At Oxford, I always used to watch the Man U games in the Magdalen common room with Lord Frederick Windsor, normally alone. We never talked.

Bono asked me to play one of U2s songs when I was DJing in his club, I told him I didn't do requests

Playing Samsara was what made us approach Meghna for 80 Days. Wonderful thing.

Can’t be bothered with this. The UK is just factually not a Christian country. Christians are the largest single religious group but they are less than half the country. The fastest growing and a second largest is “no religion”. We do not and should not make laws based on any religious doctrine.

I learned from an early age, that even if you comply with societal expectations, people will still complain about you and what you're doing. This is usually not because of some real grievance, it is an attempt at control. Fuck em. And fuck control. Do what makes you happy, but don't hurt anyone.

It was deeply cathartic to be asked to contribute some thoughts to this piece on the use of LLM chatbots in NPC dialogue. And a privilege to be among such insightful company. Very grateful to @samuelhorti.bsky.social for giving us so much breadth and depth to discuss such a hefty topic.

i think you can do this but have to design the game around it. you have to have enough hypersurfaces to pen the pointer in to the space of things which might be fun to do. but nobody knows how to do this, quite, and this is a type of constraint, not a type of freedom.

Recently had a comment about my work on NPCs go a lil viral on YT and it's actually scary how many people want gAI NPCs. You can have natural language processing without gAI. Look at Façade. It's just that gAI is the latest jangling keys from gamers and they think they want it.

I had five fascinating conversations for this RPS piece, gathering perspectives on genAI chatbots in games, as seen in Where Winds Meet. Thanks to @meghna.bsky.social, @pyrofoux.bsky.social, @maxkreminski.bsky.social, and @chrisgardiner.bsky.social www.rockpapershotgun.com/horrible-bor...

We can’t afford a $1M trailer slot 😔 But reposts on Bluesky cost $0 - and they really help tiny teams like ours ❤️ If cozy medieval creativity is your thing, here’s our Scriptorium trailer!

Hedwig and the Angry Grinch.

Either way it's a little project for yourself.

Interested in game-writing? In early 2026 we'll be publishing a kaleidoscope: short articles by 100+ game writers - experts, freelancers, and juniors - about the craft. ~1/3 of them are in: multiple bangers, from some very famous names and games. Sign up to be notified when it's ready here:

As a Hannkuah present to myself, I did a classic Vinted gamble and bought a pile of Warhammer models that were far too cheap to be real, which means it's almost certainly a scam so I'll spend a few hours next week trying to get my money back. 🧑‍🎄👹🎁

#TTRPG persons: you have until Christmas Day to get hold of our beloved and acclaimed TEETH zines of 18th century horror, lost pigs, and ballgowns, at a bold 50% off! It's the incredibly toothsome TEETHAZINE Bundle: itch.io/s/167336/tee...

Context news.uchicago.edu/learning-spe...

Admitting and owning when you are wrong, will actually make you popular. I really fucking do not know where so much of humanity has a psychosis on not being wrong, not admitting when we're wrong, WE MUST BE RIGHT GODDAMMIT It's sick. It's weird. And yeah there's people, even people you love...

reminder you can sign up to be notified when it launches here

rude but yeah I kinda agree lol I don't want Infinite Possibilities I want to know a writer wrote something compelling for me to experience. giving my idiot ass "agency" over the story just diminishes it

I think there is an underestimation of the prevalence of the use of AI in game development. The tech scares me for so many reasons, and the push back is necessary - but I fear that today's conversation isn't going to dissuade the techs implementation, but rather the transparency of its use.

Caves of Qud update: poured warm static on my dog, it turned into a dromad trader that comes with guards and items. They are all my dog, the whole trade party and merchandise. I convinced my dog to sell me my dog for free while my dog, my dog, my dog and my dog were standing guard.

Slightly longer thoughts on the passing of Rob Reiner, and what a remarkable storyteller he turned out to be. whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/15/r...

GO DESPELOTE! <3

I wrote a little comic for my brother and asked @ramonvillalobos.bsky.social to help make it real. Sharing it in case you get something out of it too.

THEY'VE PUT ME ON THE POCKETSTATION COOP. I'M BEING RENDERED IN A 32 BY 32 GRID OF MONOCHROME PIXELS. THE BOYS BACK AT QUANTICO SAID THEY'RE GOING TO RELOCATE ME TO A "DOKO DEMO ISSYO" UNTIL THEY CAN GET THIS STRAIGHTENED OUT.

RIP RR.

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

If you read one U.S. president's remembrance of Rob Reiner today...

Feck. Emotionally sideswiped into crying by the Bondi Beach shooting. We Jews, we‘re pretty inured to massacres I think, but it used to feel like there was always another country to run to. Nowhere feels safe right now.

(From Pratchett's "I Shall Wear Midnight") I hope, oh, do I hope, that I do not have to wait until 2026, or 2030, or until I die, for the rough music to begin to play for Trump et al.

From my Control writeup, my wishlist for Control 2 was: * More radically inventive Altered Items * More music * More colour * More closure

An academic disliked an Oxford Very Short Introduction (145 pages) in his field so much that he wrote a 200 page book review attacking it. www.pierre-legrand.com/ewExternalFi...

Bet. First, I'm gonna cheat and get four games from Enigma Studio because I really want to get around to talking about them and i haven't yet. First, play The Enigma Machine. It's a short (~1-2 hour) horror game about managing an AI's dreams.

I still prefer to blame terrible things on incompetence or inattention, rather than malice or AI. That’s my kind of lazy thinking.

Maybe it was the whole primitive, hateful idea of the feminine as dark, blind, weak, and evil that I saw shaking itself to pieces, imploding, crumbling into wreckage on a desert ground. And I rejoiced to see it fall. I still do.

at a certain level of any creative or intellectual collaborative job the main task is sin-eater: to fix what you can and get blamed for what you can’t, secretly knowing how much worse it would have been if you hadn’t done what you did.

This makes me so furious!! I'm so furious!! 1. Curbing human rights in a centrist way to stop the far right from doing so?? 2. Mass migration is going to be an unavoidable circumstance after 2'c warming www.theguardian.com/law/2025/dec...

Wow, so unimpressed with all of these lists. Even Best British Game is basically a "what is the most recognisable brand name" contest. If you want to get your game into the BAFTA Game Awards, you better have a game name that starts with the letter H or before. youtu.be/GHPfOGQx78I

if you give a mouse a cookie

"I can see how organisations would be tempted to capitulate – especially when they think the legal threats are all coming from one side. It doesn’t matter if they would eventually win in court – the question is whether they can justify the risk." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Open question: what, in your opinion, does the BBC do better than anything in the private sector? Not necessarily for your benefit, but what does the BBC do that means it or to exist in its present form?

Two ways to read this. One is “she lost on every substantive claim, completely failed in her attempts to ban trans staff from the workplace, and won mild procedural victories against her employers handling of her case”. The other way is, I guess, “point one is longer so it must be more important”

You’d never know this was what was decided as part of that tribunal ruling…

I've seen that somewhere before.

Retro tech can’t be enshittified because the enshittification era didn’t exist yet, You own it. Not license it. Not “terms of service” own, actually own. Hack it, mod it, repair it, keep it forever.

ITV just put the whole first series of The New Statesman on YouTube. Edited into a single video, annoyingly, but still...Peak Mayall.

It was a cold that got into the bone, into the marrow, and would not be dislodged.