Oh man its been such a busy week. On Thursday I delivered a 50mins long, 8k words talk to the students at The New Centre’s Writing the Impossible Object course. I had them all play a soloRPG / journalling game as the writing prompt and my talk was, obliquely but pretty clear IMO about the nature of the playing these games and interacting with the subconscious.

I’ll release it at some point. Maybe as a physical issue of Start Select Reset zine.

Apart form that I’ve been crossing lots of T’s and dotting lots of I’s. This weekend i’ve been engrossed in experimenting with stable diffusion / AI image synthesis and .. game engine stuff. I should probably write it up.

I am in all honestly exhausted but I still have things to do before I go to bed this evening.

Hope everyone is doing well!

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Permanently Moved

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• I was working on my Impossible Object talk most of the week.
• Did a deep dive into Pixar’s Universal Scene Description and wrapped my head around it in Blender and Unreal Engine, after this weeks OPEN USD announcement including Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and NVIDIA. Nvidia exec – “We believe Universal Scene Description, invented and open sourced by Pixar, is the standard scene description for the next era of the internet,” he added, comparing USD to HTML in the 2D web. Time to dig out all those breathless late 90’s articles about VRML.
• Hard to work on the pod this week for some reason.
• Finished up my report for a client on the NPC trend – as I’d previously mentioned it in some vTuber commentary essay last year.

I would like one more paid subscriber so I can by an autoqueue.

Terminal Access

Paul just finished up serialising a long essay on world building futures and narratology, over on VCTB. It’s really good. Well worth reading/checking out.

We’ll start our exploration from the outside, as the notional reader does, so the first thing to do is to define the three boxes:

• THE TEXT is the words on the page that the reader encounters, as put there by the author;
• THE STORY (or PLOT) is a set of events and utterances (which may or may not be delivered in a chronological sequence) that the text describes for the reader;
• THE FABULA (or STORY-WORLD) is a four-dimensional imaginary space in which the events and utterances of the story take place.

Paul concludes the 5 post blogchain with the following conclusion: all #futures are #worlds.

Welcome to the weird world of worlds Paul!

Dipping the Stacks

I’m Not Trying to be Dramatic, But I’m in Hell

You may remember, hazily, what it was like back in the early aughts. Falling into a book or a long magazine article was easy. Boredom was possible. Long walks by yourself, disconnected from the matrix of urgent knowledge.

Unreality/Strictness — The Single-Page Version by Dvaleris

How Google Reader died — and why the web misses it more than ever – The Verge

At its peak, Reader had just north of 30 million users, many of them using it every day. That’s a big number — by almost any scale other than Google’s.

GRID WORLD by Alexander Miller

We radiate grids. If you are caught in the beam of someone else’s grid, as I was in my dad’s, the grid’s virality will infect you. Its intoxicating pattern will flow through your thoughts and become the architecture of your reality. You will radiate the grid too.

Hollywood’s Cruel Strategy – The Atlantic

The Hollywood machine—from script writing, to shooting and production, to late-night talk-show PR—has officially ground to a halt.

Reading

I finished the Warhammer audiobook Cypher: Lord of the Fallen by John French. It’s very cool to see how GW go back in and clear up some lore further back in the time line to shift and reposition future / up coming storylines. The audiobook is full of great sound design.

I’m still reading Still reading Spirit Possession and the Origins of Christianity by Stevan L. Davies. I’m enjoying just how much the author rails against language like ‘taken by the spirit, full of spirit, caught the ghost’ in modern churches. Possessed. You are being possessed. Just like every other culture in the whole world across time. Possessed.

Spotify radio insists that I will like King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. I do not. I don’t vibe with them at all, despite the banishing the track every time they come on Spotify doesn’t care. How to stop the madness!??

Nia Archives – Bad Gyalz

Nia Archives has a new track out. Heavy on the Jungle breaks I bet this track is a total banger in at rave.

Remember Kids: