Alec Austin

tired: sexy murder bureaucrats vs. basically pleasant poets

wired: basically pleasant bureaucrats vs. sexy murder poets

Fond of “I am on fire, keep clear of me”, myself.

A team without Molyneux will have a fighting chance to actually prioritize and scope appropriately without him promising ten impossible things before breakfast. So that checks out.

The immediately lethal dosage aside, there’s no way anyone properly trained would suggest holding nuclear waste in your hand. Good way to get all kinds of unstable isotopes inside your body.

Sunzi's The Art of War is not a general-purpose book on life, it is a guide on how to have your princeling failson of a general fail less hard at a very specific, time and context sensitive, kind of war.

The climax of the film features them having to break the undocumented migrant out of ICE detention when he gets grabbed.

If you can substitute "hungry ghost trapped in a jar" for "AI" in a sentence it's probably a valid use case for LLMs. Take "I have a bunch of hungry ghosts in jars, they mainly write SQL queries for me". Sure. Reasonable use case.

"My girlfriend is a hungry ghost I trapped in a jar"? No. Deranged.

A giant yellow sign on the side of the road announces “YOU ARE ENTERING A FRUIT FLY CONTROLLED AREA” and below that in smaller letters “Make sure you know the rules.”

I don’t think we should have ceded control quite so quickly and without so much as a fight.

Splendid thread to uplift your timeline and for mental refreshment amid the ongoing everything.

How do right wingers love killing in the name? Because it’s a fucking banger.

Rubber duck debugging - Wikipedia

It’s like more people need to be introduced to “rubberducking”: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_...

a world where we outlaw video generation but permit text generation feels weirdly SFF: it is illegal to look upon the machine spirits in the box and the visions they create, we are only permitted to talk to them, whispering through a small hole in the wall

SAURON: for the Nazgullible!

yeah I think this is something people mostly don't get: ships + cannon were *unbelievably* powerful. like, the classic outside context problem for most places but even in the context of European land warfare ships were incredibly strong. (Games very rarely represent this well, curiously)

the 'conspiracies are actually real' rpg was very common in the 1990s but I think it's considerably harder to do today because conspiracy beliefs (and the attendant, inevitable anti-semitism) are an obviously malignant political force

Also, the "conspiracies are real" RPG par excellence, Mage, realized that the conspiracy actually was probably making some pretty good points and that maybe you would actually want to side with them a lot of the time.

[somberly] You cannot serve both god and money [upbeat music hits] Until now. Introducing god as a service

And Tiny Sim, who DID die

Suspect pan-frying is required, yeah. Would love to be able to make any version of scallion pancakes in an air fryer tho.

Hooverville - Wikipedia

American presidents who've had things named after them en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooverv...

Why don't you create a separate award for AI-generated work? Surely you can't mean that all the Nebula Awards could potentially be given to people who don't write their own work?

Really feeling this one, yeah.

And he said, "If everyone likes it, it means it's mainstream. It means it's conventional. It means it's already pre-digested for people to like it. And I don't want that. I want people to end up liking things they didn't like when they first encountered it, because that's where you really end up loving something."

Keep thinking about this term "pre-digested" that Kojima used to describe art that's instantly gratifying. And how it's better when people grow to love something instead.

I've gravitated, as player and designer, toward the latter, but that term "pre-digested" is new and feels very strong.

In Nomine is incredibly evocative for a game that verges on unplayable. I still have a Malakhim necklace that I’ve worn off and on for 25 years in my wallet, while all of my White Wolf clan pins and T-shirts are long gone.

The Game Theory of Yankee Swap A deep dive into the most mid holiday party game

I wrote about Yankee Swap, one of the most popular but most mid of the gloriously dumb games you should be playing this month.

open.substack.com/pub/mattglas...

turning a big dial taht says "Duḥkha" on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right

Instead of joy, we will always be thinking: Cat, or Dopple-cat?

TIL that this is an actual Canadian gas chain. Slightly scared to research whether this or 40k came first… 😅

Losing some people is inevitable, but if there was a big cliff, that showed you had a problem. It didn’t tell you what the problem was, tho. (Metrics are rarely self-explanatory.)

At the same time, just getting people’s attention once, or for reasons unrelated to your end goal (artist, economic, or otherwise) doesn’t really help you either. We obsessed over retention curves on Strike Force. You could literally see how many players we lost before they reached each new screen.