the rules about what's allowed to happen, all the different roles different people play in the process. this idea continues into the second ep, the school, the coppers explicitly talking about how dehumanising it is. the smell, the keycards, booking in at reception. third ep - well, it's mainly in one room, but that room is in the center of a very particular kind of institution, there's the CCTV... there's still that sense of the system, the claustrophobia, here's a single pocket but you can't forget that it's within something larger. and then the fourth ep, which should feel freeing, we're finally out of The Institutions - but actually instead you have the family as a system and you have wider society as a system. there's not too many stories about existing within larger systems where the systems themselves take the stage in this way. where they are shown so vividly on the screen.

the message that the series is about, the stuff about the radicalisation of young men. i mean, i'm not really the target audience for this, i can't find any shock or surprise in me for this. i have been in videogame spaces for over a decade, i have friends who went through the very maw of gamergate, it is Known. and, y'know, good that people who are not in these spaces are also hearing about it, good that it's being taken seriously, i hope there's some shift or some change here. i'm sceptical, though, because the people this is targeted at feel like they're going to be very liberal centrist about it and fundamentally i don't think that they can make changes that actually grasp onto the problem[1]. i feel tired of the thinkpieces without even reading them. but that's not the show, that's what surrounds it. the show is very much about opening up big messy questions rather than providing neat answers.

but there's still some tweeness about how it talks about this stuff. the bits with the cop getting told by his son how it works, it felt a bit cringe to me. but i mean also maybe necessary for the audience? i am rapidly approaching my forties but i don't feel this binary gulf between the kids and the adults applies here.

i mean but also this feels a bit like nitpicking, the writing, the performances... so strong. and again, the one shot means we stay with them, the spaces between actions matter more. i mean, the whole show is the space between actions - the space between the murder and the court case. it's all reflections on what it means.

some of watching this & discussing it with folks makes me think of one of my happiest TV memories, watching Terrace House with KB and pausing it because we had so much to say on the way they were interacting with each other, how the commentators talking about the interactions were commentating. reading the subtle tones of – okay, so for example i was talking with someone about ep 3, and the different attitudes between the guard outside the door and the CCTV guy. the moment of sharpness when she tells the guard she wants him outside the room. that that betrays the stress she's under in a possibly counterproductive way, but is also justified. a whole conversation from a single line. fundamentally it's an exercise in insight, body language, picking up on small cues and constructing the mental model of the other person. and that there's this richness, that the show lays this bare, is interested in this level of detail... that's what's special about it, not the fancy transfers to drone shots.

the kid, just thinking about how when we first see him he's tiny, huddled in bed, pissing himself. even knowing the premise, having seen the publicity shots, still you hesitate that this would be the person they're here for. and then the arc of the first episode from that to the CCTV footage of the murder. the viewpoint pivoting from innocent child to violent adult. and then ep 3, it's not a slow shift but instead flashing between the two, almost within a sentence sometimes. the way he talks, the language, the code switching. it feels prismatic. beautiful acting to shift between those two spaces that way.

and the setting we come in on, the bedroom, the star wallpaper & the cuddly toy. the childhoodness of it, the history encoded into the room. a place of innocence? but then the camera pans over and we see the desk and the computer, and actually also this is, in a meaningful way, the scene of the crime. no wonder here's where the final scene happens, too.

again with the lack of shock of the message - similarly i think i found myself a lot less distressed by the misogyny on display than others did. the anger, the threat. i imagine myself in that room in episode 3, and i imagine being the interviewer, and i imagine myself in control of the situation. she's nudging into particular volatile territory, and it's hard emotionally for him, and that's when he escalates, as defence. the anger shows... well, not that it's working, the point is not to provoke, but still ultimately she's the one steering the situation. if i was in that situation, i would struggle not to smile, i think i am saying. is that weird?

and about him - i can't find it in myself to hate or fear him, even given his actions. i just find myself feeling so deeply sorry for him, that he's gotten lost in this sense of himself, in these ideas of where value comes from, and how the world works. they're self sustaining, they perpetuate as a mental system. and yet they're so profoundly bad at leading to a good life. i mean, for other people as well as for him, sure. but also for him. that cry at the end from him, that's the one that haunts me - do you think i'm a good person? am i worthwhile? i just want normal human love and respect and this is how i thought i could find it. so deeply lost. what a fucking tragedy to lose yourself this way, and what a tragedy that so many real people have and are.

the way the light plays on people's faces in this. i wonder how much of the shot selection came down to the sunshine. thinking about the quote about acting on stage & acting on screen. a movement across a stage versus a movement across a face.

anyway, yeah, great television. space and light and people and systems. not "fun" but feels like deep art.

[1]: just tabbed away from editing this and saw that apparently the push is to ban kids using phones during school hours. yes, ok, exactly my point, that is not going to solve anything.

oh, an afterthought: god i love the matter of fact way this show depicts British suburbia. just feels good to see the places i grew up be represented this way. a home that actually looks like a home i can imagine. a school that looks like a school i went to. a police station... okay, i don't have that many experiences of police stations, but the chairs stacked, the squeaky floors, the atmosphere is familiar. i spend so long on the TV staring at images of America or images of wealth or self referential television cliches, to see something that looks real & normal feels a little surprising.

Currently reading the so far excellent "The Domestic Revolution" by Ruth Goodman (thanks Meguey Baker for the rec!), which explores the shift from heating British homes primarily with wood to primarily with coal around the 1600s. This had huge effects! Coal (especially the coat they were burning then, from near Newcastle) was much smokier, and had a lower-lying smoke. This means that you need a chimney to burn it, which reduces the heat output and causes a draught along the floor. This means you want to have furniture to lift yourself off the floor when sleeping or lounging - and it also means that you want to live in smaller rooms, rather than having one big open space. The chimney dealing with the smoke means too that the upper areas of the house are not full of smoke - allowing multiple levels to be built within the house. Such a change in how you live - not the whole household within one large space, but instead living within separate rooms, and in the evening maybe crowded into a living room where the heat is.

And that setup is familiar to me from visiting my gran's house. Heating had been introduced into other rooms, but in the form of crappy electric heaters - if we stayed around at Christmas, the evening was best spent in the living room by the coal fire*, or in the kitchen (or the dining room, which sat between the two). Nipping to the loo, either upstairs or outside near the kitchen, was something you did quickly - it was cold!

And, as Ruth Goodman says, the introduction of central heating & double glazing changes this again. The idea that you can heat the entire house means that you don't just have a single room to crowd in again. It becomes much more feasible to have open plan layouts. You knock through between the living room and dining rooms. The kitchen joins along, too. The idea of teenagers retreating to their bedrooms becomes much more feasible.

And I was thinking about this, and about the fact that one of the jobs I want to do on my place, a 1960s era ex council flat, is to get rid of some unnecessary boxing in the bathroom. It's boxing containing original air ducts - when this flat was built it was not built with the combi boiler & radiators I bought it with (or, indeed, the combi boiler and radiators I had installed shortly after moving in, when it turned out that the existing ones didn't work reliably). Instead, it had... well, I'm not sure exactly, but I think it was a forced air heating system and a heated water tank. This ran in a cupboard off the living room built for the purpose, and then vented presumably directly into the living room, and also down through a hole in the floor to the bathroom, hallway & bedrooms (not sure how it got to the second bedroom, but probably that ductwork has been torn out).

Trying to see more details on this, I searched, and I stumbled across this old debate on Hansard from 1978. Funny to read about damp problems, soaring cost of living, a lack of insulation, badly built new houses... But also of councils who consider it their job to directly build these things. God it is depressing to read something starting with "In this country we take some pride in the fact that by partnership between central Government and local authorities, the latter having done the major part of the work, we have housed millions of people in modern council houses in the post-war years.". An impossible dream, these days!

Anway, funny to reflect on these kinds of sudden shifts in how we stay warm, and indeed how we live as a result of that. I can see the start of a similar transition happening with heat pumps - if the renewables revolution keeps happening and the price of electricity drops as it seems like it might (but, uh, more volatile, and maybe more of an emphasis on off-peak versus peak pricing). And heat pumps become more affordable. When I was replacing the boiler here I looked at them - they didn't make sense here (not much outside space, no ground, current high electricity prices). How will the shift to heating which does not turn on at particular times of day but instead is best left heating continuously change how we live? Will there be a big shift to underfloor heating (for a big radiative surface, helpful for the low intensity of heat pumps). Are we all gonna start sitting on the floor again?

[* or the 2 bar electric heater that got put in front of it. or the other heater attached to the wall in the corner. the point is that it was more economic to heat only a single room of the house]

comments:

so neat. this effect is all over the place. I live in rural northern California which is a relatively young place but old for the state, and you can traverse opposing gradients of elevation, heat source, era of 19/20c building standards, that create all these different combinations. Kerosene popularity informing the placement of kitchens in the 60/70s, vanity fireplaces of the 90s shelled out to house pellet stoves in the 2010s, etc.. A whole bunch of floor plans of late 19c homes called “miner houses” are displaced fractals that spiral out from centered kitchen/bathrooms and track 20c trends through ad-hoc add-ons that reflect ceiling height and trim/closet preferences. Super weird/fun/interesting.

https://merveilles.town/@inscript/114207508477855654

Seems like these days, the only time I write a blog post is when I'm responding to one of Lu's blog posts*.

Anyway, she's just written a nice one about, well, I mean it starts being about live coding but then it gets kind of surreal. Ok ok it's also about definitions. Lu is... I think it's fair to say they're not a fan:

I hate definitions. I absolutely hate them. They drive me crazy.

I refuse to do them! Or I do them as little as possible! Or I do a when-based definition instead, which is a cop out.

And, you know what - I like Lu's post a lot but I disagree with them here. I like definitions! I think it's good to try to define things!

Lu has anticipated this response:

People tell me they like what I say about definitions but then they also disagree with me.

Okay, Lu, what's your problem with them?

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this but the world is a big big sloppy sloppy mess. We try to make sense of it by not seeing it that way, but instead see it as being made up of discrete things, like cat and man and woman, and it doesn’t work.

Or maybe it works for 98% of cases but it doesn’t work for the remaining 2%. And so what we do is we add all sorts of asterisks and exceptions to our definitions to account for the 2%. And I think that’s terrible, because for me: The 2% of exception cases to any definition are the MOST INTERESTING PART but they end up being an afterthought.

Those 2% of cases reveal the truth of the world to us: They show us what we— that we are just sloppy sloppy slodge made of bazillions of tinier pieces of slodge and therefore the gaps between us / me and you are only an illusion

To which I say: yeah! exactly! The point of making a definition, for me, is: to help find the interesting 2%. It's to see where the definition breaks down. It's to find the weird edge cases.

Maybe it's just me? I know I can sometimes be a little perverse, a little deliberately awkward. Someone says something with a confident tone and I'll start looking for the contradictions and exceptions. And I like the contradictions and exceptions. And sometimes the ones I'll come up with are interesting or are unsure or are under-explored. It's a rich seam to explore! But I wouldn't have found that seam without the confident statement I tried to contradict. And once you realise this, you realise that sometimes you have to be the one to make the confident statement.

And yeah fine, maybe a definition is helpful to reach a shared understanding. We could be talking about many things, but here's the one we're actually talking about. Let's get on the same page. Maybe a definition can help with that. It's a useful tool for that – but it's not the best one, generally people understand things better with some examples and some context.

But! the act of trying to define something makes you reach for the places where stuff breaks down. And this means that your definition is always going to be wrong and incomplete. That's fine. Don't try to pretend that your definition is ever going to be complete and, well, definitive. Better to make one, share it around, break it, maybe do without for a bit. Be slippy about it.

[* this is a joke]

fatiguey today so don't want to stretch my brain, here's some things in juxtaposition and i'll let you do the thinking about them:

There are more things that could fit within this category, I'm sure.

this is a quick response to the blog post "by pastagang" by, uh, pastagang. which talks about me miscrediting a previous blog post as being "almost certainly mainly or exclusively written by Lu". it wasn't! it was by pastagang! which is a bunch of people! I felt some embarrassment to be wrong publicly, and in a way which erased other people's work, and in a way which was done carelessly.

so, i feel a little weird harping on about this, because, again, it is something i feel embarrassed by, and generally it feels maybe unhelpful to keep harping on about a time you got someone's identity wrong - from my experience as a trans person, if you get something like this wrong, best to correct yourself, apologise briefly, and then don't make a huge fuss about it. a huge fuss is just uncomfortable all round.

and yet I'm here, writing! why? well, partly it's that I just read a post where pastagang has revisited it, and that makes me feel there's some implicit permission for me to revisit it. and more generally, I sense that pastagang is interested in talking about the question of where the boundaries of pastagang lie. the demarcation of group identity. I'm happy to be the example for a tendency they might have sensed in other cases. it's a thing of discomfort, to examine an embarrassing mistake you've made, but sometimes the thing to do with discomfort is to dive into it and try to understand the texture and source of it.

and also I sense that there's a second feeling of discomfort lurking around, and they're located around my feelings about working under a collective identity

i remember having to learn to explicitly course correct when doing press for Wild Rumpus. it was a bunch of us (six, to be precise), and we were putting on stuff together. we came to it with varying levels of pre-existing fame, different genders, and different levels of involvement. and if we talked excitedly about the work we were doing, there was a natural tendency for coverage of the things we were doing to focus upon the men who had a greater level of pre-existing fame. unless we explicitly worked to counteract that. i was (at the time) one of those men! i didn't recognise this pattern at the time, and it had to be pointed out to me.

and this makes sense from the outside! if you're writing about a project, you want to give references that your readers will be familiar with, to give legitimacy and context for them. if you're writing about a large collective, then naming everyone involved is tricky. but yet you want to personalise the people involved. your primary responsibility is not towards the people you are writing about and their preferences but for the people you are writing for. so if you can give your readers context, if you can highlight some faces they might know... you want to do that.

oh heck, i'm just reiterating The Tyranny Of Structurelessness. this keeps happening. here's an excerpt from it instead:

The idea of "structurelessness" has created the "star" system. We live in a society which expects political groups to make decisions and to select people to articulate those decisions to the public at large. The press and the public do not know how to listen seriously to individual women as women; they want to know how the group feels. Only three techniques have ever been developed for establishing mass group opinion: the vote or referendum, the public opinion survey questionnaire, and the selection of group spokespeople at an appropriate meeting. The women's liberation movement has used none of these to communicate with the public. Neither the movement as a whole nor most of the multitudinous groups within it have established a means of explaining their position on various issues. But the public is conditioned to look for spokespeople.

While it has consciously not chosen spokespeople, the movement has thrown up many women who have caught the public eye for varying reasons. These women represent no particular group or established opinion; they know this and usually say so. But because there are no official spokespeople nor any decision-making body that the press can query when it wants to know the movement's position on a subject, these women are perceived as the spokespeople. Thus, whether they want to or not, whether the movement likes it or not, women of public note are put in the role of spokespeople by default.

This is one main source of the ire that is often felt toward the women who are labeled "stars." Because they were not selected by the women in the movement to represent the movement's views, they are resented when the press presumes that they speak for the movement. But as long as the movement does not select its own spokeswomen, such women will be placed in that role by the press and the public, regardless of their own desires.

(go read the whole thing, it's relevant in a ton of situations)

anyway: the upshot of all this is a basic rule i learnt early on, and have used to guide as to what i work on. here it is, i'm gonna make it big to stand out:

in general, the credit for a project goes to people in proportion to their pre-existing fame, rather than in proportion to their contribution

and... yeah, the reason i credited Lu for that post rather than the collective authorship is not because i looked at the metadata. but because i follow Lu and had seen a lot of the language and ideas expressed in that post expressed by them, previously. because (from my perspective, this isn't something that has an objective truth) they are the more famous person, the person I was more familiar with, the person for whom I had the context for. and so i gave them the lion's share of the credit.

i fell victim to my own rule. awareness is not the same as immunity! you gotta work to fight against this constantly!

and, like... obviously it sucks as a moral to say "well, if you try to do things collectively then people will fuck up the same way i did, so don't try". and i don't think collective authorship is wrong as a whole, i think there's a lot of strengths to it, and it can definitely lead to interesting things that wouldn't have worked otherwise. we build more interestingly when we work together. I do truly believe that ego-preservation is the death of creativity.

but – i guess what i'm getting at is – some of the most inspiring, creative times in my life have been when i have had this mindset*:

we didn’t create this to get credit or favour or recognition. we created this because we wanted to!

because we want to make music! we want to play strudel! we want to do hydra! we want to eat nudel! we want to make noise! we want to make noise! we want to make noise! we want to make noise noise noise noise noise noise noise noise noise noise—

and yet when it those times have passed, i find that the credit for them drifts to other people and that feels unfair. or it drifts to me and that makes me feel guilty. it makes me hesitant to enter those environments again and embrace the jam wholeheartedly. maybe this is because i am an irredeemable career and legacy builder! but on the flipside... i do not have time and energy enough to do these things purely for the joy of it. i want to work sustainably, and in these fields that involves, among so many other things, collecting credit.

like... this is not the same thing as pastagang but when I was doing my DYCP and talking to a lot of artists about being an artist - one of them heard about the technical skills I had and told me to be careful about collaborating. to be careful not to do the complicated bits collaborating with another artist only for them to get the credit for that work because they're the bigger name.

and i don't have that fear so much with pastagang, i think posts like the one i'm responding to show a level of care and thoughtfulness about the nature of credit... but the instincts remain. and also, the pull of all the other things i've been trying to do, the paid work, the Big Project, the pottery, the being in the world and with my friends, the trying not to fall over from this energy limiting disease... alas my being creative on the computer time seems always too short... and yet i can feel the energy from here and i feel the urge to chase it down and join the jam.

[* I'd also say they are in times when the four conditions Jo Freeman lays out for an unstructured group to work efficiently are met:

1) It is task oriented.
2) It is relatively small and homogeneous. 
3) There is a high degree of communication. 
4) There is a low degree of skill specialization.

As she says, it can be a a very heady experience - but it also comes with a bunch of downsides. Go read the essay already]

followups:

(the quote was actually authored collectively, but that's messy and gets erased when attributing it)

There's also this classic example:

which I guess sums it all up.

Inspired in part by Ingrid Burrington's newsletter Perfect Sentences, I have been collecting for some time sentences I see on the internet which strike me as... well, not perfect, that's her project, but instead particularly evocative or speaking to me as characteristic of the many ways we use language online. I have more to say about why I collect these (I have more to figure out about why I collect these and why I find them interesting). But my aim right now is to test an RSS bot I just set up in the White Pube Discord server, and I am too fatiguey today to attempt to do any writing that involves thinking. So, have this collection of recent sentences:

Besides encouraging pornographic programming, giving a special interpretation to the address 0 has caused difficulties in all subsequent implementations. (src)

You can't use too much glue: multiple glues next to each other have no additional effect. (src)

It was optimistic, fun, and cross-cultural, but everything was sprinkled with a fine dust of evil. (src)

The systematic review found limited good-quality evidence of the safety, benefits and costs of the different strategies, making it difficult to differentiate between the various methods for removing earwax and rendering the economic evaluation as speculative. (src)

Everyone who saw me posting knew I had a brain injury and begged me to log off. (src)

The north of that department is all red sandstone cliffs, red sandstone buildings roofed with nacreous tiles called lauzes, the cutlery village of Laguiole, Marcillac’s ferrous wines, spectacular scapes, the great cathedral of Rodez, the sanatorium where Artaud was banged up and – alas now gone – La Taverne, where Philippe Regourd’s marvellous carte was restricted to dishes peculiar to the isolated foothills of the Massif Central. (src)

I will write again when I next have something to say. (src)

You don’t have to be a germaphobe to know that doorknobs are the highest preventable risk. (src)

an honor to be nominated for my despairing fragments lol (src)

Hope you enjoyed! More sentences some other time, maybe?

is status - sims but social media (that's the iOS link, here's the Android)

How does it work?

The game looks kind of like Twitter*. It's full of characters who post constantly - some are background characters, randomly generated, and who don't have much of a sense of persistence. And some are characters who are supposed to be (have the name, profile pic and characteristics pulled from a description of) from Your Favoured Media Franchise. (You select the media franchise from a big list of fan created ones at the start of the game). You need to post too - you can either write stuff yourself or use an LLM to generate your posts. By posting (and replying) you can increase your stats, your relationship points, and slowly level up. I think (it's been a while since I played it) there are energy mechanics and new characters are added when you reach certain goals. Lots of that kind of videogame stuff in there.

What does it look like?

Like this:

Why is it interesting?

Well, there's a fundamental alignment between the technology and the experience. You expect people on Twitter to mostly say nonsense! And the flurry of largely contentless, contextless posts feels fitting here. The meaning that filters through is ultimately the stats that underly the text generation.

Progress through the game is not gated by tricking the LLM to setting a flag, but is instead about slowly advancing stats. I think this progress is gated by an LLM checking whether the thing you said is actually spicy/impressive/etc - but honestly it could be a random number generator, the setup still works. What really advances you is continued engagement with the game.

The things that you post about seed the things that other characters post about. There is a typically dreamlike sense of a shared reality, facts slipping in and out of relevance, like doing improv with a cast of stoned people. It has a sense of being a closed universe - if you want new ideas, you have to bring them yourself. But it still does give a sense of a shared fantasy world you're creating, and the large and amorphous cast (and lack of ground truth it needs to accord with) makes it feel much better than most LLM powered gameplay I've seen.

The best thing about it is the feeling of liveness - new messages are constantly popping up! The app feels alive, it feels like a thing inhabited by people. And it's so 1-2-1 in terms of interface and fiction - it feels alive because we're used to these UI affordances, and it's been really hard to convincingly fake them until now because all of these pings and pops needs a unique bit of content to feel real. And LLMs can give you uniqueness - and sure, not interest, but that's not needed for the UI feel.

Fundamentally it succeeds at the basic thing a game should succeed at - it delivers on the fantasy it promises. It gave me (occasionally, distortedly) the feeling that I was on a fantasy Twitter trying to social climb with devil hunters. That's something no other game I've played has done. And it does feel like a real fantasy.

Do I think this is the future of the games industry?

Not really. It's a popular game on the app store (#15 in the lifestyle category right now! just ahead of "Booksy for Customers" and just behind "Amazon Alexa"!), but given the current price of operating an LLM I can't help but assume they're burning huge piles of VC cash. And if they do get established, I can't help but feel like they're up against some legal trouble from the owners of the IPs they're using. I can imagine they could put effective monetisation in there, but I don't know if the game part is going to hook people to them long term - the systems and the rewards just don't feel rich enough that people will still be playing years from now. Instead it feels much more in the model of a Nikita Bier-style social app - something that becomes a craze in a bunch of high schools for a season, sells out to a larger firm for a bunch of money, then subsides away again.

I think this is in part a sign of it being a game designed by people who are not game designers - without looking up their background, it feels like they're app designers who decided to make a game. That's one reason it feels so app-like and authentic – but it also means that some of that deeper gameplay loop stuff they're trying to figure out on the fly, or falling back to generic features which don't dig at the deeper reasons those features normally exist.

More generally, LLMs being used in this way work here because there's a really strong match between what they're good at - making lots of plausible text that's not worth reading properly - and what they're used for - generating a fake social feed. In games where that match between capabilities and context is weaker, I can't see them working as well.

But maybe I'm overly pessimistic! Maybe this is the start of a new wave of interest in fake social media games, maybe all that kind of interesting knowledge graph Talk Of The Town-style relationship games are gonna become hugely commercial. Maybe this LLM front end (and corresponding huge availability of investment funding) is gonna make them feel understandable and engaging and expose them to a wide audience. Or maybe (doomer ending) the future of games is something with marries the kind of AI Girlfriend ELIZA chatbot model with gacha gambling mechanics, and this is the first shaky step towards that deeply cursed union.

[* Yeah, Twitter, not X. Funny to have a game that apes the look and conventions of a platform that now no longer really exists, but is still enough within living memory that it doesn't feel like a nostalgia play but instead a reach for something familiar.]

writing "it's my birthday" on social media feels too obviously begging for attention but linking to a blog post saying that, even making this self-referential comment in the first bit which will be included in the little share text that gets included... that feels fine.

what am I doing for my birthday?

well* right now I'm sitting at the nice cafe near my house. it's not yet start-of-work time so I guess I could do this every morning? might be nice. I'm outside so I'm in the sunshine. and listening to nearby roadworks and next to a ventilation bit that's ejecting hot air.

later I'm going to the nice outdoor sauna with Eleanor. it was going to be with Arlo but they pulled a muscle and apparently it's bad to mix that with heat. honestly I just wanted to go to the sauna, irrespective of birthday, and it was booked out so far in advance I decided to go in a weekday afternoon and take a day off for my birthday to justify it.

and then in the evening I'm going out to do karaoke with a bunch of friends! what a good thing to do to celebrate a birthday! but it's to celebrate Ellis's birthday not mine. I am the opposite of mad, I like karaoke and I've not had to do any organisation.

I guess I'm writing this because I'm a little stressed by having a day off to do enjoyable things! I mean I don't have a job anyway (I do have work but that's different). but the self imposed constraints of a daytime where I'm not working and I don't just do regular things or read the internet, where I Make The Most Of It, that feels like pressure! ironic because the point is the opposite.

wow maybe I should just go home now and self indulgently do some programming trying to get the Downpour backend to talk to the Firebase FCM servers. (I am not going to do this, I have A Plan, I am going to read comics instead)

and then some other day I will do the organisational task I have been putting off, which is to organise an actual birthday party for myself. maybe.

happy birthday to me! I think it will be a nice day.

* absolute irritation directed at the Ghost blogging platform for not letting me enter a new line here, but instead insisting on a paragraph. on a computer I could shift-enter, but not on a phone! also for making it painful to do footnotes. also for not automatically scrolling when the thing I'm typing goes offscreen. wow it's annoying to write a blog on my phone, it's only merely okay to write it in the notes app and paste it. okay anyway send

I'm currently lying on my side with olive oil in my ear. I woke up yesterday with not much hearing and an unpleasant feeling in my left ear. I looked it up on the NHS site and they suggested it was because of compacted earwax - which made sense to me. The treatment they suggested is to put a few drops of either olive oil or almond oil* in your ear then lie down on your side for 10 minutes for it to sort of mingle with the earwax and soften it up.

and I've seen this advice elsewhere, and my understanding is that the ear drops you can buy at pharmacies are mainly olive oil, plus maybe a bit of something else to justify being a different product (but which ultimately doesn't make much difference)

so my question is: why is olive oil better than sunflower oil or groundnut oil? is there something special about the olive? (or almond). is it just that there was a folk remedy that specified olive oil and so that's the one that got tested and now that's the one that has evidence?

and my follow up question is: given presumably people use cheaper olive oil for this (or, I mean, whatever they have on hand. but that's likely to be the cheap end of the market just due to demographics). and given that there's huge amounts of counterfeit olive oil, which is not actually made from olives but is in fact other oil. does that work worse? my olive oil is from Lidl, it is not expensive, is it fake? have I applied fake oil to my ear and is this period of lying on my side, writing this post on my phone and waiting for waxy substances to mingle all for nothing?

answer: no, it's fine, my ear is better since yesterday, I'm just following up to try to stop it from recurring, the oil does seem to have helped. but the other questions do remain, and I have made no effort to seek out the answers.

ok i think my ten minutes are up, time to get upright

* they clarify: unless you're allergic to almonds

it's not quite 8am on a Saturday, i'm up early and enjoying the quiet of the morning (okay, i say up, i'm still in bed but on my computer). let's try to have a quick thought about AI! but also have enough nuance that no-one yells at me.

first i should say that i wrote a long and thoughtful talk about AI (when i say AI in this post i mean LLMs, this talk was also about LLMs). so go read that for some well considered thoughts, rather than these less considered ones. tl;dr: things have second and third order impacts, and it's worth thinking about those.

so with all that out the way, here's the thought:

i feel very differently about an AI model which runs locally than one which runs remotely

why do i feel this way? well, fundamentally there's a way in which AI models distil down books, transcripts, websites, Everything, into a big file made of parameters. you run the model and you can reconstruct versions of the things it was trained on. it's a type of lossy compression. the model is a representation of the corpus. and when that corpus was Everything, it can (re)produce a lot of types of things.

now, as i wrote in my longer and more thoughtful thing from a few years ago, that Everything, that significant-proportion-of-human-culture, that has value. we built that together, and long may we continue to do so!

if we're talking about a model that runs remotely, on someone else's server: we're looking at taking Everything, and gating it behind a monthly subscription fee to OpenAI. or credits to Anthropic. or given for free in the Google search summaries that a team of highly paid engineers are feverishly working to inject advertising into. it sucks! it's the enclosure of the mind.

but in the local case, where it runs on the machine we're using... sure, we're taking Everything from all of the individual people who have contributed to it. and some nerds with ulterior motives somewhere have figured out how to squish it all into a multi-gigabyte file. but... i can use it however i want. however much i want. i can change it, i can think of new ways to use it. i don't need permission, i don't need to pay rent. it's kind of beautiful, just as an object? like carrying around a dump of wikipedia, it just feels good to be able to touch a crystallised representation of human knowledge.

i guess the contrast here is between Pirate Bay and a SAAS. they come from very different places, ideologically. one is a gift, the other is rent. now, it's reasonable to be a creator and to be mad at Pirate Bay! they take a thing you worked hard on and they let people circumvent paying for it. the gift was not theirs to give! but the musicians i know are so much madder at the way Spotify operates, taking a monthly subscription and giving legal access to music... but somehow not letting any but a trickle of that money get back to the artists.

a confession

i do actually have a local model that sits on my computer, and that i occasionally use. it's MacWhisper, a nice app that wraps OpenAI's Whisper model. you feed it a recording of speech and it gives you a text file with a transcript in it. it works pretty well - if you're publishing something you probably want to clean it up/check over it, but it provides a pretty good replacement for transcription and a great starting place when doing subtitles. MacWhisper has paid options, but the free version works fine. i like it! and a big part of that is because it's a program that sits in my Applications folder, not a service i'm subscribing to. it's not going anywhere! it can't go bust or change it's business model. and it can't use my data in ways i don't like, which is especially important for something like transcription, where the thing being transcribed might be sensitive info. i'm not uploading that into whatever cloud service with whatever data retention policies and whatever partners and whatever policies on using the data for other purposes.

the fact that the thing i downloaded is not made by the people who made the model also points to the potential in local models. sure, there's tons of people making products that are interesting interfaces wrapped around an OpenAI API call. but the fact of every query having a cost limits the forms those products can take. it increases the latency, makes downtime possible, means those interfaces also have to be a live service, maintained, running the red queen's race. whereas, if you can download the model, lots more shapes of software become possible. you can provide access as a live service - as a provider you can choose your choice of hosting to run the models on, and you're not locked into a single expensive provider. you can also make it standalone, as with MacWhisper. or you can just embed it within your products as a little corner, a single feature. and you can also edit the model. you don't have to use it exactly how it came out the box, you can finetune it to work a different way, to express a particular corner of the latent space more, to have a different personality. you are part of the development process, you are on a level with the people who trained the model in a way you never can be if they control the model and access to it.

(a sidebar to get on a little hobby horse of mine: a local model also gives the possibility of really low latencies. reducing the latency between input and output can lead to a step change difference in experience of using a tool. now, lots of models are local and are heavyweight enough they'll run slowly on a normal computer, whereas remote once might be running on hyper-specialised hardware and will run faster - but remote models will always have the latency involved in communicating over the network. only local ones offer the possibility of running in proper realtime, in getting quick enough to feel transparent. i should write more on latency in tooling.)

if you're an AI sceptic, you might be saying here "wow, V, what's up with you? i know you talked about how AI is stealing IP, but what about the energy cost? what about the water? AI is burning the planet!". and... yeah, locally run models make that part better too! sure, maybe the training was big and expensive and cost a lot to do. but if the model can run locally, then the power consumption is... i mean, maybe your computer spins up it's fans, maybe your phone gets a bit hotter, i'm not saying there's no additional energy consumption. but it's limited by your mains electrics. it's within your control. you know how much energy it's using (you're paying for it, you can look at the electricity bill when it gets delivered).

(and flipping to the developer perspective again - internet businesses are based on the idea that running the servers is very cheap, and development costs only have to be paid once, so you can offer services to people for something like zero marginal cost. this is why you don't have to pay for WhatsApp. but when AI models start to really take a lot of money to run, that stops working. local models, or models that are lightweight enough they could run locally - they change that back to the zero marginal cost model. i would like to add a feature to Downpour where it can automatically cut subjects out of photos. i will not add this feature if i have to pay every time a user does this. i would add this feature if it could run on the device.)

so why aren't they all local?

this does bring us to the flipside, and why this isn't the way that all AI models are run. the first reason is: you can only run stuff locally if it's a small enough and fast enough model. if it can run on whatever hardware and doesn't need a ruinously expensive NVidia chip to complete in a reasonable amount of time. and that's... some of them? not all of them? definitely not the cutting edge, best performance, state of the art ones. but these big new expensive models have a tendency to get optimised, to get distilled, to get replicated smaller and cheaper. i'm hopeful!

the second reason you can't run models locally is because: you need to download it first. so, someone needs to put it online - either in a leak, or, more often, licensing it openly. why would they put all this time and money (lots of money) into making a good model and then give it away? well, sometimes they're academic researchers, but mainly because they're a big tech company who are not currently in the lead in terms of making AI models, and they see a future where every model is owned by a few companies who charge rent for accessing them, and they want to make a strategic play to try to keep stuff open and competitive. this has been Meta, this was most recently DeepSeek... even in this world of local models, we're still beholden to the manoeuvrings of the giants as they sumo wrestle, hoping not to get squished by their feet as they shuffle around.

but lots of models are not available for download. the tech companies are keeping them close to their chests. sometimes if you ask them why, they will say the reason is safety, which... yeah, okay, there's something to that. not so much the risk that the AI will turn out to be incredibly smart and take over the world, i don't think that's a real thing. but what is real is: download an image model locally and you can finetune it to generate deepfake porn and child abuse images and other awful stuff. download an LLM and you can finetune it or change the prompts and get it to tell you how to build bombs or be your fake girlfriend (who is actually allowed to sext you) or sweet talk you into weird and awful ideologies.

but also the main reason you can't download them is: they have spent a lot of money to train their models. they do not want their rivals to see how their model operates and catch up with them. instead, they want to become the monopoly provider of AI services. they are looking forward to a world where they get a cut whenever anyone does anything with a computer.

in conclusion

i don't know if i like AI, as practiced today. but i do know i feel differently about local models versus remote ones. they feel like different visions of the future. neither vision is utopian... but i know which one i prefer.

wow, i tried to write a quick thought and ended up with a 2000 word essay. also it's 2pm now. i'm bad at this. worse thoughts next time, i promise. maybe on a less contentious topic.

It's the year of the blog! Everyone's writing one! Everyone's setting up an RSS reader so they can make sure to catch when their friends have posted. It's the cool new thing! Sometimes they're called newsletters, but we know the truth - they're really blogs! Everyone's fleeing from the monopoly platforms, there's no longer a genuine case to be made that they're good, only that they're there. And when they find they still have a desire to put some thoughts online... it's a blog, baby!

Okay, maybe it's just me. And a subset of my friends.

But seriously, it's nice. Lower your standards. Unkink your writing, it's got all tangled up from fitting into that tiny box. You can put a pictures into them if you want, but you don't have to. There's no algorithm to beat, no best time of day or necessary face pic needed. You can refer to a thing you wrote in the past in the future!

I'm on a Discord server where every time we post a blog post it gets posted in the channel. That's nice. Often there's a nice chat! I bet there will be once I post this one. I want to set it up for other Discords I'm in. Not to post Official Updates on The Thing the Discord server is about... but just to let everyone see the blogs everyone else is writing. Get excited about it! Respond to each other at length!

A blog feels a little safe, a little cozy, but also free and clear. It's simultaneously public - you just need a link! But it's also hidden - it's not on the feeds, it's a click away. In today's internet we're either hiding away from the world in our little communities or we're hyper-optimising our public personas... but a blog is a secret third way to post!

Cohost got me started - you could write a post, and it felt appropriate at any length, and any level of thought. Two word shitpost or essay-length research report, people demonstrated they could appreciate either. It felt freeing after years optimising myself for Twitter! Cohost died, though, and to get that feeling again I had to spin up some infrastructure myself. It was annoying to do! I know people are trying to make it easier, and I wish them luck. But I succeeded, and I know you can too - join me here, writing posts of variable length and putting them online for people to read, join me in celebrating... The Year Of The Blog!

Some echoes to this post I wanna link here:

The year of the blog? + how to easily put a Bluesky feed widget on your website

After all, if you're 30 or older and you're reading a blog, then you may have to consider the possibility that you don't actually have any coolness left to preserve. You might as well just join Bluesky and give up. 

A bunch of us are here and we're posting. As if it's 2025... The fuckin' year of the blog!!

an RSS bot in a group chat is our era’s best salon

Okay, I’m being too cute by half with the title. But! Walk with me here.

maya.landMaya

Thrilled to have Maya respond - I also know what she means in terms of being sceptical about the blog's status as a safer space... I definitely take the warning! But still there's a psychological element to it, this is my turf in a way... Anyway, good thoughts about salon culture and the conversations that can flow from blog posts...

And on that I should say that I have had a few people mention this idea of it being the year of the blog, talking about how they feel like they should start blogging... More meta posts to come, I think.

23 Mar: ah! like this one:

and in fact going to look at her blog, i see this post:

the year of the blog - kaylee rowena

i’m trying to blog more! listen to me ramble about it!

kaylee rowena

or: not necessarily, quality, but effort, or polish, or high standards that mean i'm constantly thinking about making blog posts and rarely ever sitting down to write them, because to write them i'd need to open my code editors and mess with the layout and maybe i should do something interesting with the layout of the page instead of having it be a basic text-heavy page, maybe there's something i can do with the form of the website to make it unique and noteworthy ——

no! stop! bad! just write things!

i get bogged down in the process of things a lot, whether it's blog posts or comics or sewing projects or party planning. i always want to make something Different™ — as if the form of the thing is more notable than what i'm actually trying to say with it. i'm trying to convince myself that saying something badly is better than stressing about saying it interestingly and ending up never saying anything at all.

yes yes yes yes!!

So I saw this link to a new CrowdSupply campaign, for a new device called "Ink Console", which is designed for playing text games. It's got an e-ink screen and joysticks, they're gonna make a tool to let anyone make games for it... I like new hardware devices, I like text games, I like new tools for making games... why am I not excited for this?

Well, mainly it's that it doesn't seem like a serious attempt to do these things. The games look like they're made with AI, the organisation behind it is just one guy (I think), the page is light on details, the photos are random shots... all seems like a punt, to me.

But it provides a nice excuse to talk about making a games console. The thing about making a new console like this is that designing the device, whilst very difficult, is also one of the easier parts of the problem. Harder parts include:

• manufacturing and shipping it
• managing capital, cash flow and inventory
• actually having some games on it that people want to play

Let's focus on that last one, because it's the evening and that's the fun problem not one of the depressing ones.

If you invent a new device for playing games, where do the games come from? There's a few options.

Option 1) the games already exist. You make a device that's compatible with previous devices. Great! Sensible solution! The question now is... if the games already exist, and can already be played elsewhere, why do people want to buy your new thing? Maybe the answer is that it is more portable, or better set up for playing games, or doesn't involve having to deal with Microsoft Windows (the Steam Deck is all of these). Maybe it makes the games run better ("pro" editions of consoles, or every incremental PC hardware upgrade). Maybe the old thing just isn't made any more (so, lots of GameBoy projects, such as the Analogue Pocket). Maybe it just looks cool! (a bunch of weird hardware mods).

Option 2) you just make the games yourself. Look, it works for Nintendo. Honestly, this is one of the better options here, although any plan which has as a necessary step towards success "make multiple exceptionally good videogames on time and on budget" is... I mean, there's some risk involved, is all I'm saying. Even if you're Nintendo, and have the deep experience of making good videogames they've nurtured over the past forty years. And the rights to fuckin' Mario.

Option 3) people make the games because they want to make money selling them to people. The best way to convince people they might make money by making something for your hardware platform is to have a lot of people own it, and to have those people eager to spend money on games for it. This is unfortunately hard to achieve unless you already have a lot of games for people to buy, or a really good marketing team with a lot of money. Great position to be in once you're there, though. Especially if you can take a cut of every sale - a back of the envelope calculation estimates that Apple makes at least $15 billion per year from their cut of games revenue. That's a good business model!

Option 4) people make the games because you promise them some money if they do. Great, perfect, absolutely the traditional route to take when trying to establish a new games platform. This kind of thing was propping up the indie games industry for years! There was so much money available to put your thing out on a platform that a large corporation was hoping would some day be the monopoly player in how people obtain videogames. Or to put your thing on a service which would hopefully attract people to whatever non-games thing they cared a bit more about. A TV subscription package, probably.

Unfortunately then interests rates went up, and all those platform plays that were not really going anywhere at any particular speed suddenly lost their budgets for buying the rights to interesting but questionably popular indie games (the really popular games were out of their price range). And unfortunately, as I previously said, they were propping up the indie dev industry, and now that prop has fallen away, and no-one is particularly enjoying the consequences.

Option 5) people make the games because making games is fun, and your device is especially fun to develop for. Look, a lot of this post has been quite cynical but here I get to celebrate some fun stuff! Like, the Playdate - just charming, and the constraints make it more fun to work with, and the tooling was pretty great... Or, all the people making weird Gameboy stuff - a big boost from childhood nostalgia and that Gameboy is now a standard... but it's fun, hard hardware constraints, but they're well understood! Heck, even consoles that don't exist, like PICO-8, can be fun enough to develop for. I think the trick for pulling this off is to be very thoughtful and very charming. Difficult but quite possible! Of course, this does then mean the platform is full of enthusiastic hobbyist stuff, which obviously I'm a huge fan of, but doesn't necessarily attract millions of players. If that's what you're looking for. Maybe the hobbyists are the point.

I think that's all the good options right there? There's a few more I can think of that I just don't think work, let's quickly go through them:

Option 6: AI??? Okay, sure, you can generate the games with AI. But unless you've invested billions into training new and exciting AI models, then so can anyone else. So why are your AI games a draw, when people could just generate their own games. And anyway... I have not yet seen a game made primarily by AI, and I am sceptical that the technology exists to do it, or that it would retain a player's interest if it did exist.

Option 7: Ignore the problem, hope it solves itself, we're busy making this complicated device right now, we'll sort that out later. A surprisingly popular choice, but alas it works about as well as you'd think it does.

I think that's all the options? None of them are especially easy or cheap or reliable routes to go down, but then there's no reason that building a sustainable platform should be an especially easy thing to achieve.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about this kind of problem - it was the implicit background for a lot of the work we were doing at Sensible Object when we were developing Beasts of Balance (we were never quite trying to make a hardware platform for other people to make games for, but largely because it's as hard as it sounds). And then, while Downpour is not a hardware platform, it is a platform. I just deeply enjoy thinking about the way that play interacts with it's surrounding context. How does the business model shape the game design? How can the hardware affordances shape it? How does the social context people approach the game with shape it? Fascinating, chewy questions, but also ones where you can find surprisingly specific answers if you look.

Anyway, just to end this on a plug: if you are making a new hardware platform, I would love to chat about it. I spent some enjoyable time last year prototyping a new game for a hardware platform with novel interaction affordances. We made some good stuff and of course I can't talk about it - but I would love to do that kind of work again. Or frankly just hear what you're up to, I'm always curious about new takes on a crunchy problem.

Hey, it's a vaguely work themed post! Today is the release of Terry's Other Games, a nice collection of, well, the games that Terry Cavanagh has made over the years that aren't his big commercial releases. Commercial releases like VVVVVV, Dicey Dungeons and Super Hexagon - all good games!

Why am I posting about it, other than I'm friends with Terry and just generally excited about the release? Because one of those games is A Proper Cup Of Tea, a Downpour game which is probably the most popular thing made on the platform (look, he's good at making games, okay?). And this means that this is also the first commercial release of a Downpour game!

Structurally it feels like this is the place I should describe A Proper Cup Of Tea. But actually I think you should just play it. Here you go, it's embedded just below, it's a short little thing to click through, it'll take you a minute or two:

How was that? Good, right? If you only made one cup of tea you should go back and play it again, you won't properly get the joke otherwise. It's a good joke, imo!

Anyway, yes, it's been great to see responses in the runup - the Reddit AMA Terry did had a bunch of people asking or referencing the game, it's nice to see how it's sunk into the pop culture. To see streamers streaming the game too, playing it really fast and singing a little tea-themed song while they play. It's a weird thing, making tools - you have these feelings of pride and accomplishment, but over things that other people made, that are fundamentally not something you would have made. It's a very good feeling. I wonder if I'll see even more people posting about it after the launch?

I should also say: I'm proud of A Proper Cup Of Tea being included in the collection because the collection is the result of recoding the games so they all work from within the same codebase, they're all maintainable together and not a disparate collection of .exes that work or don't work under different circumstances. So it wasn't a case of plopping a web browser in there to make the game playable, but reimplementing it in a new language. Which is something I worked hard to make possible! A design goal when I was making Downpour was to allow people to take the games and do things with them outside of the contexts and tools that I provided. So you can export games from the app, and they are a html file, a folder of images, and a data.js file. That data.js file contains a big JSON blob containing all of the game data, in vaguely human readable format. So what Terry did was he wrote his own parser for that format, he positioned images and text in the correct places as that file specifies. He told me it was "not too painful"*. A proud moment to hear that! And also a reminder that maybe I should document the format properly so some of the corners that are a little more cryptic make sense (for the record, b_c is border colour and bg_c is background colour).

And then of course, Terry has done the work to make this a proper release - and that means that he's added controller and Steam Deck support, and he's added localisations into a ton of languages. So now I can see what a Downpour game feels like when you're using a controller. This is also the joy of making tools - doing hard work, in the hopes it will pay off in an unknown way in the future. Making something rich, and leaving all these loose threads that someone can hook into later on and build it out in ways you wouldn't anticipate.

Anyway - the collection just came out, go buy it. If only for Tiny Heist, which is pretty addictive. Here's a big thing to click:

* I checked this quote with Terry on Discord:

So, yeah, on the record: it was delightful.

A tired joke. But let's see if there's any interesting insight to be found within it. Let's examine each word in turn:

"Can" - a defining quality of videogames is that they offer means to exert agency. Is it meaningful for a game to feature dog-petting if the dog-petting is compulsory, automatic, involuntary? "Can" here implies that the choice is offered to you. And that's an important emotional beat - if the dog wags his tail you want to know that you were the one to make that happen. Otherwise where is the satisfaction?

"You" - I started writing this post as a way of expanding on this post from earlier:

Implicit in the question is a conflation between "you" the player and "you" the character that is controlled within the game. A conflation that is simultaneously natural and fraught. I can't find the quote, but I recall someone talking about how when writing about videogames you naturally shift across all of first person ("I jumped up on the ledge"), second person ("you then need to find the key") and third person ("Lara Croft discovers the secret entrance"). It's worth noting the power that playing with the distance between player and character can have - the twist in Bioshock, the subtle shifting of viewpoint in Kentucky Route Zero, the reflection in the screen in Her Story.

"Pet" - As a English speaker living in the UK I have only encountered the verb form of "pet" within the context of "petting zoo", the phrase "heavy petting", and the question "can you pet the dog?". It's meaning has always felt a little mysterious to me. I mean, I understand that it's physical touch, intimate and affectionate in nature. But the similarity of the word "pet" to the word "pat" makes me feel it is limp and slight contact, unsatisfying to the giver and to the receiver. As an English person, I would much more naturally say "Can you stroke the dog?". And on looking up if this was a me thing or an English thing I saw that Irish folk might well say "Can I rub your dog?" - a funny phrase to my ears. So "pet" is a reminder of the way videogame culture can spread a certain kind of implicit Americanism world-wide.

"The" - Implying that there is only one. A nice humorous simplification. Well of course there's a dog in your game about X. And of course there's only one. But also, if you are making a game, it's interesting to reflect how once you have made one dog, the second dog becomes much cheaper. A third dog, well, that's cheaper again. And the tenth dog! The dogs start becoming almost free at this point. But at a certain point you start having so many dogs that you have to start doing dog-specific optimisations to keep going. All this reminds me of Bennett Foddy writing about numbers in game design:

As I play through the latest warmly received game that has Good Game Design I always find myself wondering: could it be that zero, one and infinity are the only reasonable numbers in game design?

(https://thatsnot.fun/zk-map-for-stranger/)

"Dog" - Of course, you can pet other creatures. Much fun has been made taking the format and applying petting to other objects. But when I think of this, I mainly think of a blog post I remember reading from Matthew Inman, the former content marketer who does The Oatmeal, writing about how it's important to follow your creative impulses even if they're not perfectly aligned with the market, and giving as an example making a comic about dogs when the common wisdom is that the internet prefers cats. Which wasn't a hypothetical example, he did make that comic, and he does seem to be someone who owns dogs and does not own cats - we can imply that his personal interests really do align with dogs. Of course, it was his card game Exploding Kittens which really pulled in the big bucks and got a Netflix deal, so... I'm not sure if the lesson really applies. Maybe we should be following the most tightly commercial thing, rather than trying to follow our own interests. Or maybe we should try to avoid rewarding anyone who has this kind of deeply cynical instinct, even if in this particular instance it does align with our interests. A stand against "selling out", I guess you could call it, if one wanted to assume that people naturally start from a position that is not sold out, and are only later tempted to it.

Thinking today about how much of game design is about creating desire from nothing, or from the smallest things.

You sit down to play a roleplaying game. You create some characters. Who are they? Where do they come from? What ... wait for it ... do they want? They go into a tavern, they meet a wizened stranger, he offers up a quest, and at the end of it... We look for things to desire, and when a possible object is offered up, we leap at it. It is the thing that animates the characters and brings them into conflict. One desire leads us on to another - What does my weary warrior want? He wants peace. He wants to retire and settle down. He needs enough money to buy that cottage in the countryside. He needs to take on one last job. He needs to trust his companions to succeed. From one desire, many desires are created. The chips are down... he sacrifices himself, his original dream, and saves his companions. None of that momentum is possible without him starting off by wanting something. And then a satisfying (if tragic) resolution. Desires come into conflict, and the character says something meaningful by choosing between them.

You install a free to play game on your phone. It looks neat, and you're bored one lunchbreak. It's a tactics strategy game, you have a cast of characters and they do different things. They look different, too. One of them has a cool coat. And there's little levels to solve, almost like puzzles sometimes, each needing a different combination of abilities. Abilities that your characters have, in varying amounts. And – did you notice? It happened so quickly – already desire has crept in - you were given some tasks, and now you find you want to complete them. You're working through the levels. The starting characters get you through the first week, and you're levelling them up to make them stronger. But you know (you've played this kind of game before) that their power curve will tail off and you'll stop making headway soon. You turn to the slot machine (of course this game has a slot machine). You can see the prizes you might win when you pull. There are characters who are strong, characters who are interesting, characters who are... sexy?? The financial success of this game relies upon offering up access to the JSON files and JPEGs that constitute a character. Small amounts of data, sitting behind a CDN, ready to be enabled once a variable in a database is set correctly. But yet that data has meaning behind it. What a magic trick, to design a system such that these bytes have such weight!

A clown walks on stage. The clown is wearing a hat. Another clown walks on and stands next to him. The second clown looks at the first clown, and thinks... I want that hat. A whole routine ensues. The hat moves onto the floor, onto another head, onto the floor, is kicked about, goes into the audience, back on the first clown's head, is sat on, and finally into a bucket of water. The hat is just a hat, but the clown works hard to want it, and to express that wanting to you.

You're playing a game where the flow of water has been modelled with care. You have the ability to build dams. A small river runs through a deep valley. Do I need to say more?

I could continue, and maybe some day I will. I'm fascinated by this magic trick we do when we design a game. Where does this desire come from? We start with rules, images, text, movement. Players construct meaning from them, and find that that meaning brings with it desire. Something is unresolved. We want to resolve it. We want, we want, we want... But as designers we need to carefully nurse this desire, we need to cradle it like a candle in a draughty house. A gust from the wrong direction, sustained a little too long, and it can be extinguished. Boredom, the ick, overwhelm, distraction. But if it is sustained, then it can pull us for forwards through a game. It can drive us into new situations where we find, maybe, new things to desire and pull us yet further onward. What a thing to work with as a raw material!

I was going to end it there, I felt that was a nice conclusion to the post. But then I had a little time after and I realised I actually had some practical advice for game designers coming out of this. And that advice is: remember that you are not just responding to desire, but also creating it. A system which takes existing desire and works out how to resolve it is a tool, not a game. So if there is a problem with your design, think about how to inspire desire in the right places, as well as just fulfilling it (or not fulfilling it, in the case of free to play).

i am a big fan of Emma Garland's newsletter Gabrielle. which honestly could be the whole post, heading "some good writing about desire", body "read Gabrielle". but i want to more specifically point to a recent essay she wrote about shame:

Gabrielle #30– Shame

The forbidden emotion.

GabrielleEmma Garland

and just as a treat, here's the first para, because it's great and you'll get a sense of whether you'll be interested from it:

Like many women, I once dated a guy who punched a hole in my headboard. He wasn’t a violent man whatsoever, but he had certain sexual impulses that he didn’t like. In the heat of the moment, rather than act on them, he would hit something – the headboard, the wall, himself. It was sad, not least because they were impulses that dovetailed with my own, so I would sometimes find myself in the humiliating position of feeling jealous of a wall. Still, there was nothing to be done about it. Shame had already taken root.

she talks a little bit about changing mores, as examined through culture, but if you want more on that, she also wrote this recent piece for Dazed, as a kind of update to the 2021 essay, Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny:

Everyone is horny now

From FKA twigs and Ethel Cain to Babyratu, it seems like the stifled sexual expression of the last decade has finally breached containment – and it’s filthier and messier than ever

DazedDazed

she talks a bit about Nosferatu in that, which she previously went deeper on:

Gabrielle #28 – Too Much Blood

Sirens and vampire simps: what Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu says about contemporary sexual anxieties.

GabrielleEmma Garland

(here's what i thought)

i think you can take this whole cultural criticism thing too far, people's lives are wild and diverse and buck against trends in every which way. a classic variance within groups is larger than variance between groups situation. but also it is so hard to talk about vibes changing without reference to a thing, and i love the way that criticism, good criticism, can use culture as a lever to grasp otherwise very slippery things.

anyway, some good writing, i recommend it.

thinking about the things i think about, care about, post about elsewhere. and comparing that to the things that i end up posting about here. so often this blog dives in towards the trivial, it's a "look at this cool detail" rather than talking about larger things or more systemic things. and that's fine, i value my ability to notice a cool detail and think about what it is and why it's there. but sometimes i wish i could talk about these larger things here.

but the thing is, to talk about a large thing properly, you either need to write a lot, or you need to have done a lot of thinking and editing to get a short thing. and both are a lot of work, and the guiding light for this blog is to keep as low effort as possible. the platonic ideal for posts on here is a single paragraph, written out and posted without having been read. i never hit it, but that's what i dream of. it's close to "microblogging", that surprisingly popular pastime made famous by Twitter. but definitely not macroblogging, either. i guess i'm aiming for midiblogging.

just want to quickly connect a few thoughts here, inspired by Mike Cook posting this:

this links to the pastagang blog and a post almost certainly mainly or exclusively written by Lu [not true! see correction below]. pastagang is a bunch of people who make music together by writing code in a shared room (this one: http://nudel.cc/ - you can go make music there right now! you can join the pastagang!)

that post talks about a lot of futures of computing, talking about three different approaches to it, and trying to find the common element:

my idea was that they all acknowledge that code can break and die in various ways, and that we should plan around that.

in my opinion, the three movements don’t say that code death is something to be avoided, but rather that it is something to be handled gracefully.

something here about entropy, about failure and accepting it, using it, turning it into something else.

and then Mike connects this with the idea of the archive as attempting to not just capture the artefacts that resulted from people's lives, but, more importantly, to try to understand the context that people made them within. the kind of archival work that Holly Neilsen partakes in:

or look at the work of Kat Brewster, looking through the archives of the GayCom BBS, which was operated for and by gay men during the AIDS crisis:

Kohn’s work establishing GayCom as a means for LGBTQ+ people to connect during a “time of multiple crises,” was integral to his ethos of liveware — an approach that valued the people who maintained systems just as much as their hardware or software.

this kind of archival work is kind of defined by it's futility - no matter how extensive the archive, it will never fully capture the richness and texture of life. but it can get close! and it can give us glimpses of lives outside our own.

but actually i think the thing that i thought of when i saw "let code die" is that it's a mantra that has come about [is here used] in a very specific context, which is people playing music together. and that instead makes me think of this long article on Nine Inch Nails, mysticism and Robin Finck that i read instead of getting out of bed this morning.

‘They’re Really Close To My Body’: A Hagiography of Nine Inch Nails and their resident mystic Robin Finck - The White Review

‘We possess nothing in this world other than the power to say “I”. This is what we must yield up to God.’ — Simone Weil ‘God break down the door You won’t find the answers here Not the ones you came looking for.’ — Nine Inch Nails Photosensitivity…

The White ReviewFred Fernandez Armesto

here's a relevant section:

It has long been said by musicians that you can tell a good one by what he doesn’t play, by the notes he chooses to leave out. It reveals his understanding of the song as a structure, and how his decisions not only hold it up but give it space to breathe, let it live its own life without him. It also shows how self-confident he is as a player, knowing that he doesn’t have to blow his load over everything to leave a mark. Of all the rock gods, Robin is the only one I can think of who lets one or two notes do for him what the rest of the guys use dozens for.

Look at the video of GNR guitarist Richard Fortus and Robin playing an instrumental cover of Christina Aguilera’s ‘Beautiful’. Fortus starts with a cascade of noodling. He’s a fine player, and I have nothing against him, but when Robin starts playing, you can see what is soul, and what is not. It has to do with Robin’s timing, his choices about what not to play. Remember that he thinks of the breaths between phrases, like a horn player, so he doesn’t fill all the space with wiggly notes, showing off how quickly he can go through scales. He lets one note sing, really sing, and there are as many soundless pauses as there are notes. At around two minutes, he starts to play rhythm so Fortus can have his turn to solo. Listen to the difference. The spacing becomes rapid and crowded, which indicates rock-guitar expertise, and draws the focus to Fortus as a player, but pulls the focus away from the song. It’s like Fortus has something to prove about himself that doesn’t include the song, whereas Robin is content to let the song be bigger than he is, which it is.

i feel like at this point in the post i should draw a connection between these multiple perspectives. but i don't know that i have anything neat and conclusive to say. the value of leaving space. the value of accepting failure. glorying in the moment, knowing that it's fleeting. making connection with others. all of these things.

Lu responds:

couple corrections:

- the post was not by me. from a count, at least nine people participated. i just moved some of it to a separate file. this is why its best to say "by #pastagang". because it gets so hard to keep track, and its best not to give credit to the wrong person, while discarding the efforts of the others

- the mantra didnt come about in this specific context. its from the tadi web, which nudel is part of, and @froos@post.lurk.org is running with. see: https://garten.salat.dev/meta/youre-do

i regret the inaccuracy, and i especially regret erasing the work of a diversity of contributors while making a post trying to connect a variety of ideas together

okay okay, "clown school" isn't quite accurate, it's just a weekend class on clowning and physical comedy at Citylit. and i've only done one session (I missed the first session from illness). but the session I just did was great.

this post is me writing down some stuff that I'm thinking about on the bus home, so don't take it as too definitive a statement on anything. I give you this warning with the utmost seriousness: I am not a professional clown.

in a previous post I wrote about the magic circle, holding the game and also the context within one's head. clowning talks about playing multiple games within each other: there's the thinking about the performance and the being a clown within that, and then the clown also has stuff that they're trying to do within that. or, there's the game you're playing, the scaffolding of the performance. and then there's the bit that you find within that game, which is also a game. you hold onto the game for as long as there's something there, and then let go afterwards. learning how and when to leave the game is one of the most important parts of the game. thinking a lot about Bernie DeKoven here.

there was a bit where the teacher was talking about how what we're trying to do is play until we find the funny, and then we can develop that further. and it felt like, if you just deleted the "-ny", like I was in a production stages 101 talk at GDC.

it is so weird to try to interact with other players and also perform for an audience. I mean, not weird as a thing, but as someone who has been doing either roleplay/larp or public speaking, but never both... it's a lot to hold attention to!

and actually that holding and understanding attention is a lot of it. where is the audience attention, when do I take focus, how do I project focus (how narrow or wide is that focus). the idea that there is an audience focus is... well not an entirely new concept but it's not something I've had to play with directly in this way. I've done a lot of thinking about pointing attention places (eg doing the thing of inserting a blank slide when I want to do some important talking and I want the audience's attention. or designing the Beasts of Balance UX so the screen only demands your eye when something important happens), but that's typically planning ahead for where the attention ought to be, not responding to the shifts in attention. not seeing the attention as something that can be played with, dynamically.

or, maybe another way to look at this is that I'm used to the outer frame being care for other players and the experience they should be getting. and inside that frame there's the character and what they want. and now there's an extra layer in there of whether the thing we're making is funny, and funny for this audience specifically, and I don't know where to put that extra frame, and i'm not used to it, and it's hard to do other things while also holding this brand new frame, it's so big and awkward. and yet of course, nothing works if you only use one frame at a time, these are games that only work if you play all the games together at the same time.

also, yes, finding the bit, those smaller games - doing something that gets a response, setting up a dynamic between players. and that dynamic is often about wanting something and not getting it. this is something i feel in larps, often. how can i find something for my character to want? how can i find a way for them not to get it?

there's a thing which I kind of came to this to find and I don't know that I will - the experience of holding a strong feeling in my body. it's something I have loved a lot when I have found it in larp and wanted to find elsewhere and understand it more. but clowning is maybe not that, because it's something so focused on audience. the feeling is not in the body, but in the room. between the other performers and you and the audience, in, maybe, the tension between those places. we have not yet (i have not yet) been a clown on my own - maybe that will feel more natural, with one less frame to carry.

I like the teacher a lot - as you'd expect, he did a lot to try to lower the stakes, and accept failure as an outcome to be celebrated. good practical work on that, which I've not seen to quite the same extent elsewhere - when you fail the game, you have to own the moment of failure, you have to accept that attention and acknowledge it before withdrawing. he made a point of learning people's names and trying to get everyone else to learn them - building that into the games - which is a lot for a 18 person 2 hour class (I have to assume he'd prefer to be teaching half that). if I had to think why he'd focus on that, it'd be building that sense of community within the class - mutual trust, lowered stakes, etc etc. i am no longer surprised by this, but it is definitely worth saying how much you can make a room full of strangers feel like a community in a few hours.

anyway, like I said, this is like one class in. but I thought these notes might be interesting to someone else. and for me, later on.

if i was reading text, like this, on a web page. and i was on my laptop. and i felt a little discomfort at the small size of the words on my retina, if i was straining a little to read them, how could i make them larger? here is a list:

• i could move the screen closer to my face. sometimes i do this, but rarely. it's more enjoyable since having a high resolution screen - or maybe it's less enjoyable. i do like it when the materiality of the digital insists itself - i enjoy it when i can solve a problem by using a physical ruler on a digital screen. tracing onto thin paper would be a joy but feels so risky - the ink or the pressure leaking through. i am someone who lives with perpetual smudges on my screen, though, it is not an immaculate portal.
• i could press Cmd-+. this is the classic browser zoom, it does something to the CSS and then triggers a rerender. enjoyable how this alters the logic of the page at a deep level. but i do find i don't trust this fully - so many layouts don't rely upon the meaning of em or rem at a deep enough level to adjust properly. Downpour doesn't, for instance, although the bottom bar does increase in size.
• i could use my trackball mouse (an Ergo M575) to put the cursor over the main body of text and then hit one of the secondary buttons (the bottom one). this changes the field of view of the browser window so that the span of text under the cursor takes the full width of the screen. i do this often, although it does have the disadvantage that it seems to break scrolling with the scrollwheel. i'm not sure exactly how to characterise how scrolling is broken, but i do dwell on the issue.
• i could reach a little further, to the trackpad, and reverse-pinch (spread, i guess) two fingers on the touchpad. this does a similar sort of zoom, except now i have control over the degree of zooming. i don't know whether it would be good, or indeed be funny, if i could rotate a webpage this same way.
• i can hold Control and then scroll (either with my trackball mouse or on the touchpad). this, on my laptop, causes OS X to zoom the view on the monitor. this is an accessibility setting i enabled when i was working with a colleague who had vision issues and needed to have his computer zoomed in to a great degree to make out text - it was handy to have about in case i needed to show him something. since then i have left it enabled because i find it often comes in handy. so often i do want to look at something more closely, and the controls within each individual application i find leave something to be desired.

well, that's all the ways i can think of for now. or, i can think of more ways (go to a reader view, modify the CSS using the web inspector or an extension, copy elsewhere where the text is more modifiable, use some kind of lens between my eye and the screen, etc etc) but i don't use any of those on a regular basis.

why am i posting this? i guess because i find it interesting how many ways there are to accomplish a straightforward task on the computer, and how designing something reasonably straightforward (render some text on a web page) can interact with various of those ways, and how thinking through a widely usable interface requires thinking through all the idiosyncratic ways people use their devices. selecting text, for instance, which some people (including me) do as a kind of digital fiddling while reading. so easy to add some extra behaviour to this kind of thing, and thereby discomfort us (or the people you have now subjected to our fiddling).

a friend was like "i really like your blog" and also was like "i like how upfront you are that your current rate of posting will not last, and is in fact early January energy"

well, guess what? it did not last. i got ill instead. i think it's the flu? lots of snot, developing into a cough, with a stretch in the middle there where i think i was a little feverish. yesterday i did some really heroic amounts of napping, before (and i was worried about this) sleeping through the night. today is a little better, but i did not make it to clown class.

and this is the worst thing about getting ill, in my book - it's the sense of isolation, it's the way that i feel disconnected from all the stuff i had happening in my life beforehand. my POTS means that hitting a crash or getting some other illness that incapacitates me for a few weeks now happens kinda often (a few times a year), and while i am grateful for the reflex that makes me just immediately dump all my ongoing responsibilities to focus on getting better (it's the response that's best for my health, for sure), the situation of getting a little better and going... what was i doing? how can i catch up on all this? i feel lonely and isolated and i don't have any plans planned... it's not my favourite.

anyway, i do seem to be on the mend, so hopefully in a day or two i can start picking up the things i have committed to doing. i'm finding myself making lists already, so that's encouraging. and also writing blog posts.

sidebar: media consumption

• a big book from the 50s on clay chemistry. probably gonna stop reading it now, it's got onto glaze & i don't have that many pressing glaze questions
• The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett - started this, seems good so far, enjoying the worldbuilding & the energy between the protagonist & his boss
• A City On Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith - continues to be entertaining & factual. although there's a bit where they take against the entire concept of auto-ethnography, i think unjustly.
• the first hour of Barry Lyndon - a good film but too many people doing foolish things to be an easy watch
• random snatches of Games Done Quick - great as always, but a bit too hectic for my struggling brain
• First Blood - right at the start when i still had brain, Letterboxd review here. fantastic film.
• lots of jigsaw game

oh, and

very glad i got a flu shot, tbh

Today is the 7th of January, 2025, and yesterday evening I moved my phone charger so that my phone can charge overnight on the other side of the room. Some people would say that it is too early to give an update on how this is going, but I am not some people.

Effects I have noticed, so far:

• My bedside lamp is in a dumb place - I need to dig out a longer extension cord so it can go back to the taller bedside table rather than the stool I have on the other side of the bed. That's okay, though.
• I forgot to take my pills before bed last night. I guess I was riled up from all the excitement of dealing with plug sockets (I'm normally alright at remembering... I forget let's say once a fortnight on average. Not great but not the worst)
• Last night, I read before bed! A reasonable amount and then I fell asleep with the book still open. I generally don't let myself read before bed because either it'll be a book that compels me and then I'll stay up too late to finish it. Or it'll be a book that doesn't compel me and in that case I'll stop reading it after a few stabs at it. I lack persistence in these things and an easy relationship to doing things habitually.
• But this book was fine to read before bed, because it is a 1957 book on the chemical composition of clay. A subject I find fascinating, but learning that clay is typically primarily composed of fine crystals of feldspar does not have me hooked to find out what happens next.
• I'm now considering making a special pile of bedside books, where every book has been prefiltered for being a little bit too much effort for me to be keen to read it.
• I then woke up earlier than usual, and had a nice reflective hour or so as the sun rises compiling my intentions for the year. I don't know if I can ascribe this to the phone thing, but it was nice.
• What I have really been hoping for did happen, although it is again too early to credit this change - I woke up, I acknowledged that I was awake, and then I got out of bed. I did not check what was happening in the world and what messages I'd received for approximately one hour longer than I would have intended to.
• I was thinking about this reflective time, and how I wanted to maybe use some of this time around bedtime not on a device, so I moved a couple of spare notebooks down to sit beside my bed.
• And going to bed this evening, I find myself in bed at 11PM, a whole hour earlier than I usually am! Incredible! And I'm looking forward to learning about how different types of clay differ in crystal formation.
• The punchline is, of course, that I am currently writing these words on my laptop. Probably it isn't a positive step that, in the absence of little computer, I find myself on the big computer instead. On the other hand, I am using it as a typing-words device, not a checking-up-on-the-world device. But I do understand how a slippery slope feels underfoot.

But still, it seems like a good change, we'll see how it goes over the longer term. Arguably worth it even if it only gives me a week of vague benefit, it was not a lot of work to do. I struggle with setting habits, with valuing """self-care""", with sitting with myself. So it's better, where I can, to shift the way my environment works instead. Forcing functions & ways to lower activation energy for things I want to happen.

One example of this is that I have always been bad at opening and closing my curtains at the correct time of day. I know I'll just have to do it all over again, and besides, once I'm up I'm up. And before I am... well, it's dark, do I really need to get up. So now I own my place, I bought some expensive and complicated "smart blinds", the selling point of which is supposed to be that I can operate them from my phone, but the real point of which is that they go up at 8AM and go down some time after it gets dark. I wake up so much more reliably now that the sun shines across my face at the right time of day. (There is a downside, however).

Anyway, time for bed actually going to sleep. Thank you to Holly for inspiring this positive life change. And to that particular mood that comes over a person at the very start of the year. Here's to good intentions!

i've been thinking about games which make use of an already existing design, the way that they can be more interesting and lumpy than design which has been specifically designed

some examples:

[[fr0g] clan official server 24/7 zk map (for stranger)

lemme just quote from bennett foddy's great post on this:

The thing about making a game involving route-finding is you can't really get there by designing great routes. No matter how good your level design skills are, if the player is following a path you laid out for them, they aren't really route-finding at all. The player becomes too aware of your intentions, and their own autonomy becomes subsumed in them. As mkapolk explains:
My process for making the levels was to scatter geometry more or less randomly and then try to traverse it. Sometimes when I was going down a map if I thought that an area shouldn't be a dead end I'd add some more stuff to it, but that's about as far as it went.

You can construct a level that players can route-find through, but you can't design it... or to put it more precisely, you can't crack out the Good Game Design if you want players to experience route-finding. To pass through a well-designed level is a hike, not an expedition.

this technically isn't a case of pulling from the world but from randomness. but it feels kindred, and gets to a similar place.

OS map jigsaw

i was doing a jigsaw puzzle with my mum at Christmas. we played one that my aunt had given her, where the image was an Ordinance Survey map centred on her house. i suggested we played without consulting the map itself, which made the puzzle more interesting. the process went:

• finding the edges and the corners
• finding pieces that contained landmarks we knew the rough location of
• finding pieces which contained major arterial roads, and trying to put those together in ways that connect across the map in the places those roads are
• finding other routes that connect - train lines, marked footpaths, the run of the ridge across the left-right sweep
• finding the numbers that label the gridlines, and putting those in order
• filling out the green for parkland
• doing all the fiddly little bits

so many of these steps are satisfying in themselves but more satisfying when you know that no-one designed them for you. that no-one else has done this puzzle. that the order you are uncovering is truly being uncovered.

i think it's also that i like noticing details about the world or about a work, and this means there's more of them. the ugly copyright line at the bottom right, and how it confirmed some pieces. a designer probably wouldn't've put that there as a game element, but it worked as a game element.

Nico's jigsaw game

and of course i have to talk about Nico's jigsaw game, which we have been playing with a group of us on a Sunday morning (slash evening, half of us are Australians). it's an online web browser thing, still in development, where we do jigsaws together.

the way it's different from a normal jigsaw puzzle is that you just swap the tile positions. which leads to interesting stuff in terms of - you have to manage space, you have to shift completed sections carefully, you can get annoyed when someone loses a bit you just put together.

but the bit that's even more interesting (and relevant to this post) is that we're doing jigsaws of paintings, and the paintings are not designed to be jigsaws. it's great to look closely, to think about the texture of the chunks, to think about brush strokes. opening a new one and groaning at how brown it is. but then when the composition is completed, marvelling at how awash with colour it is, the macro structure absolutely informing the colour structure. thinking about planes and perspective and meaning, and all of this feeding into the puzzle solving while also not being designed to do so.

and the metagame of choosing pictures that would make good puzzles. or terrible, annoying puzzles, that too (still remembering Goldie picking that picture with disjointed tiles and then getting the splitlines just right so that they matched).

the game as a way of looking at a painting, not the painting as a way of finding cheap content for the game.

Untitled Goose Game

And since Nico & a bunch of the other people who play jigsaw game are the devs of Untitled Goose Game, it feels natural to mention it here. they did a whole talk about how the level design for UGG came out of doing location scouting - finding real locations and repurposing them for the game. finding details that would be extraneous if you were designing from scratch but... help give it an air of authenticity and specificity when pulled from a real place

(there's also a lot of interesting stuff about the relationship between Australia and the image they have of England, and of using references from the other side of the world)

but also it's fascinating, having played the game, to go visit the locations in real life and recognise bits. that path to the corner shop, that weird metal thing on either side of the door, the actually very nice fish restaurant that isn't in the game but you can see where it might be.

found videogames

we never actually finished it, but a good number of years ago i was working with some friends on a zine about the idea of "found videogames", the idea that the formal properties of a videogame, something like:

• has electronics
• has input and output and a relationship between the two
• has a sense of challenge
• affords "play"

is something that does not need to be created as a videogame, but is instead a set of properties that can be found within the world in many systems, which can then be viewed as a game. and so the idea was that we would create an imaginary catalog for a impossible exhibition of these games. one of my favourites was "using a subway system in an unfamiliar city". it has feedback loops, it has electronics, it has a system to engage with and gradually come to master. it does potentially have the lack of optionality, the unavoidable stakes, the ability to quit, that is possibly characteristic of games... but still, an interesting frame to see.

in this case, we are not just repurposing geography or architecture or an image as content for a designed system, but instead adopting a system wholesale and instead imposing a particular frame upon it.

some others

I don't have much to say about these right now, but I feel like I should include them:
- Geoguessr
- Audiosurf
- Scrabble
- most folk games
- football (soccer) (by which I mean, how big is the pitch?)
- mods which recreate existing places within game engines
- gambling on horse races

in conclusion

i don't know that i have a conclusion. it's something i've been thinking about, it's something that applies to a lot of the things i've been recently working on professionally (but can't talk about). most of my work within games has been on games which have one step into the "real world" - whether that is using map data or responding to social contexts or the hard constraints of making physical components. the examples i've pulled from generally sit more within a traditional game framework, but still pull in the world within them, with all the texture and rich context that provides. maybe i just like noticing things, and this is a technique that gives me more things to notice!

comments

there's not a proper comments section on here, but let me link some stuff people have said:

which in turn makes me think of plunderludics - this stuff is kind of the opposite of what i've talked about here, using the found texture of videogame as raw material for... sometimes more game, sometimes something else

Nico announced it!

School! Yes, I agree - so much of the design work I do is about creating contexts for other things, or providing new contexts for existing things.

(Marie is the "m" you can see, busy assembling the painting)

(Marie was also the host of the first Party In A Google Sheet)

step 1 is not to start writing a blog post instead. but let's ignore that part for now.

step 2 is to do nothing. just sit. no, sitting is too active, lie down if you can. close your eyes. do nothing.

step 3 is: that's boring isn't it? i find i immediately get agitated. but agitation is one of the things that is the opposite of rest - rest is not exerting yourself either physically, mentally OR emotionally. so

step 4 is: try that again, knowing that it's useful to do even if it's boring and even if it's confronting. you're not meditating, it's fine for thoughts to wander through your head, but try not to solve anything. if you're reading this then you probably do really need to do some resting, so: this is more important than the worrying you have to do.

step 5 is: okay this is still difficult. so let's set a timer. 15 minutes. it's a game now, can you lie there and not do anything, not try to solve anything, for fifteen minutes. if you fall asleep then that's fine - but it's also not the goal here. it's like having insomnia and lying there, knowing that you won't get some sleep but trying to gain the benefit from some quiet lying down anyway.

step 6 is that your housemate starts making some noise and you try to ignore it because the timer hasn't went off yet. you can hear the plane outside. this would be easier if it was warm and you were in a hammock. a bunch of time has passed, i wonder how much. i think i'm doing it!

step 7 is more of the same. worrying is also exertion, so try not to worry that you're doing this wrong.

step 8 is that your timer goes off and wow! you did it! you rested!

step 9 is that you probably need to do this again soon

step 10 is: i guess i should rework my attitude to this, try to make this necessary thing not something i actively dislike. better to enjoy it if it's necessary. better to do it sooner rather than waste a lot of time failing to do it but also not doing anything enjoyable either.

for more information on resting, please see this video:

Is over here