Thom Lawrence 🍋👀

Very impressed with Manabox to quickly scan your collection. manabox.app

I felt absolutely no urgency about any of this because I had a vague sense that one day I’d sell my Force of Wills and chuck the rest. Turns out the best card in EDH is common from Prophecy?!

Phyrexian Dreadnought is like £100. There’s an enchantress deck propping up things like Serra’s Sanctum and Parallax Wave etc. Psychatog is up to £5-10. Gaia’s Cradle seems to have gone nuts, Masticore, Mox Diamond, Cursed Scroll etc. I dunno, definitely worth looking at while the format is frothy.

Premodern has done some weird things to Magic: the Gathering card prices, and by extension, my ability to clear out my old attic.

Seleucid empire instability dominating the news this week.

The Red Dwarf On the 15th February 1988, the first episode of Red Dwarf aired on BBC2. I had no idea about it. On the 7th January 1994, the first episode of Red Dwarf aired on BBC2 for the second time. I became …

Back in 2023, along with announcer Duncan Newmarch, I made this little tribute to Red Dwarf happen on BBC Two. The fact that I got to do this meant everything to me.

If you haven’t seen it before, I hope it can give you some joy tonight too.

www.dirtyfeed.org/2023/08/the-...

Was this caught on video?

"Does every Sheffield business or Sheffield landmark need a mural of another Sheffield business or Sheffield landmark emblazoned on the blank walls of its premises? Does that make it more Sheffield? Does anything in Sheffield need to declare they’re in Sheffield? They’re already in Sheffield."

OK, so bear with me here. What we have is Berthold Woltze's 1874 painting 'The Irritating Gentleman', an oil painting of a young girl on a train who is looking decidedly nonplussed as the titular bore is leaning over her from behind no doubt dropping some incredibly tedious patter. EXCEPT for reasons known only to the subconscious mind of Wyrd Science's editor the 'irritating gentleman' has been crudely replaced with a cheap 1983 Dungeons & Dragons toy figure, The Raging Roper. Roper! Please. This dude is a cyclopean yellow bug with big fat wavy tubular arms, he's actually quite cute and for further unknown reasons I have had a jpg of him (it?) sat on my desktop for ages now, anyway he quite perfectly fits the scene (ok, maybe not perfectly but are you paying for this? no, well at least not in monetary terms.) Anyway please buy our magazine so I can stop doing stuff like this.

I regret to inform you that I woke up with this image in my head and so I've decided to make it your problem too

Read a bunch of stories from RA Lafferty's Nine Hundred Grandmothers today. What a delightfully weird little goblin he must have been.

most cutting food you can offer someone is a bread bowl. because it implies they're a) a peasant & b) not even a peasant with time for a long lunch.

In most European countries, social status is determined by how many piles of things you have.

Maybe more of a spectrum that asks participants what they’re willing to give up in order to have a satisfying goal to pursue. Some groups want to give up very little but are satisfied by collaborative fiction. Some will give more in search of goals that require solving rather than just experiencing.

In my setting I have attempted to sidestep some of this, as most magic is granted by saints who mediate between inscrutable gods and mortals, and who more or less mirror the political machinations of the mortal realm. Thus, agrarian magic just like labour can be withheld to extract concessions.

Colony Ship might work, interesting sci-if setting, and chunky combat that will kill you if you don’t pay attention.

Never has an usher’s job been easier than separating the arriving fans of Motionless in White and Stewart Lee playing neighbouring gigs.

First two night trip away with my wife since we’ve had kids.

As they say in sport: the best ability is availability.

In football, the goals are big and the balls are bouncy. No other sport capitalises on this alchemical formula, and no tactics will quench its fire.

It's all spaghetti for the spaghetti machine, I guess.

Having a Mandela effect mental breakdown here: I have always known "whiles and wends" as an idiom for meandering at a leisurely pace. Independently, "while away" and "wend its way" are common but I can find only two pages on the whole internet using "whiles and wends" that isn't about BASIC.

Seventh with zero goal difference is basically the platonic ideal of an Everton team to me.

Isn’t the same design used in La Liga, Serie A and other English leagues this season?

For whatever it’s worth, the StatsBomb model has total sight on goal, largest gap, keeper sightedness and shot velocity (which is noisy over short distances but constrained to be a monotonic effect). Many of these features were Dyche inspired. :P

And of course to go back to the beginning of this thread, of course there are mechanics that are so obnoxious they are hard to integrate. But my bar is quite high before giving up!

Some players find this translation back and forth easier in some games rather than others. It’s a complex multidimensional relationship and not a binary property of a game. Exploring those relationships is more interesting to me than assuming games are fundamentally multimodal.

It’s an outcome, not a precondition. And I think there’s space to think of non-diagetic elements of games as compressed, fractal opportunities for imagination and discovery within your model of a world, rather than unfortunate rough edges. This takes more work by the player but is deeply satisfying.

My best explanation is that for me, immersion is not the linear, realtime, in-character thought and speech which is interrupted by even the whiff of the non-diagetic. Instead it’s a flow-like state of being able to effortlessly integrate the diagetic and non-diagetic into a single model in my mind.

There are no in character thoughts. None of this is a real. You always have to do work to incorporate yourself in a game and its world. Eventually the work falls away, but I understand everyone has a different threshold.

I don't know how any game can ever be immersive under this definition, so it doesn't seem particularly useful to me unless you are only interested in LARP. It seems such a pessimistic appraisal of player imagination - I can have a visceral relationship with my character's HP without you hitting me!