ah, i want to make a game where there are lots of independent things with tags and complex interactions all swimming around in a big soup as i add more flavours to it!

Causal bookkeeping According to the various mechanisms outlined above, Viv automatically records causal links between actions as they occur—a concept from my PhD thesis called causal bookkeeping. The result is a partitioning of the chronicle into a forest of causal trees (DAGs, technically), each of which might be deemed a storyline. By recording causal links as they occur, the task of causal inference is obviated, and story sifting becomes more tractable in terms of both pattern authoring and computational efficiency.

sickos yes meme

Viv: An Engine for Emergent Narrative Viv is an engine for emergent narrative.

incredibly sickos mode reading this documentation viv.sifty.studio
(to be more specific: it's a runtime & editor by James Ryan for doing complicated causality and knowledge modelling for NPCs in videogames. if you've heard of the term "story sifting" you will be excited)

I love that you asked me. social dominance signaling of some kind mixed with generally making the rational call that consequences WON'T descend on him mixed with the oversize benefit of looking "radical" as a tech leader noxiously combined with getting rewarded for fulfilling tech stereotypes plus

tagging in @arlohoward.bsky.social who also has this problem

(as a donkey walks by)

ah the noble donkey!

(donkey moves out of earshot)

foolish beast

Scottish Greens manifesto is out, compare and contrast

(hopefully obvious thing to say: none of this is any shade on Adriaan, a game designer who is perfectly capable of making expressive and joyful puzzles. if he wants to)

it's kind of miraculous that it can work, that you can be guided to make specific mistakes or have specific misconceptions and then the puzzle can then say, in an invented language, hah! I thought you'd do that.

again and again, the way I think of game design is as novel ways to tell jokes

I disagree - but with many games, the play is something that is generated by the player from a rich set of affordances. with puzzles, the play exists in the tension between the designer's intent and the player rediscovering that. it's a dialogue where one side has written their part in advance.

I Stop Writing the Poem Tess Gallagher

Don't stop writing the poems

god damn it dude

it's good!!!

the crew named it! they were literally like "this is the value we wanna live up to". or I mean, that's what they said. they might have also thought the second thing, I definitely would have.

personally I'd drink a big glass of water with a rehydration tablet in it, then have a cup of tea and a big breakfast, then I'd go for a nice walk. sounds like a good set of decisions to me.

This Sunday 19 April is Good Decision Day! This is a fake festival I made up some years ago: a day when you must make only good decisions. I find it a weirdly refreshing thing to try for one spring day. Perhaps you would too? Some friends of mine also observe it, some others find it very upsetting

what beautifully drawn maps

there’s a Type of Guy who will be awesome to you while he can gain clout for Supporting you. Once you expect to be heard, hired and paid like an equal, you will be jettisoned for more grateful and impressionable women

Dancing cat
#digitalart
#artwork
#cat

Loving it! Loving it all! The spreadsheets, the feedback, the sticky little problems the team are waiting for you to write the way out of. I remind myself: "what are you here on this earth to do?" I mutter. "This." And get right back into it. I remember my death. It's coming! "So what are you going to do about it?" Comes the inner whisper. I mutter "This!" and get right back into it. If I worry about what other people think, I try to raise my gaze all the way out past the heat death of the universe. This! Mmm, I love it.

Ultimately, you have to put your ego aside and try to enjoy the ride. This advice from Charlene Putney (in The Game Narrative Kaleidoscope by @inkle.co) feels worthy of printing out and sticking on the wall.

yeah, we're VN-ish, and sufficiently "let's see where this goes" that loc is not something we're worrying about

nothing called "a club" but I'm a member of a community pottery studio and I have a monthly boardgame night that I host. both could count??

you can define your own "external functions" and call them from within Ink - obv needs a little setup but feels easy enough to me

currently working on something not even *that* text based, and we're putting the dialogue and a bunch of the quest logic into Ink. but also I feel relaxed about us maybe having to pull things out into a custom thing later.

and WhatsApp for closed communities

if anyone has any recommendations for accounting software that can file CT600 forms and annual statements to CH, and also ideally doesn't make me want to kill myself... please let me know

this despite a press release in July 2025 from HMRC saying they were abandoning plans to introduce MTD for corporation tax. instead they're just shutting down the filing service instead. hoorah.

relatedly! I use Quickbooks to do the accounts for my micro-entity limited company, and HMRC has dropped the ability to file for corporation tax on their website. And Quickbooks doesn't do it, so it looks like I'm going to have to switch accounting software. What a gigantic pain in the arse.

All in a Day’s work art002e009206 (April 4, 2026) - NASA astronaut and Artemis II mission specialist Christina Koch, seen here on the fourth day of the mission, prepping for lunar flyby activities after completing aerobic exercise on the flywheel device. Credit: NASA Image Credit: NASA

A crew is people or, you know, a group that is in it all the time, no matter what. That is stroking together every minute with the same purpose that is willing to sacrifice silently for each other, that gives grace, that holds accountable.

The UKVI rejected the application, explaining that they were not satisfied the applicant was genuine given they had quoted the wrong founding year. The university subsequently confirmed that the applicant had provided the correct year and the UKVI caseworker was incorrect, but the decision could not be reconsidered. In another case a foreign student was rejected from obtaining a visa to study at the University of East Anglia due to a dispute over whether the university was in Norfolk. The applicant asserted correctly that it was, but the UKVI caseworker appeared to confuse Norfolk with Norwich, which is the capital of the county, and rejected the application - believing the applicant was wrong.

I hope the new Permanent Secretary at the Home Office is going to be able to look at the UK Visas and Immigration’s practices
www.thetimes.com/article/1644...