Calum Novak-Mitchell

Which is, of course, the promise of gen-AI "art"

Speaking as a resident of Oxford, I reckon most of us would consider this money well spent.

A hilairious mismatch between level of skill and the end result of that skill.

Re: the hellishness of Murano, I once watched a glassworker making a horse on that island, and while he was working on it, it was one of the most mindblowing acts of craftsmanship I'd ever seen. But then we saw the finished horse and it was an unbelievably ugly piece of tat.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpuJ... I mean look at this title sequence!

Simon Schama's A History of Britain, from 2000, is on iPlayer. I loved it as a kid. Watched the first half hour today, and it's full of glitchy slow-motion fog-wreathed stone circles and monochrome bare winter trees underscored by spooky music... did this build a huge chunk of my aesthetic tastes?

These days, despite everything, it’s probably Merchant of Venice. A woozy dreamlike fairytale crunching into the hard cruelties of cash and politics and hatred. Sadder than Lear, the best love poetry he ever wrote, full of myth and vicious little rug pulls.

I love how this reads as if Ralph Vaughan Williams’ was intent on reviving the dead villagers and creating an undead horde of zombie folk singers.

Just going to text all my friends saying "you know your debilitating phobia? Have you considered that it might be in the room with you *right now*?"

Demented behaviour from this astrologer

I used to work at a company which had an annual Christmas sketch show which sort of did this? General mockery of the previous year in the business, and you could tell what morale was like at the company based on how bitter the jokes were.

I’ve had the privilege of being in the room when Deep Purple play Smoke on the Water, and you now how despite having seen thousands of images of Michelangelo’s David or Van Gogh’s Starry Night the real thing still knocks you backwards? It’s like that.

I’m enjoying this book, but how dare you.

1) escape from dino island is a lovely piece of design, and 2) wow apparently my brain does *not* mesh with running pbta

This is just a big list of cool things.

It makes it look like you think your time is more valuable than your readers' time.

If you're a bad writer and want to present to a corporate audience, I can see the use-case for putting your scrappy notes into an LLM and getting it to spill out some organised spell-checked and grammar-checked bullet points. But paragraphs of bland empty rhetoric serves nobody.

I'm not sure why so many industry articles include AI-generated paragraphs that neither advance arguments nor include any substantive information. It just gives the reader a worse experience!

Haha fair enough - this is one of my favourite books ever, the one I always go to bat for as a Lost Classic and one I have bought for So Many People as a birthday present. For me it’s just soaked in atmosphere. The haunted house as a place of traumatised interwar melancholy.

Attending a good stag party.

(Anyway, I love Heart to death, your one-pagers were one of the things that brought hope and light during lockdown, and I’ll be backing Salt on day one)

… especially given how good stuff like fallout and the beats system are at shaping and driving stories (as a GM I am not great at Serious Consequences, and fallout sorts that right out for me). Don’t suppose you’ve written more about this anywhere else?

I think this is the first time I’ve seen you writing about Theory and Playstyles in a way that even glances at *discourse* - “something to do whilst you’re telling a story” is a really interesting way of formulating the purposes of mechanics…

weapon tags always seem frustrating to me. It just means you have to flip constantly to manage of bitty rules, and they usually show up in the kinds of games where these bitty rules are otherwise avoided

something like Men is deliberately distorting that with a glossy, holiday-brochure version of the countryside. I’m not sure there’s a coherent definition that can cover everything under the umbrella.

I reckon those three films all have the same relationship with an unsentimental, muck-covered British countryside, and you see the same thing in e.g. A Field in England, but that’s not what something like Middommar is doing at all, and

God, vantage is a clever game. The way it starts as a fluffy choose-your-own-adventure and blooms outward into both a crunchy tactical puzzle, and longer term narrative mystery box…

I’ve only played it twice. It’s possible that the magic trick will wear thin. But it hasn’t worn thin yet.

I read it at university and despised it, but increasingly I reckon the problem is not “James is terrible” and is instead “very few 18 year olds are going to enjoy this”

It‘s certainly an… interesting statement of intent to walk into Oxford University's new humanities centre and see a giant piece of Gen-AI video art projected onto the wall.

And like, it’s not slop. It’s from a carefully licenced dataset and clearly involved a bunch of human effort. But still.

Ah amazing, this feels a bit like seeing someone casually posting a photograph of the Grail