Mike Martens | Clear Keep

I deeply agree that I want more people from the RPG world working with mainstream publishers.

I don't want to frame it as something people can just decide to to.

Working with a large corporation is always a situation where the artist has very little control over what happens.

A map of the United States with the frost line marked.

We can narrow the possible locations of the house by comparing that ceiling height to the frost line, bringing us that much closer to finding the crime scene and bringing the killers to justice.

You also saw the “Gen Z has killed adorkability” headlines this morning then?

Coming soon: Public Access Analog Horror Mystery TTRPG From the creator of Brindlewood Bay and The Between, Public Access is a roleplaying game inspired by analog and found footage horror!

Public Access is coming to Kickstarter on March 17th! We’re aiming for 5000 followers before launch. Help us out by following and re-posting!

www.kickstarter.com/projects/gau...

“Everyone is just trying to figure their shit out.”

The thing to always keep in mind online.

A fair amount of ttrpg commentary and design involves folks grappling with their expectations of the medium, based on their route into it.

Hot takes and even thoughtful critiques tend to tell you more about the author than provide concrete guidance.

Still useful! But differently.

What if there’s no election though..?

A bunch of random people giving “hard times” music suggestions feels pretty nice actually.

Thank you!

This heist asks, “What kind of vampire is a space vampire?”

And then answers, “All of them.”

If we're friends and you have any reason to suspect that you may like some of the same music I do, these super secret mixes can become slightly less secret for you.

One of my all-time albums

I get it

Yes! Straight from my early 10s hometown.

My go-tos have been @aquariumdrunkard.com broadcasts and @signalstation.bsky.social’s super secret mixes.

Hell yeah

It’s been a rough week.

What are your music recos for being in a slump but building hope (even if you’re in no mood to celebrate)?

Artist Christine Sun Kim Rewrites Closed Captions | Pop-Up Magazine YouTube video by Pop-Up Magazine

This is more than you necessarily need to do … but it’s a wonderful way of thinking about what to write in your alt text.

youtu.be/tfe479qL8hg?...

If you don't pick 4, you either haven't used it or need to get checked for that rfk brain worm.

1st day of expoing at #GAMA in the books & winding up for day 2!

If you are here swing by and say hello!

ohhhhhh

thanks for answering, I know nuance is difficult to capture on microblogging platforms

Why is everything graverobbing with you these days?

First TTRPG I played that wasn't D&D?

Amber. Also first ttrpg.

So anyway, I hope you didn't get this far in reading all that, because oh man, that's a lot. But it's what I'm thinking about today.

Stay blessed.

Time (and our perspective of it through memory, foresight, consciousness) exists on a bell curve. And when the present is more chaotic and overfull, a ton gets lost in our experience of time holistically.

We forget how much we've forgotten.

Douglas Rushkoff's Present Shock got a lot wrong, but there are a lot of things I'm still convinced it got right.

The present is overwhelming our perspective.

(Ironically, this is happening just as we grew more *able* to keep past and future in view.)

I'm tempted to say we've been scaling the internet (and our tools for navigating it) on a bell curve rather than a world-wide web … The tails growing fatter and noisier, and the deeper content gets buried by time and "relevance."

To some degree, that seems unavoidable. (Maybe not!)

AND. They can only be trained by what is available to them digitally.

Nothing that's not made the jump (still well over 90% of the world's information) can be included, and presumably nothing lost … or what will eventually be dropped from the training repositories.

Because over time, that technology is also producing more content optimized toward the middle. So we get the feedback problem of that mid optimization growing grotesquely large.

Think of it like the freshwater carp problem. The most "optimal" entity overtakes the ecosystem after x cycles.

LLMs integrating into search tools both helps and hinders the ability to find lost content when it comes to this third point.

More extrapolated query context, rather than stricter term matching.

They also optimize toward the middle, especially over time. (Likely a net neg for the tech's role.)