Every crowdfunding campaign begins with a series of emails from people who want to help you with your Kickstarter (for a small fee, of course). Some of these are legitimate marketing scumbags, but most are full-blown scammers. Previously, I’ve just deleted these messages, but this year I decided to respond to them and see how…
In a world plagued by mundane realities such as climate change, political upheaval, and economic inequality, it’s all too easy to lose sight of the single greatest threat that the modern world has faced since the rise of Hitler: Namely, the invasion of our our creative commons by algorithms armed with digital paint brushes, code-based…
From the Principia Discordia: THE MYTH OF THE APPLE OF DISCORD It seems that Zeus was preparing a wedding banquet for Peleus and Thetis and did not want to invite Eris because of Her reputation as a trouble maker.* Facebook Twitter Reddit Tumblr Email
From very early on, the Hex plan for American Artifacts was to release three PDFs and then collect them into a single print edition. Now that all three PDFs are out, we’re hoping to release the book at Archon in October. Instead of just collecting the three existing volumes, we decided to add some new…
I haven’t created a new random thing generator since Christmas, so this week instead of a blog, you get a web script: The Random Conspiracy Generator! Just click the link and you’ll get 10 nutty conspiracies ranging from the almost believable to the completely batfuck. Don’t like them? Click the button at the bottom of…
As I told you last week, I decided to write an awful fantasy novel for National Novel Writing Month. So far I’ve written right around the 1667 words per day needed to finish in 30 days and I feel good about finishing on time. My original plan was to build the world as I went, but…
Last week, I set out to answer a question we get periodically, “when are you guys releasing more Qerth books?” but kind of got sidetracked explaining what happened with Qerth (and our company, and the game industry) between the time we started writing it in 1997 or 1998 and the book’s eventual release in 2006….
Except for last week’s blog about running con games, I’ve been doing a lot of shameless self-promotion here recently. I’m going to continue the trend again this week, but at least this time I’m using it as a sloppy segue into the main topic of the column. But first, the whoring: Brainfart Press (which is…
Last week, I applied Timothy Leary’s definition of a “game” to role-playing and ended with a promise to discuss other passages in his presentation “How To Change Behavior” that, despite having nothing to do with role-playing, are strangely applicable to our hobby. Here’s the first passage I was talking about: “All behavior involves games. But…
This article, which reprints Timothy Leary’s International Congress of Applied Psychology presentation, “How To Change Behavior,” recently showed up in my newsfeed. What does Timothy Leary have to do with gaming? Well, in the case of “How To Change Behavior,” the whole presentation starts with the idea of looking at behavioral sequences as games: “The…
