I thought I’d throw some kind of blogparty to celebrate 300 weeknotes. But in the event after the fanfare of last week’s new blog theme, the passing of the number is duly noted and things continue at jaymo industries without fuss.

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Accessions Jun.23

Taking my cue from PGR I usually do accessions over on my Tumblr . I thought… Why not mix things up?

My backers copy of A.A Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games arrived this week. Can’t wait to dive into it!

I got Royal Mail’s limited set of Warhammer’s 40th anniversary stamps in the post. Its a really nice little collectible set. Wonderful selection of art. But given his recent retirement it’s a shame that John Blanche’s work wasn’t featured.

I got this Introduction to role-playing by Steve Jackson. It’s an interesting book which I never encountered when I was young. The book uses the Fighting Fantasy book series’ lightweight rule system and combat resolution and hand holds a young person into creating their own narrative driven role play environments. Very cool!

My biggest observation is (I think) that culturally in 2023 everyone knows how to play a role-play game. It’s very rare to find any RPG rules (or narrative producing boardgames) of any kind these days that start from first principles like this book does. Even if people haven’t ever played one, most people are just ambiently aware of how they work and how they are played. Given that RPG’s are a cultural technology this is a significant ! I wonder if there’s any polling/social science data about this.

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Permanently Moved

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Writing my New Centre lecture
• Writers bloc – meeting 2
• Was on a cool call about blockchain gaming with the co-founder of Zynga
• Permanently moved Season 9 began
• Discussion and notes for workshop in Berlin in July

Terminal Access

Tobias mentioned my Worlds a Walk-Though talk over at The Bounding Box.

Jay did a talk about ‘not fucking up’ the building of worlds which is part of his series of musings on worlds as a medium. I like his thinking on the so-called ‘metaverse’ and it’s laced through with a radical optimism and politics. Still, how do you not just make these things a distraction from climate collapse?

He makes a good point on worlds being a distraction from climate collapse. This is of course a conversation that I’ve had with myself many times. But my interest in worlds – both as a medium and as an idea – grew out of my deep engagement with climate change and Solarpunk. I’m not *just* interested in videogames worlds. The subcreation of worlds, and new worldviews presupposes that the same thing is possible in ‘The World’.

Kyle Kukshtel over on their game development and design blog k-hole wrote a great post recently on ‘Cultivating A Space For The Doing’ as a riff on my ‘The doing‘.

Studio visits are bad inputs. Social media validation is a bad input.

To quote the perpetually-inconvenient adn:

Game Quality is all that matters

The post was initially inspired by reading Justin’s recent piece about the workspace of artist Francis Bacon.

Dipping the Stacks

On Jane Austen and The Lovable Unlikability of Emma Woodhouse ‹ Literary Hub

That’s what Austen promised. A love story for imperfect, “unlikable” women who hold strong opinions and make mortifying mistakes. In short: women just like us.
No other novel encapsulates this better than Emma.

What watching my daughter play ‘The Legend of Zelda’ taught me

Her life, I fear, as it plunges deeper into the 21st century, will be filled with far more Challenger disasters than Zelda releases. And so I’ll tell her to remember this — the feeling of a world that feels lifted, not collapsed; conquerable, not corrupted; joyful, not terrifying. Remember this. And remember us, too, together. Playing.

Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm

Last May, the National Toxicology Program (NTP), a federal research agency, was set to release its eagerly awaited report into the cognitive and neurodevelopmental impacts on humans from fluoride exposure.

Ian Mackay and Gavin Owens – Wont 2 Cant: Part I – Printed Matter

A charming fitness guru megalomaniac takes over the Monastery in a small medieval town. Or is it present day? The new Leader takes our protagonist Harold under his wing, but Harold is having second thoughts – is the mega-capitalist, ‘optimized’ new Monastery doing more harm than good?

The enteric nervous system relays psychological stress to intestinal inflammation: Cell

Mental health profoundly impacts inflammatory responses in the body. This is particularly apparent in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD),

Reading

I’ve made no progress at all on Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication by Oren Jay Sofer. I’ve been playing a little Zelda here and there and going for long walks along the river without my phone.

Coupdekat – *FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY (EP)

Loud Ldn collective co-founder Coupdekat has dropped an EP! I’ve been eagerly awaiting it! I was trying to describe it to someone in their 40’s the other night and I ended up at: ‘If Kate Nash was a Hyperpop star and was really into Drum and Bass’.

My fav bit (as with all the LL collective work) is the production, this EP strikes a nice mix between synths and live instruments – which is very much post pandemic online/offline re-negotiation thats happening don’t you think?

As of the time of writing, STUNT GIRL the EP’s opening track only has 21 views. It’s a banger and I think will be a big single this summer for sure. Listen early!

Remember Kids: