I promised myself I would cut down on buying books this year. Lucky for me things, I backed on kickstarter ages ago are arriving.
Today after quite a bit of back and forth with the postman, the cards for Downcrawl 2E a game by designer Aaron A. Reed finally arrived! So its time to log this new game rulebook into the library.
Downcrawl is a tabletop roleplaying toolkit that lets players build and explore a weird, wondrous underworld together.
Evocative prompts help frame your stories of dangerous journeys through forgotten labyrinths, strange folk trading dangerous fungus, and subterranean cities so far from the surface that that sun has become mere legend.
Revised and expanded from the original edition (a DriveThruRPG Platinum seller), Downcrawl 2E features new rules for solo or collaborative play, and an optional deck of idea cards that makes sparking weird underworld adventures easier than ever.
I went back down to the chalk on Wednesday last week and spent the time at home with my parents. Really blessed by the weather. It was supped to rain the whole time but it was really nice! The whole time back home was packed. We went to the theatre, I went to the dentist, we went out to dinner, I saw some family, we went to Canterbury and bumped into my Uncle Michael randomly in the high street lol, and also walked round the Cathedral, we visited Walmer Castle (saw Wellingtons Boots) and it’s gardens. Made several trips down the town for coffee, went to church, did some sea wall walks and popped into the Easter food festival.
So now I’m back in London, I’m looking forward to throwing myself back home into the normal routine for rest!
I was going to write a whole thing here this week, I had all the bullet points in my head. I was going to write it on train back from the chalk. But in the event, when I did get on the train back to London today, I sat down at an empty page in my word processor and just typed for an hour and twenty mins. It was just a huge brain dump, writing at the speed of thought. Writing is thinking, and it turned out that I had a whole bunch of thinking to do.
I really wish that this had been explained to me when I was younger. Perhaps it was, but I wasn’t ready to hear it. But I feel so much better for having exloaded a bunch of stuff on to the page. There are a few ideas in there that might become something – maybe not. But they are out of my head now. Once the ideas hit the page, they change shape. Sometimes they evaporate and go nowhere. Other times they calcify into something solid and worth taking further. Most of the time they’re just… dust. But either way, I’ve cleared the decks now.
One of the things I decided returning to the theme of last weeks post is that i’m actually going to drop one of the writing projects I have going and just focus on the one thing until its done. At least to first complete end to end draft anyway. The less there is to split my attention across the better.
That’s the update this week. Had a nice time at home. Did a bunch of thinking on the train No neat conclusions, just a quieter desk and a little more room to think.
On The Blog
AI UX: Pixel Agents, Talking Cars, and Moving Eyes
I wrote about some of the novel agent interfaces I’m seeing emerging.
There’s a meaning crisis going on, which means there is a gaping emotional void waiting to be filled by a good listener that’s found in the safety of a car. Some people, especially men, already love their cars. What happens when the car appears to care for them back?
Her becomes a lot more plausible when the AI you fall in love with is also a car.
In a follow-up essay that Lau co-wrote, he argued that the startup boom of the two-thousands created a culture of convenience and an appearance of innovation that has now dwindled: “a generation of youth are experiencing a brutal realization that nobody is coming to rescue them.”
I like to look at my usage stats from time to time. My goal each month is to have less than five minutes of actual voice use. I don’t care how much data I burn through or how many messages I send and receive, I just don’t want to talk on the phone. This isn’t the 80s.
Interfacing with rarely used, complex interfaces is a perfect LLM use case. Previously, API and UX designers have had to simplify interfaces for powerful tools to produce reasonable surface areas for casual users. But with LLMs we can expose all the complexity with few of the downsides.
The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings. That is a more subtle problem, but also a more pernicious one. Explaining it is going to require some words. Bear with me.
Let’s be condomy about it: literary fiction right now is very much Rigged for Her Pleasure. The stories are rigged and the men within them are rigged, the men the protagonists love or hate or hate to love.
The blinders have been lifted from the public’s eyes.
Big tech has destroyed its credibility—and all the billionaires in Silicon Valley can’t restore it. They can buy lobbyists and co-opt “experts” with their cash. But the evil they are doing is now apparent to all unbiased observers.
Warrington Runcorn New Town Development Plan – Overspill Estates
Warrington Runcorn New Town Development Plan has a new EP out. According to the liner notes Overspill Estates contains tracks that for a long time were on last years album Your Community Hub. It’s more ambitious retro futurism. I love it.
Remember Kids:
It cannot but look strange, you know, to outsiders, to see a person making such an ado apparently over nothing. Put yourself, if you can, in the place of the uninitiated; you come along, see an operator quietly seated, reading the newspaper, with his feet elevated on a chair or table, the picture of repose. Suddenly up he jumps, down goes the paper, he seizes a pencil, hurriedly writes a few words, frowns violently, pounds frantically on the table, stares savagely at nothing, bursts suddenly into a broad smile, and then quietly resumes his first position. Wouldn’t these seem like rather eccentric gambols to you, if you didn’t know their solution?
Wired Love / a Romance of Dots and Dashes by Ella Cheever Thayer
