/inbound

 

Scripted moonlight
Borrowed faces

1. Jubensha Con
2. On The Blog
3. SSRZ15: Monsters in the Mirror
4. Photo 365
5. The Ministry Of My Own Labour
6. Terminal Access
7. Dipping the Stacks
8. Reading
9. Music
10. Remember Kids:

Jubensha Con

On Saturday I went to Jubensha Con 2026. The first english language convention about the Chinese social phenomenon of Jubensha.

We’re the world’s first convention dedicated to English-language jubensha. Jubensha is a phenomenally popular “scripted murder” format of games originating in China, where participants roleplay as detectives and/or suspects in mystery to deduce who the culprit is. In recent years it’s broadened far beyond murders into investigations of all kinds, and is spreading internationally.

We’re organising this convention to give people a chance to try out games, spur new collaborations, and help grow the scene. It’s a deliberately lo-fi, informal, and non-profit endeavour, and we want to keep costs as low as possible so money isn’t a barrier to entry.

Huge shout out to Adrian Hon and all the other organisers of the event. I had an amazing time there.

If you are unfamiliar with it as a form, this 2024 People Make Games documentary about it is a good place to start.

I haven’t written up my notes properly from Saturday’s talk track yet, but the following brain dump represents most of the big takeaways, and will forms the basis for them.

• China has/had no extant consumer market for LARP/TTRPGs/Murder Mystery/Escape Room/dinner theatre/or Euro style boardgames. No do young people have a huge ‘Party’ culture. As in having a party. So when Jubensha came along and combining elements from all those things around a social deduction mechanic it exploded in popularity and immidiatly fused with the dating market.
• Jubensha is treated more like a social commodity which is why there was such a boom/bust explosion in Jubensha. Its more like going to Karaoke than something involving a trained and talented performer as the DM. Because of this profit margins are tight, and quality of massively variable. Necessitating the creation of and App called Qiandao to keep track of and rate games and parlours providing them.
• Despite the boom and bust cycle post pandemic the industry is still worth $2billion.
• Yulin Tian and Yihan(Clytze) Li talk on Scripted Intimacy: Designing Emotional Experience in Chinese Jubensha Games was very interesting. A great deal of the current trends in the games have moved away from murder mystery and towards deeper emotional play. Instead of all 6 couples/players being equal in the game. In Script games, there is a clear Main Character and supporting cast. Some MC players will pay their friends to sit though 6-8 (even 13 hour long games) so they can experience them.
  • I think it’s interesting that the new form of script games treat Jubensha as a social technology. Mechanisms like: archetypal casting, asymmetric character scripts, scripted physical moments like weddings and symbolic gift-giving, are essentially techniques from therapeutic and theatrical traditions, packaged into a consumer product. VERY Interesting design space.
• Eastern Jubensha has points systems and defined winners; Western adaptations are moving away from overt win conditions towards pure storytelling. Which seems to reflect a deeper philosophical split about what games are for. The Western instinct is that competition undermines roleplay but in China, the instinct seems to be that stakes require scorekeeping. Neither is obviously wrong, and the tension between them is a productive design question.
• All Jubensha games require a lot of reading, upfront and during play. But Chinese players read Jubensha scripts faster because Chinese is a logographic language, meaning more information is compressed per character. Western designers face a genuine cognitive-load problem that their Chinese counterparts simply don’t. The proclivity toward reading and comprehension etc shapes how dense and long english scripts can realistically be.
• There was an observation that game authors/designers in China have no creative community per say, and games are judged solely by market profitability, and this is was put as an example of when a creative medium scales too fast without building the infrastructure that sustains quality.
• Eastern jubensha is frequently designed for exactly 3 male and 3 female players, with storylines to match, often with a romantic or dating dimension built in. This is a design norm, but for a Western audience steeped in inclusive design, this is genuinely startling.
• In the UK due to the lack of parlours and places to play fully costumed Jubensha, boxed games without a DM seem to be the emerging form factor and design space for play.
• In the West the DM in TTRPGs are co-players in the game. With a level of social respect that Jubensha DM’s working in parlours / treated like Karaoke spots don’t get.
• Lastly, many of the game authors and designers in China come out of the online fandom/fan fiction world. So many of the new emotional script games, their logics and archetypes can be esiely classified by existing online fandom community nomenclature.

Super cool day out!

On The Blog

April 2026 | Photo 365

Photo 365 2026. Year 5, Month 4. Photo-a-day for the month of April 2026.

SSRZ15: Monsters in the Mirror

This zine contains the full essay transcript alongside an introduction and afterword written exclusively for print, material that doesn’t exist in the audio. 36 pages. A5.

Buy on Etsy

Properly printed on heavy stock with thick covers. Hand stamped twice, copy number and FOG logo. This is remaining stock after the print run for my paid subscribers. Once they’re gone, they’re are gone. £18 + shipping worldwide

CAVEAT EMPTOR: International zines are posted with full customs declarations as printed booklets. Depending on your country, local VAT, customs, or handling fees may be due on arrival.

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Call with the WineDark crew
• Finished end to end draft of INTERNET OPERATOR episode 303
• Wrote a first draft of ‘ON THE CONSTITUTION OF THE MACHINE MIND’
• Started editing SLOP MACHINES
• Worked on a job application
• Did some work spreadsheeting for a company I advise
• Did a days work over the week working on a set of MCP/REST api prompts for a SME.

Terminal Access

Andrew Dana Hudson’s debut novel Absence is now out!

I was lucky enough to read this in several drafts including the opening, when he thought it was going to be a novella 😂. Its a great story, really gripping and has a lot of philosophical reflection throughout . If you like authors like Kazuo Ishiguro then I think you’ll enjoy Absence! ADH has put the opening chapter up online if you want to whet your whistle.

People are “popping.” Disappearing, one by one, into thin air. A global cataclysm known as Spontaneous Human Absence. In a world where prospects for survival are increasingly grim, hopelessness prevails, political rifts widen, and doomsday predictions flourish.
Harvey Ellis works the night shift for the Bureau of Depopulation Affairs, an ad hoc federal agency meant to contain and catalog the crisis. Harvey’s job: to investigate claims of Absence, and, if validated, issue a standard government stipend to boost morale. Still recovering from losses of his own, Harvey is content in his routine—until his life is shaken by an unexpected assignment from the central office.
A woman long thought Absent has reappeared in her hometown of Dawnville, Kansas, claiming she’s been to the other side and back. But is her wild and irresistible account true, or is she just the latest false prophet, offering hope to a world desperate for it? Together with his no-BS partner, Shonda Erins, Harvey travels to Dawnville to find out.
A resonant portrait of a world beset by confusion and dismay, Andrew Dana Hudson’s debut is a vividly imagined novel of cosmic proportions, examining life in a time of exception and the stories we tell to get by.

You can get this book wherever books or ebooks are sold! Find it on Amazon, B&N, Bookshop.org, or ask your local bookstore to order you a copy.

There’s also an audiobook edition (Audible, Apple Books, Kobo), and — based on my own listening as well as the reviews flooding in at Goodreads — the narrator Dan John Miller does a great job.

Dipping the Stacks

Humans 40,000 y ago developed a system of conventional signs | PNAS

Humans have carved visual signs into the surfaces of mobile artifacts and cave walls since several hundred thousand years. We here analyze a 40,000 y old assemblage of mobile artifacts bearing sequences of intentionally engraved geometric signs. These sign sequences have a complexity comparable to the earliest protocuneiform and were selectively applied to yield higher information density on figurines than on tools. This proves that the first hunter-gatherers arriving in Europe already developed a system of intentional and conventional signs on mobile artifacts. Our study more broadly relates to research into statistical properties of human language and writing compared to other sign systems.

Bike share

Nothing could have prepared me for the revelation that awaited me on a quiet Sunday morning in Paris. After a seamless one-seat train ride from the airport (AHEM), I stepped out of my hotel with a plan to meet friends a few miles away for Sancerre and oysters freshly shucked on a sunny sidewalk. Without even glancing at my phone, the choice for how to get there seemed obvious. Across the street I saw a cluster of bikes and a bike lane; around the corner: more bikes, more bike lanes; down the street: bikes, lanes. Soon, I was pedaling through a city that unfolded like a treasure map before me, an American tourist full-on yelping in astonishment.

A Cryptography Engineer’s Perspective on Quantum Computing Timelines

If you are thinking “well, this could be bad, or it could be nothing!” I need you to recognize how immediately dispositive that is. The bet is not “are you 100% sure a CRQC will exist in 2030?”, the bet is “are you 100% sure a CRQC will NOT exist in 2030?” I simply don’t see how a non-expert can look at what the experts are saying, and decide “I know better, there is in fact < 1% chance.” Remember that you are betting with your users’ lives.

Generative Pressure

What prompting more closely resembles is unlocking — finding the language that opens a pathway through the model’s latent space, not writing on a surface but turning a key in a lock that has no fixed shape until the key arrives. The output arrives as an edited version of the context that created it, and the key returns from the lock reshaped, carrying something that was latent in the mechanism, not something that was inscribed by the hand that turned it. The result is emergent from unrepeatable conditions and dense in its circumstance. It lays on a heavy fog, blurring the original source. A specific cloud is not a record of the atmospheric conditions that produced it. A specific generated sentence is not a record of the prompt that elicited it.

From biodiversity to carbon capture: Saving bison from extinction has brought big benefits to Europe | Euronews

After disappearing from Romania more than 200 years ago, Rewilding Europe and WWF Romania reintroduced bison to the Carpathian mountains in 2014. A 2024 study from Yale University suggests these massive herbivores could have a role to play in mitigating the impact of climate change.

The herd of 170 individuals could potentially be helping capture and store the carbon released by up to 84,000 average US petrol cars each year.

Reading

I started listening, to AND FINISHED, all 30 hours of Strength of the Few . The second book in the mammoth Hierarchy trilogy by James Islington. It picks up directly from book #1 with no handholding. I can see why people are saying this set of books is fast becoming this decades most important fantasy series. What a book series. Amazing.

Moved on and now I’m listening to that Nintendo book thats in the hardback non-fiction charts at the front of Waterstones. Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun by Keza MacDonald.

Music

Spotify Playlist

• Spotify

Chiminyo – NRG 5 (LP)

Chiminyo’s 2025 NRG4 album recorded live at Ronnie Scotts was a highlight of the year last year. Not just as an album, but as a beacon of whats going on in UK music right now. NRG 5 is no different. Recorded live at Peckham Levels, it captures the kind of cultural energy that’s instantly familier to anyone that’s recently spent time amidst London’s concrete spaces.

I mean honestly. What could be more London that this in 2026?

Remember Kids:

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Hard agree with David's comments here - he and I regularly exchange emails, actually. I try to reach out to authors whenever I read something that resonates with me. I'll also try to share their work via posts like this too.

For me, blogging is the original social network; just because we're on our own spaces doesn't mean we can't be socially connected. That's why I offer comments, and a reply by email link on all posts, including my RSS feed.

So yeah, start communicating! 🙃

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

It would be great if Beeper supported RSS in and out. It would help encourage other messaging services to do the same, and all of a sudden we'd have lots of easy interop instead of lots of really iffy interop. If they want to do it, I'd help, for free. Just to help things flow better on the messaging web, because we reallllly need help there. #

Realtime Claude still evading me!#

• A while back I was asking Claude (privately) if we could have it monitoring the messages posted to an app I'm working on. I wanted it to save them in a certain way, have it watch for messages that begin with //claude and maybe act on them somehow. I mostly just wanted to see if I could create a pipe and what its limits would be. #
• I asked what the max frequency is and was told it was 1 minute, meaning it would start a thread running Claude that would initialize, and it would read the file, and if there were any new items, it would process them, and then it would shut down. Barely enough to be useful, where we live we like notification within a second, but I went ahead, at least it'll be a thought-provoking demo. #
• So I wrote the software. Not much to it, a Node app that's hooked up to FeedlandSocket, and when it sees a message from me, it appends it to a JSONL file that Claude is watching. At most one minute later it wakes up and sees the new stuff and acts on it.#
• So I'm right there, it's all working, the JSONL file is being saved in a public place, and when I ask it to start listening to my JSONL messages I learn that the max frequency is one hour, rendering my work useless. This has happened before, btw. #
• I asked what about all the "agentic" stuff they hype so much, how do I do that?? I can't?? What?? Somehow I have trouble believing they're all telling such a big lie. I wonder if Claude understands its own architecture. #
• Dave: "What is all this hype about agentic stuff. Every time I try to do something I hit a wall like this."#
• Claude: "The pitch is 'agents that run on their own'; the reality you just hit is a one-hour floor on the only scheduling path the tooling actually exposes. That's not agency, that's a batch job with extra steps. The honest read: the cloud-side scheduler is built around long-running, infrequent tasks (digest emails, nightly reports) because each run spins up a fresh sandboxed session, which is expensive. Anything that wants to react quickly to a stream of incoming items -- which is what your app actually is -- doesn't fit that model. A plain local cron on some server running every minute would do the job today and cost nothing."#
• I edited Claude's response so as not to not reveal code names for products. ;-)#
• A silver lining -- I had never heard of JSONL, but it sounds pretty useful, so if I can't hook up to Claude realtime, now -- I can start using JSONL, which I wll. #
• Comments, stories, suggestions -- here.#