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When did Google get so f-ing weird?

2026-09-27T19:48:00+00:00

I recently had an experience while doing a simple Google search that was so profoundly weird that it stopped me in my tracks.

Understanding this Google search experience involves understanding a niche mid-2010s basketball meme, so bear with me for a minute. In 2014 the Philadelphia 76ers drafted Dario Saric, who was playing basketball professionally in Turkey at the time. He announced his intention to finish out his contract in Turkey, meaning he wouldn't come to the USA join the Sixers for a couple of years. There was a joke within the fan community that Dario was "never coming over" which became sort of a shibboleth for part of the fanbase.

I saw Dario's name mentioned in an NBA article recently and I wanted to find some of those old funny tweets about him from the 2010s, so I Googled simply "hes never coming over dario". I assumed I would be either find nothing (maybe I was remembering the phrasing wrong) or find old Tweets/Reddit posts from that time.

Instead, Google did what Google does in 2026 and gave me an AI overview. These used to bother me but at this point I'm mostly ok with them, they're sometimes helpful. Here's what the AI Overview said:

Google, a search engine which does not have human emotions, assumed that I had been spurned by a man in my life named Dario and decided what I wanted was an empathetic digital friend. What I wanted was some links, but that's not what Google does in 2026. Expanding the AI overview to see the full answer gave me this:

What in the fucking hell? I think this was the moment I, the frog, noticed the pot had been boiling for a while. In what universe is it Google's job to console me and be an empathetic listener rather than just find what I am looking for on the internet? In what way does this "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"? Maybe if I had loaded up a Gemini app with a chat interface this would be somewhat acceptable, but I'm using a search engine! Google has seriously lost the plot.

If I scroll down a few hundred pixels below the AI slop, Google did have exactly what I was looking for:

Regardless of what you think of AI or chatbots, I think it's pretty obvious this is just plain weird. Have we gotten to the point where we have to constantly be in a parasocial dialogue with our computers? Is it so hard to imagine that some parts of search were just fine before LLMs?

I'm not sure how to feel about all of this. Maybe I should go talk to my friend Google, it's always so nice to me.

we stopped being bored

2026-09-28T07:28:08.639090+00:00

I caught myself reaching for my phone while waiting for the microwave the other day.

There were maybe forty seconds left.

Apparently, this was too long.

I didn't even have anything to check. No message I was waiting for, nothing I particularly wanted to look up. I just unlocked my phone and opened something because there was a small, unoccupied space in my day and I had developed the reflex to fill it.

I started noticing how often I do this.

Waiting for food. Standing in line. Sitting in the car while someone runs inside somewhere. Waiting for a game to load. Even watching a movie sometimes, which feels particularly ridiculous because I am already doing the thing that is supposed to entertain me.

I don't remember always needing this much stimulation.

I remember being bored.

Really bored.

The kind where you would lie upside down on the couch for no discernible reason. Read the ingredients on whatever bottle was within reach. Look through the same drawer you had looked through a hundred times. Stare out the car window and make up rules about which passing objects meant you were winning a game nobody else knew you were playing.

I used to draw houses on paper and decide who lived in every room. I made things on the computer that served absolutely no purpose. I rearranged my bedroom because the afternoon was long and apparently the bed needed to be on the other wall.

Sometimes I did nothing at all.

And I don't remember thinking there was anything unusual about that.

Now doing nothing feels almost deliberate.

You have to choose not to reach for something.

That's strange to me.

We have filled almost every awkward little pause that used to exist in a day. There is always a video to watch, a conversation to check, something to read, something to listen to, something happening somewhere.

Which is wonderful, really.

I don't particularly want to return to sitting in a waiting room reading a six-month-old magazine because it is the only object available to me.

But I wonder if boredom wasn't entirely useless.

Not because it secretly made us more productive. I don't want to turn boredom into another thing we have to optimize.

Maybe it was valuable precisely because nothing was expected from it.

Your mind could go somewhere stupid.

You could notice something irrelevant.

You could have a thought that wasn't prompted by anything you had just watched, read, or been shown.

You could waste twenty minutes and have absolutely nothing to show for it.

I think that's the part I miss.

Not boredom itself.

Just having little pieces of the day that belonged to nothing.

And maybe we didn't need to fill all of them.

learning how to be findable

2026-09-27T17:15:27.942971+00:00

In eighth grade, my English teacher once quoted Descartes to a shy classmate who folded into silence when she was called on. I think, therefore I am, I recall her say. When you express yourself, that’s how you know you are here. That's how people find you. It’s proof you exist. I remember fidgeting with my books, terrified of being singled out next. Back then, I was already dissolving in the absence of my own self-articulation.

My silence followed me until I was 23, and I almost made peace with the idea of staying like this forever. I hid my art, my writing, swallowed my words whole before they reached my throat. Perhaps I'm simply not capable of existing loudly, of being findable. It's like when other people are born luminous by nature. You don't question their radiating ease, do you?

What started to bother me wasn't loneliness - I wasn't that lonely. It was watching rooms fill and glow with people who wanted collaborators, wanted company, wanted someone like me, and realizing I had made myself impossible to locate. I wanted to be pulled into things, too. I wanted to exist in other people's plans and projects, not just on my own head where no one could reach me.

If I don't show up and dare exist, how will I ever be found? I've been raising my voice more lately, but it's still not enough. I want it to erupt, higher and higher and higher, past every year I spent underwater, until the silence finally drowns out instead of me. I want people to find me and say come do this with us, too. This time, I would like to answer.

Even Though It’s for Nothing — Do the Work

2026-09-28T01:13:00+00:00

In music, if you work your ass off, throw in, do your part, and something gets successful, I got bad news for you.

If it’s any kind of band, there’s at least a 60% chance that someone will upset the apple cart and it’ll all go to shit. And you’ll kind of know when it’s peaked.

I used to play bass for a pretty popular guy in town. And we’d built his following back up through a series of happy hours and gigs, and it was an amazing time for me because I was the worst person in the band and I learned so much.

Anyway, we’d finally sold out a pretty cool venue and did this great show with a bunch of different people walking on and off the stage. Probably even a few people you guys have heard of.

And I just knew at the time: that was it.

We had this huge show. And I was just sitting there thinking to myself, oh, this is too much. He’s going to scotch the whole thing.

And he did.

And I’ve found over and over again, in two of the situations I’m in actually right now, that once everything starts working, the rug gets pulled out.

This is kind of why I really love and guard my DJing, because I’m in total control.

All of this to say, it’s okay to care. It’s okay to try. It’s okay to work your ass off, just so long as you know.

Someone put it—I forget where I heard it, probably read it somewhere—bands are for kids.

And when you’re an adult traveling in the band world, it can be, at times, incredibly frustrating.

Because they’re somewhat democratized, no matter what you do. No matter if you are the one filling the seats, you took that role on and you picked it.

So you’re stuck with it.

My advice to everyone is still do the work. It’s so rewarding. Just know these things are going to happen.

I said 60%.

I’d say they’re 60% likely to happen when everything is going right. And then stuff gets really messed up. 100% chance of failure, though.

Once it gets right, that’s when the real meddling begins—the 60% hits.

I can’t think of a time in my musical life, here at 55, that I was sorry for putting in the effort.

Not once.

Do the work.

Re: How to break up with someone you love

2026-09-27T11:52:00+00:00

This is a reply to: How to break up with someone you love by folkmoss

5yrs ago or so, I left a relationship where both of us loved each other dearly. To this day I still think of her, she was great and I hope I don't find her again as I don't know what I'll do.

It was easier for me than it will be for you, due to distance.

I'm from Puerto Rico (PR) she is too. I left to Missouri during that relationship to start a job there. COVID started, we continued our relationship long distance. It was always great. We talked everyday, we did stuff together, sent letters to each other, etc. I knew I was coming back to PR at some point.

But there was a ghost on our relationship. We cannot marry or live together. She is Christian. Very. I could care less about it, and had actually left religion officially during that relationship. So we can't marry, as I'm not Christian, we can't live together, as we're not married. This haunted me. I knew we were going nowhere, even though there was so much love, understanding, even though we were basically best friends in love, soulmates. There was no future.

Then why stay? 10yrs were going to pass, we were going to be together, but stuck. I tried church, but I don't believe that nonsense anymore. I did not judge though, that's her beliefs, but it wasn't for us to stay in this boat, when the boat is just floating with nowhere to get to.

I had to talk about it first. "We have no future, then why should we be together if we will never even live together"

I ended the relationship. Cried for months, kept contact with her for a while. I came back to PR to visit, we talked, no change in sight, we stayed separate.

I decided to return to PR and managed to keep my job remotely, but did stop contact with her. It worked.

My life went on. Quit job, stayed unemployed for a while, met someone. Got an even better job here. New relationship was different, weird, took a shile to get used to, but its working great now. Been with here 3 or so years. I don't know why I stayed to be honest, but glad I did so far. The other end of the spectrum.

I'm definitely on a much better place, no need to hide my disbelief, no need for guilt.

It gets worse before it gets better. But it does gets better. If you're stuck somewhere and know how to get unstuck, why fear the exit? It might hurt, but it's for the best.

There's only one life to live, but there are many days to enjoy.

On sending emails and being a part of a community

2026-09-28T12:35:00+00:00

I'm very new on this blogging thing - like I created this blog 2 days ago new - and I never engaged on this kind of thing before. I think I joined the internet after the time of blogs tbh. Now that I'm here I'm still not fully sure how things work.

I hadn't realized before but being an active participant in a community means actively engaging with it and not just consuming it. In the case of blogs that means sending messages to people, even tho it feels like i'm a kid sending an email to a teacher for some reason. There is something there about the veil of authority someone gains just by being the writter of the text you are reading.

That all being said I do want to try it out. It feels like a way nicer way to be on the internet then endlessly scrolling youtube shorts - not that I'm gonna stop that any time soon. Oh and I'm probably gonna be translating all my posts to english over the week since most of the people I want to interact with are speaking english.

[allanlkley@gmail.com]

Completely Untested Magic System Theoryslop for the Masses

2026-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

I don't really have time to write this, but I was already spending the time i didn't have discussing it on discord. This will be fast and dirty.

We've been discussing Warren D's post about the joys and benefits of Vancian Magic and it has me thinking about spell components, when they're fun, when they're annoying, and when we just ignore them. My personal gripe with Elmcat's position that we should all just be using Wolves Upon the Coast style ritual magic is that I want my (specific) game to be about the dungeon, not scaring off looking for spell components so that the wizard can do their thing. I'm fully in support of requiring 100gp pearls to cast Identify, but much like roleplaying shopping, collecting wool and colored sand gets tedious very quickly.

What if we want to make spell components matter though? How can we introduce an interesting cost and decision using them? Make them take a slot! Instead of some wimpy skimpy "component pouch" the material components of each spell takes a slot (they aren't consumed upon casting). This isn't too big a cost for level 1 magic users, but much like Knave and Cairn spellcasters they'll soon enough need apprentices and porters just to move around will maintaining their full potency.

There's another potential benefit to this system. If for some reason you dislike Vancian "prepare some obscure key ahead of time and hope you find the right lock" spellcasting you could treat carried spell components as "prepared" spells. Your magic user is still limited to a specific number of castings per day but they can cast any spell they know so long as they're prepared to, thus making Floating Disk, Hold Portal, or Read Languages much more likely to be cast at all.

Maybe this method would satisfy Elmcat, probably not unless the components and rituals themselves are actually interesting (something I also fin desirable), unfortunately it'll be no help at all to people who want to do away with magic systems altogether.

While pondering this post I was of course thinking of this Paolo Grecco post, because I basically always think of something Paolo wrote when I think about magic systems.

Addenda:

Went back and realized I should credit Rasperry Cat for the idea about spell components not depleting with use.
I was similarly inspired by how remedies work in Mythic Bastionland.

Who I blog for

2026-09-27T15:59:59.988737+00:00

I read Sylvia’s lovely post Who I blog for, and I wanted to write my own view on it. It’s not that different from hers, actually, and I think that’s the case for many bloggers.

First and foremost, my blog is an outlet for my own thoughts and feelings. I’ve tried journaling in other ways, and sometimes still do, but blogging is what makes it consistent. I think it comes down to the feeling of creating something outside of my own safe space, even though no one might read it.

This is where the voice in my head kicks in:

“That’s enough, you blog for yourself. It doesn’t matter if others read it or not. You don’t need it.”

The soundtrack of my life. Maybe it’s the Scandinavian Law of Jante haunting me. I don’t know, but I do know that the voice isn’t quite telling the truth. I do want others to read my posts.

Not that I would stop writing if no one did (or is that also a lie, hmmm... maybe it is), but it’s a nice feeling knowing that at least someone felt something. A connection, a sense of community. Sometimes on the other side of the world, yet closer than the neighbor next door.

Quite a few of my posts are about blogging. I know, meta-blogging is the pineapple pizza of the blogosphere, but I happen to like it. Blogging is my number one hobby and I love seeing others getting into it. Every time I read a post like first blog I get all warm and fuzzy inside. Hopefully, some of my pizza slices make others start or stick with blogging.

A handful of my posts have touched on the subject of my constant doubts and history of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Hearing from readers who’ve found them helpful is what’s meant the most to me.

It took many, many years for me to dare to speak up about these issues, even to my closest friends and family. Writing about it in public would’ve been completely out of the question.

Now I’m able to do so. Learning that others felt connected and empowered through it is, to me, the most beautiful example of how wonderful and powerful the blogging community can be.

Hello World

2026-09-28T15:57:37.733305+00:00

It is Monday the 28th September 2026.

I've been struggling with the idea of too many ideas right now. I'm an aspiring coach, a freelance worker and a person who struggles to focus. I sometimes get these waves of pure concentration where nothing can take me away from what I'm doing. Otherwise, like today, I cannot get started.

I have a busy mind and used to tame it with meditation, a skill I took a long time to develop but has sadly now been forgotten about. As the annoyance of the not being able to focus mounted, I invested in some CBD gummies today to put my mind at rest and make progress in work and everything else I want to do... but there is the main point. I want to do so much.

I noted down, in my notebook with a notable bit of art on the front (you know the ones I mean, some have Van Gogh's Sunflowers, others have The Great Wave off Kanagawa on them), everything I want to do on a personal basis. Some would have professional benefits as well but , the list will grow and change but as it stands, it has 30 things written. 30. This is coupled with working and starting my own business (that isn't going the best at the moment) and also the necessities of sleeping and just enjoying life. How on earth am I supposed to get all 30 things done?

The reality of this is that I won't, some of these activities on my list will never happen. Some take years to master and I do not have infinite time on this planet. However, some are lifestyle changes that would benefit my life.

I once heard that you should have four different types of hobbies for balance. They are the following:

One that challenges you mentally
One that keeps you fit
One that is creative and shows expression.
One that just simply makes you happy.

Now, they can be quite arbitrary but if they make sense to you, then they must make sense.

My list has now grown to 36. I have them in a table and now I'm trying to work out if I can somewhat make this into a formula.

A new wind of inspiration has come to me from writing this which is good. I will be back by Friday with more. I'll be doing this for 4 Fridays to see how things go.

Wish me luck.

All the best

27 - depression is so cruel

2026-09-28T20:37:09.941276+00:00

Depression is so cruel.

it's agonizing, when you think about it. when you've gotten this far and realizing you have wasted your youth so thoroughly thanks to this common but horrible disease that your prospect for the future is bleak. No money, no job, no nothing. just you and the ashes of every plan of being more productive, more disciplined, more proactive, left as ashes that once held a lot of dreams.

it's genuinely tiring, to have one slip up ruin your mind like that. That this condition can be spurned on by something like a change of the seasons, a change in medication, or something so trivial, is agonizing. You've lived long enough to recognize that it's temporary, but the pain of enduring is one that you're starting to realize you can barely tolerate any more.

why i hate 7th grade

2026-09-28T17:50:13.710827+00:00

constantly talking over each other (and me)
random yelling
random animal noises
random clapping
never reading instructions
asking the same question several times due to never reading and/or listening to instructions
the "play" fighting that suddenly turns into choking
throwing school material at each other and on the floor
hitting each other with notebooks
trying to play soccer inside the classroom
scoffing when asked to do something
not doing anything, really, even graded work
running around and out of the classroom
getting angry with their failing grades despite not doing any work
6-7

Writing this in the middle of 2 out of 4 English periods with my 7th grade groups (urban public school). They do not know how to behave in society/around other people and are extremely resentful of any attempt at teaching them to: listen, wait their turn to speak, not to hit each other. I've previously taught middle school from 2019-2023 before coming back this year; these are the worst children I have ever had in my classroom. Most of them were around 7 years old when the pandemic hit and it's like they lost and never recovered any sort of ability to socialize and behave in public. There is no way to work with them that doesn't end up with me stressed as shit, with a migraine or screaming. I hate it! So much!

When Servers Go Away…

2026-09-28T15:00:00+00:00

If your smart device requires the internet to work, it will die when the servers go away someday.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, The Verge:

Weber, which bought the company in January 2021 and stopped making the ovens in 2022, shut off the app and cloud services, leaving its users with a sleek-looking toaster oven. There will be no app control, no software updates, and no new AI food recognition to crisp that strudel perfectly. You can still use it as an oven, but there will be no support or parts, and if you have to factory reset it for some reason, that could be the nail in the coffin. [...]

The Nest Secure, early Nest Thermostats, Belkin’s WeMo line, Neato’s robot vacuums, the Brava smart oven, Logitech’s Pop buttons, Bose’s SoundTouch speakers, and Sengled’s smart bulbs all lost their lifelines. While some were saved by local APIs and protocols — such as Zigbee, Thread, and Apple’s HomeKit, or a Home Assistant integration — most are like the June Oven, destined to live out their days in a zombie state.

Link:

The Smart Home Graveyard is Getting Crowded, by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, The Verge

All versions of you

2026-09-28T01:21:00+00:00

Dear Dad,

It's getting colder. Mom's toughing it out in flannel pajamas and I have a plug-in heater pointed into her room.

If you were still here and not in hospice, but doing your usual antics you would have been screaming at the top of your lungs that it's too cold and that the central heat should be on at 78 because it's your house. You wouldn't even mind the wild winds outside or the fact that we're closing out September with a Nor'easter. It would only matter what you were feeling at whatever fleeting moment.

However, if you were still in hospice, I don't think there'd be much change to how I'm navigating now (household-wise), since you were mostly immobile for the half of it. If you were still here bedridden, I would've likely bought some flannel sheets for your hospital bed and a new comforter. Ugh, actually I don't even want to think about it.

I've been trying to hard to put aside the versions of you that were sick and trying to find memories of you from before but it's been such a long time that I worry I've lost them already. I'm sorry — I've said this before. Maybe they will come to me randomly when I am not searching for them.

I think that if you were not sick, you would've also held off on turning on the central heat — you used to hold off for as long as possible because you didn't want the electric bill to get too high, too soon. I also think you'd be dressed in your warmest fleece, the one with the Olympics logo on it. I always wondered where you got that sweater. Did you go to the Olympics? Was it a gift? Or did you buy it as a keepsake from a random Time Life collection like where you got all your keepsake plates and figurines that I have no idea what to do with now.

I haven't cleaned your room. I think we'll be holding it off now that fall is here. Maybe we'll just start packing stuff. But we did manage to donate some of your items in August, so I hope they meet someone who needs them and puts them to good use.

Both me and mom are not in the mood to do very much and it's been hard to get her motivated to do anything with the days getting shorter. It'll be harder when it becomes even colder — I'm wondering how long she can be a good sport about the heating before it becomes necessary to turn it on for her health. Maybe I'll have to turn it on mid-October.

But this is a milestone if ever there was one: not turning on the heater at the start of Fall. The past few years, I've had to go straight from AC to opening the windows to turning on the heater two weeks into September, worried that you'd both catch a cold since the house is old and drafty.

I took mom out the other day and showed her some lego sets that I wanted to buy. They were floral arrangements — Legos for adults — and I said if we put one together, we wouldn't have to worry about fresh flowers for your altar in the winter. She's semi-interested. I'm just trying to find something for her to do than rot on Facebook all day.

We're okay dad. We're eating. Sometimes we're sleeping. I'm taking mom to all her appointments. I had to reschedule her ENT appointment last week because they never received the referral from her PCP, so we went to Costco instead. Now we just gotta transition from Summer into Fall.

We miss you. All versions of you.

book club: kiss of the spider woman by manuel puig

2026-09-28T14:45:00+00:00

In the Grizzly Gazette book club, we've voted on reading Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig next, suggested by Psycheoma. We kinda lost sight of the book club and posting it in time :p

I've struggled with reading fiction for a while now; I manage to squeeze some in here and there, like when I read The Dispossessed 3 years ago and loved it, but most of the books I own and end up finishing are non-fiction. It wasn't always this way, especially as a child, but the older I got, the more I felt pressured to read things that had an obvious "return of investment".

Fiction can teach you a lot in unexpected ways, but you never know whether it will just be a nice story for you, or something that makes you think of life, society or yourself differently, and in which ways that will be. You have to start reading and trust the process, just enjoying it for what it is, and let it give you whatever it ends up being, even when it is not life-changing or improving on anything.

Meanwhile, buying a book specifically about a specific topic/field or an autobiography immediately tells you upfront what you can expect and what you'll be taught, no surprises. Having read it carries the promise of improving in that area or at least having valuable knowledge. I like that predictability and usefulness, and I am a very impatient person with a tough schedule at times, so I am unfortunately obsessed with not wasting my time.

After all these years of barely any fiction reading, I've become lazy and inflexible. It's now so, so hard for me to give books a chance without knowing definitively if I'll enjoy them and what I'll take away from them. Non-fiction is easy for me to read because I already have a reason to care: Me. I'll relate it all back to me, and my interests, what I already know, or who or what I want to be. Anything that is not relevant or interesting to me can be disregarded in self help.

Fiction challenges that, because the beginning of a book will just present me with characters that do not yet give me a reason to care. I don't know them, I don't know anything about them yet, and I cannot relate them back to me. I'll have to sit there patiently until everything is slowly revealed and the characters become more than random names on a page, and may be completely unlike me. That isn't easy for me, but I'd like to change.

I went in completely blind. I had not looked up anything about it and had no idea what to expect.

The narrative style (a dialogue without names showing who says what, but it becomes apparent when you continue reading and see how they refer to each other) is definitely a surprise and took me a while to detect and get used to, but then it is fairly easy to read and understand. I was done with it after 2 days, in which I read for about 4-5 hours in the morning.

The book released in 1976 centers two prisoners in Buenos Aires in 1975, one a trans woman referred to as Molina (her last name), the other a man named Valentín. While Molina is incarcerated for "corrupting a minor", Valentín is a political prisoner because of his involvement with a revolutionary group.

The story is told through their dialogue, which is mostly Molina describing movie plots to Valentín, many of them centering on romance and having real life equivalents. Through discussing the movies, they occasionally reveal things about their outside life or themselves. Later on, the story continues through written reports by a third party.

Molina's gender is mostly not acknowledged; she repeatedly states she sees herself as a woman and is not a man, yet the prison system and even Valentín continue to misgender her and simply see her as a homosexual man. Even the English Wikipedia page makes no mention of it.

(Spoilers ahead)

After about half of the book, it gets revealed that Molina is in this cell together with Valentín because she is cooperating with the prison on getting more information out of him so they can arrest more members of the group. Her meetings with the warden are covered up by getting groceries and pretending they were brought by her mother and lawyer, and her incentive is an early pardon.

While everyone involved seems to not (fully) acknowledge Molina as a woman, they are absolutely aware that she is queer, to them an effeminate gay man, and use what they associate with that femininity to their own gain. And Molina indeed fits the bill: A caring and romantic person who wants to be liked, wants to help people and build a bond. She helps Valentín as he is sick from food that was intentionally tampered with to weaken him, makes him food and tea, even washes his stuff and gives him hers when he shits himself from it. She even has sex with him, seemingly consensual.

It reminded me a lot of the practice of V-coding, which is the common practice of placing trans women in the same prison cell as male inmates to placate them. The idea is that by getting to rape the trans woman, he'd become calmer and more docile. It's absolutely horrible. While in this book, Molina apparently wasn't raped and wasn't just placed there to calm down an aggressor, she nonetheless seems to have been used specifically for her femininity and willingness to have sex with men, in the hopes to break through the walls of a very closed-off man and get some intel. The warden and sergeant even toy with the idea to release Molina, orchestrate a fake admission by her and surveil her in the hopes that the revolutionary group would seek her out to get revenge, which would give them a chance to pounce. It's a great fictional, but sadly very realistic case showing how far the justice system was (and is) willing to go to abuse and endanger queer people if it helps their investigations.

Molina seems to want to be a neutral party to all of this initially; telling the warden openly she's making no progress, but asking for extensions. She has become attached to Valentín, and who knows who else she could be matched up with? It could be worse. At the same time, she gets multiple chances to press him on his political contacts but chooses not to, even one time telling him that she'd like to hear anything else but the name of his comrades. She fears that they could interrogate her and she'd spill, both betraying him and painting a target on her back after her release. Slowly, she changes her mind, and Valentín convinces her to relay messages to his comrades once she is out, telling her who to call, where and how. He wants her to get involved with the group(s) too.

Unfortunately, she gets surveilled for longer than Valentín said she could expect, and in ways she possibly failed to detect after a while. Thinking she was safe, she makes moves that make it obvious to surveillance that she is reaching out to the group and trying to get picked up by them. Sadly, at one final attempt (which already seemed decently hopeless and dangerous to Molina, as she already withdrew all she could from her bank account and left it to her mum), she gets nabbed by agents just as members of the group drive by to kill her and wound an agent, likely to prevent her from spilling anything. It feels tragic, another trans woman killed, used as cannon fodder, used in the agenda of the men around her, just seeking for connection, love, a bigger purpose. One can only hope she felt at peace as she died for a supposedly greater good.

Meanwhile, Valentín is still in prison, getting tortured during interrogations. He thinks of both Marta, his love, and Molina, as his mind drifts off on a high dose of morphine in the infirmary, even mixing them up. He regrets what happened to Molina because of him.

My wife asked me if it was a fun book. Kinda depends on the definition... I was interested in it enough that I was able to read it for hours on end. Was I truly excited or gripped, always expecting the next turn or twist soon? Mostly no, it was very predictable in the sense that the prison days would pass and another movie would be discussed; I think I was only glued to the paper when the surveillance reports came up, because I wanted to know how Molina would act - would she really follow his instructions, and what was her support network outside like? I wasn't laughing or crying either, I had no strong emotions, but it was nice to read, it kept me company, it filled my time in a way that didn't feel like a waste.

It's not a book I would put on a list of recommendations, but if anyone was planning to read it or asking if it was any good, I'd encourage them to.

Published 28 Sep, 2026

the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me

2026-09-28T22:53:00+00:00

In high school, a well-liked acquaintance and I traded CDs.

We'd meet at our news club, he'd give me a CD from his jacket, drug-dealer style.

Stevie Ray Vaughn's Soul to Soul and the Alabama Shakes' Sound and Color are the ones that stand out to me. Especially Sound and Color, because I ripped the corner of the case and spent the rest of the week with a bad stomach ache.

I felt whatever we had was uneven, so I gave him a friendship bracelet. It was purple, his favourite colour. I wanted something. It's okay to want something.

I'm putting this here to preserve it forever. It's one of those things that makes life worth living.

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Signposting, Signseeking, and Agency Spirals: Hazards for the Ambitious in Tabletop RPGs

2026-09-28T14:32:00+00:00

Aleksander Rostov, Idiot Doom Spiral, Disco Elysium

There are endless ways to improve one's GMing. But given the fondness many of us hold for our earliest games, as crude and unpolished as they might seem in hindsight... could it be that running fun, engaging games isn't actually that hard? Do veteran GMs, as they acquire opinions, ambitions, and maladaptive habits, get in their own way?

Of course, before committing to a mid-life GMing crisis, it's good to remember that the rose-tinted games of yesteryear were from a simpler time. But if novice GMs are capable of running engaging games, it's probably true that doing so requires less expertise then the volume of GMing discourse™ implies; and also likely that of the GMing practices decried as bad form, many were reinforced and cemented by experience.

Wrestling with one of those habits - reliance on what I call Signposting - started my own journey into the OSR. In their purest form, 'signposts' are instances of design intended to influence player action. They're essentially unavoidable - all design influences player action - but when wielded intentionally, they can be quite powerful. Yet as a GM's reliance on 'signposting' grows, the subtle consequences for player agency can spiral out of control.

While not yet in the TTRPG lexicon, the idea of signposting is adjacent to concepts most GMs are already familiar with. If railroading is a stick, then signposting is a diffuse, socially acceptable carrot. Neither is 'linear prep,' but either can be used to encourage the players to stay in it. Yet unlike railroading, signposts are omnipresent and make no mandates, making signposting the (often unconscious) tool of choice for pro-agency GMs. Its once all parties become accustomed to the arrangement that things go off (or on?) the rails.

Today's topic is all this and more, so strap in readers - this is a long one. The theory-slop train is officially leaving the station. All aboard!

Signposting for Dummies

The literary definition of signposting describes the process by which an author imparts structure or direction within a text for the sake of the reader's comprehension. Transition words like 'however' signpost an upcoming textual shift, keeping the structure natural and clear without clunky, flow-breaking asides.

Translated to level design, trading the 'text' for the 'game world,' the art of signposting is that of subtly influencing, or guiding, player behavior. Designers often signpost by adding extra light or color to features they want to draw the player's attention to. More broadly, while pasting-in 'you should go here' in glossy red text could harm immersion, something like the ever-visible, horizon-framed arches of Skyrim's Bleak Falls Barrow form a natural, dietetic beacon.

Signposting (if we expand the scope) can be achieved through non-visual phenomenon as well. A retrieve-the-stolen-artifact quest in Riverwood, the first post-tutorial settlement, leads the player straight to Bleak Falls Barrow. A few hours later (if following the main quest) the player is sent right back to retrieve a different artifact, assuming the dungeon wasn't already cleared out.

Todd does NOT want you to miss his masterstroke of level design. (IC)

This, of course, could be taken even further. What if you couldn't leave Riverwood before visiting the Barrow? What if the game started in the Barrow? Neither escalation is unreasonable, though once a player's action (or lack thereof) is more 'forced/disallowed' than 'influenced/guided,' you're probably dealing with a bog-standard restriction, which of course has its own valued place in the level designer's toolbox. Cobble together enough 'reasonable' restrictions for the wrong reasons, though, and you get poor-man's signposting. Or as it's better known in TTRPG discourse, railroading.

Despite 'sign' implying the guidance of exploration, the real potential kicks in when signposting is applied to other aspects of gameplay. For a final related example, how one solves Bleak Falls Barrow's pillar-spinning puzzle is excessively hinted at, including not-so-subtle carvings in the puzzle-room itself which literally spell out the answer. All of Skyrim's puzzles are designed for toddlers, but that's the point. The design influences player behavior; that's signposting, baybee!

Of course, the term can become useless if stretched too broadly, but the point here is the designer's agenda. Level design also evokes atmosphere, provides challenge, tell stories, and sets boundaries. Signposting (what will this design push the players to do?) is just another tool in the toolbox.

Does the location of these 'red painted' barrels give you any strategic ideas? Hah, get signposted, idiot. (IC)

In TTRPGs, where level design is called 'prep,' the most obvious utility of signposting is gently guiding the players towards prepared content and away from everything else. At its simplest, merely choosing to describe a feature is enough to 'suggest' the players interact with it, and the usual tactics of rumors and quests tend to be more than enough to get the party from point A to point B.

Similarly common are combinations of signposts (helpful NPCs, situational information, convenient tools, etc) which turn an open-ended, difficult encounter (how are we gonna take down this dragon) into an easier, closed one (oh finally, the instructions for taking down a dragon). While the players could seek out this aid on their own, many GMs default to 'handing' the player most if not all of what they need through generous interpretation of skill checks, NPCs, and 'well your character would know'-isms, ensuring the heroes feel like they've cleverly saved the day without having to actually rely on their players' cleverness.

Taken a step further, paternalistic NPCs, patrons, or factions might regularly assign, support, or suggest the party's activities, providing consistent influence on a campaign scale. Here it's a little easier to see where excessively signposted gameplay could start to diverge. Is the party's relationship with the faction nuanced and interesting? Or, through the urgency of the 'plot' or the real life expectation of playing along, is the GM prescribing the players' actions for them?

Of course, having the GM set the agenda every week may be what your play situation demands. (IC)

On a even larger scale, a simple prophecy informing the party that they're the 'heroes of destiny' (a mistake I myself made one-too-many times) dramatically influences how players decide which activities are appropriate, for the rest of the campaign! That's not to say that the players won't be into it, or that such a game is doomed to fail. But like with reasonable restrictions eventually turning into a railroad, the compounding of reasonable signposts makes the question of 'what are we going to do this session?' shrink smaller and smaller.

At this point some alarm bells might be ringing. Does signposting harm players' agency? Maybe! It really depends; on the players themselves and on the intent of the GM. Signposting is a continuum; every design decision has the potential to influence player behavior. But there are consequences when that influence, intentionally wielded, seeps into most aspects of play. Even the least arbitrary, blorb-pilled GMs (i.e. those concerned with the consistency of their game worlds; see Elmcat's take) may find themselves hampering their players' agency should baked-in, internally-consistent signposting be used to shepherd them around. As discussed last time,

"Excessive signposting doesn't really restrict player agency, it just ensures it isn't necessary."

"It's not that you can't do things the GM didn't plan for, it's just that those options tend to be unattractive."

Taken to the extreme, when what could be player-led initiatives are routinely suggested, spurred, or made obvious through the circumstances of the game, signposting eventually delivers a game that plays itself. Not because it's quantum and unpredictable, but because if there's anything around worth doing, at any scale, the party can rest easy knowing it'll be designed to get them do it.

Signseeking and Other Semantic Nonsense

If the process is gradual and goodwill is maintained, players can become accustomed to this arrangement.

"This ... precipitates a shift in the player's job from acting on their own desires to figuring out what the GM wants them to do (even if the GM emphatically states otherwise) ..."

Let's call this sort of reactive metagaming, the other side of the signposting coin, 'Signseeking.' It exists on a spectrum within every player's mind, acted-on or not. While these instincts may or may not be verbalized or realized, the more used the players get to the GM 'supporting' one option over others, the more prevalent it becomes.

Where is the plot? Wait, was that guy at the tavern "important"? GM, are we doing this wrong? (IC)

From the players' perspective, metagaming via signseeking can seem like the polite, mature thing to do. In excessively linear or low-information games, blatant signseeking might be the only reliable way to move the game forward. A particularly lazy GM (not that one) might even come to rely on this fact.

Nonetheless, some practical applications of signseeking seem reasonable; it must be good for players to choose to engage with the material the GM actually prepped, after all. But if the players weren't likely to engage without metagaming, the problem, really, is that the GM has prepped an uninteresting or PC-misaligned game. Signseeking isn't doing what sounds the most fun or logical in character (what I'd call 'natural' or 'authentic' play); it's abandoning those drives to optimize towards metagaming when authentic play is no longer as rewarding.

This is (rather crudely) described by the Alexandrian as a symptom of Abused Gamer Syndrome, which he explains as a consequence of formerly railroaded players coming to believe that 'finding the railroad' is the default mode of play. It's not hard to imagine this in players exposed to particularly manipulative GMs, but I don't find it sufficient to explain the origins of most rail/plot/sign-seeking behavior. There are too many novice players who come to the table naturally favoring this style (perhaps because signposts are everywhere in gaming), and too many more who seem to have adapted the habit despite otherwise thriving.

But... isn't excessive signposting just railroading? After all, implying that a certain decision is 'good,' or at least, always providing an obvious one, is implicitly pressuring the players to follow the GM's lead, right?

And now, a brief interlude into semantics, where interesting arguments die torturous, pointless deaths. (IC)

My goal is drawing attention to a phenomenon which I believe GMs against railroading (whatever that means to them) are particularly susceptible to, but if it's easier to imagine this signposting stuff as having really been railroading all along, be my guest - the point is still worth making! That said, despite the plentiful digital ink spilled over what constitutes a rail, a line, or a quantum ogre, genuine railroading (to me) is underlain by the assumption of conflicting play agendas between the players and the GM.

Breaking this down a bit, I like Rise Up Comus's distinction between GMing which is arbitrary (what he calls quantum, where the reality of play is retroactively edited to suit the GMs needs) or restrictive (what he calls railroading, where play itself is extremely defined and narrow). Taken to their extremes, both harm player agency: the first by making choice pointless, and the second by reducing the number of valid options to choose from. But in order to satisfy what most people mean when they describe being railroaded - given the negative connotation that you aren't just moving in a straight line, but that you cannot get off - that restrictiveness or arbitrariness must extend beyond limiting character options to causing the players themselves, as participants in a collaborative game, to feel their desires for play suppressed.

If the will of the players is to sit back and enjoy the ride, I'd find that style best described as passive, linear play. Signposting guides player choice but risks minimizing it with overuse, while railroading is a pejorative applied to GMs whose abuse their game-given authority to assert their choices over their players.

Why does this distinction matter? Because the majority of GMs, far from fixated on dominating their friends, are just desperate to keep them entertained. Some might prefer open-ended situations, others might favor a clear narrative, but I suspect most would be delighted if their players actually took the initiative for once (despite overlooking the cause of that behavior's rarity). I'm serious! Despite what r/rpghorrorstories might make you think, most GMs aren't sitting around, grumbling about their stupid players and their pathetic little ideas getting in the way. Well, fine, certainly some are.

For these very special GMs, my humble advice can be summarized as 'aww man, comeon, don't do that.' (IC)

But most of them, especially the new ones, just want to run a good game for their friends. The idea of needing to carefully encourage their players to act of their own accord doesn't even cross their minds. And to be honest, it shouldn't have to. TTRPGs usually just work! If they didn't, no amount of blogosphere advice could've ever gotten the hobby off the ground.

So what changes? Why might those very same, starry-eyed GMs wake up one day to realize that authentic play is slipping away in a game that suddenly appears to be rail-shaped?

Ambition, Fear, and the Agency Spiral

The real danger, I think, lies in how the seemingly innocuous behaviors of signposting and signseeking are amplified and cross-pollinated. And how well-meaning players and GMs, in trying to capture or recapture some magic they think they're missing, might make everything worse. Let's work through an example.

It starts innocently enough. As GMs become more experienced they have a natural tendency to dial things up, and as the players learn the structure (and tells) of play, their ambitions - expressed in increasingly complex backstories, builds, and goals - grow in parallel. As exciting (and relatively modern!) as this evolution is, it puts the game under increasing strain.

With enough commitment and the right expectations, the results can be frankly fantastic...

Matt Mercer Effect this, unrealistic expectations that, blah blah blah. Did you know that it's actually cool and based to aspire to something? (IC)

...but far too often, the GM, being the participant who feels most responsible for the game's success (and the most likely to be an unrepentant control freak) takes on the majority of the burden themselves. A fear of failure and a lack of trust in their players amplifies that burden even more.

The expectation of interwoven backstories sets up story-beats that the GM must find a way to pay off. The players' investment into build-crafting (you know these guys aren't playing Shadowdark) necessitates regular, balanced combat encounters, made exponentially more challenging by complex system rules. And that's not even to mention any of the overarching story goals the GM has promised themselves they must bring to pass.

The GM has, to put it mildly, a lot on their plate. Never, at any point, have they wanted to railroad. But what else are they to do? In the hopes of creating an amazing game, the GM has instead imagined one. What's left isn't to see what the players make of it, but to find a way to, well, squeeze them in. How does one pull this off?

Signposting, of course.

Just a more few friendly NPCs to set the players on their way. Oh, and very intelligent but completely unknowable bad guys, can't risk them getting one-upped before the grand finale when we find out which one of the players is the BBEG's son. No Jaquaysing the dungeons here, one way in and one way out means the combat goes how I expect; I mean, their backstories are so intertwined with the plot, I can't imagine what would happen to the campaign if somebody actually died. Think of the prophecy! (IC)

The players won't be 'forced' into a single one of these encounters. But this is exactly what they wanted! Why would they do anything else?

Maybe it works, at least at first. Cool moments are still indeed cool! And even if one dimension for expressing agency is shut down, creative, headstrong players often find another one (for better or for worse). But for most players, it's becoming more and more obvious where the fun 'is' and 'isn't.' Sessions have an agenda now, and the players have accepted that it's their job to get through it. They wanted these high highs too, after all; signseeking to more efficiently find them makes even more sense than before.

Yet, despite the GM's Atlas-like efforts, this style of play is less engaging for most in the long run. Players are so out of practice that when confronted with a real choice, they find authentic play frustrating! Apathy is right around the corner.

This is bad enough as is, but consider: might the GM interpret this as their own failure to deliver a sufficiently engaging narrative? A failure to give the players, who now constantly ask for it, enough direction?

Enter the Agency Spiral.

As the GM crams in more content the players have even less say in, actual participation becomes more and more lopsided. And what might have started as an open-ended situation is beginning to decidedly resemble a rail.

Breaking the Wheel

There's actually a pretty cool analogy to systems theory here. GM-player interactions can be seen as forming a complex, adaptive system, which are notoriously hard to predict and full of behavioral feedback loops. Like the stock market. And Dwarf Fortress.

And as far as negative feedback loops go, it could certainly be worse! (IC)

Given the difficulty of 'guiding' one of these systems, it might be better to focus on making the underlying experience deeper and richer than risking Goodhart's wrath by constantly pushing the players and yourself to be more productive and engaged. Continuing our systems theory theme, Agency Spirals might simply be an attractor state these tables run the risk of drifting towards.

Thankfully, there are plenty of prophylactics. The ancient OSR maxim, 'prep situations, not plots' handily prevents the spiral from getting off the ground. Even if you prefer straightforward, event-based play, prepping in terms of the properties of and interactions between relevant fictional elements (instead of timelines) might be the single best way to encourage players to interact with the world. But sadly, in an age of actual play and epic storylines, it might be obvious why so many GMs simply don't see things this way.

But hey, I get it! I don't want to give up my precious storylines either. I'm getting used to letting them emerge during play, but there's something to be said for a good old fashioned ready-made twist. My advice is to just loosen your grip a little. You don't have to run a sandbox, but you should trust your players to be satisfied with their own decisions. Give them the power to derail sessions and fail quests, and you might find they use it more responsibly. You might even get a little more comfortable with uncertainty yourself.

In fact, here's a handy-dandy flowchart to help keep you on track (and for me to point to when the semantics police come to arrest me for making up new words).

Dotted lines reflect edge cases where 1) despite limited use of hard restrictions, excessive signposting is used to impose a conflicting GM agenda (which is how I define railroading), or 2) players accept excessive hard restrictions on play but nonetheless begin signseeking. These are rare, as 1) once GMs are willing to negate their players, they usually aren't subtle about it, and 2) once hard restrictions become omnipresent, the rails aren't exactly hard to find.

If you do want to run a sandbox, or perhaps more wisely, a local, interesting situation, you're in good hands here at the local blogosphere. Take a look around; find something that looks cool! It's always a good idea to run and learn from prewritten adventures, especially as I imagine the GMs most susceptible to agency spirals are the ones who tend to homebrew all their games from scratch. If you must write something yourself, instead of a plotted-outline, you can't go wrong with a few factions vying for power in a local region filled with interesting characters and magic-filled locales. Cool, unscripted stuff is guaranteed to happen. That's most of what Act 1 in Baulder's Gate 3 is! You could do worse.

Anyway, I also hope it's clear that while some of this terminology is new, the problems and solutions pertaining to them are not. The Agency Spiral is also the folly of excessive people pleasing. GMs will be especially tempted to rely on signposting with players who aren't invested in play in the first place. Online play (and tight schedules in general) makes pretty much all of this worse!

And the end of the day, every game must strike a compromise between the benefits and consequences of arbitrary or consistent restrictions, signposts, and, to put it another way, player handholding. In fact, if you found this entire post baffling, it might be because you're used to headstrong players who couldn’t care less about the subliminal guidance you may or may not have attempted to impart. Good for you! When they annoy you, remember, their dense foreheads are worth their weight in gold.

But if you did find this all to be eerily relatable, know that you aren't alone! This (obviously) happened to me, it's happened to very talented GMs I know, and I suspect it happens all over the hobby. The good news is that this hobby is naturally enjoyable, even when things don't work out how we'd imagined. Those games were probably still worth every moment, and your future games will be as well.

So go forth! Slay some dragons! And think about leaving the instruction manual at home.

I just want to be okay.

2026-09-28T19:28:27.332290+00:00

I just want to feel okay.

Yes I have tried to make life a bit more sufferable for others. I try. I really do.

I just haven’t been able to make myself proud. I am not talking about others. Not my parents. Not my friends. Not my colleagues. I don’t care about what they think.

Me. I want to make myself proud. I want to make something or be somewhere and tell myself: yes you have made it I am proud of you. Good work. You can rest now.

Maybe I am on that path. But why is everything so damn hard?

Other bad photos I took at the beach

2026-09-28T16:41:00+00:00

This is what it actually looked like when I was taking those pictures of the darkened trash removal barge I posted yesterday. I needed a flashlight to avoid tripping off the top of the quay:

This is a picture I took half a second before this wave actually hit me and made my shoes nasty:

I was taking random pictures of the shore while walking around and later realized that because of the way the edge of the beach curves, and the way the hills work on the horizon here, it absolutely does not look I had the camera basically level when I took this particular (mediocre) picture. In particular, it starts to look like I wasn't holding the camera straight when you stand further away from it.

I was, though!! I am learning from this and other shots that "taking good pictures" means "only taking pictures of things which are visually legible and do not look inherently like a mistake".

The moon was extremely full lately, which is part of why I've been doing this nighttime stuff in the first place. Anyway, here's another angle of the same hillside, the one on the right side of that previous image which helped to make it look inherently mistaken:

Sleepy Zebes

2026-09-28T19:19:00+00:00

The season changed last week. The wind kicked up, the clouds blanketed the sky, and our subtropical summer briskly gave way to seasonally and historically appropriate temperatures. It’s colder on the top floor of my pre-war apartment building where the wind howls through the stairwell and the breeze breaches the windows, and so I feel in my bones that it is time to go apple picking. It is time to get tickets for Hanif’s annual show. It is time to listen to History Books and make chili. It is time to reread The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

It’s been kicking my ass this year. I’ve read two pages a day, tops. The 200-year old grammar and syntax, always a hurdle, has become a wall. And I just haven’t been able to read much at all this past week. The books I’ve been working through each day are piled on the coffee table. My focus isn’t there. Still, I persist. Most things worth reading, to me, have been challenging. Slogs, even. The classics I liked and disliked in AP Lit. The theory books I bought for class or because they were on sale in 2020. The novels and collections I checked out when another writer recommended them. There are exceptions, of course. Sometimes books are easy to read, comprehend, and remember—in nonfiction because I feel the author is reconciling my own unanswered questions, in fiction because a narrative is thrilling or a romance intoxicating. Other times I even enjoy the struggle. Such with Washington Irving, a linguistic, temporal, and cultural foreigner I relate to purely through geography and a mutual appreciation for the season.

I also tried playing Super Metroid on the 3DS’s Virtual Console this weekend. I swear that, after getting the Morph Ball and Missiles, I went up the elevator and nothing happened. It was only after exhausting every other action I could think to try twice that I phoned a friend. I went back up the elevator. Pirates were there now. My game continued… Until I got stuck down a pit, a tunnel full of alien bats leading to a locked door I couldn’t open. I shot lasers. Rockets. Jumped. Morph balled. I looked up a guide: Shoot the red doors with five missiles. Of course! If something doesn’t work, I should simply try doing the same thing again, even more.

It was here that I knew I would only get through this game with a guide. And while the exploration, atmosphere, and action would all be the same, I felt I would deny myself the game’s puzzles and mysteries, challenges I found more interesting, discoveries more rewarding, than just fumbling around in the air trying to avoid acrobatic space pirates. My second attempt at Metroid had gone worse than my first. At least I wasn’t being paid to tell the internet my opinion about it this time.

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But why does playing with a walkthrough feel like it undermines play? Why do I refuse to approach a difficult game with some study aid and the perseverance I do texts? The former might be answered in the pages of one of those books sitting on my coffee table.

In The Score, C. Thi Nguyen contrasts the ’object beauty’ of traditional media and art with the ’process beauty’ of games, cooking, music, and sport: “In the traditional arts, the beauty is in the art object itself. It’s in the painting, the song. It’s in the sculpture that’s radiantly gorgeous, that novel that’s bittersweet and moving. But in games, so much of the time, the beauty shows up not in the game but in the player. Games help mold, shape, and heighten beauty in the player’s own actions.” There’s a lot I appreciate about The Score, vocabulary and observations that help me articulate why we play games, but I fundamentally disagree on this point. There is process beauty in all art. I have felt moved and disoriented standing before monumental modern art like Vir Heroicus Sublimis. I have felt my life affirmed by letting a movie like The Boy and the Heron guide my thoughts with it sights and sounds for two hours.

Learning about modern art can help me appreciate Barnett Newman, trying to cast The Boy and the Heron into the mold of Hayao Miyazaki’s career can be diminishing, and playing Super Metroid with a walkthrough feels a bit like when I first started reading theory for Dr. Wheeler’s classes. Coming to class, having no idea what I read beyond a string of words, then working through Debord sentence by sentence together. I didn’t know what I was learning that semester until long after I had learned it—until I could read theory by myself, slowly still, but independently. Until I could pick up any novel I found daunting to broach in high school and know it was a matter of time, and maybe some effort, to read the prose. At the culmination of my undergrad, I had grown used to the syntax of translated Greek in Aristotle and Plato. Contemporary YA novels and lit fic felt easier to read when I began reading more for pleasure. But now I had bigger questions—of craft and theme. And to this day, I feel like I’m still trying to read at that level. Could I ever play Metroid like I read Irving? Maybe. I’d like to play Ravenous! I could play Dread on my own, after all, but I didn’t like it. What did laboring in Dread produce? Who would I be at the end of playing Super Metroid?

I like to look at books. Or, I like to think that I am the kind of person who spends more time looking at books and less at screens than I really do. I don’t really care about being a person who is good at Super Metroid or retro videogame logic, who has played all the hits like someone who’s read the classics. I know from playing Shadow of the Ninja with Cole that, like reading old texts, it would make me better at playing games old and new. But right now? I just don’t really want to juggle a second screen.

Surfing the Smallweb IV

2026-09-28T22:14:01.779871+00:00

This post is part four of the Surfing the Smallweb series.

ReedyBear's Blog

This blog's theme is amazing! The post is embedded in a book (on desktop), and instead of scrolling up and down, you press buttons to flip through the pages, or embedded on piece of tattered parchment (on mobile). The header, the navigation pane, and even the site's leathery background are all a pleasure to look at, and the author is generous enough to openly share the theme for other bloggers. Typically I prefer that a site's themes and decorations just stay out of the way and fade into the background, but when the aesthetics are done this well, it makes me want to stick around just to interact with it. (Also, on desktop, the cursor is a panda!)

There is no dearth of content to enjoy with it, though, as this site has a pretty sizeable backlog of blog posts. For a good starting place, here is a brief yet thoughtful explanation of why ReedyBear takes issue with capitalism even when its implementation appears a net-positive for society. When the material conditions of billions of humans are so abjectly awful, it's easy to focus solely on how capitalism fails on a practical level. This article touches on why it would be insufficient even if all eight billion of us were more or less comfortable.

NORMALIZE DESTROYING THE CAREERS OF RAPISTS AND ABUSERS | Deerhoof.Website

In stark contrast, this article is kind of a difficult read because the background is a bright cyan, and the text is stylized to be all-caps.

I expected from the title that this article would essentially serve as an argument in favor of Cancel Culture, or at least the part of it which prescribes that bad people should be ostracized to the point of destitution, and are thereby prohibited from ever reforming themselves and contributing to society. This was, however, a hasty judgement on my part, and Deerhoof actually expresses the opposite:

i’m all for personal forgiveness when someone owns up to their mistake. even rapists and murderers. but there is no way that this person should be allowed to continue along their path to power. NORMALIZE DESTROYING THE CAREERS OF RAPISTS AND MURDERERS. it is not an example of “decorum” to allow such people to pursue positions of trust and power over other people’s lives.

It is honestly sort of baffling that this distinction is reserved for the final paragraph of the article, as it reads more like both a thesis statement and a disclaimer against judgements like the one I'd entered with.

Regardless, as this quote demonstrates, the argument Deerhoof makes is that evil people should not be elevated to positions of great power and influence over society and politics, because their demonstrable wickedness ought to disqualify them from the ability to inflict great suffering upon everyone else.

it’s hard to believe, but there are americans alive today who actually remember when america was against genocides and mass rapes. today, both parties see a genocide/mass rape and immediately try to figure out how they can worsen it. fast track it. make money off it. how did our leaders become so depraved? partly because we dispensed no consequences. we assume that someone stealing diapers from walmart obviously has bad intentions, but pretend that someone committing genocide is just a tragic victim of the system they actually are being paid to control.

With a cogent focus on economics, war, and technology, this article provides a nice overview of one of the ways the world has been set aflame, in case you needed another reminder. There is, however, a paragraph about television which seems rather out of place:

romcoms and sitcoms model a certain behavior. somebody fails to communicate their actual feelings, there’s some misunderstanding, hijinks ensue. perhaps in the minds of the entertainers making romcoms and sitcoms, the whole moral of the story is to know your feelings, don’t hide them, and don’t try to trick people into loving you. but if that was actually the behavior they showed onscreen, no hijinks would ensue. the romcom or sitcom would fail in the marketplace.

I'm not really sure why this bit is included. The idea that a narrative imparts a lesson to the audience by showing a cautionary tale of what may otherwise befall them is not aberrant nor objectionable. Plus, a digression about televised sitcoms seems a little temporally displaced shortly after a paragraph about AI and its interactions with government.

Aside from that, this is a decently incisive article.

Gatekeepers Are Dead, Long Live The Gatekeepers | BiteofanApple by Brian Schrader

This is a succinct article discussing the role of traditional media gatekeepers, such as publishing houses (for books) and personal recommendations from popular influencers (for YouTube), in a world beset by AI slop. Allowing gatekeepers to restrict access to the eyeballs of consumers ordinarily strikes me as a failure of our economy and culture, but Schrader makes a compelling case in its favor:

Yet in this new age, where attention is a scarce resource compared with the glut of content to consume it, we have found ourselves bereft of those who can wade through the cruft and the noise and surface real wisdom.

In short: I seek gatekeepers, not to surface diamonds in the rough, but to hold back the oncoming tide.

This is an intriguing framing of the place we've found ourselves in, where both gatekeeping and AI slop appear as evils which more or less play in opposition to each other; the promise of AI is to "democratize" the creation of media, but all it does is make the gatekeepers' role more valuable. (Perhaps, then, these evils are not so opposed after all, but are attuned to the same goal!)

This is a thought-provoking article that is well worth a read.