Author: Brian
-
Snowuary 2025 – Silent Hill: Shattered Memories
(Autumn, from the Ranged Touch Discord, encouraged people to play snowy games in January and February and write about them. I used this opportunity to motivate my return to Silent Hill: Shattered Memories a game whose snowy town and chases have stuck with me for 15+ years. Also, I wanted to play it again before…
-
An Addendum
I have a lot of feelings about studying generative ai and LLMs. How in order to understand how they work you have to use them, repeatedly and intentionally, and therefore repeatedly and intentionally perpetrate their harms. I don’t know what those are in the ostensible vacuum of the laboratory. Aside from their environmental costs, which…
-
Statistically Speaking
In a Discord, someone linked this substack post by Gabriele de Seta, Project Leader of ALGOFOLK at the University of Bergen. It’s about Butterflies, which is like “what if you had a bunch of chatbots talking to you and each other” aka 90% of what advertising and algorithmic social media electricity is spent on. De…
-
That thing where Making a Website has gained, in some places, all the trappings of a Thing
part of what keeps me from going all in on Making a Website is I do sort of have a creative web outlet in my day job, part of which is the building and maintenance of an asp.net webapp for research administration. But there’s no, like, oversight on my part so i literally just get…
-
The Prisoner’s Viewer’s Dilemma
Watching the show The Prisoner (for a second time) along with the podcast The Prisoner’s Dilemma (for the first time). The podcast is using the ITV broadcast order, which doesn’t match the order of the A&E DVD set I have. So before I watch every episode, I am reminded of this alternate order. One that…
-
Snowuary 2025 – Mafia II
(Autumn, from the Ranged Touch Discord, encouraged people to play snowy games in January and February and write about them. I used this opportunity to motivate my return to Mafia II, a game whose snowy beginnings have stuck with me for nearly 15 years). Second Snowuary 2025 post, on Silent Hill: Shattered Memories What I…
-
Nina Simone’s Gum (by Warren Ellis (the musician))
I do not normally go for books (or other media) that narrativize the creative process because their stories seldom feel familiar. But Ellis’s description of the mutual care of collaboration is lovely. https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571365630-nina-simones-gum (Ignore the blurbs from the shitheads)