20 pages into this book, and I’m jealous of its doomed 1970s central couple, who may have just bought a haunted mansion, but only paid £40k for it.

There's a lot wrong with this statement, mostly I reckon Granta is ignorant about what AI text looks like. It's got *such* a specific voice, and if you're at all attuned to difference in prose style (and I'm going to assume that a Granta editor is) you can spot it a mile off.

Happy to get a score of 44 here, though admittedly the whole "having an english degree" thing is an automatic boost to the numbers. www.theguardian.com/books/ng-int...

hey john. its your cousin marvin. marvin cage! you know that new sound youve been looking for? well listen to this *hangs up phone*

Ran a lunchtime ttrpg in the office. Six players, only one had played an rpg before, everyone had a good time. It accidentally became the most classically OSR game I've ever played?

The most tempting thing about this game is that it sounds like an Asterix simulator.

Arturo UI at the RSC: proof you can get away with didacticism as long as the play is extremely good. My wife and I were trying to work out if we've ever seen Mark Gatiss be as good in anything else as he is here... and I think not, but only because he's never given anything as chewy as this to do.

My *god* Ben Lerner is good.

@lukegearing.bsky.social seem to remember you writing that you run/ran a one-hour lunchtime game at your work - any advice on how to Make Those Good? I'm starting one up next week in my office

A genuinely unsettling tourist trap on Bank Holiday Monday.

I dreamed last night that a psychopathic five year old had been employed in my office, and was planning to wreck all of our careers. "Why has she been employed?" I cried, "she can't even read!"

It’s good like the internet says it is! After we’d finished, my wife said “oh by the way, my character was a giant walking tree”, and looking back, yep that made absolute sense.

Celebrity endorsement for Phoenix Fest! My wife Sam runs a bunch of marketing for The Phoenix comic, and has worked insanely hard to make sure this festival works. Wandering through Oxford today, and the city was basically a sea of delighted nine year olds so I reckon it’s doing ok.

“Novelist”???

Some fun provocations here if you want an argument (Merchant of Venice is way too low, As You Like It is way too high, and I’m not a big fan of the number one choice, but I get that this is probably my fault.) www.theguardian.com/stage/ng-int...

samuel beckett was born on this day 120 years ago. astonishing to think that if he had survived, and could run 100m in 9.57 seconds, he would be not only the oldest but also the fastest man in the world - together with his nobel prize for literature, an astonishing trifecta

Obviously Vance is a terrible person, but I do find the “haha, no real Catholic would disagree with the pope” stuff weird. Every catholic I’ve met disagreed with the church about something. My extremely devout grandmother thought priests should be allowed to marry! My mum didn’t believe in hell!

It is weird listening to the lyrics of nursery rhymes for the first time since I was, like, six, and finding out that so many of them aren’t even hiding that they’re about the fragility of human bodies, economic anxiety, and class warfare

The sinister temptations of the Mothership Month backerkit survey coming round and listing all the zines you didn't back last time as potential add-ons... If nothing else #over/under was a hell of a marketing exercise.

In today's session: two knights owe a debt to an Eldritch Being. The rules text: "he accepts anything of value, and tries to kill those who won't pay". The first knight offers up a treasure he's carrying. Fine: the eldritch being accepts. But the second knight isn't carrying anything valuable...

This is completely right. 'How do these fun made-up stories fit in with each other?' - sorry, that is the question of a particularly dull child. Have fun with it!

Me and my crew love Barry Lyndon. We go see it in costume. Every slow zoom out, we cheer. Every slow zoom in, we boo. When Colonel Bulow rewards Barry, we throw Friedrich d'ors at the screen. When Barry attacks Bullingdon, we start fist fighting in the theater. Then we shoot each other.

Woman at the window of a bare, clean house. Who is outside? Child, ghost, spirit? Friendly, frightening? You say. By Jacob Vrel, whose day is today.

There's a phrase in 'The Whitsun Weddings' which I love, when Larkin describes finding his seat on the train, sitting down, and: 'all sense / Of being in a hurry gone.' I often have exactly that feeling when travelling, and the line comes back to me. The syntax of it is so unmistakable.

Mythic Bastionland feels like a magic trick. Structurally, it's pushed me into *by far* the most complex campaign I've run (in terms of level of player freedom, number of interacting factions, threats and NPCs). But it's requiring close to zero cognitive load.

When it comes to expositional tricks, this may be true - but I’m less convinced by the habit the lead character of (horror tv show) Evil has, of saying “daughters!” whenever she walks into a room containing her daughters.

Simon Schama's A History of Britain, from 2000, is on iPlayer. I loved it as a kid. Watched the first half hour today, and it's full of glitchy slow-motion fog-wreathed stone circles and monochrome bare winter trees underscored by spooky music... did this build a huge chunk of my aesthetic tastes?

These days, despite everything, it’s probably Merchant of Venice. A woozy dreamlike fairytale crunching into the hard cruelties of cash and politics and hatred. Sadder than Lear, the best love poetry he ever wrote, full of myth and vicious little rug pulls.

I love how this reads as if Ralph Vaughan Williams’ was intent on reviving the dead villagers and creating an undead horde of zombie folk singers.

Demented behaviour from this astrologer

I’m enjoying this book, but how dare you.

1) escape from dino island is a lovely piece of design, and 2) wow apparently my brain does *not* mesh with running pbta

This is just a big list of cool things.

I'm not sure why so many industry articles include AI-generated paragraphs that neither advance arguments nor include any substantive information. It just gives the reader a worse experience!

Attending a good stag party.

God, vantage is a clever game. The way it starts as a fluffy choose-your-own-adventure and blooms outward into both a crunchy tactical puzzle, and longer term narrative mystery box… I’ve only played it twice. It’s possible that the magic trick will wear thin. But it hasn’t worn thin yet.

It‘s certainly an… interesting statement of intent to walk into Oxford University's new humanities centre and see a giant piece of Gen-AI video art projected onto the wall. And like, it’s not slop. It’s from a carefully licenced dataset and clearly involved a bunch of human effort. But still.

The sixth session was very different. Dice flying all over the place.

I rarely post about Work on here, but I thought this was extremely smart and level-headed look at some of the questions that get glossed over when Gen-AI gets approval to be used in scientific publishing. scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/01/22/g...

It does feel *odd* that if I want to make music or do amateur dramatics, I can go to the places where people make music or do amateur dramatics and find a community there. But when I want to play ttrpgs, I have to persuade friends to play ttrpgs.

Five sessions into Mythic Bastionland and only one player has rolled any dice. Impossible to know if this means I'm running it Very Right or Very Wrong.

If you want to break your brain and avoid everything else in your life for a day or two, this is an excellent option.

OK, this is amazing. An automata of Gormenghast. youtu.be/v3fyV06D1gk?...

Ah this will include a cool book by my cool friend @thezhm.bsky.social! manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526188854/

It’s Bioshock then and now. But it’s *weird* to see that Bioshock and Portal came out in the same year, given that they felt like different eras to me. I was 17 in 2007: Portal feels like the last game of my childhood and Bioshock the first game of my adulthood.

We accidentally terrified the toddler by telling her that a guy was coming down the chimney tonight. Pointing to the thin pipe above my dad’s fireplace and saying “yep, a big man will be crawling through that this evening”.

A toddler asking you to make up a full story based on their insistent two-word prompt: this to me is a TTRPG. (Today it was “Winnie the Pooh” and “train”. Quite pleased about how consistent I made it).

25 books read so far this year. Which is not nearly as much as I'd like, and not nearly as much as I used to read, but I have been parenting a one-year-old, which does seem a reasonable excuse. Anyway, here's what I've thought of them:

Wake Up Dead Man is of course, great. The Benoit Blanc movies work for me because Johnson is so much more interested in the formal structures and atmospheres of murder mysteries than he is in the mysteries themselves.

Ragged, late-night Fairytale of New York. Just a magnificent room to be in.