Newsletters

Sign up for my newsletters

Sign up for my Weekly Squeak newsletter, specific topic newsletters directly, and receive a free sticker, or use the minimal form.

Gaming newsletter

Occasional games related stories I notice across the internet, sign up for the newsletter version, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Pandemic’s creator is making a board game about climate change

from WIRED UK

When game developer Matt Leacock released his best-selling board game Pandemic, he didn't expect that twelve years later people would be using it to help them process an actual pandemic sweeping the world.

Indie RPGs show roleplaying can - and should - be far more than Dungeons & Dragons

from

Dungeons & Dragons is such a behemoth in the tabletop roleplaying game scene that it’s become a synecdoche for the hobby itself; to many, “D&D” and “tabletop RPG” are one and the same. The game is massively popular.

RuneScape saved her life. Fifteen years later, she’s still playing

from WIRED UK

When Allana turned fourteen, the limits of her world shrank to the four corners of her bed. A heart condition kept her between hospital and home. She could not attend school or make friends. She was lonely. She could not live like a normal fourteen-year-old.

The Best Tabletop RPGs Of 2020

from Game Informer

Many tabletop role-playing enthusiasts had to make big changes to their playstyles in 2020. Whether it meant suspending long-running games, moving to virtual play sessions, or playing more with those they lived with, it’s been a challenging time to get a fix of that dice-rolling goodness.

Worldbuilding: Fantasy Religion Design Example

from

Working through the Fantasy Religion Design Guide, our first step is to decide on the scope of religions on the world we are creating.

Worldbuilding: Fantasy Religion Design Guide

from

Depending on your campaign setting idea, in the early stages you may only need a bare minimum of details about your religion.

Ethics newsletter

Occasional ethics related stories I notice across the internet, sign up for the newsletter version, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

It Began as an AI-Fueled Dungeon Game. It Got Much Darker

from WIRED

In December 2019, Utah startup Latitude launched a pioneering online game called AI Dungeon that demonstrated a new form of human-machine collaboration.

I Wrote the Book on User-Friendly Design. What I See Today Horrifies Me

from Pocket

The world is designed against the elderly, writes Don Norman, 83-year-old author of the industry bible Design of Everyday Things and a former Apple VP.

Apple's new privacy feature will change the web. And not everyone is happy about it

from ZDNet

These sort of adverts, almost eerie in how relevant they are to users' interests, are now a common part of our experience of using apps and the web. But with the new release of iOS 14.

Nobody is flying to join Google’s FLoC

from The Verge

Google is going it alone with its proposed advertising technology to replace third-party cookies. Every major browser that uses the open source Chromium project has declined to use it, and it’s unclear what that will mean for the future of advertising on the web.

‘Master,’ ‘Slave’ and the Fight Over Offensive Terms in Computing

from The New York Times

Anyone who joined a video call during the pandemic probably has a global volunteer organization called the Internet Engineering Task Force to thank for making the technology work.

How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation

from MIT Technology Review

Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, a director of AI at Facebook, was apologizing to his audience.

Language newsletter

My curated recommended articles on linguistics, natural language processing and interactive fiction.

Newsletter coming soon, for now enjoy the posts below, updated regularly .

Why GPT-3 is the best and worst of AI right now

from MIT Technology Review

GPT-3 has captured the public’s imagination unlike any AI since DeepMind’s AlphaGo or IBM’s chess-playing DeepBlue.

from

Michael Moorcock's Three Day Novel

from

In his early days of writing, famed fantasy and Appendix N writer Michael Moorcock was a disciple of Lester Dent's Master Plot.

How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker

from The Guardian

The Guardian’s style guide was originally published in 1928 as a physical book, and is available to everyone on our website. Over time, it’s grown bigger and more complex, containing guidelines on important topics that we want to get right.

How to Write a Novel, According to 10 Really Good Novelists

from Esquire

A long, long time ago, back in the first lockdown, you probably told yourself that now – right this moment, in the middle of a pandemic – was the perfect time to conceive, plot, write, revise, rewrite, complete and publish a novel which completely transformed what we thought it was possible to e

The best sci-fi and fantasy books of 2020 to catch up with

from Polygon

2020 was quite the year for science fiction, but it wasn’t all about escaping to other worlds.