March 22, 2022

s11e21: Words and how to use them to achieve and convey your intended effect and meaning?

0.0 Context setting

It’s Tuesday, March 22 2022 in Portland, Oregon and it is not raining as hard as it could be. Freischwimmer cover/mix of California Dreaming¹ is playing in the background on single track repeat and has been since last Thursday because a) it was in that episode of Star Trek: Picard and b) apparently it’s an ADHD thing to listen to a single track on repeat as a sort of audio stimming? I am not entirely convinced, I just… like listening to certain songs on single track repeat. For days. Weeks, even.

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The book, it’s here!

Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes of this newsletter is out now! Subscribers can get a copy for 20% off; paid subscribers/supporters get a free copy.

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Okay, let’s get on with it!

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1.0 Some things that caught my attention

Apollo, unfortunately, was destroyed

Annie Rauwerda has a piece in Slate, Russians Are Racing to Download Wikipedia Before It Gets Banned. Some notes: Russian-language Wikipedia is 29 gigabytes, English Wikipedia with images in 87 GB (or 47 GB without). Part of the reason due to the size difference is the number of articles: Russian-language Wikipedia has 1.8 million articles compared with English Wikipedia’s 6.4 million. This one can easily be put in a sort of Moore’s Law leads to cheaper storage (flash drives, not hard drives!), cheaper cost to access and cheaper cost to participate. Although remember, it’s not like the democractic, open encyclopaedia doesn’t have issues of participation, representation and bias, never mind outright sexism and racism.

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Casting

Internet friend Cat Manning, a Nebula-nominated narrative designer and writer, is at GDC this week which means I get to vicariously enjoy all the good bits of GDC. Cat has a great thread on Nate Austin’s session, Getting Players Emotionally Invested in Procedural Characters in ‘Wildermyth’, covering the idea of doing ‘casting calls’ when generating a procedural narrative. Just the terminology I think is brilliant because it reframes, in human brains, at least, the problem from “search for an available character through which to continue the procedurally generated narrative” to “cast for a character”, and cast just has… such a better, more expansive meaning. A much better looking vector, if you like, for the problem at hand. Cat points this out: the casting is framed as “theatricality”: how do you think about a game’s narrative design using the metaphors and analogies of scenes, plays and casting.

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Emergency snap

Just writing above about how the single word casting reframes a problem in a different direction and gives it a whole new colour reminded me of when a few weeks ago I ended up thinking about Iain M. Banks’ use of language in his Culture novels.

It started pretty dumb, with Terry Matalas, the showrunner for Star Trek: Picard season 2 pointing out that shuttles still don’t have cup holders in the 25th century², to which my snarky response was that:

Iain M Banks’ Culture solved the problem of needing cup holders in modules etc by being able to snap-displace any beverage container as soon as it enters an unstable state³

But just that joke/aside had me thinking about the difference in language and feeling (in me, at least) of a snap displace versus, say, an emergency transport, from one of my other favorite multi-decade conglomerate-owned multi-platform science fiction franchises exploring a utopian post-scarcity future. Snap.

Words, huh?

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“Tech, amirite?”

There’s a bunch of stuff going around where an influential⁴ Silicon Valley figure invented⁵ slavery by suggesting that the best way to, I don’t know, make sure a gazillion Einsteins bloom is to own a bit of them and their income for, like, ever, if it doesn’t work out. So I’m all:

feels like

tech: nonfungible tokens!

also tech: but also, fungible humans!⁶

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Odds and ends

• Via Christina Wodtke’s poll⁷ about terms for no-code interactive design testing/research, I learned the phrase Wizard of Ozzing, where it’s faked and you’re not supposed to look behind the curtain and I love it again because the theme today appears to be “words and how to use them to achieve and convey your intended effect and meaning”

• Via many people, here is a Twitter microfiction/thread of some magical technology realism about Google Maps by @grahamvsworld.

• My friend Leigh Dodds has a good thread on data stewardship, data governance usw⁸ summing up the state of the art and pointing out unhelpful incompatibilities and internal inconsistencies. Which I’m noting here because I need to go through it and read it properly.

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Okay, that’s it for today.

Hi! How have you been?

Best,

Dan