Pursuit of Play: Side Quests
With the Pokemon season concluded, the summer means I have time to pursue some side quests. For the past couple years, summer has meant a lot of travel for one particular project...
Seth Trudeau
But not this year! And that means I have some extra energy. I’m going to give you a bit of a rundown of where that energy has been going. BTW, Nerd Notes subscribers got an even more in-depth rundown, including some very rough work in progress on my latest iteration of my White Whale project. If your Routine Chaos itch isn’t scratched by 1-2 emails a month, join Nerd Notes and get 3 [1].
Wait, what happened with the Traveling Circus (aka FutureShock)?
It lives! In fact, it’s running more sites with more kids this summer than last summer - and I did a bit of work on this last iteration to make it participants into their passion projects faster while also giving them the ability to be more self-paced…and it kind of feels like we cracked the code, or at least that’s what I’m hearing from the people who are on the ground to observe it this summer. They’ve been sending through pictures and videos[2] and stories about the kinds of projects people are doing this summer, and it’s pretty cool to see how the program itself has matured.
OK, fine - here's one...
The Reinvention Lab at Teach For America
And on the one hand, I feel a bit of FOMO…but on the other hand, not having to travel to places like South Dakota or the Rio Grande Valley in the summer is not the worst thing? And being home and getting into more of my creative groove, also not the worst thing.
There are more traveling circuses in my future, just different ones[3].
Another installment of The Charmed Idiot
A few years ago, I came out as a charmed idiot. What might be most shocking is that it’s taken over 2 years for a second installment of that series, but here we are - Reflections of a Charmed Idiot, part 2: how I became an Afrobeats mogul.
OK, that might be a bit overstated, but have you heard of this guy Rydm?
Well, as it turns out I own 12% of the streaming revenue for those 2 songs. Go listen to them! Listen to them on repeat!
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for any period of time, you might have noticed that I am not a musician or even peripherally involved in the music industry[4] …and that might leave you wondering how this happened.
There is a simple version of this story, and a more complicated one. The simple one goes something like this: Rydm is signed to the Alafia Collective, the CEO of the Alafia Collective is a friend of mine, and the collective needed a quick infusion of cash to get those songs released, so the CEO approached me with an offer to front him some cash in exchange for a portion of the streaming rights, and I said OK.
The simple story, while true, is also incomplete. Because why did the CEO approach me specifically, and why did I say yes? I will preempt the obvious answer to the second part by saying from a pure financial standpoint, this was probably not a good investment. The odds that I fully recoup my investment are probably a coin flip at best. If my main motive had been profit, from an expected value calculation I would have done better to just take the money and put it into a medium yield index fund for a few years.
But where’s the fun in that?
Ultimately, this came down to a few things:
- I want to support the person behind the idea, and I want them to know that there are people out there who believe in what they are doing.
- The actual amount wasn’t anything that I’m going to lose sleep over, and I’m operating above my threshold of sufficiency. If no one ever listens to those songs and I never see a penny of return on my investment, I won’t lose even a wink of sleep[5].
- I enjoy learning about the ins & outs of something that I have no expertise in, especially when I can learn it from someone who has substantial expertise.
Sometimes the broken thing is the one you need
This could have been the name of an emo album, circa 2003[6]. Alas…
What it actually is is a description of the Bluesky client I built in 15 minutes or so using Lovable.
Lovable
The idea was this: I was spending more time than I wanted to scrolling in Bluesky, and I kind of suspected it was because of the continuous vertical scroll behavior. The fact that I could see just enough context of the next post that I would scroll just a little more to see what was there, and then I could see just enough of the next post that the cycle would repeat - that was the problem. And I wondered: if posts were presented as tiles on a carousel, would that calm my brain down and make it easier for me to opt out when I didn’t actually care?
A quick aside about this: this is one of the benefits of a more open web where protocols make data portable. I don’t think this would work with most other social media sites because they prioritize lock-in and want to keep you in their client. This is also one of the ways that software is transforming: I don’t imagine that my custom Bluesky interface is something so in demand that it could be a viable product, and it doesn’t have to be - it just has to work for me. This is very reminiscent of the story of web 1.0.
The actual webapp does the main thing that I wanted it to do: it lets me - or any other user, in case you want to try it - log into their Bluesky account and see posts in a horizontal carousel in which each post is a tile.
And then there are a bunch of ways that it doesn’t work that would probably take another half hour or so of working with Lovable to refine:
- it often mismanages image handling so it only shows part of an attached image.
- for reposts, the original post is static. The user can’t click on it.
- clicking on a post to see the full thread or replies and then going back to the carousel takes the user all the way back to the beginning of the carousel.
- the carousel only loads about 50 posts at a time, and when you get to the end of that there’s no way to get it to load more.
This would all be a huge problem in a product for a market larger than 1. For me personally, though, a lot of that qualifies as feature rather than bug. The problem I was trying to solve for myself was spending less time mindlessly scrolling. All of those problems above create this small amount of friction that makes me pause and say, “how much do I really care about this?” For most posts, the answer is “not all that much.” Rarely does something rise to the level where I care enough that I will try to remedy the situation, which usually just means opening up the post in the official Bluesky app.
Hey, speaking of…
This entire thread was well worth my time. It’s a very counter-intuitive idea about cooperation and trust in the context of games, the gist of which is that competition and cooperation in games are not two dynamics inherently in opposition to each other. If you’re intrigued, read the thread.
Taking some friction out of tabletop RPGing
Almost 3 years ago, I backed a crowdfunding project for a new tabletop RPG based on NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. You should take this as an indicator of just how much I love Jemisin’s work in general, and that series in particular because I don’t actually do much roleplaying. I’d be hard pressed to tell you the last time I did a campaign, but I am certain that it was pre-COVID.
It has taken waaaaay too long, but the creators finally released a draft digital version of the rulebook…and I was really excited, but then I started going through the character creation guide and remembered why it’s been so long since I played an RPG: character creation can feel like such a chore as a way to start into something new.
This is a bit of a tragedy, because often one starts into the process with an idea of the character they want to create, but then that energy gets gradually diminished by a series of tasks that are akin to finding Dewey Decimal System entries for a range of random subjects. There are hacks for it: a good DM can guide you through the process in a way that maintains your enthusiasm, especially because - to continue the metaphor - they can take on the role of a reference librarian in helping you get setup; some of the bigger RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons have simplified character development processes for newbies who just want to start playing or existing character sheets that you can just take up and maybe lightly modify.
And I get why the process is what it is. When you’re already invested in the game and know that going through the whole process opens up hours of enjoyment, that totally justifies it. In my case I don’t even know when I’ll be able to get enough people in a room[7] who have read the books and are down to play an RPG based on them[8].
All of that is to say, it is not a novel idea to think that LLMs can be a great supplemental technology for tabletop RPGs, so I went ahead and made a Fifth Season RPG character creation tool. Especially if you’ve read the books, you should try it out[9]. Maybe it’s fun even if you haven’t, though you might want to read up on the world Jemisin has built.
I alluded in the last installment of Pursuit of Play that I was trying to figure out if there was going to be another season of Pursuit of Play, and I want to tease you a little bit and let you know that partially through indulging in these side quests, I'm pretty sure there will be - in fact Nerd Notes subscribers have already heard a little bit about it - though I'm not committed to carrying over the name. It's going to be a bit of a divergence...I'll tell you more about what I'm thinking soon.
- and a sweatshirt if you want.
- which I can’t share because we’re not in the business of sharing pictures of kids around here.
- Is this foreshadowing? Maybe…
- At least, I wasn’t until, as previously mentioned, I acquired 12% of the streaming revenue for 2 songs by the next Burna Boy.
- I’m going to just quickly plug the idea of the threshold of sufficiency…but I’m going to do it in the footnotes because it feels a little too much like being a life coach, nonetheless it’s an incredibly important concept in my life: there is a lot of freedom in knowing the actual dollar amount you need to have a good standard of living. Don’t just make the number up, actually think about what you think constitutes a good standard of living and calculate what you need every month or every year to make that happen. That is your threshold of sufficiency, the amount where you are doing well enough. If you have more than that, yes you can improve your standard of living…but you can also do all kinds of other things with that money too. I think when we don’t know that number, we often get caught in the trap that we don’t have enough.
- Did you just imagine Chris Carrabba singing it as a lyric? No, me either. Totally. Let’s pretend this footnote never happened.
- real or virtual
- Trust that if I know you’ve read these books, I’m going to be bugging you shortly about this.
- And if you leave your email address, I’ll probably contact you to see about playing the game.
Member discussion