Unstoppable, Infinitely Moddable, Autonomous Worlds

5 minutes

A day late on my Weeknotes due to exceptional circumstances. Those circumstances being a sore throat.

I know, I know, thats a little woe is me.

But it totally wiped me out. It started when I woke up Tuesday morning, Thursday though Saturday it was like swallowing sewing needles. Saturday night I was thinking that I’d have to go see the clinical pharmacist today with full blown tonsillitis – but Sunday lunchtime things turned a corner. It’s now day 7 and it just feels like I have a lump in my throat, so I’m on the mend.

Recording the podcast last night was the least fun I’ve had making it in a while to be honest. Ah well.


On Monday I went to 0xPARCs Autonomous Worlds demo day in London. A follow up to the AW symposium I attended in November.

If you aren’t familiar with AW’s check out my long essay on ‘Wind-up Worlds

It’s a project exploring advanced technologies for ‘on chain’. I was absolutely blown away. Things are moving insanely fast in this space. Improved Gas / transaction fees and ZK rollups are changing whats possible with the ‘world computer’ that is Ethereum (and other compatible EVMs).

Some of the games on show at the demo day had over 10k lines of solidity and execute very very cheaply on chain.

Livestream of the event below:

If I hadn’t been so sick this week I was going to write up my thoughts on the event – but alas.

Instead you can check out Luke Gibson’s very impressive live tweeting skills below:

Almost all the projects were built on the MUD toolset which you can see introduced earlier this year here:

64 player tower defence game on the blockchain? no problem.

Games shown at the demo day take advantage of the three other affordances that blockchains provide in addition to creating and organising value, ie Composability, persistence, and encryption.

For the first time ever, using novel encryption methods like witness encryption game designers can now genuinely hide things from players, and the game state.

There is also no client server architecture per-say present in any of these games. They are all loaded from the blockchain – they are server-less. MUD uses a ECS (Entity, Component, Service) architecture – like OG mainframe games like…MUDs. And includes some really nifty P2P networking code for multiplayer.

All the ‘WhATs ThE usE CAsE’ people are going to have to find a new line when these games launch next year.

Unstoppable, Infinitely Moddable, Autonomous Worlds are coming.

Might be a good time to refresh/re-read my wind up worlds post.


Permanently Moved

Step Away From Noise

Perhaps things that are meaning-less can be made meaning-full by stepping away from them?

Photo 365

335/365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

  • We had our last week at the New Centre course I’ve been teaching. The students did their final presentations – DAOs of 2035
  • Went to the Autonomous Worlds demo day on Monday and had my mind totally blown
  • Finished up a short writing project.
  • I need to edit and submit two essays for various upcoming books ASAP

Terminal Access

Friends Huw and Ben’s book Bad Gays: A Homosexual History won Goodreads.com’s Readers Choice award in History & Biography category. CONGRATULATIONS!

Dipping the Stacks

Soap Has Always Been With Us, and Longer Still

The oldest record of soap is from Babylon, some 4800 years ago as we moderns tell time. A clay tablet bears the magic formula for the creation of a specific kind of soap, one used to clean wool so that the dye will take better.

Rebuilding After the Replication Crisis—Asterisk

Over a decade has passed since scientists realized many of their studies were failing to replicate. How well have their attempts to fix the problem actually worked?

IFComp Winners 2022

70% of the top 20 Interactive Fiction entries are choice-based instead of parser-based, continuing the trend of the last few years

Dr. Smartphones: an ethnography of mobile phone repair shops

The rapid spread of these repair spaces poses questions about the sustainability of contemporary technical objects. The smartphones repaired, refurbished, and jailbroken in these spaces are, elsewhere, held up as icons of a continuous innovation regime

gilest.org: How will your words exist in the world?

Here’s a tip for anyone about to embark on some writing: before you start, have a think about where your words will live. How will they exist in the world?

Reading

This week I read JDO‘s book Dying World. Absolutely brilliant. highly recommend it.

I’m currently reading a PHD from 1999 called EMuds: Adaptation in Text-Based VirtualWorlds which is basically a book. A bit of a slog but very interesting. Its pairing very well with a MA thesis from 1996 I read recently called Nonverbal communication in text based virtual realities.

I listened to a Warhammer book called Rogal Dorn: The Emperor’s Crusader it was quite short. More of a long novella, it was OK. Well paced for this kind of book/series entry.

Music

thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist

Daniel Bachman – Almanac Behind

What an album. A fully formed Sonic journey that paints with field recordings, fingerstyle guitar, and drones to die for.

The thing that sets this album apart form me is the tunings. To my ear, almost all the instruments across the 15 tracks of album are modally tuned. The melodies he plays are internally coherent, captured and located around the electronic drones.

This is an album about climate change and natural disaster. As the album unfolds, so does ‘the event’. Track names like “Grid Reactivation” and “3:24 AM KHB36 (When The World’s On Fire)” give you an idea of where you are in the unfolding drama.

I listened to this album twice so far. Once on a train journey and the second time on the stereo . Sat on my couch paying attention from start to finish – whilst I was under the weather this week.

The album also has a complete accompanying film. If I do a third sitting I’ll watch this.

I find work like this super inspirational. I’m going to try and pick up the record on the secondary market.

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2 responses to “Unstoppable, Infinitely Moddable, Autonomous Worlds”

  1. […] Worlds essay in May of last year. Attended the first AW symposium in November and the follow up hackathon in December. The Autonomous Worlds Summit was in May this year, and 6 months later over 500 people came […]

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