There's a bit in the White Pube interview with Flo Dill[1], where Flo talks about how she feels like artists have this compulsion, this absolute need to make art, and how she doesn't have that, and feels a little wistful over that lack.
And Zarina does ask her - so if you could choose to have that, would you? And she says no, I'm happier without.
And, like, she's on radio, and she's conducting an interview as she says this, so she's very clearly a creative person all the same.
And this mindset has previously made me question whether I am an artist - I don't know that I feel driven to make art, I feel like I could just not make it.
And I mean, I do call myself an artist, often enough. But also I don't feel like I need to? I was doing the same kinds of stuff before I felt like I should use that term, it was just games and other projects. And then I hung out with artists some, and felt like I should also call myself one. They said "you're an artist! you should call yourself that!". But at the same time, I don't feel like the communities of artists I hang out with are more core to my conception of myself than the communities of gamedevs I hang out with. I don't feel the drive - feel a strong enough drive, anyway - to get exhibited in arts spaces, to have a career in that world. I mean, it'd be nice, I like to go to weird places, I like to see people see my work, I like to feel important. But I don't feel like I need it to feel like I've made it. To make the making worthwhile. [2]
And I mean, that's the thing. When I look back, I can see a revealed preference - given a choice between more money or working on something interesting, I choose the something interesting. And interesting means a new project, means more creative control over it, means trying something I don't know will work. Following my nose, I guess.
But, I mean. I don't feel it like a drive or an itch. Not really a compulsion. And when I'm making things, I don't often feel transported in creative visions. I mean, sometimes, very rarely, I do. But most of the time it's just... work. Often irritating work -- I tend to have the habit of making the kind of things where I have to do a lot of tedious stuff in order that the people who will interact with it later can get to do the fun creative state-space-exploration themselves. Instead, it's just a thought of "oh, it would be cool if...". Or "someone really should make...". I'll even admit it's sometimes "wait, [person]'s thing is getting some attention and I reckon I could do better". Or even "they're wrong, but to demonstrate the counterexample I will need to...". Or, with pottery, often it's a "oh, I should learn to make X" - but I have a bit of a different relationship to pottery than to my other work, there's something about the fact that I'm making single artefacts, useful things that can be appreciated even if they're worse in every aspect than some other bowl or mug or plate or vase existent in the world. I've spoken about this before.
Anyway. My point is, I don't feel like my self identity is bound up in calling myself an artist. I don't feel like I'm compelled to make art. I could not! But, and I guess this is the important bit, I don't feel like I have to be compelled to do it in order to choose to do it. I could live a different life, but I think it would not be as rich. So I choose this one.
And, funnily enough, that last paragraph also describes how I feel about being trans.
Zarina: But um yeah, we thought we'd speak to artists about maybe like a more general sense of like how they go about things. And every single person we spoke to said in some way, in some form, I have no idea why I do this. This is not materially or financially beneficial to me. I'm like, I'm not I'm not paying my rent with this. Like, it's not like--this isn't a living, but I don't know how to not make art. Gab: You have to. Zarina: Yeah, it actually comes out of me. Yeah, it's like a compulsion. Flo: I wish I knew what that felt like. Gab: But but I mean you've got like a different relationship with like a different thing. Like do you feel like you have to do this? [gesturing at the soil in which they are digging] Flo: No. [all laughing] Zarina: Do you want to do this though? Flo: Yes, very much. I find it really enjoyable. I find it really satisfying and I find it kind of therapeutic which I'm sure that artists feel in some way about the stuff that they do too. Maybe to greater or lesser degrees with all of the different things. I don't have that like – it's not my self-expression. It's not my – if I don't do this I'm going to die. Gab: Okay, yeah, yeah. Flo: You know, I don't know what that feels like. And I I really think only artists feel like that. Zarina: Do you want it though? Flo: Maybe not. Gab: It's so intense Flo: Honestly, after I read your book, I was like, "Oh, I'm good. I'm good. I'm good."
[^2] a sidebar here for how maybe this is because I started by making Things For Online, and, like net artists, therefore have a weird relationship to the gallery. If I make a webpage which is itself a work of art, you can put it in a gallery - but it's a weird fit compared to looking at it from your computer, it's a translation of the piece which has lost something, the same way that a high resolution scan of a painting you can look at on your computer has lost something compared to looking at it in the flesh.
I was just watching Ada Null's 2025 Roguelike Celebration talk, and there's a bit where she's riffing off Kate Compton:
Picture a garden full of wild trees of the same species. If you compare any two trees, you can clearly tell they're different trees that have grown in their own way. But you'd be hard-pressed if the next day I asked you to describe exactly how they were different. They're just, you know, they're different trees. They they branch differently, they're slightly different heights. These trees aren't characterful, at least not relative to each other. So, they aren't perceptually unique, but they are perceptually differentiated. Once more, this garden's kind of boring, but it's a different kind of boring from our topiary garden. I feel like we could walk through this garden forever and ever, and we'd know we're making progress through it and not just walking in circles, cuz these trees are actually different, but it's all just blah. It's not really a garden anymore, more an endless forest.
a few years ago i had an opportunity to pitch a book to a proper nature publisher, so i pitched a field guide to a single butterfly species, with 100s of illustrations covering every slight visual variation, it wasn't picked up
it was based on the time my mum saw a late season ringlet in the garden and after looking at a field guide decided it was a mazarine blue, which is extinct in the uk, the only way i could convince her it wasn't was to show her the natural history museum's digital collection of ringlets
I love scientific illustration but not it's tendency towards generalisation, i'm a portrait painter I can't paint the average
I guess the point of this post is just to make the kind of shallow point that the property of whether something is interesting depends as much on the attitude of the viewer as it does on the thing itself. This is one reason I enjoyed doing my podcast the machine gently stutters❏❐❑❒ - every episode, I was reading out an instance of procedurally generated text. And, often this text is kind of bad, or is there to make a point by its volume, it's presence, it's overall structure, and is not really designed to stand up to the serious scrutiny of a line by line reading. And yet I found that when I did subject it to the serious kind of attention necessary to perform it, when I did try to infuse it's (often) lack of meaning with as much meaning as I could, that I could find something there.
I collect sentences I find striking on the internet, and often the sentences I am collecting are put out to fill space, because it's expected that there will be some text in a place and so some text has to be created to fill it. Text that's designed for machines (SEO), or text that's written carelessly. And yet the more you look at it the more remarkable it is. I can find as much to wonder about in this byproduct-text as I can in a seriously considered work of literature. Often this meaning is unselfconscious, or the observations are as much about the environment that selected for this text, but it comes through just the same.
In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it's not boring at all but very interesting.
At the New School once I was substituting for Henry Cowell, teaching a class in Oriental music. I had told him I didn't know anything about the subject. He said, "That's all right. Just go where the records are. Take one out. Play it and then discuss it with the class," Well, I took, out the first record. It was an LP of a Buddhist service. It began with a short microtonal chant with sliding tones, then soon settled into a single loud reiterated percussive beat. This noise continued relentlessly for about fifteen minutes with no perceptible variation. A lady got up and screamed, and then yelled, "Take it off. I can't bear it any longer:' I took it off. A man in the class then said angrily, "Why'd you take it off? I was just getting interested:'
Okay, that's all well and good, V, but it's more complicated than that because the trees that Ada is talking about aren't real trees. In the real world, the trees have infinite detail to them. The more you look, the more there is to find. But in the digital world, even the most intricately simulated bowl of oatmeal is going to bottom out at a certain point. The oats won't bear the marks of the particular processes that were applied to them since harvesting. The milk won't come from a particular herd of cows. The bowl won't have been made in a particular factory, out of clay sourced from particular clay pits, bearing the unique mineral composition that that signifies. The glaze - do you think this digital version will consider the glaze separately from the ceramic? Do you think that the choice of digital glaze will be decided based on having similar shrinkage factors to the digital clay, such that it isn't prone to crazing when run through a simulated firing schedule?
That's the thing about going outside. It's so much... so much everything more than the computer. And the computer can do some pretty amazing things, but the thing about a simulation is that it is not not the real thing. The thing about a map is that it is not the territory. The model is useful because it has made a choice for what to model. And that is where the art comes in.
There's also something here about the trees being within a garden. But I just got a book about gardens, so I will wait until I am deeper within that to have those thoughts.
two short youtube videos that i have watched today. i recommend both of them, you can watch them both in approximately 3 minutes:
and now i am enjoying comparing their structure, and also the way they differ. they have related vibes! i mean obviously one has wholesome vibes and the other has coked-up vibes, but the twist moment, the satisfaction of it, the way the tension builds before that moment, even as you know it's coming... i guess in one the interviewer is uncertain, and in the other the cat is uncertain... or is the cat uncertain? they seem determined, and they do succeed.
anyway, two good videos, and a nice thing to puzzle over. the deeper meaning of a moving image...
in fact, let me make a lie of the title and add a third video, for use in comparing with the comparison you have made between the first two videos
Mentioned this in my post about Unfair Flips, it's weirdly the mirror image of that game.
By which I mean that Unfair Flips looks like it's got clicker meta-mechanics, and it kind of does, but they soon abandon you to pure chance and desire for a particular flip.
And Q-Up – well, it's kind of the opposite. It seems very briefly like you should care about what flips you get, but soon you realise that the flips are the tiny bit of grit at the center of a palace made of pearl. It's all about the meta-progression - the skills, the items, the various currencies, the narrative structure built up in in-game messages. The various prompts "in-game" advance themselves, allowing you to, for example, start and game and then tuck your Steam Deck behind your laptop while you write some blog post about it.
Oh let me amend that last paragraph. I just unlocked challenges as well.
So, I mean, it's both seriously doing these things and it's also a piss take. A piss take of a genre I don't really play, but it's serious about taking the piss. The amount of intricate design that's went in here to balance this stuff while also keeping it funny... it's pretty impressive. Both the visual design and also the complexity of the thing.
Ah, I was just thinking I was feeling a little too satisfied with the experience I was having and then the demo ended. Good demo timing!
It's a... wait, I don't know what this genre is called. A game where there's a pile of physics-y things and they merge together when two of the same thing touch and you gotta make the big ones? There was a Disney one of these... oh yes, Tsum Tsum. Right. One of those.
Anyway, it's one of those, with, yes, also lots of meta mechanics. It's a deckbuilder, you are manipulating and buffing the dog-cards you use to spawn dogs to stack, and when the dogs merge you get money and bones which let you do that better. And there are also global buffs. And the whole thing is done in a lovely clean art style.
Also very impressive in terms of the amount of stuff there & the mixture of careful game design to give some good strategies and synergies to find, and also some stuff that's just fun & funny and probably not the best way to go. i look at this kind of design and I admire it aesthetically while also not having any real itch to dive deep within it and understand it. I don't even understand what things would synergise, I can just see that things have clearly been designed so they would. Some buffs interact with these buffs, and this thing rewards you for not having any of this, and I can see that there are likely to be multiple viable strategies and if I wrinkled my forehead a bit then I would probably understand what they are, but also I want to remain beautiful and smooth forehead-ed so I will not.
This might also explain why I like the kinds of boardgames I like.
I haven't played much Lumines, and I'm not very good at it, but I liked how the game still made me feel good even while I was flailing around at it. Nice rave visuals & music, yeah. Doop, doop, doop, I can imagine getting into the whole flow state and enjoying the hell out of it in a audio-visual-ludic-interactive way if I was any good at the game.
Guess maybe I should play Tetris Effect? Not that I'm an especial fan of Tetris either.
I really wanted to play this but it still has not finished downloading and it is now past midnight. Ah well.
It's a game about riding a horse across the steppe. But, like, it's really into the horse part - breeding horses, looking after the horse, the horse looks good and moves good. I'm not really a horse girl, but I can appreciate some people who care about a thing putting a lot of effort into doing the very specific thing well. Tourism for special interests. anyway, the pitch for this is: kind of like Death Stranding, but historical and about horses instead of piss. And cheaper.
Oh, it downloaded. But my blog locked me out on my laptop and now I've wasted a bunch of time grappling with the mobile editor to get this up so it's definitely too late to start it now. Next time! And also probably more Baby Steps, too.
Update, after having actually played some Legend of Khiimori. It's got a lot of systems in there, more than they could reasonably deliver on. And that means that there's a lot of stuff on screen. In a way that feels a little unconsidered - a bit "if I had time, I would have written a shorter letter". Not that it was overwhelming - the only thing I really had trouble with was the thing where you have to double tap the left bumper to tell the horse to stop, which is admittedly nice in a kinetic-skeumorphic kind of way. Wait, does "kinetic-skeumorphic" make sense? What I mean is that the bumper taps feel like kicking in your heels to tell the horse to change to a faster gait, or giving a little yank on the reins – or a double yank in this case. Did they have reins on the steppes? Probably.
Anyway, a lot of ambition here. I mean, not least that it's open world! I felt in safe hands in terms of the horse handling, and it felt good to be out somewhere and have my main worry "my horse is getting thirsty, I need to find a stream sometime soon". I guess the thing I didn't quite feel was a sense of the air rushing through my hair, alive & free and galloping across the plain to an unknown destination? I don't know that that was a promise this game made to me, but that's a feeling I would like to experience and this game didn't give it to me. It's partly that the game encourages plotting out waypoints on the map, doing some strategic planning as to which way to go. It's partly that going at a gallop is tiring for a horse, and I was never in such a rush that I wanted to tire it out, so I always stayed at a canter. And I guess it's also a little because I was playing on the Steamdeck – this is the first time the screen has felt small to me. I need to have a huge TV, soak in the world and see the grass blowing in the wind.
So, a reason that is about the game being about planning carefully to manage your trip. A reason that is about caring for the horse as a fellow being, not just a vehicle. And a reason that is about me not having bought a dock.
A few random niggles:
funny that the horse would only eat grass if I was on it's back. I'm like... I'm just here having a chat, you're fine, eat up! No? Okay, I'll get on so you can eat.
as someone who has almost always ridden a horse in situations where the horse knows the way much much better than I do... I miss the BoTW thing of the horse doing pathing along trails automatically. Or, to be honest, just being a bit wilful at times. Definitely helps in terms of feeling like the horse is in control of where it's going, rather than you.
Hard to balance making the horse feel alive & giving you a bunch of horse management simulation gameplay to do! Especially if you're also implementing a whole open world on top of that.
it's a game which, like Bennett's previous game QWOP, asks you to walk by moving each foot manually. except this time, in a realistic 3D world, and also there are characters and jokes and other things. it's a much bigger game. stop thinking about QWOP now.
i started by figuring out the controls at all, placing each foot with great uncertainty. then i got a bit more practiced, and graduated to a kind of march - lift foot, move forward, drop foot, repeat on the other side. after an hour or so this was working fine, it had become muscle memory and i was making steady progress so long as i didn't try any tricky scrambles. but my thumb was getting a little sore from pushing the stick forward so frequently. every step, i'd be flicking it up from neutral. then i discovered you could push forward on the stick, holding it there while quickly alternating the feet lifts. even faster walking, and no thumb pain. the only problem is that it required a rhythm i could not manage - and presumably it also requires some expertise in adapting that rhythm to the current terrain. i've not given up yet, thought - on easy ground i'm doing it a bit to rest my thumb, but it does mean the character keeps falling on his face.
which makes me think about the funny shift between discomfort for the player and discomfort for the avatar. i'm shifting discomfort from my thumb to failure for the character. constant "shit"s and "oh no"s and "aww"s. reminded of the bit about how games are the only artform where a review of them can shift fluidly between third ("Lara Croft then discovers this room in the temple"), second ("where you have to jump off the ledge and catch the bit on the other side") and first (" - but i keep fucking it up and dying") person perspective within a single sentence.
i admire the character physics in this game a lot. thinking about how Bennett made QWOP amongst a number of other flash games, and how much of his career has been defined by failure and movement since. a case of someone not trapped by their success, but using that success to tunnel deeper into an interest, finding new ways to express it each time. and maybe it takes that depth of expertise (which i'm sure is also very practical, dealing with instability in physics solvers etc) to make a control scheme as simple but as rich as this. like, that improved form of walking i can't master? i feel like real walking works this way - when we walk we are constantly arresting a fall. and when babies start to walk - this game is called Baby Steps - when babies start to walk, they do a little march, three steps and then they overbalance and fall on their arse.
thinking too, of the multiple paths you can take within Baby Steps. how much world there is, and how the level design is much looser than the typical Foddy game. sure, some bits are placed with immaculate care - there's some rock climbing bits i've noticed at even this early stage, and which ask you to demonstrate some specific tricks. but the game it makes me think of is [fr0g] clan official server 24/7 zk map (for stranger), which incidentally i found out about when Bennett recommended it on his old game-recommending blog. let's quote from his writeup:
You do a lot of downward climbing in _zk map, but the core activity is route-finding. You look across a haphazard pile of shapes, and your eyes trace possible ways down, imagining the lines of sight and obstructions along each meandering path. Route-finding is one part forward planning and two parts 'dead reckoning': making a choice and then figuring out how to get yourself one step out of the mess you just made. There is something magical about route-finding in a videogame, since videogame worlds are untrammeled, immaculate spaces. Every unguided turn you take is yours and yours alone.
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.
yep, that seems to accord with (parts of) Baby Steps.
anyway, i'm not that far in! gonna post this and play some more.
This is Unfair Flips! This is the game this post is about.
So, I think the first time it was Tom Walker. He's an Australian comedian who does a bunch of Twitch streams, and he decided to do a stream where he would flip a coin and get ten heads in a row.
EXCEPT, he made it awful by adding the extra condition that if he flipped 10 tails in a row, he would change the target to 11. And so on.
It took him 8 hours and a bit to accomplish. He used the words "coin madness" repeatedly. He talked a lot about the way he was flipping. Felt uncomfortable when friends came over and flipped for him. A lot of fetishising the specific coin he was flipping with. It's inevitable, I think, when faced with random chance, to start trying to find patterns. A desire for consequence for your choices. Ways to bend fate to your will.
It was interesting making it - not least the desire to add some kind of gameplay excitement for getting multiple coins flipped consecutively. I added this by using a selection of coins, one for each flip. This starts off kind of humdrum, but when you see the 7th coin for the first time, after tens of minutes of flipping... I think it works.
The other part of it was adding to the physical labour of flipping. Each flip, for my game, takes at least two clicks. And restarting requires clicking in a new location. There's a bit of rhythm. Something you can tune into over time. I think Tom Walker got better at flipping a coin after 8 hours of doing it. If you play this, you will get better at flipping these virtual coins.
I mentioned that I had made a game with a similar concept to Heather Flowers, the developer. She said:
your game was very possibly one of the inspirations for this project! i remember playing it a time ago and thinking "lmao this rocks" and then only remembering i played it at this exact moment
which means I think the chain of inspiration I am portraying has some validity. Enough for a blog post, anyway.
Anyway, earlier today, my new Steam Deck arrived in the post. And about an hour ago, I started using that Steam Deck to play Unfair Flips.
Now I should note that, across all of these experiences, I have never flipped ten heads in a row[^1]. I believe I will soon achieve this in Unfair Flips. I mean, eventually. I'm gonna get there[^2]
(warning for spoilers, such as they are, for Unfair Flips in the rest of this post. These are mechanical spoilers, rather than about narrative twists but... it's a game of mechanics)
The structure of Unfair Flips is that you start at 20% odds of flipping a head. And you get a little money for every head you flip. And you get power-ups. If you've played a videogame with this kind of economic engine - maybe an idle game or something with a similar kind of structure - you might be familiar with the power curve. You start by grinding out individual things. And then over time you have the money to buy upgrades, and the upgrades mean you get resources faster, and the resources mean you can buy yet more upgrades. The costs go up on a power curve, and the rewards go up on a power curve that is just a little bit steeper. The game I was playing before this, Strange Jigsaws, about jigsaws that are strange, even had a bit where it did one of these [^3]. That's how common this particular setup is.
And... Unfair Flips doesn't work that way. I mean, it starts like that. The coin gets more valuable. You can get bonus multipliers. You can reduce the flip times, you can adjust the probability. But as you get to around a 50% probability of getting heads... everything is maxed out. Well, except the one which bumps up the probability, and the price of the new upgrades is pretty steep. And the power curve that usually follows the price curve, which makes those upgrades more affordable... well, that stopped a while back. If you want to climb the big numbers, you have to do it the hard way.
So: you start with an unfair coin. You do some idle game power curve upgrade stuff. And now... you have a coin that approximates the one in your pocket. And you still have to flip it.
One other effect of the upgrades is to imbue getting a streak with even more excitement. It's not just about the possibility of succeeding getting raised... it's also that this is where the money comes from. Getting a combo. More reasons to hope, more reasons to get anxious after 6 in a row. Maybe those big prices for reducing the probability are sensible? If you get a good enough streak, I mean.
And that streak excitement is amplified by the sound design. It's got a good coin flip sound, of course. Little metallic ting wobbling away. But also there's this little guitar strum when you get a head. And a second, with the pitch just adjusted when you get a second. And a third... a chord is being built, and you want to feel it completed. And you feel the dissatisfaction when it doesn't.
Let's talk about one of the updates - the time it takes to flip. You can reduce it! Now, the particular superstition I find myself indulging... is that it is best to flip immediately as the coin lands. I mean, it is clearly better - it means you flip fractionally faster. But not such that it is actually beneficial, outside of a speedrunning scenario [^4]. Instead, mainly... I like the rhythm. I like getting better at the rhythm. It upsets me a little when I get a run of heads when I am not tapping on the rhythm - seems unfair, I'm playing badly and I still get the reward?
(It's also enjoyable how, when you are in the upgrades bit of the curve, the flip time changes and so you have to adjust your rhythm. A nice bit of actual gameplay, there.)
One feature I found myself wishing for, and I am totally not arguing for it, but instead just kind of noting that it's interesting I was wishing for it... was something that showed the distribution of outcomes that I had actually seen. A long run where my probability was around 30% where I was like... is this busted? Seems like fewer than usual. I want stats so I can be sure (if I can't trust the 30% I have been given, why would I trust the other one?)
This kind of dissatisfaction is of course why games usually don't rawdog probability. It feels unfair. Randomness is clumpy, what we expect is something with a bit of scale invariance. Poisson disc distribution seems fairer than a true random distribution. There's a reason we use other colours than white for our noises. But... it's good to be reminded what a run of independent events feels like. A good lesson.
Oh, I went back to it after writing all of that... and I ended up flipping with my eyes closed, just vibing with the rhythm and appreciating how I could track the game state with with sounds... and I won??? On 55% odds of a head each time. I opened my eyes to see a final flip ready to trigger. I flipped... and the coin never landed. End of the game, that's what victory looks like [^5]. 90 minutes of play time, apparently.
Wow, what a game.
Aaaaand... I should also mention the other coin flipping game that is set to imminently release! It's called "Q-Up", it's a satire of online multiplayer games, all big brash esports arena with a fridge of the sponsor drink in the corner. Except now you can't complain that it's unfair or whatever, the outcome is literally just a coin flip. It's led by the guy that did Universal Paperclips, and also working on it is my pal Joon. Hi Joon! Anyway, I haven't played it but there's a demo!
Oh, I came back to finish this post and actually put it up... And as I write this, Jerma is playing Unfair Flips. And Northern Lion was earlier, as well. From the stream it came, and to the stream it returns.
[1: how did i test mine? i cheated. you can cheat too! use the back button and you can redo a flip. sorry if knowing this ruins the game for you.]
[2: ok ok I don't know if I'll actually get the 10% chance of getting a real 10 heads ending. But, y'know. I will get to 9 heads and one not-tails. That's good enough for me.]
[3: I recommend the game. It's a mark of how strange the jigsaws are that this small parody idle game counts as a jigsaw]
[4: horrifyingly, it seems like there is one]
[5: again, fuck trying again for the 10% chance. I mean I appreciate the taunt, it's a good commentary on videogames, and a good joke. But also not one I feel I have to personally put myself through to appreciate it]
Me, Whisper & one of the Lost Children (a skeleton) - photo by Triss Gutkowski
As I am writing this[1], I just got done doing my first big larp. By which I mean the first that lasted longer than a few hours, the first one I've travelled for, the first that I have slept during. As I understand is normal after this, I am buzzing with it, absolutely at risk of boring the hell out of people about it. So let's talk a little about it.
First up, the details. The larp was called Children of the House, it was made by Poltergeist Larp - the larp runners were Lotta, Sandy & Lucky, and it was hosted in Pałac Lubinicko in Poland, which is a few hours from Berlin. Tickets were €350, which covered their costs but not their labour - this covered the larp, accommodation and food, but not travel. It was a larp in "the Nordic style" - which means it's more on the artsy experimental side.
The larp was an adaptation of the book Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke. It's a beautiful book about a man who lives within an endless house – giant halls filled with statues. There are clouds on the upper floors, and oceans in the drowned halls below. The man is filled with a great sense of peace and benevolence, and he has lost all memory of a life outside of it.
me, looking at a statue, filled with a great sense of peace and benevolence - photo by Triss Gutkowski
This being a larp, the primary change is that it is not a story of a single man, but instead the story of a community. We live together within the Embrace, which name refers both to our community and to the room in which we live. We each have names that denote our function within the community - I was Mender, who attempts to prevent imbalance within the Children. I related these imbalances to the operation of the House - defects of the body related to the oceans, defects of the mind related to the statues, and defects of the spirit related to the clouds. There were also Children who fetched things, who led our rituals, who made decisions, who explored farther halls, who interpreted signs in the clouds or listened to the statues, who recorded our histories, who predicted the tides. And Children newly arrived in our community, who we were in the process of finding roles for.
community looks like lots of meetings - photo by Triss Gutkowski
The larp had a three act structure – wait, before I go into that I should sketch out the experience as a whole. Ahead of the larp there was homework - a costume to prep, a player guide to read, and a character sheet to internalise. On Thursday I woke up in Berlin, got breakfast at the hostel, and got a train to the airport (it ran late). I there met with fellow players who were giving me a lift to the venue, a mansion in Poland a few hours drive away. We arrived and unloaded, and I sat a little awkwardly waiting for the larp to start. I didn't know any of the other players, or the organisers (except one player who I had talked to a little at AMAZE earlier in the year). The afternoon was then taken up by workshops - structured exercises to prepare us to play - and then we entered into the House that evening. This was the start of Act 1, which was meant to be low conflict - setting a baseline of harmony among the Children, and letting us settle into our characters. We slept within the game, had breakfast within the game, and then had our first break - an hour to reset and do calibration (jargon for discussing how our characters will relate to each other, and what kinds of play we might give each other). Then back into the game for Act 2 - for this, the larp runners told us we were aiming to add a little more tension, but not to get as far as open conflict. We played within Act 2 for most of the day, and then there was a final calibration break - a longer one this time - in the evening, and then we were in Act 3, where we were told the intensity could reach new heights ("but you should still stay together as a community, and don't die"). We played through the evening, slept, and then played through to the climax of the larp the next evening. There was a couple of hours of practical info and workshops to decompress, and then there was a party - alcohol, a disco, lots of very hyper chatting, some people hooked up. And then we woke early in the morning, helped the organisers pack up and reset the venue, and then I got a lift back to Berlin and arrived exhausted at my friend's apartment, where I am writing this (the next day). That's four days in total, with a solid 48 hours within the fiction of the House itself.
Liam & Rory (the Ancestors, played by the larp runners) - photo by Triss Gutkowski
I struggled with my fatigue a fair amount during the larp - especially during Act 2, I could feel the brainfog and my instinctive reaction was to go entirely into rest mode. But I also knew that I needed to keep making connections to other characters to have some setup to play off later.
My character, Mender, was focused on the other Children rather than the House itself - which meant I didn't have particularly organic reasons to explore, do blackbox scenes, etc. (Blackbox scenes are where you go into a separate space to play out a pre-prepared scenario - something where the organisers help you set up something more intense, rather than something that has come up naturally). Instead a lot of my play ended up being what I referred to as "toxic therapy" - coming to a character, asking how they were, and attempting to sooth their worries and doubts about the House. My line was: the House protects us, the House will provide, the important thing is the warmth of the Embrace. I felt like a theologian - studiously collecting evidence and then finding a way to turn all of it towards the conclusion that everything is as it should be. It was nice to have a reason to always pay attention to new discoveries, to be open to them - but always to push back against doubts and worries (which was the natural arc of the game, I think - to start from acceptance and rebel against that). In the calibration break before Act 3, I went for a little walk by myself and gave myself the goal to keep arguing for the House, and eventually lose that argument honestly - but I failed in that quest, and instead found that I kept the faith, even to the end. The House is good, it is good for us to lose our memories, the warmth of the Embrace and the sublime peace of the House are what matters above all other things. I think I even went far enough with this that I convinced my off-game self of the rightness of my position [2].
toxic therapy (maybe, i forget this conversation) - photo by Triss Gutkowski
Let me give you a peak moment for me, along with the context needed to understand it.
Meals were provided to us "by the House" - we would find them by a statue in the main halls. We would assemble and gather them, slowly walking down in a procession. There would be much singing - "it fills us, it feeds us, the House does provide". Beautiful improvised singing, some humming and some harmonies layered under and over. The food would be carried to the table within the Embrace, we would line up with plates and serve ourselves. The food for all the meals was tortillas with olives, dates, hummus, seeds, often other bits alongside. I was warned that it might not seem like enough - but I found it was plenty, after a meal or two I adapted fine. We would sit down to eat in silence - most of this ritual I've described was created by the players together, but the idea of silence during eating was the one bit that the designers asked us to abide by specifically. That was such a delicate bit of design. Voice, who was played by a player with a lovely Scottish accent, would lead us in these rituals - collecting the food, handing out plates and flatbread and collecting many of the plates, and then at the end offering thanks for the food that we had received. I grew to love these meals - the silence made the space feel reverential, the arguing (of course, it's a larp) ceased and we could feel togetherness. The repetition of the ritual, but obviously with variations, singing together... and of course, it helped that my character was a true believer in the togetherness of our community.
So that's the context. By the third act, players were rebelling in whatever direction they could - they wondered if the food was making them forget, they wondered if breaking the rituals could effect change in the community, they distrusted the Ancestors (NPCs who visited us, who we initially held in high regard). So, in that final lunchtime meal, several of them chose to break the silence. I gathered my food from the high table and I came back - I was going to sit by Voice, and then she asked me "would you like to sit with us?" in a mild and welcoming voice. %%%not clear speaking is the problem%% The sacrilege! And from the person who led us through these rituals, whose very purpose was to do so! I said (said!) "no, I would not" and walked away to sit elsewhere. I ate my food with alarm as other Children within the room talked. They did not do so loudly - they quietly talked about the savour of the food, they offered bits of flatbread to each other. They transgressed in the mildest possible way. After I had eaten, I saw that Voice had left the room - she was eating in the vestibule just outside the Embrace, by the statue of the Satyr. And then I thought about how she would not say those closing words, ending the meal - and I broke down sobbing.
What glorious play! Real tears, a real sense of loss - the community I loved so much had turned against each other, the things I treasured most were discarded. And it was only getting worse.
I put my plate away in an upset, stormed out, confronted Voice (a quiet and bitter "has this helped?"), and in this was caused an argument to start which broke the silence even more comprehensively. I had no heart for arguing, I was only for grief. I took myself to the upper floor to sit by the statue of Beekeeper and admire her silence and grace until I was filled again by the tranquillity of the House.
Me, Sunseeker & Voice (this wasn't the confrontation, but a different moment) - photo by Triss Gutkowski
I'm not sure I have more organised things to say about the larp. The rest of this post will be scattered thoughts:
It was strange waking up in character. I was quiet, and my dreams were those of myself, not my character. It took me a few minutes to start interacting as Mender, often after going off-game to brush teeth etc first. In the car on the way back, a fellow player said they had a dream in character, and I was jealous of that.
But on the other hand, it has been 4 or 5 days since I left, and I still sometimes think of the voice or faces of my fellow players.
During the afterparty, someone came up to the off-game lounge where I was sitting. Come down! The song after next is going to be the pornipolka! Come dance it! It's a big tradition!
So I did, and found to my surprise that this larp tradition stretching back to the 90s is in fact a tradition that I was already familiar with. I knew it as Orcadian Strip The Willow, a ceilidh dance that was always the second last song at ceilidhs when I was at university in Edinburgh. You spin your partner with one arm, and then spin all the people on one side of the room with the other, moving down the room as you go. Unfortunately they skipped the bit where you spin real fast with your partner at the start – booo!
The night before joining the larp I slept in a hostel with 3 other people. During the larp, I slept on a mattress on the floor with 20 others. I slept much better during the larp.
I was warned to expect physical discomfort, but I didn't experience this (except for stupidly not getting into my sleeping bag the first night and waking up a little cold -- but that's my own fault).
The food, too, I was warned about. But actually I found I adapted just fine to it. Some figs and a handful of raisins for an energy boost at the end, a little bit of calibration for what was enough to be full, and how much I could take without causing anyone else to miss out of something.
I miss being in a community in this way - I have been talking about it with friends as being like in a cult. That sense of togetherness, singing together, eating together, knowing that there is usually someone in the room you can go sit with and have a quiet talk with. I don't have this level of physical touch within my life out of game. I do have friends, an active life filled with people. And I find I am even hungrier for it now.
I guess one reason that I feel this especially is because my character always believed in the benevolence of the House. I didn't have any fear or doubt about whether it was right to be in the House or not, whether losing our memories was something to fear or not.
In the briefing after the larp had ended, one of the few questions that were asked was "where can we go if we want to have sex during the afterparty?". The answer was: this isn't a larp with a sex room, and we don't want to create one now, but please find somewhere quiet and where you're not going to be exposing yourself to other people, you're creative. Also we have condoms and the morning after pill in the player supplies[4], help yourself.
And indeed multiple people did hook up at the party (though, just for clarity, I didn't). I have a bunch of thoughts about the relationship between in-character and off-game attraction and relationships, and indeed about neurodivergent styles of hitting on people and how they relate to larp. But I am not going to write them here.
I should also say that apparently the run before us was much more inclined to in-game cuddle puddles, and in character romance & poly groupings. I wasn't aware of many (if any) in-game relationships in our run[3]. Me and two others calibrated for a polycule in game but it never properly came into being - it was defined around our shared opposition to the forces of change, but it turned out we had enough internal disagreements that that dynamic was never quite realised. Or maybe we were too hesitant about initiating that kind of scene. Or the story just moved on...
Sometimes when I was tired I would slip out of character and I would make somewhat sarky jokes. I kind of missed being cheeky, it wasn't really within my character, but the characters who did seemed to have a lot of fun. One particularly memorable bit where all the naughty kids got together and had a fake meeting where they did satirical bits, pretending to be the more pompous members of the community. Which is a pretty impressive bit of roleplaying, really - playing a character who is also playing a character.
As Mender, I was the closest thing to a doctor we had. Which came into play more deeply when the person playing Fetcher decided to break her leg and arm with a day to go of the larp. We hadn't interacted much - her role was to fetch water from the upper floors. But suddenly I was the default caretaker - setting the break, binding it up, helping her settle and caretaking - and also talking about how her identity was threatened by no longer being able to do her job.
I also cared for a few other people - which largely consisted, in roleplay terms, of draping a scarf over them to prevent them from getting cold. Which did at some points mean I was scrambling back and forth to find my previous scarf so I could myself stay warm, after having given away a different one.
Oh right, also giving it to Fetcher to bite on when I set the break, definitely a bit where I was mentally going "well, if you're up for putting it in your mouth then I don't mind..."
Another big element were the journals. Scribe was the Child who wrote journals, to record events that have happened to our community. They were writing in the latest one, and they had a few that they had written in the year or two before the larp started. And then, over the course of the larp, we found many more. The revelations within these obviously caused us to question some truths we believed about the world and our place in them. There were also some photos and notes we found as well. This was a great way to regulate the progress of the plot, without being didactic about what response we should have these revelations. And, too, these journals were often found when Children went exploring, or had dramatic blackbox scenes. So they were a nice way to reward that kind of play with something that would add to the drama for the whole community.
And then, later on, we found the journal that related Scribe losing the memory of who they used to be, and becoming Scribe, trapped and accepting of their place in the House. Most of the journals they would read out loud to the rest of the Children, but this one was too much for them to bear, and they had to ask someone else to read it.
(also, wow, they must have been a lot of work to write!)
looking at the journals with Scribe - photo by Triss Gutkowski
This section is about the ending, so skip it if you think you might play this. Not that there are currently plans to run it again, but...
Anyway, it was very good & effective. A flood long foretold was suddenly upon us. I realised what was happening, and ran from it. And then, up the stairs, realised that while everyone was streaming after - what about Fletcher? She couldn't move without help.
We huddled upstairs, waiting for it to pass. Our familiar halls were deep underwater, we could see the blue light from the top of the stairs. Fear, loss & disruption, but a sense that we were all in this together. Cold, everyone wet and no way to get dry. We can hear the pounding of the waves below.
Waiting for the waters to subside - photo by Triss Gutkowski
And then they subsided, and an unfamilar noise came to us. A sound of... breaking? Mechanical, maybe?
And then suddenly, our tribe was visited by police officers. Not that we had any concept of police officers. They were people we'd never seen before, something that was not within the memory of any of us there. Barking official commands, wanting to know how many of us there were, un-used to our language and ways. Hustled us downstairs, sat us down, fed us cold chips and ketchup, handed us dossiers with our histories and told us we had 5 minutes to decide whether to forever leave our home, the only place we had any memory of.
And actually let me talk about the chips. They were cold, as I said. And with ketchup. And it was such a delight to eat chips from within the perspective of a character who had no memory of them. To dip my fingers in the ketchup and taste it with curiosity. It took me a while to try out dipping the chips directly. So strange, this food! And talking while we ate, but the whole thing felt so unfamiliar, it didn't feel like a violation.
And a dossier with lots of writing, some clarifying the role of the Ancestors and what had happened to them. And some telling me about a person who was supposed to be me (I can't, now, remember the name I was supposed to have). Phrases I didn't understand: "payment in arrears", "mortgage foreclosure", "job interview". I didn't know what this was about, and I didn't want to know.
A choice: to stay or to go. 2 minutes to decide, no big discussion. I knew I was staying. I knew many people I loved would be leaving. I sought them out to say goodbye. Deep farewells. A gift given to me. Most people left. I stood with Poet to watch them go. After a while, we were pulled back to the few that remained, huddling on the floor. We clung onto each other, weeping. A close community of 35, now reduced to 6. How would we survive? The loss of all our friends.
The players leaving told me later that it was very affecting to see us sprawled like that. Almost like we were a Renaissance painting, limbs, faces visible, extremes of emotion but also very still.
And then... the end. Shake it off. Change your clothes, try to step out of your characters. Some rituals to help re-enter this world, decompress from the fiction. And a party.
the only photo that i actually took during the entire thing
Okay, that's your lot. I have more I could write - stories from the larp and reflections on how larp works as a larger practice. But in the interests of getting this posted, this will do for now.
Oh wait - there is one more thing I haven't said. Which is a deep deep thank you to the larp-runners, the crew, and to everyone I played with.
[1: but not when I'm posting it, this took a long time to get finished. I did the larp at the end of August]
[2: Since writing this, I have listened to the audiobook, after not having read the book for a few years. and the feeling I get is that Susanna Clarke would also be tempted by this. On the other hand, I think my conviction has wavered with time away. there's probably a moral necessity to not turn away from knowledge? But on the other hand, the two things that really kept me to the House were sublime beauty and the warmth of community... which are hard to argue with. ]
[3: But apparently more of this happened than I was aware of - which makes sense, really]
[4: I find this comment symbolic of the degree of care and forethought that the runners had for the players]
The boardgame Perspectives is a game where players are handed different cards, all of which are different bits of evidence for a case. The players look at their cards, and they talk about what they can see, and combine the evidence to understand what's going on - they have some questions to collectively answer. Seems relevant to the forthcoming Western rise of popularity for Jubensha games! Anyway, I haven't played Perspectives yet, but I have played the tutorial – which, enjoyably, is played using the box.
the sides of the inside of the box
What you do is you put the box in the middle of the table, such that each player can see no more than 2 sides. And then you compare what you see with each other, and so solve the mystery of the stolen Faberge egg, as depicted on the front of the box. I tried this with my housemate and it totally works! Very delightful, especially as the illustrations are not so prominent that it's possible to not clock they are doing a puzzle thing.
And especially good when Act 2 of the tutorial reveals that there is critical information within the cover art of the box!
When I started writing about this, I remembered another boardgame in my possession that also does something with the box. It's Ice Cool 2, a fun game about flicking penguin pieces around. One thing about flicking games is that they depend not only on the physical properties of the pieces, but also on the physical properties of the tabletop that they are played on. I mean, also you probably want barriers and things to aim for and things of that nature. Even shove ha'penny has a particular board that you play on. And if you're selling this as a retail game, you want the box to be a reasonable size, but the board to be as large as possible. I think you see where I'm going with this - the box is one of the components of the arena, and is clipped together with several nested boxes which fit just inside. There are little doorways in the side to allow the penguins to move between the different rooms... again, delightful.
i couldn't be bothered to set it up for play, but you can see the different components of the arena stacked up inside each other here
So, because I'm me, let's ask: why is this so delightful? Well, it's because it extends the game slightly beyond the frame you expect. It's the same thing as the classic escape room bit of revealing a second room halfway through - I thought these were the limits of the game, but actually the limits are a little larger. Or you can look at it like a joke - the punchline is something that makes sense but also exists slightly outside the bounds of what was expected.
But this isn't all - in this case, it's also a thing where I get the pleasure of observing things being well-scoped, or the pleasure of watching good value engineering [1]. They came up with a pleasurable solution to getting more experience out of the same manufacturing budget! The cardboard has one more use than you expected! And I know that this meant that some tricky creative work got a little trickier because it had an extra constraint put on it. The job of doing visual design to make a boardgame look like something you wanna buy in the shop - that's a tricky thing to do. Making it also do game design at the same time - oh, it's even trickier now! What are the right proportions for the flicky arena? Hmm, good question, let's do some playtests about it. What are the right proportions for fitting on shop shelves & fitting efficiently on a standard palette? Let's do some math & send some emails. Do these two match? Errr, hopefully!
Anyway - felt good to write about a little enjoyable thing. I got a little stuck on blogging because I started writing about the larp I was recently at, and it turns out that's a big topic. Glad to be making smaller posts while I wait for that one to unclog.
[1] I went to see if I should link this to the Wikipedia page, and saw it has a picture of a smoking Grenfell Tower to illustrate the concept. Value engineering gets a bad rap, okay?
Some responses!
This looks very good, I want it:
And Illimat, which I also have on my shelf but for some reason didn't think of when writing this post:
Although also to be fair idk if I have much extra to say about it.
Also this:
for another game that does a kind of "the classic escape room bit of revealing a second room halfway through" there's The Initiative. Without spoiling, I'd say Matt's reasons for his "it's not for me" are valid, but the tricks are pretty cool.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkgT...
and, like, those arguments for an ID card are not designed to appeal to me. but we have had this discussion before, and so i have some kind of a sense of the arguments for an ID card. as i recall, when people say ID card, they actually mean at least two distinct things:
a physical card that you can carry around, which has your picture on it and can tell people you are who you say you are, and how old you are etc. maybe it's compulsory to carry this around if you leave the house?
a government database which has some kind of unique identifier for all the people resident in the country, and which all the other government databases can use when they want to refer to a person and the arguments for and against the two are quite different
now as a trans person existing at the present time, i have a particular feeling about both of these, which is fear. for the physical card, if it has a gender marker on it then we now have an angle for bigots to ask people who have a non-gender conforming appearance for proof that they really are the gender they're claiming to be. seems bad? and the database part, well, i can't imagine that in the current climate they're going to introduce a new authoritative system with an easy and relaxed attitude to changing your gender marker. also seems bad.
anyway, this isn't what i came here to talk about. instead, as presaged by the title, i had a thought about the British national character[1] and why it might resist one of these two parts. no, i'm not going to claim that we have an instinctive resistance to tyranny. we love asking people for their papers. it's instead about the database bit, and the plan to make it simpler.
it's my feeling that a British person, confronted with a system with a long and complicated history, and different parts working a little bit at cross purposes to each other, and odd wrinkles that happened by chance that have now become load bearing, and that is clearly not quite fit for the purpose it has been put to... well, they might take a kind of perverse delight in seeing it? some people would see this and go "well, this needs cleaning up"... but there's something in a particular British mind which is like: how can i lean into the contradictions. how can i make this worse.
i think about the way that railway ticketing works. i don't actually understand how railway ticketing works. but i do understand that in the UK, it is possible for a regular ticket for a train between A and B, passing through station C, to be more expensive than the sum of a ticket between A and C and a ticket between C and B. and that both would be valid on the route, even if you don't actually get off the train. it's called split ticketing, and many of the ticket booking apps will automatically do this for you. i look at this situation and i know that it is bad and that a system without these problems would be better, and yet there is a part of me that goes "oh, how glorious! i wonder if there are other treasures to find in the ticketing regulations"
and even when these things personally inconvenience me, like when HMRC and Companies House had different ideas about the dormancy status of the company i work under -- there's still something in me that enjoys the mess of it all. the perversity. and that part feels British?
sidebar here to note that the thing about complicated situations is that they require complicated solutions. and that it is hard to tell what complexity is essential and what is incidental when confronted with a running system. people of all nationalities preserve messy contradictory systems when they encounter them, because sweeping them away forcefully and instinctually very quickly leads you to disaster. but! if you want to read too much into it, then i would note that the truths in this paragraph belong to the area of study called "cybernetics" and one of the main theorists of cybernetics, especially when applied to human systems, was a guy called Stafford Beer, who was British. so his drive to look at complicated messy systems with a kind of affectionate interest could also be chalked up in part to this same British tendency.
anyway – this part of the British national character, it looks at the idea of instituting an ID card database, sweeping away all the glorious complexity of the previous systems, the bit where your passport, your doctor, your local council and your library can all have quite different ideas as to what your name, address and gender are and yet occasionally still connect between them... and it sees the potential for beauty to be swept away.
[1] i'm running with this as if the idea of a national character is a real thing. i mean it clearly is. but also it's very much one of these "the difference within groups is larger than the difference between groups" type of thing. don't take it too seriously, you know?
I miss living in a globalised world. Thinking of a friend from online I made a bowl for, I procrastinated posting it, and now I can't send it to her at all. Thinking of websites increasingly being geolocked, not available due to GDPR compliance or OSA compliance or whatever it is they're doing in Mississippi. Thinking of men being threatening outside of refugee accommodations. Thinking about how I know what the term "GPSR" means, and why it's a pain for friends with small online shops. Thinking of the queue for passport control, the questions, the stamp in my black passport when I visit my brother, my niece & my nephew in Denmark.
I guess it's the inevitable downstream consequence of the global superpower (the USA) losing its grip on that power. The "weaponisation of interdependence" I've heard it called. When there's a power struggle, empires are going to pull on every string they can grab - the common good comes in a distant second place. And this globalisation was indeed a secondary effect from American empire - markets opened up, made dependent on the dollar, Americans able to trade their stable common currency for endless consumer goods and the oil to power them. That the opening up also enabled the life that I have taken joy in... that's just a byproduct, a happy accident, a good case study for imperial propaganda.
But at the same time - I have built a life and a career in a nexus of friends who live around the world - or at least, mostly the rich countries. The indie game scene does depend on geography, but it's also a scene joined by an international round of festivals and events and awards and discussion. It came into being when digital distribution allowed games to be distributed without worrying about supply chains, it was formed from people in forums hyping each other up, and it was perpetuated by people seeing photos from cool events elsewhere and saying "hey, we could do that". I know not everything is like this - obviously most jobs are more connected to the places where they are performed - but many of us do work in the kind of space where our peers could live anywhere. I guess these spaces are the left leaning, queer kinds of spaces that are under attack right now - academia, nerd culture, tech. So I don't have much hope for loud voices from the political mainstream to spring to their defence. But I do want to say: I miss it.
I saw this Reddit post linked on Mastodon this morning, and I've gotten a little stuck on it.
The core of the thing is an uneasy feeling at AI being slipped into the taking of photos, and being done so in such a way that the presence of AI isn't apparent. This matters a lot when it's pictures of people's faces - when the selfie you take is hotter than you are, when your camera automatically lightens skin, when blemishes and pores are removed, leaving you to compare yourself against a artificial version of not even celebrities, but your friends posting candid shots.
But this isn't really a post about self-image, it's a post about the moon. The moon! It's such a particular thing. It's a singular object that everyone can see for themselves, it's the singular object we can all see together (ok ok, there's the sun & the planets & the stars, but they're more like points of light, they don't have features in the same way).
My friend Gab runs a Tumblr account where she collects the moon depicted in videogames., and this kind of gets to the same feeling. The moon, the same moon, but shown in all these different ways, in all these different contexts, and in all these sometimes-fictional worlds.
And all of this kind of peaked when I read this article trying to understand if the moon is fake when you take a picture of it with a new Samsung phone. I think the article is kind of... confused? But, like, actually very illuminatingly so? It's full of folk theories about how the software works, little conspiracy-minded rabbitholes of reverse engineering, and a continual redrawing of the lines of what is "fake". It asks people and keeps the score on what side they come down on without ever really examining what those sides are.
Now that we’ve established that the Moon photos from the S21 Ultra are most definitely not fake, how is Samsung pulling off the seemingly impossible? How is the S21 Ultra’s 100x zoom taking a photo that bests even a $4,800 camera setup? Simple: AI.
The line seems to be: if it's compositing in a texture, then it's fake. If it's using AI to "sharpen details" based on identifying the object, then it's real. To which my literal-minded brain cries out: but the AI is just storing the same details, in a form that is less straightforward to access! Just because a process is harder to understand doesn't mean it's not happening. The camera sensor, the optics, they are literally not able to resolve these details, but they must be coming from somewhere. "Scenes and objects that aren’t recognized by the Scene Optimizer will likely look like grainy mush at 100x zoom."
But the really interesting thing that's happening in this article is not really the technology, but seeing culture collectively trying to make sense of it. Trying to decide on the boundary lines, trying to define what a "photograph" is. Photography has never been a neutral process, it has always involved setting up lights & staging & pushing the exposure & dodging & burning & airbrushing & composites & all the fussing called "editing". And at the same time, it's always derived a lot of its power from its uneasy relationship to that promised neutrality, to that idea of the objective flat capture of the world. It's "Photoshop", the software manifestation of the place where photographs are developed, that is the catch-phrase for manipulated images.
I think I'm actually just as interested in the way that AI categorizes the image as I am the way that AI produces the image. The thing that captures the public imagination is the way beautifying filters distort the face, but the thing that really got me, a trans person, was when my phone came with a little overlay that categorized my face by age & gender in real time. Screwing up my face & looking a little older, pulling my hair down to hang besides it & seeing the little label flip over to "Female" - it didn't necessarily feel good, but it did feel compelling. What a thing to offer to a trans person! A machine that can tell you if you pass or not, a device incapable of judging you that can also tell you how well you are performing, some way of bringing rapid iteration loops into a years-long process loaded with shame!
And, to return to the moon, always always staying with the moon – if I had a studio space, if I had some practice with the paintbrush, if I had a Samsung phone (all of these problems are solvable, and maybe I will indeed solve them), I would drape that space in black cloth, I would dim the lights, I would shine a spotlight on a canvas, and I would paint the moon, adding in progressively more details until exactly the point at which the phone would recognize it and fill in the rest of the details for me.
Welcome back to another link roundup. I am writing to you from a train back from Scotland! I have had a nice time on this trip. And I'll get home with hopefully just enough time to do some laundry before setting out again for Denmark. But for now... we have links!
i wanna talk about rewilding my field, but really i wanna talk about nurturing an outcome in an organic system
And it caught my attention because it chimed with the beautiful ending to Italo Calvino's Imaginary Cities, words I think of often when thinking about how I want to live and what I want to prioritise:
He said: ''It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is here that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us.''
And Polo said: ''The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many; accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.''
The knapweed thread doesn't quite accord, but I think there's a common thread here in that what's effective is not focusing in on what you hate and opposing it, but in focusing on the things you do like and boosting those things.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you call your team “patient” then they will become more patient. If you call your team “hard working” then they will work harder. Listen, I don’t make the rules, but you can steer a group’s values by stating what it’s good at. It attracts more people who also value those things, and it means that people hold themselves to high standards in that standard.
Again, giving space and time and attention to the things you want, not the things you don't.
Here's an article I think I will be referring back to, on the way that Trust & Safety work is shifting from being something where people try hard to solve for their particular platform and userbase, to something where they demonstrate that they are compliant with regulations:
In other ways, the compliance model is a mismatch with the regulation of speech. Human rights systems around the world require that state control and influence over speech be kept to a minimum. The idea that states can govern speech-related “systems” and “metrics” without crossing the line into governing speech itself may yet prove to be dangerously naive. Perhaps more fundamentally, the standardization at the heart of compliance models may simply be inconsistent with enforcing nuanced rules for human expression. The ocean of speech sloshing around the global internet is dynamic and unruly. Trust and safety teams must evolve, experiment, make mistakes, and iterate. They must be adaptable when words like “queer” are used hatefully in one context and as a term of pride in another. Or when cartoon frogs and dishwasher detergent are innocuous one day, sinister the next, and the subject of complex satire and commentary the week after that. Trust and safety work gets harder when teams must confront adversarial actors like spammers, Google bombers, and purveyors of coordinated inauthentic behavior. The optimal responses to these challenges may vary across the hundreds of language groups and untold numbers of subcultures active online. There is something disturbingly robotic in the idea that all this chaotic and generative human chaos can be governed by systems so consistent, automated, and bloodless that they can be run like factories and audited like investment banks.
Let me be a little self indulgent here and link a Bluesky post I made that is relevant here:
I'm not saying you can't shape culture through careful application of censorship. I'm just saying that the British state does not have the capacity or the will to do so successfully. (and also that it's a bad and illiberal thing to try, that too)
When I read the excerpt about Trust & Safety, I think about the Chinese censors, and the ways they flexibly respond to new discourses, new jokes, new bits of slang. They have specific political objectives they are aiming to achieve, and they are reasonably effective in trying to achieve those. That is a demonstration of state capacity that I doubt the UK or US is able to achieve – unless they truly co-opt tech platforms to their cause.
By May 2013, I have close to four million followers on Weibo. Such accounts are not handled by Liu Lipeng. Weibo allocates a personal censor, known as a Weibo gatekeeper. Mine is Jia Jia*. Whenever I write inappropriate content, she phones me. ‘Mr Mu, that post of yours won’t do. I deleted it for you.’ Sometimes she tells me the names of people and the events that cannot be mentioned, so I can detour around the forbidden zone. ‘We don’t need to get into direct conflict with them, right?’
She says ‘we’, not ‘you’. When she refers to such matters, she speaks softly, her tone suggesting that this is a consultation, as though she were a sister or a close friend. I never meet Jia Jia but I feel obliged to say, I quite like her work style. Yes, she is a censor, yet she is so gentle in her work, so considerate, not lacking in human warmth. In China, censors like her are rare and precious.
Playing boundary ball is a precarious game. In table tennis, when a player serves up a “boundary ball” (打擦边球), they hit the edge of the opponent’s table, but the ball is still safe within bounds. It’s a tricky move, one that demands good skill, good luck, a good feel for your opponent, and a good appetite for risk.
Three decades ago, Chinese journalists, allowed to report more liberally about their country for the first time, began to borrow the diction of table tennis to describe their own work—like a game of “boundary ball.” Like a good hit, a good article should skirt the line and test the limits of the permissible, all the while staying within bounds. Like a skillful table tennis player, an agile news editor aspired to push for change without violating the rules, circumventing control without invoking the wrath of the censor.
When I first read this piece it felt like exciting reportage from a foreign place. It itself talks about how there's not an equivalent term in the West. But fast forward a few years, and the idea that certain statements can be illegal to express becomes scarilyfamiliar.
Let's go back to that Bluesky post. The start of that thread was on a committee proposing to ban certain types of porn as a result of the Bonnie Blue documentary. This documentary has, despite being apparently pretty bad at challenging her, caused a lot of discussion about the morality of her actions. I liked this piece by Shon Faye unpicking exactly what in that situation is worthy of condemnation:
I predicted Bonnie Blue’s capitalist defence of her work, but I could not anticipate the sheer extent to which her own value system lacks any sense of broader ethical responsibility to the world, to her subscribers, to young women who will experience the brunt of Tate’s propaganda, which her own promotional material echoes. I had hoped that whatever psychological mechanism allowed Blue to fuck a thousand men one after the other would not lead her to grant herself a complete acquittal on her responsibilities to other people. But it seems only money and attention are meaningful currency to her.
When I think about Bonnie Blue, the main thing I think is that if she did not exist, the set of incentives in place would produce her. Given OnlyFans, given the attention economy, given financial precarity... all that's needed is for someone to decide to give the system what it wants.
To flip away from trying to resist the consequences of a system to the feeling of embracing the flow of the system wholeheartedly, here's a piece that was recommended by Maya. I don't know that I fully agree with the conclusions he draws, but I agree with Maya that the way he's using language is a joy to read:
Bro needs to consider that there is some lore to this world that bro will not be able to understand. Bro has not been patched. Bro has not got the DLC. Bro is perfectly aware that old modes of engagement with media are not ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ or truly ‘goated,’ and that each new mode is incomprehensible to anyone still simping for any of its predecessors, but bro wants to come with this cheugy Gutenberg ahh paradigm? You can’t vibe with us until you in the squad. Blood in blood out fam. You only clocked right at the end that you gotta take the L, gg, touch aluminosilicate glass, abandon Cartesian subjectivity, get pozzed with the rage virus, become infected, join the wordless masses, literally be a mf zombie bro you gotta join the horde. Slough off your individual subjectvity bro. Go brain eating mode. Eat people bro. No cap you have got to eat people.
I can't help but note that he is being unfaithful to the dominant Californian idiolect online, and is actually writing in something that is recognisable to me as Multicultural London English. I also want to pick up this bit:
But most people don’t actually watch TikToks. Next time you’re next to someone doomscrolling through short-form video, watch what they actually do. Most of the time, they never actually watch a single twenty-second video through to the end. Flick down, vaguely register the general content of the video, immediately flick down again. Flick, flick, flick, for hours at a time, consuming literally nothing. Or, rather, consuming nothing except the algorithm, the pure flow and speed of the machine that gathers the entire world together and beams it directly at your face.
and say that anyone who is interested in understanding this state of being in a deeper way reads Natasha Dow Schüll's Addiction by Design. It's specifically about slot machines in Vegas, but she gives over plenty of space for gamblers to describe the feeling of "the machine zone" that they're seeking, and which bears a real similarity to the description above.
Okay, nearly there. Here's a short comic about being a delivery driver in a near future:
Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, you know?
“Out for Delivery” is a new comic drawn by @egallagher.bsky.social and written by myself. You can read all of it below, or buy a high-res .pdf for a price of your choosing (process edition also available): hagaipalevsky.itch.io/out-for-deli...
Bleak, huh? I guess we started this set of links looking at a system from the outside, and we have now moved deeply inside the system. We're now the people who are being acted on, and we have increasingly little control over what actions we're permitted to take. Sorry for the depressing link roundup. And the final link doesn't really lift us out of bleakness, although it does contain some genuinely beautiful writing. I don't know if I can sum up this piece easily - it's Patricia Lockwood talking about her father's deafness, about the X Files, about life.
The anxiety about genre is really an anxiety that history should have happened differently, that the realism of the 19th century should not have turned to the experiential writing of the world wars, that those wars should not have been fought by journalists who became novelists who became memoirists, that we should not have become a nation of analysands, that an overeducated class of women should not have been locked up in the suburbs in the 1950s on tranqs, that their successors should not have taken up the sharp fragmented reportage of the 1970s, and on and on.
Do we live in a describable time? New sentences have appeared on earth, not written by human beings. Metallic whiffs from texts, emails, articles. Then there was the decal situation on a truck I had seen recently, which seemed to summarise the clash of ideologies so characteristic of the present:
Before you can be strokin’ and cummin’ You better be ROCK HARD BITCH Yin yang Peeing calvin Peeing calvin FUCKIN BITCH FUCKIN BITCH
People who talk to ChatGPT like a therapist say, almost uniformly, that it is because it is so encouraging, so full of love. What if parents or teachers had talked to them that way? Told them they could make art, music, movies. Apparently the em dash is the thing that gives it away, though the essay had that first.
I continue to be in Scotland! Right now I am on a train on my way to Edinburgh, but yesterday I was at the Glasgow Indie Games Festival. What a nice event! Friendly people, a showcase of games (some I knew, some I didn't), someone doing face painting, a bar in the main space, live music, talks... and a Downpour workshop. Run by me!
It's always a joy to run these - the typical setup is that I run through how the software works, making a stupid little game where people (who I pick on in the audience) pull faces. Then everyone is set loose on some crafting supplies - things to cut out illustrations for collage, coloured pens and pencils, paper, whatever else seems like a creative thing to make images with. Then everyone just... does some crafting. This is the real aim of the workshops, giving people a space to create with their hands, to make something small and silly and have it finished. And the bit where you have to do stuff with your phone, where you actually make the game and upload it... that's kinda just the context that gives you an excuse.
Anyway, this time we had a slightly shorter slot and everyone was finishing at different times, so it didn't make sense to call people up to show their games off to each other on the big screen. So as a substitute, I said I'd do a little roundup of the games people made. And this is that roundup.
First up, the story of a Minoan Bronze. Or is it?
The transformation of a butterfly
This is the game that had the most impressive real world bit of construction. Single-handedly justifying bringing along some crepe paper
I love these illustrations. Makes me really want to do the setup so people can make paper doll games with Downpour
"Dad, you always make games about submarines"
Cronch cronch
Why can't I click on the shoe??? That's clearly Mairi's shoe!
And finally, my personal favourite, a tale of dinosaurs and real estate.
Okay I think that's all the games that people made! If you made a game but I missed it, let me know and I'll add it! Thanks to everyone who came along and made stuff - a joy to show you Downpour.
Update to my last post: I'm gonna try to get the ferry tomorrow!
And update to the update: I just got a text saying... the ferry might be cancelled. Ongoing power cut due to the storm. Will let you know how that goes, I'm sure.
Anyway, that's not what I'm here to talk about. This afternoon I had a little free time and I figured I should actually bestir myself and see something in a city I've never spent proper time in. So I took a little walk down Byres Road and along to Kelvingrove Art Gallery And Museum. This is Glasgow's "proper" museum? You know, the place where they keep the important stuff. And I can report I had a nice time getting very brain-tired from looking at a lot of art. Lots of thinking about colours and stuff. And also there was a man playing on the big organ?
But that's not what I'm here to talk about. What I'm here to talk about... is the particular tone that their little gallery text plaques sometimes take. I think this was the one that made me take notice:
Isn't it bitchy! The amount of judgement put into it! We get a little bit of contextual info (it's his brother, it really is bigger than all his other work), but mainly it's just... judgement, uncut judgement.
Here's a few more from the little Pringle showcase they have. Don't worry, he does like Pringle after all:
I mean, personally I'm not sure I agree with either of these statements? But I do enjoy reading them. Here's one pic with an actual painting in, just so you have some idea of what we're dealing with:
The speculation! I mean and also it's a perfectly fine still life but nothing to write home about.
Any more context on Pringle before we move on?
I mean, like, I do enjoy having the context of him being an optician related (it's mentioned a few times). Probably did come from looking at other paintings too, yeah! Generally that's one way that artists develop their style. But also fascinating is the binary drawn between painting in a named style and painting for pleasure. Like I get that he's an amateur painter, and I get that the museum has collectively decided that he's good enough to get an exhibition, but... are the more famous painters suspect because they painted well for the wrong reasons?
Anyway, it's not just Pringle that gets this treatment. Some big names get the sharp edge of the tongue, too:
Look, I worry that this post is tipping over into seeming like I'm making fun of this writing. I'm not! I genuinely enjoyed reading it as I walked around. Often when I'm in a gallery I try to avoid reading wall text - I realised I sometimes spend more time with the text than I do with the work itself, and that seemed like the wrong way round. But these - I mean for one thing, they're short. And for another, the judgement seems to free me up to also have judgement of my own. Like, yeah, Monet, what do you know about the light in the south of France?? These girls do look like they might be sisters, glad to see that I'm capable of the kind of idle speculation that is cutting edge among art-knowers. And yes maybe I didn't know that Madame Wray was a painter before reading this... but also why should he paint her at work, if I was getting a Renoir done of me I'd want it in a nice frock, not covered in paint stains. The texts are engaging me and bringing me into the work. They're even sometimes informing me!
Or consider, in a run of paintings which all have metaphorical meanings, we get:
Okay! The terms of the puzzle have been expanded, "nothing, they're just having a nice time" is also an acceptable answer to the riddle "what does this painting represent?". Good to know!
And I should also say: this tone is sometimes used for more serious business. I really appreciated seeing one or two flashes of red as I was looking about, a border that indicated we're dealing with slavery:
Like, yeah, that is actually context I wanted to know. It deepens my relationship with the painting. And likewise:
Like, beyond all the arguments about woke and so on - I guess this is what you get from not just being an art gallery, but being a broader museum? I was only going to the art bits, but nevertheless the organisation's mission is to educate visitors about the world in a broader way, not just within the world of painting.
So, should this style of curatorial text writing catch on? Will it catch on elsewhere? Well, as I was starting to write this post, I did a little Google, mainly to check I wasn't awfully stumbling on the name of the little signs. Wall text? Curatorial text? Plaques? I think it's fine, I think I don't lose my curator badge for saying any of them. In any case, I found a nice little PDF from the V&A, explaining their house style for writing these, and some general guides for writing them well. I recommend reading it if you're interested - it's short and, as you'd hope from a style guide, well-written. However! It does include a few examples for how not to do it, and 5 of those are sourced from somewhere other than the V&A, and if we examine the final one we find...
It's 8:20am, and I'm sitting in a tiny waiting room at Balloch station, just north of Glasgow. It was a little hard to spot the station because it only has a single line running into it, and it doesn't run out again. There's 4 seats in the waiting room, and they're all positioned to stare directly at the man behind the ticket desk. I did not plan to be here today.
I was supposed to be going up to Harris today. An early coach from Glasgow up to Uig, which is a 7 hour trip - I think I saw that it's the longest named bus route in the country? It's a long way, anyway. Then the ferry over to Tarbert, to join my dad & stepmum for the week. Despite living in Scotland for 4 years for university, I never made it out to the islands - barely made it out to the highlands. So this was (is?) a chance to rectify that.
I was more nervous about today's travel than I have been about any travel for a while. I think it's that it involved travelling in places badly served by public transport, with public transport. I'm used to travelling to cities, places where if your plans go wrong you can just spend some money and fix things. I'm used to arriving in an airport in a foreign country and going – huh, guess I better figure out how to get to wherever I'm staying from here! I quite like that, absorbing context clues and puzzling out a foreign system. Like a big videogame you're stuck inside. But this felt... well, I guess I just had less confidence that if I fucked up I wouldn't end up stranded in the countryside with a wheely suitcase and nowhere to stay for the night. Higher stakes makes it less of a game.
Anyway! The stressing paid off, because it meant I did enough preparation for things to go wrong in a gentle way. In the event, it turns out that today is the day that Storm Floris hit, with the peak of the winds hitting at approximately the time the ferry was scheduled to depart. But I'd subscribed to the text alerts for the ferry and got notice through yesterday that it might get cancelled. And then, this morning, as the coach wound its way up past Loch Lomond, I got a text through: yep, definitely cancelled.
Yes okay, fair not to set out to sea in this
So I got off at the next stop and... now I'm making my way back to Glasgow & my Dad's flat there. Half an hour's wait for a bus, then a train back to Glasgow, then the little underground service back. Definitely could have been worse!
And then I need to decide whether to try again tomorrow. I'll be coming back Friday anyway - I have a workshop to give at the Glasgow Indie Games Fest on Saturday. Or alternatively I could relax and maybe see some more fringe shows, see if I can meet with some folks I thought I'd miss on this trip... I reckon I ought to have a nap first.
I'm travelling for most of August, complicated travel with a bunch of moving parts. This is also one reason I'm more anxious than usual, all the logistics feel knotted together into a bigger tangle than usual. My health has been pretty good recently, but over the course of the train up to Glasgow I went from feeling fine to feeling wretched - maybe I'm going to blame the leaning Pendelino trains they have on the west coast for setting off a stomach that was a little unsettled already. So since arriving I've had to prioritise lying down and making some serious progress through Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone. Not that this is a real hardship, it's a banger of a book - just some fantastic funny character work through the various narrators over the course of the book. Although some of the twists are... not the most plausible. I admit I don't have direct experience, but I'm pretty sure that's not how O____ works!
an exhibition about IKEA fabric patterns. Nice to see all the sketches (I love seeing design sketches) and think about patterns and design – but I think it was a bit too corporate to justify paying money to see. Maybe if you're a real IKEA head.
some paintings & prints & tapestries by Victoria Crowe. Some beautiful stuff - there's a big tapestry, not on show there, that was done in undyed wool, the shades just coming from the variation in breeds. And nice to see the printmaking, the attention to the natural world, light, etc.
and my favourite, although I have no picture of it - a nice view into the working tapestry studio, where you could see a giant tapestry seemingly completed, but not removed from the loom, and a woman working away at a smaller tapestry. God what an endeavour a tapestry is.
We went back to Alice's flat, where her cat Hilda was very brave and stayed under the coffee table while I sat there drinking my tea. I would look down sometimes and see her round eyes staring up at me, the rest of her body just a silhouette where the pattern of the carpet was obscured by darkness. What a creature.
And then we went out to see a clown show! Furiozo, who puts on the clown olympics (on again on the 18th!) which Alice is obsessed with, and I am by proxy. The show is some great classic clowning - but he plays a Eastern European hard man, raving, threatening violence, driving his beamer, etc. Very Anora. But also he is very clown the whole time. It's a good dynamic. We sat at the front, so I was brought up on stage - he proceeded to cut a literally comically large line of "coke", then snort it with a vacuum cleaner. Then it was my turn:
What a fantastic show, if you are about and into clowning then I very much recommend it. I'm also gonna keep an eye out and see if he does any clown workshops back in London.
Anyway – in the process of writing this I have arrived back at the flat, so I will sign off again – maybe some more rest would do me good, or maybe I'll be bored and at a loose end once I finish the last few pages of The Moonstone. Maybe it hinges on whether I'm likely to get some good views if I see through that same bus journey tomorrow. We'll see!
It's another link roundup! Some day I will start writing new things again (or finish writing the stuff I started). But in the mean time, lots of other interesting things have been written, so let me write them down for you here.
This time, the theme is craft. The idea of caring about your work, the material you're dealing with. Attending to the task as best you can, whatever that is.
What I like about this is that she has went beyond just taking some pictures of nice signs, but she has spoken to sign painters, she has considered how they tackle the problems they are trying to solve. How do they deal with different languages? How do they stand out when everyone else has colourful signs? And on the flipside, how are they maybe reproducing limitations they don't actually need to abide by?
To stay visual, let's look at some corpses! (yes, this is a content warning)
(also, yes, it's a scientific paper, but it is readable and has a lot of cool details you don't get from, for example, the BBC article about it)
I just keep thinking about the ways that these tattoos show the hand of the people who made them. The development of a style, working back to the nature of the tools uses. Just some startlingly cool graphic design, too - the way the animals entwine around each other, the way that the tattoos are placed on the body in a way that accentuates the forms. The development of the style between the different tattoos, too... ah, it's just such a joy to think about people thinking hard to solve recognisable problems, thousands of years ago.
One of the people they worked with was Daniel Riday, who gave himself experimental tattoos to try to understand what the characteristic signs of various methods of prehistoric tattooing might have been. I don't have a good link for that, but I think the paper Chalcolithic Tattooing: Historical and Experimental Evaluation of the Tyrolean Iceman’s Body Markings. There are some videos online of him doing the tattooing, but I won't link them because I'm squeamish.
But! Here comes a forced segue – I am not squeamish about bog butter! Bog butter! Butter buried in a bog!
A writeup I keep coming back to, about going into the woods, making butter, and burying it in a hole. Deeply connected to the physical work required, but also to the factors that surround it. And, like Daniel Riday, by doing it you can understand the physical details that say: oh, this is annoying, or this doesn't work that well, they probably did it this way. And insisting - this is not just done for ritual reasons or to preserve for hard times, this has joy in itself. The butter has a taste you can appreciate, the tattoos are placed in a way that shows craft. Whatever other reasons they had, people found joy in this.
Okay, time for more gross stuff. Let's think about worms for a while:
"Canadian nightcrawlers", what a name for an earthworm. But yeah, there are so many small parts of the economy that you don't think about, that have their own culture, their own history, their own economic circumstance. This is that classic genre of story, one where people go deep into a little quirky neglected corner of the world and now your understanding of it is a little wider.
Speaking of quirky stories, here's one about buying some crude oil:
Again, it's a classic genre of article, the one where someone does something that experts tell them is a bad idea, and persists even as they discover that the experts are correct. The deeper point is still the same, though - to connect the flows of numbers and commodities on a screen to something tangible. Pierce through abstraction until you have a bottle in your hand.
One final link! It's about game design, and actually something pretty close to my Knife Fork Spoon game. It's mheibes:
A game that's purely about detecting a lie. Well, that's not true - there's a little more to it, maybe it's a small shift in the position of a tendon that gives away the game. But people are so so good at picking up on small details of another person's behaviour - this is wild to read about. And the durational aspect of the matches. Conserving energy, conserving spirit, conserving focus.
Anyway, that's all your links for now. I hope you're doing something focused and material with your weekend. I'm going to Scotland.
I'm in a couple of Discord servers, nice places which are about chatting to friends and not so much about promoting something or doing "community management". Here's some channels I like in them!
#content-warning / #im-fuming-because: it's nice to have somewhere to put misery! it makes it easier to not see misery if you don't want to, but more importantly it lowers the barrier to posting misery - if people see it they knew what they were coming for!
#fascism : similarly, it's nice to have #politics but also sometimes you need a super-politics channel for the really depressing stuff
#dream-diary
no one wants to hear about your weird dreams
except often, in my experience, they do
here is somewhere you can post about your dreams and know that if people didn't want to read it, it's their problem
or, alternatively, #drains-and-dreams. this is a channel for chat about drains (and plumbing more generally). and also for dreams. and also for stuff that crosses between the two. i think it's important to have stupid injoke channels. that's where the culture is.
#this-server or #server-suggestions. somewhere to talk about the server itself
#self-promo or #making-whatever or #what-are-you-working-on or something. something where it is explicitly encouraged to talk about the things you are doing. people can be shy otherwise! worried about spamming! but it's nice to see that stuff!
#downpour - yes definitely important to have a channel for sharing cool Downpours that people have made or played. yes yes. vital.
#instasham or #camera-roll. somewhere to post pictures. you can even prohibit people from posting text in this channel, too, if you want. somewhere people can share the cool bird they saw, again without fear of spamming. that's what a lot of these channels are about - either giving someone implicit permission to post something they might be hesitant to post, or giving people the ability to ignore a category of thing they might not want to see. or both at the same time.
channels for people who want to practice specific languages. i mean, i am not currently learning a language, so this isn't useful to me in an active way. but it's a cute thing to see anyway.
i don't do this, but it seems like a nice idea:
Every Discord should have a “wiseposting” channel, a place where only one message is allowed per day.
Having a private Twitter feed amongst friends rules.
however, i am on a little private Mastodon server with a similar community size, and one thing that is nice about it is that it has Posting Energy (as distinct from chatting energy, there's something about the way that posts are sent out into the void and are not implicitly a response to anything anyone else is saying). this might be a way to get Posting Energy onto Discord.
a "specific things" category. for stuff that there's repeated conversations about. maybe it's nicer to use threads for this, but no-one can ever find them if they didn't get in them from the start, so maybe not.
i mean also lots of other channels for things people might wanna talk about. tv shows, videogames, exercise, their art practice, books they're reading, whatever. idk, you can add them whenever there's a sufficient volume of chat to make them seem worth having.
Also on the subject of Discord - did you know you can "ignore" people now? it's like muting. their messages still show up (and annoyingly will set a channel to be unread, i assume for arcane operating systems at scale reasons), but you have to click through to actually read them. very helpful for That One Guy. i have definitely been in communities that suffered slow evaporation because of One Guy Who Not Actually Harmful But Is A Little Irritating before. maybe "ignore" helps with that. or maybe it just means it's even less likely anyone does anything about it.
In a vague continuation of my previous things to read collections, I started gathering articles I'd come across that I thought were worthy of sharing. Then I started grouping them. And now I might even have a thesis?
which is pretty long and academic but I think captures something important about the present day rise of fascism. Here's a few pull quotes to illustrate where it goes:
Once people get a taste for humiliating, they will fight very hard to be able to keep doing it. Like an addiction, the competitively powerful will often put this urge above all else and behave in profoundly self-destructive ways to chase it. People with others beneath them in a racial caste system almost always prioritize maintaining it over their own economic, social, or cultural interests.
Right populism is driven by the desire to humiliate, left populism by not wanting to be humiliated.
And to connect this to AI, we have this extremely unsurprising story:
And this is extreme, but the point of AI is not just to achieve tasks, but to give the simulacra of having a servant. Someone who will endlessly try to please, someone who you can be cruel or polite to without fear that they will respond to you in kind. I was always pretty sceptical of people saying "I think it's important to say please and thank you to Alexa, just to remember how to behave properly", but maybe I was wrong.
A post that also connects:
i believe that at 18 every american should be entered into a draft, not for military service, but for one year of mandatory retail or restaurant work
Using this lens of humiliation, what does this give us? People who routinely humiliate service workers now might instead think of themself as a potential or former service worker, and treat others more humanely. It's struck a chord.
And you can go darker when connecting this to mainstream politics. Here's Liberal Currents again:
Which instead draws as it's unifying logic the desire to sexually prey on children. Horrifying, yes, but also hard to fully argue against. And it comes from the same basic logic:
Matt Walsh provides a neat summary of the fantasy, tweeting an image of a man carrying a woman and child out of Hurricane Harvey's floodwaters: "Woman cradles and protects child. Man carries and protects both. This is how it ought to be, despite what your gender studies professor says." Of course, in the reactionary fantasy, these benefits are not provided for free. They are animated by a quasi-feudal vision in which other members of the family owe the father absolute obedience in return for the protection he provides.
Fundamentally, children are easier to manipulate. Children are easier to control. Children are easier to groom. Reactionaries believe that women exist to be ruled over by men and bear them children. Of course adult women—and especially educated adult women—will have their own ideas about this state of affairs. But a child you can shape, you can make totally dependent on you, emotionally, socially, financially. What else is "headship" but an argument for pedophilia?
It's not just about power, it's about having absolute power. Being able to subject other people to it.
You might well have seen this next article linked before:
He said his wife had almost been assaulted in Texas, and when she’d called the police they arrested a man who turned out to be an “illegal alien” and who was promptly deported. He said he’d seen videos of a member of the Taliban getting into an argument at a fast-food restaurant in California (I couldn’t find any evidence of this—not even as a conspiracy), and that he wanted to join ICE to protect his family.
“I learned all these skills in the army—smash and grabs, site exploitation—and never got to use them,” he said. “So I’m here to kind of do what I learned to do over there, but this time here, defending my country.”
And here's the way that would be humiliators justify their aspirations.
(also, wow, what a pseudonym "Yanis Varoufuckice" is!)
And now it's time to leave America and go to Dubai:
I went to Dubai wrongheaded. I learnt nothing and left nauseated. I had thought it would be fun – funny, even – to experience the disorientation of standing at the pivot point between two world systems. Instead, it was merely disorientating – sickeningly so. There are hells on earth and Dubai is one: an infernal creation born of the worst of human tendencies. Its hellishness cannot be laid solely at the feet of the oligarchs, whose wealth it attracts, nor the violent organised criminals who relocate there to avoid prosecution. It is hellish because, as the self-appointed showtown of free trade, it provides normal people with the chance to buy the purest form of the most heinous commodity: the exploitation of others. If you want to know how it feels to have slaves, in the modern world – and not be blamed openly for this desire – visit Dubai. But know that you will not be blameless for doing so. Every Instagram post, every TikTok video, every gloating WhatsApp message sent from its luxury is an abomination. A PR campaign run by those who have already bought the product, and now want only to show you that they can afford it.
(what good writing!)
So where is the opposition? Here's two pieces on the failure of centrists to make headway, or even hold their ground, against the fascists. First, at home:
Cross-national studies show that mainstream parties that try to compete with the far right on immigration consistently fail to achieve their goals: It doesn’t gain them votes, and it often loses them. Starmer’s strategy of constantly giving ground raises the salience of the issue; it implies that immigration really is the problem that nativists say it is, and it even legitimates the idea that regular politics has failed people. This all amounts to a complex way of validating fascists: It is effectively saying the far right has the correct concerns, the clearer view of politics, and the greater authority to hold forth on the issue.
Because reactionary centrists do not really have values, they struggle to understand the motivations of those who do. Starmer’s substantive concessions on trans issues and immigration are the most obvious thing in the world to them: He’s giving the median voter the policy they want! But the party isn’t just communicating a policy; its policy is communicating its values—and the “values” proposition is hopelessly incoherent. The government is simultaneously saying it believes and does not believe in liberal core principles. To liberals, this feels like a betrayal. To the right, Labour’s concessions appear inauthentic and pandering.
Our disagreement with fascism is, ultimately, one of values, and it is on that level that the rhetorical fight against fascism must be taken. Those to the left of the populist, nativist right must articulate a competing, values-based vision to give everyone else—and especially the complacent middle—a true alternative to reaction; they must offer a clear, compelling, and coherent story about what the sorts of lives we want people to be free to pursue, and what type of society we want to have to support those dreams. And part of this story will be about just how dangerous, how utterly society-destroying, the far right’s story is. What policy views people can be persuaded to support will follow this conversation, not the other way around.
“The core work of what a party does—determining what the message is, what does the party stand for, what policies does it pursue, what are the public rationales it offers—all those things have been outsourced,” Martin said. There is still a party machine, of sorts, in that Democratic decisionmaking is disproportionately controlled by a certain group of powerful individuals, like the ones who were accused of putting their thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and helping cover up Joe Biden’s decline in 2024. But now those figures are part of a “blob” (that’s another Hollow Parties term) of consultants and fundraisers clustered on the coasts who have neither formal obligations to nor channels of communication with the vast majority of Democratic voters.
Message testing can’t tell you how to handle contradictory or volatile voter beliefs—the public tends to say it supports both increased government spending andsmaller government, for instance, and has shifted its position on whether there should be more or less immigration 10 times in the past 10 years. It can’t tell you, in the event that you enact a useful policy, how to make sure voters notice its effects and associate them with Democrats; conversely, it doesn’t tell you anything about the potential consequences of winning office and failing to follow through on something that you claimed, during your campaign, to support. Shor’s tests regularly find support for unambiguously liberal messages about taking on corporate special interests and raising taxes on the wealthy, but when Democrats actually hold power, this commitment somehow always ends up getting stuck to the bottom of the desk drawer.
Public opinion can be fluid; a party that wants to succeed in the long term—and especially one that bears the burden, in a two-party system, of maintaining a functional country—needs to have priorities besides winning the next election. With these truths in mind, Democrats have a choice. They could put their heads together to make an educated guess about what the country might look like, think like, and need out of its government in 2028, then conduct themselves accordingly for the next three years. Or they could spend several hundred million dollars to find out again that the middle class likes the phrase “lift up the middle class.” Which do you think they’re more likely to choose?
Okay, enough with staring into the void. Time to link some stuff that's hopeful. This mindset is not the only way to think. There is a better way to live! Social status is not purely zero-sum. People can be good to be around! Loneliness and isolation is not obligatory.
Just like that essay on humiliation, this starts with recounting childhood bullying:
I still can't really make sense of what happened next. I said some words, following everyone's lead, and the girls decided to pretend they'd not been playing that game at all, and were shocked to hear me say such bad things, and they went to report me to the teacher, who duly told me off. Had they lured me in for the specific purpose of eventually betraying my trust, and getting me grounded? I'll never find out. I can't think of another reason why they did what they did. I can't think of a reason why such small children would behave in such a vicious way.
But, rather than staying in that mindset, instead, she chooses instead to talk to people, to live within the world:
I love my friends but I love my acquaintances as well; I know so many of my neighbours, and the people who run my local businesses, and it can be hard for me to leave the house without exchanging at least a few words with someone, somewhere. I've no idea who I would be without all of them. I can't imagine what navigating the many lows of the past few years would have been if I'd remained alone.
Anyway, it's a great essay on the value of human connection, the sheer joy of it in and of itself.
On the subject of connection, here's a story from 1989 which is just... the story of someone's life:
Across the street from the sailors’ apartment was an old but unfinished house. You couldn’t see it from the street; it was shrouded in pepper trees, bougainvillea, morning glories. The house belonged to a person who called herself Corsica Bascurain de Kuprinska, an old woman with white hair and thick black mascara. The sailor figured she must have been in her late 50s. An aged, would-be Paloma Picasso. A quasi bruja. A painter who didn’t paint anymore, just drank rot-gut gallon bottles of Cribari burgundy. She chain-smoked Delicados. Her speech was laced with insults, and her insults were laced with words like “bureaucrat,” “Nixon,” and “ cochino .” Like the building inspector, who would come around once in a while.
Just great writing, and exemplifying, if not talking about, caring about other people's lives.
And here's a review for the new Superman film (which I liked):
Superman is an alien in every sense of the word, raised with what we have mythologized as traditional values in rural America, sent to spread the gospel of doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do. When he matures, he braves the sin and seductions of the Big City, the mortal city, the Fritz Langian Metropolis, which, whatever its faults, still has a newspaper that aspires to journalism in 2025. There, he falls in love with the creatures he was entrusted to protect. All of them. He sees value in everyone because he is the most alien of anyone. Some people would like to frighten you away from places where you’re forced to consider the broad diversity of mankind as human beings–colleges and cities, for example. Did you ever wonder why?
All of these pieces make the case for a life lived not in dominance and fear, but with open curiosity, compassion for others.
Okay, that's your lot, that's what I've been thinking about recently. Some good writing, some interesting arguments, a thesis for the shape of the world as-is.
Oh, wait, here's a post-script. A bit from that Marie Le Conte piece that I think needs more emphasis:
Of course, it requires more work, but that's the entire point. It's easy and tempting to opt for solitude because nothing is more straightforward than lying to yourself, sometimes even without realising that you're doing it.
It's work, and scary work, to talk to people and exist in the world and not be isolated. It's safer to seek an AI "relationship", because there's no fear of rejection there. Lockdowns, and algorithms, and the apps, and an increasingly atomised society... they get us out of the habit of talking to other people, of valuing human contact on non-commercial terms. Important to push back against, just on personal terms - but if our political futures hang on society to be more pro-social in fundamental ways... I feel deeply unsure about that happening any time soon.
it was pretty cool to see! here's some scattered thoughts:
the former Olympic zone is a weird place. simultaneously desolate, difficult to navigate, pleasant & full of little bars, and oppressively corporate. people are trying so hard to produce some vibes, but unfortunately half of them are people with too much money drawing up plans in climate controlled offices elsewhere.
it's cool to see some of the workings of the museum. here's how stuff is packed, here's a forklift, here's someone sorting out some hangers in the conservation room, here's an explanation of the museum's numbering system...
lots of stuff
and also catalog systems are pretty fascinating, just thinking about maintaining a database for 200 years is a big thought to have, even without the worry of having to keep all that metadata connected to a big pile of physical objects. you start to understand why they used to just write the numbers on the object!
turns out a museum can be a good time even without an exhibition or a narrative or an organising throughline. you can just... look at stuff & go "oh! that's cool!". and if you wanna find out more you can look at the catalog number on the tag & look it up on the website.
(placeholder for a link to a post about other people visiting the science museum stores, which are even more of this experience, and much less of a place intended primarily for visiting)
but nevertheless curators can't help themselves, and so there were a number of plaques, explanatory signs, outreach projects, thoughtful juxtapositions, installed galleries with particular things on display, full rooms recreated to understand them in context, etc. i did like how the initial impression was that there was just gonna be stuff, and it was only after you looked at the stuff for a while that the curation started impinging on you.
but i was reminded of how so much of the learning that is done in these kinds of spaces is done via visitors talking to their friends and family and sharing their experiences with the work. there was a installed instance of the Frankfurt kitchen and seeing it made me talk about how cool it was to see to my friend Arlo... similarly some work by Lee Kang-So which got me to nerd out about pottery sculpture techniques. (this thought also connected to the work thing we had secondarily met up to talk about)
Frankfurt kitchen! looks kind of unremarkable
but maybe i'd learn more from the online catalog if their wifi worked better
and too, this collective exchange is not just "what this is" but also making sense of it. i appreciated the conversation i overheard about Robin Hood Gardens, talking about how it felt overly voyeuristic. i didn't agree, i think the domestic always feels intimate, and i think there's a lot of value in collecting and treasuring the mundane. mainly watching it i thought about my place, and i thought about all the flats that i had seen when i was attempting to buy it. i thought about the particular style of internal door handle, how i didn't really like it, but that seeing it in this context made me appreciate the heritage it suggests.
door handles & ironmongery
also i collected some funny faces i saw around the place. who's your pal?
it was pretty busy! we went on a random Tuesday afternoon & had to search for a locker to put our bag in.
oh yeah, they (reasonably) are stricter than a museum usually is about people taking in bags or food or drink. funny moment passing a member of staff talking into a walkie-talkie: couple standing in the atrium... in the center, on the glass... they have a bag of skittles... they are *eating*... do you copy?
the cafe: i'm not a big fan of museum cafes, they're generally expensive & loud. i did not find this one an exception. but also it was fine.
oh! and we played a fun game with the pull out panels of fabric samples near the cafe. pull out one, and try to guess where it was made and how old it is. (the safe answer is : England, 1830s). possibly this game would be less fun if either of us was an expert on fabric history. or even more fun again if both of us were. it's nice to play these kinds of games, i think.
not a panel of fabric BUT it is a woodblock for printing on fabric. so close enough.
fucking around, trying things, seeing what happens. I do this too little, I think. It's especially informative to look at the generated shaders and see how they've been put together. See the next step for details.
How to tell if you've fucked up
The shader will start glitching back and forth between two frames. It'll look broken, but in a less exciting way than you were going for. You go to the inspector, switch to the console tab and then look for these two lines:
As the second line suggests, you'll only get this once until you refresh the page.
Probably you're wondering... okay, but how do I tell what I've fucked up. Here's my workflow, although it's not the most convenient:
1) Get the Hydra code that's calling your new function. Let's say it's something like this:
osc()
.coolFunc(17)
.out(o0);
You wanna edit it so it looks something like this:
3) Look in the console and you can see the generated shader source.
4) Now to figure out what's wrong with it. Maybe you can tell by looking? Looking and thinking, that's what coding is all about.
5) I personally paste it in here: https://evanw.github.io/glslx/ Probably I should set this up so it runs in a code editor & I can do some stuff there?
Types of input
So if you look at the docs or the built in functions, you will see a lot of functions which take float as an argument. Almost all, in fact! And this makes sense, there's lots of fun stuff that works when you're passing in floats - you have the array syntax which sequences the input, you can smooth it, it's easy to do maths on it...
That's right, you can pass in a matrix (of course, we're not doing anything interesting with the matrix... that's your job).
How do we call this? If we try to pass in an array then we trigger the clever sequencing logic. Well, I'm not sure if there's a smarter way. But this works:
matExample("mat3(1,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1)").out(o0);
Hello magenta!
Sampling
What else might we wanna pass? Well, if we wanna do something where we're taking multiple texture samples, like a blur or whatever, then we're gonna want a sampler2d. There is of course an example of this in the default functions, it's good old src() . Let's have a look at that:
Funny to see commented out code from an earlier version in there. Anyway, yeah, we can do the same thing ourselves! To make a function that looks like this: blur(s1) (note: not blur(src(s1)). Or indeed src(s1).blur()). We want this to be a src type of function so we know _st is available, and also just because it makes sense - it's always going to be at the start of a chain of functions.
I haven't experimented with the full range of possible inputs, but understanding how to pass in stuff that isn't a float took me some time, so hopefully this is helpful to others. I think other things should work similarly - falling back to passing the value as a string if needed.
Of course, the other way to sample is to read from tex0 from somewhere else in the chain. This will, if the chain contains a texture read, read from that same sample. But it'll break if you're not doing any texture reads anywhere else. So I don't recommend it, even if it makes the code a bit nicer in form. Thomas Jourdan's convolution shaders seem to do this, and this is why they sometimes don't work if you aren't also doing feedback stuff.
Also worth noticing when doing sampling is the resolution uniform. We can correct for the size of the screen! Make shaders which correct for the aspect ratio automatically (uh, although they will make assumptions about the lack of transformations earlier in the chain)
Although...
Hydra doesn't re-evaluate width & height? it should!
This is just a moan as I run down through my list of notes. Hydra doesn't seem to re-evaluate the builtin variables width and height! A pain if you wanna play with window size. Or maybe it makes sense given setResolution exists. Anyway, you can listen for the window resize event and set stuff yourself if you need to. But it was a surprise to me.
And yes, this affects the resolution uniform.
Helper functions
One thing I've spotted going through the built in function source is this bit of mangled code:
{
name: 'sum',
type: 'color',
inputs: [
{
type: 'vec4',
name: 'scale',
default: 1,
}
],
glsl:
` vec4 v = _c0 * s;
return v.r + v.g + v.b + v.a;
}
float sum(vec2 _st, vec4 s) { // vec4 is not a typo, because argument type is not overloaded
vec2 v = _st.xy * s.xy;
return v.x + v.y;`
},
Can you see what's up? The glsl includes a close bracket and a new function declaration. If we try to use this, we find that the generated shader is invalid... but it doesn't need to be?
One limitation of the way you declare new functions is that you can include helper functions that you can call from your functions. When converting shaders I've written elsewhere, manually inlining these turns out to be a bunch of work. Can we take advantage of the textual mangling that Hydra is built on and sneak something in like this:
But alas, we need to declare otherFunc before we use it. So we'd have to rely on adding the helper function with a different setFunction call than the one we're using it with... which feels too fragile to actually use, for me. Maybe there's a way? Let me know if you figure it out. Or if you've fixed up Hydra so helper functions can get defined, that too.
Okay, I think that's the tidied up version of a bunch of my notes. Hope this is helpful to someone! Maybe just to me, later on!
Adam Saltsman has a term he's started using, "corgispace". Let's quote him on what that means:
"How are you shipping so fast?"
Similar reasons! Basically, I'm just not doing hard or time consuming work. #PICO8 also has pretty extreme scope boundaries built in, especially if you are keeping things "easy".
So we're working in "corgispace" - games that have short legs on purpose.
(this whole thread is worth reading, click through)
It's about working with the grain of the material. It's about saying "hm, that's hard, let's not do that". It's about finding the dumb hacky way to do it, because you are making a finite thing.
Here's another Adam quote:
my favorite part of pushing as much of the design of these games as possible into the art tools (like the tilemap tab) is to get as much of the DESIGN to be : draw a level that i have no idea if its fun or funny or even works, and then just press play, and play it, and see what happens
interesting to compare this old Jenny Jiao Hsia comic about her process, and about the ways that she was finding it limiting in the long term. and then the ways that she ultimately overcame it to finish Consume Me, which seems like it might be a masterpiece? maybe that's a post for her to write, not me.
It's about keeping iteration times short. It's about working in such a way where you can see the effects of your actions. So you can try a goofy thing and then see where it goes, rather than having to make sure it's gonna be worthwhile ahead of time.
I think about seeing the Sokpop showcase at AMAZE this year, and about how a bunch of the games were broken or crashed sometimes, just logic errors or edge cases getting hit. They worked well enough to be fun, to be playable, to be something that you could derive a large quantity of joy from. But also, in a expo environment where they ran for hours on end without being reset, they sometimes had issues. Crashes, glitches, whatever. Because that's not what they optimised for. They optimised for making 100 games. And for those games to be fun, or interesting, or whatever that particular game was trying to do. And... I mean, isn't that the right way to do it?
I think this is a really powerful way to work. I want to work in this way more.
But!
I find myself inevitably attracted to the boundaries of the space. I wonder what things are within reach, and what things are tall. I think about what height comes from convention and expectations, and what height comes from technical limitations, and what height comes from the natural structure of human nature and physical reality. I think about what shape things could be if some of these things were changed, and what work would be involved in changing some of these things.
I think about building ramps. I think about all the places a corgi could go if a ramp was added. Like... the sofa. Or upstairs. Or on the bed. I think about what these things metaphorically map to. The games you could play on top of the kitchen counters. There's cool stuff up there! I'm not entirely sure it's safe for the corgi, and I'm not entirely sure what the corgi would do up there... but that's part of what makes it interesting.
There's different types of tool, right? There's tools which make previously impossible things possible (like the Large Hadron Collider). There's tools which make expensive things cheaper (like swiss roll production lines). There are tools which allow professionals to be more expressive (like theremins). And there are tools which allow people who aren't interested in complicated things to do more things than they can before (like Downpour). I'm most interested in this last type of tool. But to build this type of tool, you need to use a bunch of the other types of tool. So it's worth keeping an eye on all of these, to see if suddenly there's something cool that someone's placed just out of these reach of all these damn corgis.
And the thing about building a ramp is that once you have built one ramp, tons of corgis can get up there. It can have a big effect! A second order effect, for sure. But think of all the corgis doing cool new things with this space that they wouldn't have gotten to otherwise!
Maybe they mostly just smile at the camera for the ramp advertisements. That's cool too.
Building ramps isn't the only way to do this, of course - you can also be a corgi who does cool shit and inspires other corgis. Or you could host Crufts, and help show all the other corgis what cool stuff other corgis are doing. This metaphor is getting increasingly tortured, but what I mean here is that curation and community organising is a powerful way to affect the culture of a creative community. This point was the end section to my recent talk about making creative tools, which you can watch here.
Anyway
Ramps, am I right? And thinking about what spaces a corgi can get to, what a corgi might do there. The statespace of possibility that a new tool opens up. The way you never really know until you actually see a corgi play around up there, but also you can have a sense of it.
But on the other side...
Maybe I want to be a corgi, go to the places which are easy to get to. Get good at running around at ground level. Get fast at trying new things, and not getting stuck on the perfect thing, just out of reach.
I can operate in either mode. But it's probably useful to be intentional about what mode I'm in at any particular moment.
Or maybe I need to make more ramps while staying in corgi-mode?
Bonus Round
I haven't watched this interview with Adam Saltsman yet, but I will:
Also here's the tweet version of this post:
wrote down a note for a blog post i should write, but maybe it's just a bsky post ("tweet") instead. or maybe unpacking it so it makes sense to anyone else is the blog post. anyway, here it is, in maximally dense form:
making ramps to extend corgispace
Wow what a messy post this is, it is an undigested thought trying to connect to a thousand different places. Let's hope writing it helps digest the thoughts.
Oh, even more further reading, here's a new thread responding to this post:
I think it might be important for "us" (take that how you will) to move past the idea that good tools democratize our ability to explore well trod spaces, and instead move toward the idea that good tools democratize the exploration of unknown spaces and i think V is poking at that (i might be wrong)
sometimes i find myself thinking "hm, i'm not doing enough". and then i find it useful to write down a list of current projects. not necessarily things that are taking chunks out of every day, but things that are bubbling along and taking up a burner of the hob of my mind.
and why not also post that publicly? nice to tell people what i'm up to – i write a good amount on here, but little of it connects directly to what i make money doing. which is fine, the work is in the specifics and that's harder to write about, but... anyway, here's some context for you.
so, here it is, in rough order of "am i getting paid for this":
in the end stretches of putting together a prototype with Marie, Dick & Angus. we're funded to the end of the month, and then hopefully we can (Marie can) show off the vertical slice and get more money to keep making it. this is the biggest thing i'm working on right now. it's a real cool project, i have a lot of faith in it.
a few weeks of work with Arlo testing out playful interventions we can do on people who have just left a play. it's the kind of thing where we're artists being brought into an academic context.
maybe doing a few days of work fixing up some tooling for an immersive theatre company. hopefully the start of more??
this doesn't really count because i've done all the work and just need to invoice for it - but i was doing some consulting on a game about Vikings with too many emotions. this came out of a lab i went to at UAL on disinformation a few months back. more academic entanglements...
i've got some Downpour workshops coming up this summer. and i guess i should pitch some more? lemme know if you want me to come show people how to make videogames by doing crafts with their hands.
ongoing Downpour code work - trying to change some boring hosting stuff that should make it little less stressful to run. and then back to adding video hosting, which is half way there... this is gonna be real exciting when it's live.
Now Play This has had it's final festival, and the CIC needs to close down. but first... i need to do the accounts, and close up services, and transfer the website and emails somewhere so they can get hosted indefinitely. boring work, but worth it for things to close down in an ordered fashion. the labour of ending a project.
in the early stages of a collab on a game with a cool artist. could be real exciting, could go nowhere... fun to talk about all the things we could make, anyway.
i'm continuing to playtest and tweak Knife Fork Spoon. getting shown at a party at Develop next month, so i wanna make sure it's solid & spectacular for that. need to order some fake sausages. i've started fantasising about getting it published... hm hm!
continuing to make pottery - it's the Open Studios this weekend, so I'll be selling a few bits, and also showing off this nice jug i've submitted to the studio competition. got ideas for some interactive pieces...
oh, and i was gonna make some of the cups i'd made into candles, but that needs some rounds of testing and refining to actually get a good wax/wick combo. that's maybe a spur for me to try working with porcelain, too (for the translucency)
finally actually messing with livecode stuff again... i've done visuals a few times recently with this webpage (warning, it can be flashy), but i am starting to practice with Hydra & get some custom shaders working for that. wanna perform live with it! yes to being on stage in front of a crowd of people dancing!
going to some overnight larps later this year... i'm still enjoying exploring larp and doing it more, and have an aim to write... something? this year.
need to fix my nice pink bike... i still don't have a wheel for it. or a saddle.
maybe some sewing? i got a sewing machine, but i've not busted it out. it needs bobbins and needles ordering, new thread. i have plenty of stuff to mend. and i have been thinking about quilts?
writing this blog post. writing on here more generally, it feels like good work to keep stretching these writing muscles.
exercise? i'm just writing down my todo list now. anyway, i'm in a decent run of health, i should use it to regain some fitness. i did one (1) jog this last week, maybe i will do another soon?
i think that's more or less complete? it seems like too many things, and maybe it is. but it's feeling okay, manageable, enjoyable. fingers crossed that my health holds up and i can keep going with this.
i was feeling nervous about paid work once the month is out and this stretch of prototyping has ended, but enough small bits have come in that i feel better about that now. i mean, also i'm away through most of August... but if there's any interesting projects that i could help on from September onwards, do get in touch. as the sprawling list above says, i do a lot of things - but generally my expertise is about making games and playful experiences which happen in unusual contexts. using real world maps, when it's actually a social network, controlled by touching a porcelain sculpture, inside a pretend spaceship. figuring out what the technology allows, what the social context suggests, what things would be satisfying to do. and also, i understand that stuff AND i can write code. which means we can try things out pretty quickly!
anyway, i did not mean for this post to turn into me pitching. but, yeah, this is what i'm up to at the moment!
Recently a joy of mine, when my housemate is out, is to find some karaoke tracks on YouTube and sing them to myself. It feels very different from singing at a karaoke room or karaoke bar. It's lower stakes, a good way to practice singing, something lovely to do in the kitchen. I don't have a mic or anything, but I'm thinking about getting one. Why not?
And one of the ways it's different is that YouTube has such a wide variety of karaoke songs. They're not official, they're just made by users who want to share some songs they love. I love seeing all the different touches they add - some really impressive effects
or deliberately going for those retro Sunfly styles
It's a joy to me - the song, singing, and feeling a little community with the people who created the videos.
a ranking of the youtube videos you can use to do karaoke of "Expert In A Dying Field" by The Beths.
Third Place: www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvIu...
+ has the nice album art & the video in the background
~ looks clean and corporate
- doesn't track through the words, just highlights the current line
Second Place: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtbM...
+ called "FakeyOke"
+ does track through words
+ classic karaoke aesthetics
~ think the backing is a little worse than #3
First Place: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NSZ...
- doesn't track the words
- or the line
+ does have a cool painting of Optimus Prime
thanks to everyone who took part in this competition, and congratulations to Melvin!
Anyway, as one of those examples might have demonstrated... I like singing Belle & Sebastian's songs. I used to really love their music, I spent a good while in my 20s working backwards through their albums, getting obsessed with each one in turn until I reached Tigermilk. For a while the intensity of that obsession curdled into disdain - I did feel like a bit of a cliche, and I wasn't really sure about the newer stuff... But that's moved on and now I feel very at peace with liking their songs a normal amount, and occasionally more than that.
I was singing Lazy Line Painter Jane earlier while frying up some chicken and mushrooms to have with rice. And then I thought... ah, you know what would be great? This Is Just A Modern Rock Song. The era just after Tigermilk, the stuff that came out on EPs and was only retroactively collected as Push Barman... that was probably their best period. And then, to my consternation and displeasure... I found that it didn't exist. Well now... I still want to sing it. All these people are making these songs... Surely I can do this?
Spoiler: Yes, I could
First, I found the video on YouTube:
And then I downloaded it. I clicked the Download button on YouTube, and it told me I had to subscribe. I thought I'd installed a plugin to do that? Ah well. I tried a random website that lets you download... it failed. I tried installing youtube-dl but it failed to install using their curl script, and brew said it was unsupported. I then finally installed ytp-dl which did work... some fussing to get the command to download it & convert to mp3 working. Okay. I have the music downloaded.
And then... I guess I need to remove the vocals. I remembered seeing a comment on one of these YouTube vids that they'd used x-minus to remove the vocals. Oh look, it's a website. Huh, that worked... pretty quick and it sounds great. Hurrah for AI, this stuff was pretty crap only a few years ago.
At this point I was like... okay, guess I'll just sing from the lyrics. Which would have worked with a bunch of songs, but this is just one escalating riff with some singing layered kind of casually on top. Not enough structure to give me cues, I didn't know the song well enough. Ah well, let's do this properly.
And so I tried to find some nice karaoke making software. I guess I need to find some... downloadable software which lets me enter the timings by hand? Tapping out the song, that's how I think it's done. I guess I can do that with the original track then substitute in the vocal-less track later... All this software is charmingly from an era before now. MidiCo looks good but idk if I want to spend $30 on this when I'm just messing around waiting for my rice to get done.
And then I nearly gave up, and then I saw someone mention Croonify and... oh yeah, look at this:
Looks so simple... let's try it. Upload the original mp3... Paste the lyrics... Add the title... press Submit...
Okay, and then you go away and wait like 10 minutes for it to process.
But when I came back... yep, that's a karaoke version of the song! Is it good? Well, the text styling isn't as swish as lots of the YouTube uploads. And the vocal removal is not amazing - you can hear some of the breathy bits sticking around where they got removed nicely by x-minus. They put their logo in for the breaks... that seems fair, though. And, alas, the automatic system got a little confused with the long long break in the middle, and kept trying to start the next lyric a little too soon. I'm not — I'm not – I'm not – I'm not as sad as Dostoevsky.
But then... it's labelled as being in alpha, but there's a manual editor. Pretty doable to tweak those timings for that line! Then push a button to re-guess the word timings. Then push another button and wait to re-render the track. It's pretty good, imo!
So here it is, sing along if you know it:
How it works, I reckon
This tool is great. A simple clean interface to get going. Some options once you have something. AI being used for clearly demarcated tasks, stuff that's tedious for people to do but now able to be automated. I reckon the process something goes like this:
AI model splits the track into backing & lead vocals
AI model matches lead vocals against the lines of the lyrics
AI model then matches words with lead vocals, spitting out a subtitle track
Then something renders the subtitle track to video, and overlays the backing track to it.
It's also so lovely that it's free. And so simple and again, very slightly janky with the homepage. It feels like it's been made by a person and not by editing a theme. I just made a bet with myself and won - the HTML is readable, and the CSS is handwritten. There are alternatives with subscription services, I just found mykaraoke.video ($5/mo if you want to use AI features, although free if you do the sync yourself) and Youka ($14.99/month or $9.99 for 10 generations). And it's not like Croonify is entirely free of commerce - they encourage and accept donations, and I believe they probably get some. But it fundamentally feels like something that has been given away because it's a useful thing for people to use, and not so expensive to run. Rather than something made because it seems like a business opportunity.
And fundamentally!!! I wanted to sing a song, and I failed to sing the song, and now I can sing the song! What better use for technology is there than that?
Well, that's a funny story. I was at university, up in Edinburgh, studying Cognitive Science - you probably don't know what that is, but for me it was kind of a mix of psychology and AI. After school I'd gone onto university - I'd got good grades and I don't think I had seriously considered not going. Just the thing you did. I'd applied for mainly psychology courses, but the two I'd picked as my main choice and my backup were both Cognitive Science - I was basically thinking of it as "psychology, but with computers". And when I got there, it turns out I liked it a lot - it started with a lot of required courses to give a grounding in all the different fields, but by the end you could pick what to focus on pretty freely. I got to make robots and experiment on crickets and learn about a whole bunch of different stuff. I even snuck in an architecture course, just because I could.
Anyway, there was this summer programme I'd heard about, called Dare To Be Digital. Basically what it was was that you applied as a team, and if you get in they'd put you up in Dundee for 6 weeks and you'd make a game together. Some friends I knew from my computer science courses asked me if I wanted to apply with them, so I said yes. Not a huge fan of group projects, but getting to make a videogame sounded pretty nice, so. And I didn't have any pressing plans for my summer.
Anyway, the day rolled round where we heard back and ... we were rejected. Bummer. I felt pretty bitter about the whole thing - I remember going to the showcase and thinking I could have done better than them. But time went on and I started to get over myself. The rules of it were that you could apply between any two years of university, or you could apply to do it immediately after you'd graduated. I was now in my final year, so I had one last change. I got together with the same group of friends, and we applied again.
And we were rejected again!
And so that summer, I remember thinking - screw you, I don't need to get into a special programme to make a game, I can do this myself. I was staying with my friend Stephen Kyle that summer, and I remember showering at his flat when I got an idea for a game - like, what about a bullet hell game where all the enemies you were fighting were people who had played the game before.
So I started building it - this was in the early days of Unity, and they had this special web player plugin, trying to compete with Flash. I remember scripting it in Boo, their now long deprecated Python-like language, and making a little PHP backend to receive and send files containing path data. They just got saved as little XML files in a folder, nothing complicated. I remember tuning it was interestingly tricky because after each tweak I'd need to play it a bunch of times to get enemies that moved in the way that the tuning implied. I added trails to emphasise the paths that the ships took, I set it to have a kind of muted colourscheme, I draw some little pixel ships and weapons. I added extra powerups, sequenced throughout each run - this meant that you generally got the new weapon just before your enemies did, which felt good. I made a little website for it, I managed to figure out how to take payments with PayPal if people wanted a downloadable copy. Oh! and I gave it a too-clever name, I called it Hell Is Other People*.
And: I was proud of my work on it. It turns out that making a self directed creative project, finishing it and releasing it and having people say good things about it – it turns out that that's a thing that I really enjoy doing. Or, enjoyment isn't even necessarily the word. Something I derive meaning from. Who knew that working on creative projects feels meaningful! But I felt a way about this that I hadn't done about hardly any of my degree.
So, then when I came down to London, still feeling kind of aimless about what I was doing with my life, I started going to the local indie games meetup. It was an exciting time for indie games! I met a load of people there who were doing really cool stuff that I wanted to get involved with. Eventually I was at one when my friend Alice O'Connor tapped me on the arm and said - hey, you've been moaning about how you want a job in games forever - go talk to that man there, he's setting up a studio. And so I did, we had a conversation there and another one at his member's club a week later, and then I handed in my notice at my current job (in telecoms), and a few weeks later I was working in the games industry.
The story obviously continues from there, but – that's my origin story. I got bitter, made a game out of spite, and then accidentally found the reward that lurks within making something you believe in. And that's what I've been chasing ever since.
[* not linking because reading writing from myself from fifteen years ago makes me cringe. But you can find stuff on it if look hard enough.]
It turns out that publishing a strident blog post on a topic means lots of people give you their thoughts on it! Which is honestly a blessing in this case, I feel I understand the appeal of p5.js much better. Thanks to everyone who got in touch!
Let's collate some responses - not all of them will be covered here, you can also look at the replies to my Bluesky and Mastodon posts to see more.
the post you linked to from ben fry i think is a one-sided view. i don't know him, but i saw that as a reaction to the efforts of the foundation to diversify, increase DEI efforts, and build community around expanding who can program. clearly they've invested heavily in the ecosystem, with way more folks employed in smaller and larger ways to work on the languages and their ecosystem.
I got pushback at my linking to Ben Fry's resignation.
On this - well, I thought it was interesting context, and definitely interesting gossip, although I don't recall enough of the details to really weigh in one way or another (which is why I linked to it but did not discuss it). But I think the counterpoint is worth reproducing:
going from a modest DIY community, building an educational tool, to a series of tools and an entire ecosystem, and later raising 10million is incredible. centering access and empowering a truly and meaningfully diverse community is sadly extremely uncommon in most programming-related communities. i think their work is kind of incredible and i have awestruck at times with their work and the people they bring to the table and the millions of learners they've impacted.
I got a few folks saying that, yeah, but 3D is a real pain. Which I think is very fair. Doing 3D in the browser without a library is something I wouldn't do except as a stunt or to work around some real annoying technical requirements. And p5.js is probably a fine choice for doing this? Or at least, I don't know any alternatives which I'd unreservedly recommend - I've generally used three.js, which is fine, but...
I got some people saying "yeah, I should try out Canvas more" or "yes, I agree with this". Obviously these are gratifying responses to receive. I'm not gonna link them directly here because I'm British and have a natural tendency towards self-effacement. You can go look at the replies yourself if you wanna. There's more thoughts and nuance than I'm including here!
Some good commentary from Julia Evans on the specific ways that p5 is friendly and approachable. I agree with this!! It's really good work on their behalf, and it's the kind of work that is so often underappreciated.
I got some people pushing back at my position - that I am a reasonably adept programmer and I'm biased towards stuff that suits me.
I don't think this is 100% fair - I am aware of this position, but it's my take that pure Canvas, approached and taught in the right way is not any more complex than p5.js. I mean, there's not currently the resources to do so nearly as easily as p5.js enables. But that's a solvable problem, not inherent to the technology.
And this is something that I don't think anyone explicitly said, although some came close - by demarcating an approach as "p5.js", it creates a boundary when searching - the resources you find will all be using a similar approach, will likely be pitched to an introductory level, generally will be compatible with your current situation. This, I readily admit, is not the case for a raw HTML & JS approach - part of this could be solved by the creation of friendly materials, but not all of it. Part of the strength of the native approach is that there aren't artificial barriers between the intro stuff and the stuff you would use "for real". But those barriers are also helpful when learning.
And finally, the biggest thing to come out of this was something I feel a little embarrassed for missing the importance of.
It's that the p5.js web editor is super important, especially when teaching. Giving people somewhere they can go, with any browser, type in some small amount of code and then immediately see the result... yeah, it's important. And, too, when teaching, giving them a way to fork the teacher's example code, a way to easily modify it and then run it themselves... yeah, that's important. And, like, this is supposed to be my whole deal! I make accessible tools and yet I didn't mention this accessible tool as a reason for p5 being the tool of choice.
And, this being my whole deal, I'm immediately wondering... well, but how difficult would this be to solve? Should I make a little editor with the defaults I like?
I started scratching out a template out in Glitch, just to see how it would work. I think it's a viable approach! Very minimal right now, there's no friendliness around interactivity for example. And, if you're one of the people wondering what Canvas code would look like and how it compares to p5.js, then you can also take a look and see how it compares.
But more thoughts on the requirements for a competitive web editor in another post, maybe. I'm gonna try to avoid building it, I don't know that I need a new project right now, but I'm interested in what shape the design would take.
(and I repeat the call-out I made before for some simple p5.js sketches you'd be interested in seeing me replicate)
So, screenshots of this bad post have been going around on Bluesky:
(apologies for no alt text - Ghost doesn't support this many characters)
And there are actually some good thoughts coming from it – mainly from people who are actually going, okay, but what about the second or third order effects? Here's some I saw:
(nb I don't buy most of this vision anyway but if I did): why do we think we won't advertise just to the AI instead of the humans? How does the AI decide which bowling alley is the best? How do they decide where to buy the cake? Is the future a pay-to-play where only bizs who pay the AI get used?
The thing about "agentic" AIs is that nobody is thinking of the consequences downstream here. Why would your guests turn up, since they'll be getting loads of random spam? How does the bowling alley handle loads of automated requests? Who do you complain to if the cake is wrong?
This is a really important point because everyone is imagining "the world as it is, but I have an AI", and consequently not thinking about the regulatory and other infrastructure needed to stop huge amounts of daily life degenerating into the disaster area that is restaurant reservation apps.
And, now I'm thinking about the front wheel of my bicycle. Let me talk about that for a while.
I bought this bike because I loved my other bike too much to lock it up on the street. But also I live up some stairs, and having to carry a bicycle down some stairs stops you from wanting to pop on your bicycle for a quick trip. And yet I live a slightly annoying distance from a tube station, and from the pottery studio, and from the nice cinema, and and. So: the solution is to buy a newer cheaper bike which I lock up on the street and which is easy and accessible by my front door.
And then of course the bike I bought was a lovely pink vintage Dutch bike. Cheap, secondhand, a little rusty - but also the right size and I love it.
And I've ridden it for a few years, but recently the front wheel has had an alarming amount of play. The rubber gaskets are brittle and failing. You can sometimes see some bearings... I think that's a bad sign?
And I know that the wheels are a weird size, because I've had to replace the tyres before. So rather than try to order some online, I go to the local bike shop down my road, and ask them for a wheel. The man takes a look, says "yep, you definitely need a new wheel". But I'm tired (no pun intended) when I buy it, so when the man insists that what I need is a 700c wheel, I buy the wheel and take it home to fit.
So: this was the task today. To fit the 700c wheel, prove that it doesn't actually fit, and then return that wheel and instead get a 28 x 1½ wheel, also known in ISO standards* as a 40-635 wheel.
And in a move that reaffirms my faith in local bike shops, the (other) man happily accepts the return, introduces himself in a very pleasant soft voice, and says I must need a 28 x 1½ wheel. He then says he'll check his stores to see if he has some spare second hand wheels of the right size, and call me in a few days to let me know.
So now I have a few different ways I have tried to get the right wheel. I have looked online, searching for "40-635 wheel". No good results. I searched for "635 wheel" – this got better results – some shops had it, all I think based in Europe (well they were priced in Euros), but generally sold out and with unknown shipping costs. A lead if this doesn't pan out. I also searched for "700b", based on a forum thread that said that that might be an equivalent. That search autocorrected to "700c" and returned useless results. I tried to search for "28 1 1/2 wheel", but Google didn't really parse the fraction in a useful way. For the purposes of this blog post, I tried Amazon directly, to no joy at all. I have tried to buy from a local shop, and they didn't have the right thing in stock. I have tried again at the local shop, and tapped into a possible source of a new wheel which is not visible to technological systems at all. A "dark pool" of bike parts, if I was being pretentious. And I have mentioned this whole situation to my flatmate, who works as a cycle courier, who made a note of the size and said he'd have an ask around.
And this feels kind of emblematic of the way difficult tasks get solved these days. There are computer systems, and they can solve common tasks at scale. For more specific tasks, they handle ambiguity badly, and they take patience and skill to extract the correct answers from. Filtering through listings, refining search terms, picking up on context clues to try to understand. The computer systems do contain good contextual knowledge, but in increasingly marginal spaces - and the motivation for creating this knowledge and making it public increasingly isn't worth the cost. And then there are the smaller scale human networks which you can tap into, if you can find them and be trusted by them, and those are inefficient but ultimately the most powerful ways of solving these problems.
So, I guess the way this wraps up is – in this postulated agentic AI future, do I think that an AI will be able to solve the problem of sourcing a replacement for the front wheel of my bicycle? No. I think that AI agents will make the task for searching for a rare and specific thing online harder and scammier. They will be optimised for the common case, and they will be ever more enmeshed in an influence arms race. I think that the most fruitful avenues for solving these problems are ones which are explicitly hostile to interacting with automated systems in this manner. I think that, to the extent that AI agents are able to access these systems, the systems will be ruined and useless for solving the problems they are currently equipped for solving. Right now I could call the bike shop and ask about a specific wheel size, and they would pick up and have a conversation. If the bike shop starts getting 50 calls a day from an almost human voice asking about random sizes of bicycle wheel, they will stop answering the phone. And if my flatmate starts getting those calls, he might give up on telephony all together.
(God – has thinking about AI too much made me an anarchist??)
[* also known as ETRTO standards. Bicycle wheel size labelling is a fantastic rabbithole]
I'm coming home from A MAZE and feeling alive and connected to the world. Surprisingly! So let's use this energy to write a little blog post.
This is one I've been meaning to write for a while. It's one where I'm a hater! What am I hating on? (you already know, it's in the title).
I think people should stop using p5.js. Now, whenever you tell people they should stop doing something, it's worth (unless you're purely enjoying being a hater) applying Chesterton's Fence, and asking why people use it now. So here's my understanding of what p5.js is and why they use it:
p5.js is a port of the Processing creative coding environment to Javascript. Processing was written in Java and gives you a nice framework for doing quick "sketches" of code, making procedural visuals, maybe some simple animation, a little interactivity, a fun little exploration of code. I have no beef with Processing. It's especially great to use if you're teaching students - the small scope is good for projects, the visual approach makes the stuff you're making immediate and exciting... maybe you're teaching them coding in general, or maybe you're getting them used to making little artworks in code. It gets you going quickly!
So then when it become clear that the energy was shifting from programs you run within your operating system to programs you run within a browser, Processing was seemed like it was getting increasingly irrelevant. So they made p5.js, and all the professors who were teaching Processing shifted to p5.js instead. It's a pretty close match, just in a new programming language. There's great resources out there if you wanna teach it, it's well supported. I get why teachers teach it!
But! I did not learn how to do creative coding by being taught p5.js, or indeed Processing,. I learned it by just... messing around in the browser. And the thing about the browser/JS ecosystem is... it's already great for creative coding. The canvas API works great. You have all these native controls ready to hand. You have capable APIs for making sounds, for doing animation, for doing pretty much anything you want. And you don't need to include any libraries - you can just open up a text document, type some HTML, embed some JS, refer to nothing outside that file, and have a working sketch. And it'll run on any modern browser.
(A moment to acknowledge here that of course in this whole rant I'm defending the thing I find familiar over the thing that's new to me. The bias is acknowledged! But I don't think that's the only thing happening here)
A while back, I took part in advent.js, a little advent calendar compilation of creative code sketches. The submissions where supposed to be done in p5.js – because they were all going to be connected together into a single thing – and while I knew enough that I could have shimmed out to native code, I decided to give it a go and work natively within p5.js. Because it's good to learn new things, and maybe I was missing out on a nice setup for making generative sketches. And, unsurprisingly... it was miserable. I spent half the time working hard to recreate things that the browser natively supports within the limited framework of p5.js.
A more specific example: I wanted to procedurally colour some stuff. I had been having fun looking at oklch, which is a great way to specify colours if you want to vary the hue but keep the perceptual lightness and value constant. It's built into browsers now, you can put a oklch(0.7 0.2135 34.01) into anything that needs a colour specified. And – which is pretty cool – if the browser supports a larger colour gamut, then you get some extra colours. But p5.js doesn't work that way. It needs colours in it's own formats. I mean I know it says it takes a CSS color string, but it doesn't take a oklch one. There's an open bug for it - "In any case I'm not very opposed to implementing this but my main concern is that this will likely require a complete reengineering of how color works in p5.js that will likely touch a lot of moving parts.". So what I did was to add a new library that could take my oklch strings and turn them into a sRGB hex code, which I could then plug into p5.js for it to do it's own colour conversions back into something that could get rendered.
And this felt kind of emblematic of the way that p5.js goes against the grain of the native platform. A lot of work to recreate something that exists natively, but different in some small ways. A lot of work... and yet this is a task which always needs more.
Now I should say that I don't think the web platform is perfect. The Canvas API is a little crufty and weird, it has some implicit state you need to manage in a way that isn't the most clear. But p5.js has even more implicit state. As a little example, let's look at the arc() function - picked because it's the first one on the reference page:
An arc is a section of an ellipse defined by the x, y, w, and h parameters.
Great! We have position and size. What exactly do those mean? Are we setting the center of the arc or the top left corner? Are we setting the bounding box of the circle the arc is part of? Well, the answer is that it could be any of them. It depends on the latest ellipseMode that was set.
The fifth and sixth parameters, start and stop, set the angles between which to draw the arc.
Okay, great! Is that in radians or degrees?
By default, angles are given in radians, but if angleMode (DEGREES) is set, the function interprets the values in degrees.
Oh, okay. But maybe all this is helpful if it simplifies drawing an arc - better than having to do math to figure out how to draw these lines ourselves. Except, let's look at the MDN docs for the arc() function of the Canvas API:
arc(x, y, radius, startAngle, endAngle, counterclockwise) The arc() method creates a circular arc centered at (x, y) with a radius of radius. The path starts at startAngle, ends at endAngle, and travels in the direction given by counterclockwise (defaulting to clockwise).
This seems less mysterious to me? Less ways that things can go wrong because of implicit state. Not least because - arc() is a method on a CanvasRenderingContext2D. So if you want to have two canvases, you can specify which one, draw one onto the other, etc.
Now I should acknowledge that this is just one small corner of p5.js, and that the two functions are not quite equivalent - the Canvas one adds the arc to a path which can then be stroked or filled later, and the p5.js one draws immediately and choosing the stroke or fill is done ahead of time. The p5.js one can do non-uniform scaling, which using Canvas you'd do with a transform. But, like... just on this small example, we can at least say that p5.js is not clearly superior, and definitely not enough to justify learning it's weird crannies rather than the weird crannies of the thing that every browser does natively.
So: I think people should stop using p5.js. I think it is, in terms of code aesthetics, ugly. Inelegant. I think they do use it because it's what they were taught. And they were taught it because it has momentum in the classroom, and it has nice learning resources. I guess the concrete obstacle in the way of this changing is someone remaking all the nice p5.js teaching materials to instead be about native APIs. So: someone should do that. Maybe the Processing Foundation?
And maybe I'll do a more effortful blog post at some point where I recreate a p5.js example sketch in HTML & JS, to demonstrate that it's not any more complex in practice. Suggestions for a sketch to recreate welcome!
A few years ago, I could see a few possible endpoints for the Israel-Palestine situation. They were:
the two state solution. Israel and Palestine are two separate countries, both of which can exist independently of each other. Separate governments, water, power. Neither has control over the other. I couldn't see this happening, because that relies upon Israel giving up control, which they seemed anathema to.
the one state solution. Non-Jews are given equal rights within Israel, and Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank become part of that society. This never seemed especially popular, but the argument in favour of an ethnostate seemed hard to justify to me.
things continuing, messily and painfully, as they have been. This isn't really an endpoint, but when something has been happening for decades it feels silly not to call it such.
Recent events have shown that there was a fourth option that I was not considering. That is:
the killing or expulsion of Palestinians from all Palestinian land, and the population of that land with Israeli settlers.
In retrospect this was foolish of me. But I didn't think that Israel, a prosperous state that is engaged fully within the networks of international trade and diplomacy, would commit genocide.
I think that what is happening now in Gaza is a genocide. It breaks my heart to see it happen. I don't know any way I can help to stop it from happening. I have donated a little to various funds - to provide eSIMS, to evacuate this particular family. I have marched. I've shared some things online. Not much, really. I think I haven't given more, done more, because it is so hard to hold what is happening squarely in my mind. How can you?
When I go on Bluesky, I see Gazans posting begging replies under the posts of people who have advocated for them in the past. I believe (I have been told by people who I have no reason to doubt) that those posts are real, that each is a real person currently trapped within a territory where no food is being permitted to enter. But it would be so much more comforting to live in a world where they're scammers trying to take advantage. And the same logic applies elsewhere. A genocide is currently happening, with the explicit or implicit support of most of the western world, and holding that fact in your head is not something that people want to do. So they aren't. And so it keeps happening.
Short one whose message is mainly in the title. Next week I will be in Berlin! I hope to see some of you there!
I am running a workshop on the Friday afternoon. It's called Let's All Make One Really Big Game (with Downpour). We're all going to make one really big game with Downpour! It's a drop in workshop, with no real limit on numbers - we should have crafting supplies available, and people are free to roam through the festival taking pictures to add to their games. The way it's gonna work is that I'm gonna make a kind of "spine" game in advance, something where you're navigating through the festival space. And then other people who come to the workshop will make their own games, and then I'll link from my spine game directly into their games. And they will hopefully also link back to the spine game from their games, or into another game, or into various places online or elsewhere. We should end up with this kind of surreal shifting viewpoint as you navigate through these games and through the festival space. I think it'll be fun! I don't really know what the outcome will be.
But actually looking for that link, I see that Nathalie Lawhead, who I was on a panel with last year, and who I feature in my recent talk on creative tools with tones of distinct envy and admiration... is also running a collaborative let's all make one game together workshop! If Nathalie wasn't such a lovely person I would consider trying to hype this up into some kind of kayfabe rivalry between the two of us.
I will also be hosting a conversation on larp with Jana Romanova and Susan Ploetz. This hasn't been announced yet. So, shh, don't tell anyone I told you it was happening.
What else? Lots of people I've not seen in a long time, hopefully some sun, radlers on the grass & dancing at Panke into the night... I like AMAZE.
I should be bringing stuff to play Knife, Fork and Spoon - would love to test that on some volunteers at some point.
Oh, and I just got a delivery of stickers, so please do ask me for a Downpour sticker if you want one. These ones are kiss cut. Which means I have remembered to put some identifying details as to what they're about when I hand them to a confused person - there's a URL! a short pitch for what the thing is! I don't have to scrawl this stuff on the back! But also the sticker is just as incomprehensible as ever, once stuck. I love my little crying umbrella man logo.
this is a quick recommendation post for Despelote. it's a videogame, it lasts about 2 hours, it is, in my opinion, worth playing!
it's a personal documentary game about the creator, Julián Cordero, when he was a kid in Ecuador, and the period where Ecuador were in the qualifiers for the World Cup for the first time.
okay, now i'm gonna talk about some stuff that's best experienced for yourself, so... go play it, stop reading this.
there's some incredible transitions in this game. i think the strongest part of the game is the transitions, in fact? not to do down the experience of being a kid, kicking a ball with friends, overhearing conversations in the park, just generally having slack time and trying to find good ways of wasting it. that stuff is super strong, too. but the transitions!!
so, the game starts with a game. it's a simple top down football game, it works like Fifa or something. your consciousness passes between players as you pass and shoot and run up and down the pitch. you're a little pale dot against little dark dots. you learn the controls, here's how to move, here's how to kick the ball by flicking the stick, draw back before for extra power. shoulder trigger to run. okay, got it. and then you start to hear a conversation. it's in Spanish, and there are subtitles, so your eyes keep getting drawn from the football match to the subtitles on each side. the screen starts drawing away from you as you're focusing on it, also trying to read the subtitles... it starts getting harder and harder to play as the distractions increase and the screen gets smaller. slowly the scene around the TV fades in, it's your parents talking about how you're always on that game. but that, actually, right now, Ecuador are playing, and you'd probably want to watch that. it's almost impossible to play now, but you're still trying, and then they come and stand in front and turn it off. the outrage!! but then they turn it over to Ecuador playing - it's real footage, but in the in-game style, and you find pretty immediately that you're captivated by this. and clearly the boy you're playing finds this too, because pretty soon the TV screen is zooming in, the rest of the room starts to fade out.
what a bravura opening!! the way it layers the player & the character, establishing sympathy between them but also exploiting the way that their interests differ (for the typical player, of course you're fascinated by the parent's conversation - for the kid, of course your parents chatting is not nearly so interesting). that interplay between being the dot-footballer, and the boy sitting on the sofa playing. the way it shifts perspective seamlessly (only to hard cut at the end of this sequence). it's in control of what it's doing, and it's happy to do things that are difficult and expensive in order to achieve the artistic goals it's aiming for.
and that's not even the transition in the game that i'm left most thinking about.
I mean, not entirely, the endgame was broken, but god knows I was not thinking as far ahead as the endgame before.
Let me quickly describe the game:
ended up being 8 people playing
on a big table, big enough not everyone could reach the cards or see other people's chips easily
card counting wasn't even counting, people placed the cards out so we could all easily see what had come out
which was good, felt nice to have an extra thing to chew on, knowing that the odds of any particular card being drawn varied continuously
the fork & spoon card got played late in all the first few rounds
a new rule, hastily adopted: on a reshuffle, increase the stake by one. this raised the tempo, especially as some people got out and then the others got richer
and then it didn't raise it enough, so we went to: on a reshuffle, double the stake. this felt scary. but good scary.
people were playing fast. i sometimes challenged people on where they'd placed their pieces versus what they'd said, and then got criticised by others for doing so. maybe that's just the natural rhythm of it? i'd like it to be a slower/more tense, though (like Skull & Roses can be)
i guess unlike S&R, the table didn't focus on a single player's bluff either succeeding or failing. instead there was a reveal & the outcome was either lots of chips but not many. but you didn't really notice where they were coming from.
there were unclear rules around what happens when you run out of chips, but still have some in your Knife, Fork, Spoon places. we had it that you could stay in til those were gone, but that broke the endgame.
the endgame was: two players left in, and one was always spreading their chips between all 3 spaces. grinding inconclusive ending, we broke off rather than see it through.
Lots of suggestions of things to change, but what I'm gonna do for next time is:
make up sheets to go in front of players that look like placemats. Unplayed chips go on the plate, and then get distributed out onto the Knife (left), Fork (right) and Spoon (top) places
make up a doubling die to show the current state of the raise (and it does double each time)
buy a load of dried beans to use as counters. maybe these do want to be chips long term to make it easier to manipulate higher stakes, but beans are funnier & cheaper
instead of reshuffling & raising every time the Fork & Spoon card is drawn, do it whenever the last card of any type is drawn. This should smooth some of the variance in gaps between raises, and means you never know that one card is impossible to place
possibly this also wants a mat showing the distribution of various cards
"last gasp": if you're out of beans on your plate, remove all but one bean from your cutlery. these beans leave the game! i'm hopeful this will fix the endgame:
fewer beans in the endgame, and a mechanism for them to reduce further in a 1 v 1 showdown.
but also removing beans from the game in a way that feel exciting rather than boring or punishing
harder to stay in, if you run low of beans and have a few players in
but if you make it to the final two, you still have a chance to snatch victory. but it's much less likely. sure, you can safely draw back your bean on your turn - but you can only really get back in the game if you bluff out your opponent.
i mean, maybe it won't, or won't be enough.
also with this rule, if you have not enough beans, you go all-in and put those in. but maybe if it needs to be dialled up, not being able to meet the stake reduces you to a single bean, rather than being completely out.
playtest with 4 players. more interested in how it plays for fewer than how it plays for 8, so i don't want to overcorrect at this stage
And things I'm not doing but could do in the future:
adding cards in between rounds - possibly blind, from another deck
obviously cards can have powers on them, if they want. like raise & reshuffle could be on different cards, as a obvious step. or...
maybe this wants to be entirely rethemed
could have a tuned escalation curve rather than doubling, if it needs finetuning
maybe the number of beans you start with depends on the number of players playing?
maybe players choose to raise the stake rather than it happening automatically?
Ricky wants to throw teaspoons around
and Alan wants sporks
Putting chips left/right/above of a placemat is cute! But it only heightens my desire for the chips to all be sporks
Okay! I have a new version of this game about lying ready to test. It's dropped, as I felt like it might, the core conceit - the idea of making a game focused entirely around a lie when there is no choice whether to, where the impact of a lie is exactly the same as the truth, where the only distinction is how you personally feel about saying something that is not strictly true. It's interesting but you can't take it too far beyond where it was already. And there's something about the triple duality of the system that was breaking my brain.
Wait - triple duality? What am I talking about?
Well, it's these:
Red / Black - what I say the card is Truth / Lie - whether the card actually is or not Correct / False - whether you got it right or not
And the thing is, every combination of these states is possible. So you have 8 states possible for each round, and yet these three categories feel very similar to each other. And yet they're stacked on top of each other, you have to draw a clear conceptual divide between them. It melts the brain just a little, holding it clear when playing. Or, even more so, when designing. Halima was round and we were playing/riffing and I was just sitting there failing to hold all the states in my head. She was like "it's very impressive to watch someone designing a game, I forgot what it was like" but I just felt stupid.
Anyway! what's the new version?
Knife Fork Spoon
This is a gambling game - each player starts with a pile of chips, and the game continues until someone has all of them. Or other players withdraw, if the chips represent actual money.
Each player has three spaces in front of them - one for Knife, one for Fork, one for Spoon. Well, I guess they have four, as they also have their reserve of chips.
Players take it in turns to play. On your turn:
you draw a card from the draw pile in the center of the table
it's either a Knife, a Fork, a Spoon. Or a Knife And Fork, or a Fork And Spoon. (it can't be a Knife and Spoon. that's a weird combination. what would you eat with that?)
you can say whatever you like about the card you've just drawn
everyone places a chip from their reserves onto one of their Knife, Fork or Spoon spaces. They can also rearrange any chips they already have down across those spaces. So can you!
when you've all finished talking & rearranging, then you reveal the card you picked up. You collect all the chips on the spaces corresponding to the card you've drawn.
now it's the next person's turn
I think for this playtest I'll make up 16 cards: 4 Knife 4 Fork 4 Spoon 2 Knife & Fork 2 Fork & Spoon
Initial notes on the game
I mean, I haven't played this yet. So I will know a lot more once it has been played even once. But I feel like it might work?
The dynamics I'm hoping for:
chips gradually accumulate, as on average 1¼ spaces are picked up from each turn, and there are 3 spaces possible
so on your turn you want to pick up the chips on your spaces, which you have control over
but to bluff successfully you probably have to make the costly signal of placing your chips in accordance with what you're saying.
but with three possibilities, you're making a statement about what it is but there's two places it couldn't be
but you could also claim that it's a double card, to force to a particular location
but such a claim is unlikely
and you want to be thought of as honest, to make your bluffs better in future rounds
and in any case, there's a little niggling asymmetry in that you can't force to Fork by claiming you've drawn Knife & Spoon. Which maybe gives the different cards a different flavour.
also hopefully it'll be funny if people bluff Knife & Spoon, having forgotten that it doesn't exist
Questions I have:
I mean, does it work, do those dynamics happen at all, is it too overwhelming to make a call as to what you've drawn, does it just feel random?
Maybe it should be 3 Knife & Fork and 1 Fork & Spoon? Even more asymmetry?
Maybe there's rules about raising? A single chip each round feels a bit grinding. Can you raise past the most poorest player's chip reserve count? Probably not. Would anyone but the player whose turn it is choose to raise? I worry they're too powerful already, even if the role does move rapidly.
Also would be nice to be able to bluff through a round without having to reveal what you've drawn. Information is precious, and it's nice to make it something that can be paid for. (but then what chips get taken? chips remaining on the table between rounds is kinda core to this)
How do you decide when to shuffle the cards? I don't want this to be a game about card counting. Especially with the double cards... maybe those also trigger a reshuffle?
How good am I at drawing cutlery (the theme had pets, initially, but I shied away from drawing a bunch of recognisable dogs/cats/rabbits. also the double cards make sense for cutlery, they didn't exist at the start)
Okay, actually writing that suggests this tweak:
3 Knife & Fork. 1 Fork & Spoon. Fork & Spoon also causes the deck to be shuffled. Card count away.
So let's try that at boardgames tomorrow. Once I've drawn some cards. And I'll bring the original version, too. Or the three in a row adaptation, anyway.
Anyway, curious to see how it goes! And curious to see if it keeps some of the dynamics I was scratching at with the earlier version.
Oh, and for "looking at bits of paper" sickos:
Here's the pic I took of my notes to remind me of what I'd designed when writing this up
Don't worry, this isn't really that classic genre of blog post, where I just write about not writing. I'm not apologising here, I don't owe you posts. But it's more using that as a lens on where my head's been at lately. So, why haven't I been writing?
I could say I've been busy - I have been working reasonably hard. On game-project and a new Downpour update, and getting to the pottery studio with some regularity. And some life admin stuff - like, I finally bought some picture frames for the pile of art I have been meaning to get frames for! (and now I have a pile of framed art that needs to be hung...)
And I have been thinking about blogging, I keep getting ideas for posts and then writing them down. But they're mainly the high effort kind - a big thought that I would then want to justify, provide evidence for, etc. I wrote a decent one of those - but then I did the research bit at the end and ruined it for myself by finding that it was a wonky frame on a known idea. I think there's some value in the wonk... I guess what I'm saying is that editing feels like work, and I don't have a scheduled time to do that, it doesn't rise up the priority list like things that are paid. And it doesn't count as rest, too, and I do need to make space for those.
But I think the larger problem has been - the past few weeks I've been in an especially acute run of What Should I Do With My Life. This is on a base level not too surprising - Downpour was my big Here's What I Am Doing With My Life for a while, and it came out a year ago. Since then I set myself the intermediate goal of not getting a job - which is going well so far! No PAYE job yet, and yet the spreadsheet that tells me when I run out of money keeps predicting a date safely in the future each time I update it. I've found a nice run of freelance jobs - interesting, paying enough - so far. But the current money for the game-project is ending in at the end of next month, so I would ideally be talking to people about the next thing... but what would the ideal shape of that be? What seems fun, what seems exciting, what do I care about, etc. Having more of an idea helps shape what I work towards, rather than just hoping something lands in my lap that I'm interested in. (but if you do want to send some work my way, please do get in touch)
But also, these existential questions have hit especially hard with the recent trans ruling, which has pierced my kind of detached politics brain and translated into a personal threat to my safety and happiness*. And I have the kind of instincts, which, when confronted with this kind of problem, tries to solve it. What can I do to make myself safe? Savings, strong networks of friends and family, knowledge of the situation - okay, yes, doing okay on that side of things. What can I do to make this situation improve? Well, good question. And one that hits me right in the What Should I Do With My Life.
And these are big questions to be turning over in my head. I've made some progress, I think, even if I very much don't have any definite answers. But when I come to write on here - that's what's been in my head lately. And it leads to the kind of post I feel like I need to edit and think about carefully. And the mental space and calm that gives me the ability to operate well, to have capacity for things like blogging - that's what's missing. But people say that writing helps them get their thoughts straight - so maybe I should be doing more writing, even if it doesn't make it out into public space.
[* is it good to have a detached politics brain? probably not. there's awful things happening out there and we need to fight. maybe what I am saying is that "my privilege has been burst"? i'm not convinced this is an especially helpful framing. in any case: it is normal for the stakes to differ between fighting on behalf of other people and fighting on behalf of yourself. that's just... being alive.]
i should really update my screenshot collection. but it seems annoying to do - like three years of images to filter, a process to sort though, etc etc. in lieu of that, here's a collection of recent screenshots that are mainly text:
most of those were links. they were mainly text because i like a theme and also i shouldn't post screenshots of the secret game i've been working on. okay, hope you enjoyed!
In fact, things that are too abundant become a bit intimidating. The philosopher Georges Bataille called the immense output of solar energy that hits the earth beyond what existing organisms need to fulfill their biological functions “the accursed share,” which he theorized as an excess that underlies all life and must be wasted. It could be wasted on beautiful things, like artistic expression and non procreative sexuality, or terrible things, like war and violence. This excess can reinforce the existing order, as pressure release valve or monuments to its glory, or be used to disrupt it.
From that perspective, an uneasy element to abundance emerges, which explains our attempts to rationalize it. Think of the cringe with which you regard corny poetry or goofy fanart that seemed to flow out of you uncontrolled as a kid… the derision aimed at the cumulative monuments to this excess and abundance, like Deviantart or the sonic fandom. But isn’t this also abundance?
The firehose of passionate and strange work, mostly naive or indifferent to “good” game design practice represented by the “new games” tab on a site like itch.io (only one site representing one medium out of all human creativity has devoted itself to) can be overwhelming; how do you even know where to start? And the internet has made us more aware of this abundance, so knowing only an infinitesimal portion of it can be comprehended or archived for posterity can inspire a kind of dread.
Cat Hicks on who counts as "technical" within software engineering contexts:
It feels incoherent but asks a completely coherent question of us. What can we do if we never have enough? This is one of the paradoxes of software teams: rich people, rich teams, rich environments, described and experienced as utter wastelands by (statistically speaking) men who have (statistically speaking) socked away more than I’ve ever touched and more than generations of my family ever touched, and their entire ownership of not having enough. I am not saying that suffering isn’t real, I’m saying it teaches us what all that richness will never fix. I have been afraid to check the mail and see a bill and afraid to go to the doctor and afraid for the future of our science is what I’m saying, and that is not how Technical feels, and yet I am the one who knows what I have enough to care about it. Without the ability to feel, part of the “enough” that Technical craves is continually novel ways to make people like me afraid.
And, finally, here's a bonus one from Katharine Cross about the recent Supreme Court ruling and "sex based rights":
To protect one from sex-based discrimination is to protect one’s human dignity from being assaulted by the prejudices of others—by their perceptions, beliefs, delusions, opinions about one’s sexed body. But to invest someone with sex-based rights is to commit both them and you to a whole theory of sex that must be objectively defined, where there is something special about your very biology that entitles you to special treatment not deserved by others. This is the film-negative of a civil right.
That suits right-wing ends just fine. They have a clear ideological project that both denies human equality and creates sex castes. The idea of a sex-based right works within a framework of easily defined men and women, where never the twain shall meet. Democratic jurisprudence, meanwhile, has to take a different approach: that identity is not the basis of a special right, but merely something to be recognised by the law in its quest to ensure all receive equal protection.
To be legally cognisant of sex, race, disability, sexual orientation, et cetera, is not to argue that there are, say, ‘race-based rights,’ but that these are categories along which one may experience discrimination that violates both one’s dignity and citizenship. One is legally cognisant of sex-based discrimination so that one can protect the victim’s humanity from an attempt to cleave them away into a biologised category that implicitly deserves fewer rights. That is, after all, the corollary to any idea of identity-based rights.
So this is what I've been thinking about and reading. A joyous abundance that makes us uneasy. A hollow abundance that leads to fear. A fear that makes us all less secure.
This is just a quick note to talk about how much I love these expansions from a game design perspective. I haven't played them, and I don't plan to, but just skimming the descriptions gives me an idea of them. So here we go:
What's the problem with Monopoly? It takes forever, it's a slow grind to complete, one player is clearly going to win and yet everyone has to sit there for hours until they do.
What's the best thing about Monopoly? Everyone has house rules they love to argue over. The way these house rules function as culture, the way people are attached to them and debate them...
How do these two things interact? Most of the house rules make the game slower to play. They're added to allow a player to stave off defeat, and in so doing just make the game drag out longer.
So how do these expansions help? Each expansion tackles a particular house rule. They take the place of that house rule, they provide the pleasure that that house rule provides (or mimic that pleasure, at least). But! In doing so, they also adapt the logic of the rule, such that the game is over much quicker and without the drag of waiting for a foregone conclusion.
Let's take them one by one.
House rule: put money under free parking, take it when you land there. It's fun because it adds some direct abilities to win cash for landing somewhere, not just lose money or gain slower strategic advantage.
And the expansion adds spinners to the board! Direct excitement of spinning to get free stuff! And also changes the rule so that the game ends when all the properties have been bought. And some of the free stuff is properties...
• PLAY IN HALF THE TIME: Play the Monopoly family board game in about 40 minutes with this easy to learn, quick-playing expansion! It’s great for fitting in fun mischief with family and friends anytime • A FAVORITE HOUSE RULE IS NOW A REALITY: Attach this expansion to the Monopoly game and enjoy the classic Monopoly gameplay players know—plus an easy-to-learn twist! Transform Free Parking into a spin-it-to-win-it jackpot • SPIN FOR A CHANCE TO WIN BIG MONEY: In this fun family game extension, the Chance and Community Chest spaces are now Spin spaces. Players who land on them can spin the spinner to go for the Jackpot
House rule: Ignore the auction mechanic if a player passes on buying a property Why do this? Because it feels punishing if someone didn't buy because they couldn't afford it, it's fussy
So the expansion: adds new ways to buy properties. Including the other spaces that aren't normally for sale. I guess this one is not so much co-opting the house rule as replacing it with one that is more in alignment with the original intent.
Also spinners, also extra conditions for ending the game early.
House rule: cheating It's fun because it's fun to cheat. Sneaking money from the bank when you're not supposed to? Delicious fun, low consequence. Especially because it's just outside the game...
So the expansion: Adds some crime mechanics to the board, adds "super jail", adds more direct excitement with spinners.
Honestly this one doesn't really have the thrill of the original, but alas it's very difficult to make a commercial product which encourages the very delicate and situational play of violating norms outside of the magic circle of the game.
(A question which came up recently on the Pube Discord - what's a work of art which encourages visitors to steal parts of it? It's a fun question because it can't openly give permission for theft without it no longer being theft. It also brings up interesting dynamics where the artist and the gallery are at odds with each other. Fascinating design question, imo)
Again on my streak of "game design is fun" - what a fun problem, to make a saleable and profitable product that fixes long standing game design issues, and does it without consumer rejection for going against long standing and much-loved house rules!
(Just a shame it does so by attempting to eradicate those house rules. Even if they do make the game worse, I am more attached to the idea of those rules than the idea of actually playing the game. But then, I'm probably not the ideal audience for a Hasbro expansion.)
Oh! Also at Now Play This, I was talking with Arlo about that day's challenge... a game to be played in crowds. We were riffing on it together, here's what I ended up happiest with:
Getting Older
A solo game for a crowded space, with people moving through
How many people can you spot, in (in your opinion) an ascending order of age? The chain is broken if you haven't decided on the next person before the one you're currently on moves out of sight!
so at the start of the month, I posted a game design without having played it at all. i was happy with this state of affairs, and had no burning desire to make sure it "worked" or was "playable". and then to my surprise i found myself wanting to try it out. so here's some sketchy notes on how it has evolved (note this post might not make sense unless you go back and look at the previous one):
played at Now Play This, as written
it works! as in, it functions, one can play it end to end. it does drag on, though, getting through an entire deck of cards feels like too much. in the original design, i was mitigating against this by suggesting that you could play it in among other activities, do some social upping of the stakes mid-way. this didn't seem to happen, though.
after one game against Arlo that was more or less tied, i was worried that it was essentially random (not that there's anything wrong with that!). but then i played against Seb (me lying, him deciding) and got way in the lead, so i'm less worried about that now.
played at Now Play This, sudden death
so to make games shorter and add some more tension into it, we decided it would be better to play where getting three right in a row (either deceiving or deciding) won you the game. getting one happens all the time, getting two in a row is normal... and then suddenly the game is at stake! exciting.
it seems to work, but there's some essential messiness about where the cards go. how do you keep track? there's some essential confusion going on, the idea of looking at a card and having to look up what you say (this is at least symmetric across lies and truth - but it's a headfuck to internalise), the idea of points coming not from lies successfully carried but from the decider being wrong (so: them accusing you of a lie when you were telling the truth counts just as much). and then to add to that, you now have four piles in front of you, and you have to remember to shuffle cards across when your opponent takes the card? something about the asymmetry leading straight into symmetry.
played at boardgames at mine last night, corrupted by gambling
we played the sudden death a bit and people liked it okay. and then i got the idea to make it even more complicated and add gambling.
ten chips each. one chip in each round, as table stakes. after the liar has announced, and the decider has also announced, either player can then raise (but probably actually only the liar will?). and only to the level of chips the other player can match, obv if you fold your forfeit your chips to the other player if it's revealed, the decider takes the chips if they got it right, otherwise the liar does.
if you get three in a row right as the decider, then you become the liar.
which also works, except for us working out the rules as we go and it being a bit complicated.
the moment i wanted was the moment where the liar states something, the decider makes a guess and the liar says "are you sure about that?" in an infuriating way. that's something i was scratching after in the original design, but i didn't really reach it - the game got too mechanical for it. but last night, with the gambling, it happened a few times. a little, maybe, still not there and probably it won't ever be. but fun to scratch away on.
things it still doesn't do i'd like it to / future work
i want it to adapt to more than 2 players. there's no doubt something here, but tricky because only one player can take the card. a binary choice... i have a design for this, i'll put it below.
i want it to be less of a headfuck. maybe the answer is just to play it with something other than playing cards. put the complexity of the lookup table into the cards rather than on the table. yes, i think i'll try that.
also we had jokers in, and the idea of jokers as a card where you can make a free choice as to whether to lie or not - that's appealing. i mean, a lot of the point of the game is to see whether detecting lies can be enough to hold up a game, even if the player lying has no choice about whether to lie. just the pure tell. but it's always fun when a small part of the game cuts against the main thrust. adds texture. anyway, custom cards allow more play in that space.
a more than 2 player variant
take turns as the liar, single turn, clockwise around the table. (maybe single turns at a time means it's harder to pick up on tells? but balance reasons suggest you want to rotate continuously) everyone has to pay table stakes - before the lie is said. can also opt out of a round (does this break things?) everyone submits their guess (is there some marker for this? thumbs up/thumbs down? maybe a bit of a hand strain. maybe there's something about where the chips are placed. with custom cards...) liar can then raise can stay in or not, change your guess or not. if it's revealed & multiple people got it right, the money goes into a central pot, and only people who were in that round play for the next mini round. til only one person got it right, who gets all the contents of the pot.
sure, that seems like it might be more exciting. and seems like it's not broken, too.
god i love designing games. even if they're not going to go anywhere... glad i chose the job i did.
That's right, I'm feeling sorry for myself so I'm going to do some illness posting.
I always knew I'd be out of it this week - last week I was busy for 4 days in a row, and I know this kind of thing can't last forever. Worth it to be around for the workshop & to be there through all of Now Play This, but on the final day I was very aware that my brain was soup and that I was into my reserves.
And it's hitting me now! Been pretty much just home since Sunday, and can definitely feel it - but I guess I should say what that means. I've been spending my day on the couch reclining. I've left the house - to go for a walk in the park or to go to the supermarket. But doing so leaves my head spinning and my chain of thought loopy. My legs feel weary when I approach the top of the stairs - this is something I measure my fatigue against, when I'm healthy they're fine. I've been working, but in the afternoon I find myself needing a nap - dragged off by weariness. Although, tbh, a nice nap in the early afternoon is I think a thing I want, fatigue-bound or not.
And this is still not bad enough to be a crash, just me taking it easy in the hopes of avoiding one. I've been able to work - I've dived into an exciting new feature for Downpour (video - but no promises as to when it might land), and really all I want to do is work on that. It's working in a fundamental way, I think, and now all I need to do is all of the rest of the owl. And also all the non-Downpour work I need to do, which does not have that new feature excitement but which does pay me in a much less speculative way. Last night I considered going back to Blue Prince (yet another sign of health, to have the brain spare for videogames), but I decided I wanted to code more Downpour. Which was foolish, and I knew it - and today I find myself dancing around a headache from thinking too much (this is why I don't play enough videogames).
More leaving the house tomorrow, so I hope I have recovered a bit over these past few days. My illness tracking band doesn't reckon so, mind... I'll take it easy, I promise!
Flowers, given to me by Holly as a thank you for working on the festival
By which I mean, it's the day after the final day of the final Now Play This. I don't know if I have any coherent thoughts on how I feel to put out there, but I'm gonna see if they come to me as I write.
(some context for people unfamiliar: Now Play This is – was – a festival of games and play, happening annually in April at Somerset House. Typically there was an exhibition, workshops, events around it. Somerset House is a pretty fancy cultural venue in the center of London, and we lived up to that setting – we showed videogames, boardgames, street games, playful art, everything that could fall under that umbrella, all mixed up together by theme. It was not just a festival for game developers, but for the general public, families, the curious. It was pretty great! And, with my friend Holly, I was one of the co-founders, 10 years ago)
In the approach to the festival, I was feeling pretty sanguine about it ending. The executive producer had stepped away, and I'd stepped up to do some of the finance-y bits, so I was more looped into conversations about the festival than I had been in years. It felt good to be more involved (but also I had stepped up because I knew it was One Last Job). I was wondering if I had some deep feelings hidden away somewhere.
And at the end of the last day, we had a little session for game event organisers to come together and talk about how to make events happen. What the barriers are, what the questions are. And at the end of that we had a little moment to talk about the ending of the festival, and give away flowers to the people who had been part of making it happen. And I had the mic for a sec to say something, and I talked about how it felt 10 years back, and what we expected, and what we hoped, and how that compares to looking across a room of people now, who care about the event. And knowing all of the people out there who have cared about it, and who have been touched by the event, and it feels pretty special to have gotten to make it happen, and pretty special too that it continued after we stepped away and other people decided they wanted to step up and continue to make it happen.
Anyway, I teared up a little while I was talking about this, and feeling this sense of love and connection. So, yes, I guess I do have some feelings.
But right now they aren't loss, they're feelings of love and connection and appreciation. 10 years, huh! Pretty good going!!
Anyway, it's the next morning now, and Jo who was staying with me has just left for home (Jo Summers, who has done tech for every Now Play This, who I have spent many hours cursing at cables next to), and I am looking at the internet, and I can see so many traces of the event still lingering. Photos circulating from the dinner after the pub, a friend thanking an artist for a workshop and talking about how they're still working on it. Thoughts about a little game I played that Seb (a former director of the festival) is working on. Notes from a rules tweak for Liar's Shuffle I should post. Someone I was talking to last night set up a Downpour account. And these are just the immediate traces...
Anyway —
Lots I could think about about why it ended, and how it could have survived, and how to run events in the new landscape, and sustainability, and what changes an event like this might cause, and who might care and who might be a comrade in making these things happen. And lots of work to do, to close down the organisation and pay all the invoices from the event, and archive the things we'd like to archive. But I think I'll end this here, with a feeling of love and appreciation for all the people who have made the event possible. It changed my life, I'm so glad it's happened. It's just — just a real cool thing to have gotten to do!!
Today is the last day of the last Now Play This. The theme this year is folk games, and way back when me and Pat Ashe wrote a zine about them. And so we were asked if we'd mind putting it online as part of NPT, and also if they could print a few copies to give away*. We said yes, of course. I wrote a little intro text for it too, and I thought I'd like to post it here as well. So here it is:
In 2014, Pat Ashe and I were at the big gamedev conference in San Francisco together that year. And we were soaking in an international culture of indie game developers who were keen to understand and experiment with games in all directions. Most of us were in our 20s and we had the energy of youth, scrambling over the form to look at it from all directions. Videogames, boardgames, art games, alternative controllers, and of course, folk games. Folk games were built into these scenes. We would meet up at London Indies, a monthly pub meetup, have some pints, and then walk across to a wide stretch of pavement to play Ninja. We would play Lemon Jousting at conferences (bringing lemons and spoons in from home especially). One of the first times I did something that could be described as “consulting” was riffing on some ideas with Holly Gramazio to make some Tiny Games (a project which has had such a long life that it’s being shown at this year’s festival). That conference in SF? Full of people touching each other’s elbows unexpectedly and saying the word “boop” (a fun game until it spread too far and then really wasn’t). Folk games were not just something to look at and study, but something we were shaping and inventing.
So in this spirit of excitement, it felt like a natural thing to try to gather some up some of that energy and fix it to the page. We didn’t just want to include things we knew, but capture more widely. We put out a public call, we asked some people, and we gathered some games. But as we said in the outro, we got more than just games: “But, inevitably, the games included have sprawled out in many different directions, and now includes genuinely moving tales of childhood, and some treasured bits of heritage.” We were aware that the context for the games mattered as much as the games themselves, but, not being historians (or, indeed, having all the time it would take to do this properly) knew we couldn’t document that context fully. That’s a bigger project than a zine could contain. But what we could do was try to keep the wording and sometimes the visual style of the submissions intact. To try to be transparent, and let the individual voices of our contributors shine through. We knew we were just getting shards and fragments… but we wanted to leave the sharp edges on them.
And people liked the zine! I find myself surprised at how it’s still mentioned, still circulating around these particular spaces. I feel like we accidentally made it too long and too nice to to feel like a proper scratchy zine – I’d claim that niceness came because of my graphic design skills, but I think it actually just came down to paper stock and getting our friend Angus Dick to do some gorgeous illustrations for it. It’s only ever been officially available as a hard copy zine – but I think that the wait has been long enough, and now a decade later it’s worth putting it out online as well.
And it’s fitting that it’s getting put up for the final Now Play This. Now Play This is a festival that comes out of that same spirit of wide ranging curiosity about what games can be, can do, all the different forms they can take, how can this thing connect to that. It’s shown a lot of the games that are captured in this zine (it’s shown the zine, too, in the little library). And now, with the festival and with the zine – it’s over to you. Take these games and make new variations, print this zine & hand it to friends. Stay curious. Keep playing.
You can download the zine here. I was wondering about printing some more copies and selling them online. Get in touch if you'd be interested in that.
On Cohost, and then on Downpour, I would collect things I have recently read and that I think are worth other people reading. I haven't done so for a while. Here's a few:
More than once, Murata drew me a diagram illustrating her writing process. It showed a standing figure (“novelist Murata”) at a table in a lab; lying on the table was an identical figure, cut into pieces (“human Murata”). Various boxes contained body parts and organs. At the top of the page was a glass cube: the clean, sanitized aquarium. The way it worked, Murata explained, was that novelist Murata dissected human Murata. Aspects of human Murata “crystallized” in the aquarium, where new characters came to life and interacted. The characters, the story itself, were living. “They wriggle, they move, they surprise me,” Murata said.
During the Cold War era, I think the infrastructure necessary to produce “consensus,” as well as other products like “the monoculture” and “liberal soft power,” existed primarily outside the United States, in countries like Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. As long as these smaller, more homogenous countries enjoyed American military protection, they could afford to invest deeply in education, social programs, and domestic cultural production. American liberals in particular, I think, became very reliant on these countries for cultural and political leadership.
A long essay on cultural production, America versus the rest of the anglosphere, the BBC and pirate radios, CanCon rules, things of that nature. I think Jaime Brooks is one of the most insightful writers about the structure of music in the present day. Maybe also read this one?
Today, you'd list your first shiny Pokemon for, probably, Raging Bolt - the weird giraffe Pokemon at the top of this post. Once someone gives you a Raging Bolt, you'll search for the shinies you want and see if any have been listed by a person who is seeking Raging Bolt. Someone probably will be. You'll make that trade, and now the player you traded with has a fungible Raging Bolt to use for whatever purpose they desire.
This is the eighth floor of the Al-Ahli Memorial Library, my favorite place in the building. When the elevator door opens, it’s like walking into a quiet circle of glass. So, as we walk, I’m going to whisper. People are reading, writing, drawing—it’s such a beautiful place to work. I’m probably the luckiest librarian in the world.
Content warning for... well, for Gaza, really. This is an astonishing piece of science fiction, astonishing because of what it faces head on, and astonishing in the hope it dares to have. I am so glad to have read it. I hope it is prophetic.
A third characteristic of adults' talk to children is deliberate and obvious lying. The teacher-testers frequently try to force answers to known-answer questions by claiming that they don't know things which they plainly do. As the children follow the strategy of saying as little as possible to stay out of trouble, they frequently answer with "Uh-huh" or a shake of the head. The teacher could simply point out that the tape recorder wouldn't pick that up. But instead she says, "I don't know what uh-huh means." A few minutes later we hear:
Teacher: Is Jerry your brother? Child: Yeh. Teacher: Uh-huh.
A beautiful paper from the late William Labov which touches on racism, lying to children and rabbits.
but i just rolled credits on S2 (weird phrase but it feels fitting), and here's some anyway:
wow this gets really campy 60s spy show at the end. i think it was when he was running around in the brightly panelled sub-basement with a gun, covered in blood, i was suddenly like... wow, yeah, hi The Man From Uncle. or with the marching band, it was like... where's Patrick McGoohan? the credits, the end song, they both leaned into it too
feels like it could have flipped just a shade more silly and the whole thing would have balanced over
i mean generally S2 feels more accomplished than S1. you can see the budget. and the courage to have gorgeous expensive shots whose primary purpose is beauty. all the top down views of landscapes...
also the budget increase is definitely reflected in them getting a load of extra corridor to run around in
some older thoughts now:
wow it's funny that this is an Apple TV show and the bad corp uses a font real similar to the Apple font. just a real shading between the two identities there. i wonder if they got any notes on not pushing that boundary too much.
the conflation of religion/corporation/underhanded stuff feels a bit much? too grand conspiracy. i am generally very cool on conspiracy theories in shows, it feels like it's a tendency that has gotten us bad places in the real world, and not something to encourage with fiction. see also: cops are good people, and the protagonists in any situation they are involved in
i quit the show the first time round because i didn't want to hang out with Mark while he moped endlessly about Dead Wife. i mean, i get it, but. anyway, that's worn off now, it's fine.
oh! lots of thoughts about the whole Helena sexual assault thing. handled pretty well, i think, overall. by which i mean, sure, yeah, victim blame him, meanwhile he's real fucked up about it...
the bit about them not having months, only quarters is good
saw someone writing about how S2 moves away from workplace satire and into broader adventures and shenanigans. yes. maybe that makes it a bit weaker, thematically? the metaphor doesn't work as well. idk.
oh! wow the mixing in this is extreme, lots of whispering things i only just about catch, lots of scenes where it's real dark and then ones where it's all white. i mean i guess i'm in favour of it, just don't expect me to get everything while people whisper. this is why people put the subtitles on!
okay back to some newer, forward looking ones:
i don't know that i have all that much ongoing curiosity about what's going on? goats are for sacrificing, MDR is sorting through memories, Lumon is expanding their mindfucking tech into non-work contexts ("the elimination of pain" etc). i guess the broader point becomes something about the numbing effects of phones the whole time, disconnecting from everyday emotional pains with distraction & pleasures? i mean, i guess i'm interested in how the rights of two people sharing a single body can be negotiated - but it feels like the start of S3 will be a big reset in terms of stakes & status. idk, maybe they'll keep some of the goofiness they started to lean into
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.
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:
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:
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.
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%).
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:
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.
![STILL LIFE WITH JAPANESE PRINT Pringle showed an enduring interest in Japanese and Chinese art. In common with the Impressionists and Whistler, Japanese prints sometimes inspired him to paint in a different way. [28 words] Non-V&A label • What does this mean? That Japanese prints, along with the Impressionists and Whistler, sometimes inspired Pringle to paint in a different way? Or, that like the Impressionists and Whistler, he was inspired by Japanese prints to paint in a different way? • Would visitors know what Whistler's work looks like? • In what way did Pringle paint differently?](https://blog.vbuckenham.com/content/images/2025/08/Screenshot-2025-08-04-at-23.22.48.png)
