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Things 2026 Q3: One Year Game, AI identification errors, Gold

One Year Game

I’m really fascinated by the space of things that aren’t quite games, so I was excited to find this write up of a Japanese games festival called “Is this a game?”. From that description, one game stood out to me: Nilgiri’s “One Year Game”

  • Each player takes a box
  • The box contains instructions
  • The instructions tell the player to write down 3 quests that could be done over the course of the next year
  • These can be 1 point quests (which can be repeated 100 times over the year), 10 point quests (10 times) or a 100 point quest (which only scores once), for a total possible score of 300 points
  • You then put the box down and take a box somebody else left, and do those quests
  • You track your quest completion on a mini calendar in the box
  • Points for completing quests go to the person who wrote the quests
  • You meet back up a year later

(Caveat, this is my read of the rules from the above description, a Twitter thread, and Nilgiri’s write-up passed through Google translate, so almost certainly some nuance has been lost)

As a pure game, it looks broken: you just write down as your quests: “breathe, eat and sleep”, and you guarantee yourself 300 points; and of course you don’t do any quests yourself, to deny someone else getting the points; and then actually everyone else does the same, so you all have boring quests and score zero points. But there’s clearly more going on, and that’s the part I love.

First in pure game terms you might observe the following:

  • If the quests are too boring or inevitable, the player might just forget they are even ‘playing’ and not mark them on the calendar or bother to show up a year later, so you get no points. Slightly interesting quests might be strictly better…
  • No winning condition is defined!

Then we get into the really interesting human-behaviour bit:

  • It feels intrinsically good to be assigned a quest and then complete that quest, as long as it is at least a little bit challenging
  • In life there are sometimes things we would like to do, but other obligations or priorities stop us from doing them – but having that thing as a quest could change that!
  • Both of these then pass through a lens of reciprocity / golden-ruleism: what sort of quest would I want someone to set me? Maybe I should set that sort of quest…
  • Then on top of that you have human variability: some people want do be funny, some people like the idea of controlling someone’s actions a bit too much; some people just really want to make someone as happy as they can…

So I ran a version of the game myself, with two key differences:

  1. The original was among strangers at a games festival and they could optionally attend a party a year later to discover their scores; mine was at an annual event that tends to have the same people turn up so the debrief stage is built-in.
  2. I think the original gives the quest-setter freedom to pick any of the three quest types three times (e.g. they could pick three of the 100-point quests); I chose to restrict it to one quest of each type.

I now need to wait a year to see what happened, but from the quests I heard about, a whole delightful variety have been set, and it didn’t seem like anyone was “playing to win” (while assuming a win condition exists).

I made a printable Google doc of my version here if you want to run your own – Christmas / New Year is probably a convenient time to do this for some people! If you want to run it starting in a different month you can edit the start date in this Google sheet and the calendar will update, so you can paste that into the doc instead. As an organiser, you will need to make sure in the exchange process nobody gets their own quests, and that you track who got their quests from whom. Or rather, you might want to do that; it could still be quite interesting without those framing rules.

Podcast: Going Rogue

Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012 and very quickly planned to release one Star Wars film every year starting in 2015. Then things got a bit complicated:

  • Rogue One (2016) had rumours of directorial difficulties and some significant trailer scenes that never appeared – although the film came out largely okay in the end…
  • Solo (2018) was originally being directed by Lord & Miller but they were quite quickly replaced with Ron Howard…
  • In the main saga, Episode IX was to be directed by Colin Trevorrow, but then with quite short notice he was replaced by JJ Abrams
  • Episode IX itself was quite notable for trying to please everybody and then disappointing pretty much everybody

Tansy Gardam’s podcast Going Rogue has no special access or secrets, but she takes a forensic approach to everything on the public record to try to reconstruct what happened on these films (and others). Most notable for me is her ability to dig out great details that were later revealed in interviews on various podcasts.

Distilling many fascinating hours of podcast into very brief summaries:

  • On Rogue One, Tony Gilroy did a substantial and incredibly late re-write after main photography was complete, which successfully brought the film together and established a new ‘grown-up’ tone for Star Wars that he later built on in Andor – but this came at the cost of Jyn’s agency as a character. Also director Gareth Edwards set aside an ‘indie hour’ on set to take the time to discover fascinating, unscripted shots; these turn out to be pretty useless for the film but absolutely great to include in a trailer.
  • I think a lot of people assumed Lord & Miller were replaced on Solo as they were going too broad with the humour, but it really seems that was not the case. The bigger problem was their extremely collaborative discovery-based approach to film-making, which is tremendously expensive and difficult to do on a live-action Star Wars film
  • For Episode IX Gardam quite convincingly shows that writers JJ Abrams and Chris Terrio left too many key decisions to be ‘discovered’ while making the film, meaning that some key beats (the parentage question; the details of the final confrontation) had not been finalised while other parts of the film were already shot – making them ultimately feel unmotivated and arbitrary.

At the most zoomed out level it appeared as if Disney embarked on a new Star Wars trilogy without a clear over-arching plan. But Gardam shows this isn’t entirely the case – scripts for VIII and IX were being written at the same time, and indeed VIII (Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi) was finished in very good time. The problem was that Trevorrow’s script for IX didn’t seem great, they pivoted to Abrams very late, and in general I suppose Disney’s creative leadership were very distracted trying to get Rogue One and Solo on track while this was happening.

As a side note, Gardam is great with the direct quotes, facts and inferences, but whenever she strays over into opinion she has some pretty wild takes – but that’s all part of the fun! I highly recommend the podcast if you’re at all interested in what happened in these films.

The trap of Survivorship Bias

Survivorship bias is where we draw conclusions from a set of entities without accounting for a selection process that shaped the set. I think it’s very close to Saliency Bias in which we pay attention to things that are more noticeable.

The classic example (and indeed the current illustration on the Wikipedia page for the topic) is the story of fighter aircraft returning from combat riddled with bullet holes everywhere but the cockpit and the engine. The naïve approach is to conclude that the cockpit and engine do not need any reinforcement in future aircraft designs. The selection bias is that planes shot in the cockpit or engine never made it back – so the correct conclusion is exactly reversed.

I suspect the same thing is at work with cats that present humans with small creatures they have killed. Cats were at least partly domesticated for their ability to hunt rodents that threatened human health and food supplies; a cat that brings its trophies to the human will be assumed to be doing a better job than one that just gets on with it, and so will more likely be selected by humans for breeding. (This process is quite similar to the Goodhart/Fisherian issue mentioned in the last things).

Other examples:

  • People hear vegans talking about being vegan. They assume all vegans talk about being vegan all the time. They do not account for the silent vegans. (Or the fact that vegans are frequently asked to explain themselves by non-vegans at meal times and so are pushed into talking about it).
  • People assume (often without even confirming) that they can correctly identify art made by AI. Certain styles certainly have become hallmarks of AI – dot-eyed rounded comic figures, overly rendered and brightly saturated smiling humans, excessively detailed yet generic fantasy scenes. But this can give us false confidence and lead us to make Type I (‘don’t think it’s AI, but it is’) errors. (Take a skim through this video to see what’s now possible with animation generation as an example)
  • A criminal was getting away with something, but then they pushed it even further and were caught – people then say “they always go too far!”, which of course ignores those who do not go that far, but is also blind to those who do go that far and still get away with it.
  • Major plane crashes have much more salience than car crashes as we hear about almost every single one. Some people thus become afraid that planes are dangerous. I made a simple estimate for how many major plane crashes would be equivalent to the annual number of car crash deaths; it’s about one major plane crash a day.

AI identification errors – Type I and Type II

Jumping off from the above, it’s one thing to make a Type I error when judging the source of text/image/video (‘don’t think it’s AI, but it is’), but what seems a lot more tragic is the rising trend of people making Type II errors (‘think it’s AI, but isn’t’). Even if you don’t mind the existence or use of AI art, the fact this error can arise is still pretty sad because it dilutes the respect an artist can get for their ideas and skills.

This really came into focus for me in July 2026 when it was reported that a 7-figure book deal fell through over questions of AI-use. Without knowing the true facts of the case, this still highlights how frightening the Type II error is here: you could now have an incredibly promising book deal fall apart just because of the suspicion of AI use. (Side-note, if I wanted to get a book published maybe it will help that I have decades of blog posts to point to as prior form; or maybe it won’t because AI can be trained on that).

I do find it quite useful to keep an eye on r/RealOrAI to continue to tune my AI-detection ability.

All the above is mostly just to give you the context for this comic:

Rotations of major bodies in the solar system

I’m very drawn to finding useful ways to look at things that help you understand them better. There’s usually no single “right” way, but having different views helps. For example, you can think of democracy as a way of harnessing the ‘wisdom of the crowd’, or a means of facilitating peaceful transfers of power, or more bleakly as a system for creating consent to be governed.

Anyway, it turns out that a great way to get your head around the spins and orientations of major bodies in the solar system is to put faces on them:

Music Video: Chet Faker – Gold

One of my favourite music videos is for Chet Faker’s Gold: a ‘single take’ of choreographed roller-skating at night that perfectly matches the rolling, wistful feel of the song, has a slightly mysterious air, and is just very impressive. It’s directed by Hiro Murai, choreographed by Ryan Heffington, and stars roller skaters Candice Heiden, April Corley, and Appelusa McGlynn. One caveat: it does seem to be shot for the ‘male gaze’, which is how it often goes in music videos:

I like to bring similar Things together in threes (like the effortful music videos from last time or mysterious music videos I posted in 2022), but when I realised I knew of nothing like Gold, that made me want to look into it more deeply. (Side note, let me know if you do know of any similar videos!)

I couldn’t find a “making of”, but there is this great interview with lead skater Heiden, (who is also a skate consultant and choreographer) talking through how the video came about, the execution, and a bit of choreography demonstration. Notably at 8:07 Heiden gives commentary over the opening part of the song, explaining where and how she’s putting in extra work to stay in the light while making it look like part of the choreography.

It’s always fun to know quite how hard it was to do a thing like this, and Heiden explains that they started shooting at 8.30pm on this small access road, driving and performing one way then turning around and doing the same going back – and apart from a short ‘lunch’ break in which Chet Faker filmed his cameo, they continued trying to get the perfect take(s) until dawn.

Based on the descriptions, I assume the location was Escondido Canyon Road (California) or nearby. Assuming it was filmed around 1st August (ahead of its 12th August 2014 release date), sunrise would have been at around 6am, making for about 9 hours of shooting to get the final takes. The shoot has been described as taking 14 hours, but I assume a bunch of that will have been getting the road swept and ready before shooting began. Either way, I’m now even more impressed than when I first watched it.

  • Transmission Ends
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Things 2026 Q2: Fisherian runaway, Androids, effortful music videos

Quotes

Here’s some nice quotes that all draw out aspects of the Dunning-Kruger bias:

Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem

– John Galsworthy

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge

– Charles Darwin

Everything looks simple when you don’t know the first thing about it

– Kevin Williamson

Having established that, I now return to confidently holding forth on things I’m not an expert in, probably annoying Darwin in particular. I leave you to judge how sensible that is.

Super-normal stimuli and Fisherian runaway

Bear with me on this one as I invoke the principles of sexual selection to explain burgers that are too tall to bite.

Part 1: Gestalt Perception

Perception usually feels effortless, but the process that makes it work is strange and subtle. Dozens of contextual clues (sight/sound/smell, movement/light/texture, size/silhouette/colour, and many more) are all subconsciously processed, usually based on previously observed patterns, and our conscious attention is directed to whatever that process deems the most salient aspect. For example, you might see a poster you’ve never seen before, but it has a picture of an actor you know, some words in an elaborate font, a release date and some small print, and without effort you recognise it as a film poster, as well as a good guess for the genre and if it’s likely to be worth paying more attention to.

The way many parts contribute subconsciously to our overall perception is summed up by the slang term ‘vibes’, but over the decades other terms have approximated this idea – ‘vibrations’ of course, but also in different contexts bag, energy, flavour, and more recently aura or “x-coded” (for something with various signifiers of x). Similarly people say an idea ‘doesn’t pass the sniff test’, not because they can smell abstract concepts, but because of how it comes across in almost every other way.

Part 2: Supernormal stimulus

Certain aspects of perception have clear dimensions to them. Most obviously things like bigger/taller/longer but also brighter/more-textured/more-saturated, and beyond. If we recognise an object based on it being notable in some dimension, an object with a stronger version of that attribute can register more quickly and more strongly as a signifier of that object. Further, I think that obviousness biases us to rate it as a ‘better’ example of that object in some way. If it has an unnaturally pronounced example of that attribute it can become a supernormal stimulus.

Wikipedia gathers some examples from the natural world here, for example:

  • Birds will nurture fake eggs over their own if they are larger or more saturated (and Cuckoos exploit this fact)
  • Butterflies that select mates by bright colour markings will prefer orange paper model butterflies over receptive real mates
  • Herring gull chicks seeking a parental beak for food will choose a red stick with yellow markings over a faithfully reproduced yellow-beak-with-red-dot replica gull head

Of course, we can intuitively understand this without tricking small animals in laboratory settings, because we are animals ourselves. For example, a drawing of a woman with a dramatically high hip/waist ratio or a man with an implausibly pronounced shoulder/waist ratio will read as stronger and more obvious examples of each sex, even if those ratios go beyond what nature would naturally produce. Some examples:

Designs from Disney’s Hercules (1997) – exaggerated but legible:

Designs from The Book of Life (2014) – frighteningly extreme, still works:

Beyond human secondary sexual characteristics, we can experience it in pretty much everything. A giraffe with an extra long neck is extra giraffe-ey; a stretched limo is an even greater affluence signifier than a regular limo; a monster with an excessive number of impractically long and excessively sharp teeth is extra monstery.

Part 3: Fisherian runaway / Sensory Exploitation Hypothesis

Natural Selection just by itself is an incredibly powerful theory, but some things defy it – a classic example being peacock’s wildly impractical tails. Less often remembered is that Darwin also theorised about Sexual Selection: genes that produce traits that elicit sexual preference will have a reproductive advantage, even if they have no survival advantage. But this on its own doesn’t explain the peacock.

Fisher’s suggestion was that the earliest version of the ‘ornament’ (the surprising feature the species developed) initially signalled greater potential fitness in the natural-selection sense, which meant a preference for that ornament also had an advantage. If the ornament and the preference are correlated (I assume mainly because genes for both get passed on together) you can enter a feedback loop of ever-more exaggerated ornaments that are just barely constrained by natural selection.

The ‘sensory exploitation hypothesis’ proposes that preference for exaggerated traits arises from sensory biases such as the supernormal stimuli I mentioned above. It seems pretty intuitive to me that this will help drive the Fisherian runaway effect far beyond what natural selection would usually tolerate. It’s a bit like Goodhart’s law – when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

So a male peacock with an even bigger, brighter, more saturated and more ornamented tail will look even more appealing to a female peacock, and both the tail and the appreciation for the tail get passed on. Thus the tail becomes ever more extreme, until it finally bumps against natural selection’s hard limits.

No points are awarded for this, but I did come up with the sensory exploitation hypothesis myself! Only after looking for research did I learn that all the above is well-established, and that point about ornament and preference being correlated is the deeper insight.

Part 4: Fisherian runaway in capitalism

I do think this same process applies to capitalism:

  • Consumers select products by their utility. Products with greater utility are more selected, more successful, and so are produced more. Natural selection at work. A Drosselmeyer nutcracker is incredibly good at cracking nuts, so it does well in objective comparisons, and people like me will recommend it to anyone that wants to crack nuts.
  • In many cases the consumer can’t perfectly assess the utility of the product before purchase, so they rely on other signals. This becomes more like sexual selection.
  • We can fall victim to a super-normal stimulus here – a thing that depicts outrageously exaggerated traits looks more appealing, even if it’s beyond all reason. A 13-in-1 tool must be better than a 3-in-1 tool. Drinking Tango gets you slapped by an orange man. This car looks so good, fireflies follow it. These two people love this product, and they are very attractive!
  • Then the Fisherian runaway can start – to compete, those products need to show the super-normal stimulus, and then the only way to stand out is to exaggerate it even further until you eventually run aground on actual utility / natural selection.

Perhaps you think I’m mad, but remember the burgers?

As a food, a burger is notable for being quite tall – it’s a stack of three (or more) things. A burger can also seem more appealing if it has more than just a plain burger inside. So what happens? Burgers that are taller and have more additional things inside look like even better burgers. Before you know it, restaurants are serving burgers that have to be held together with a skewer and cannot even fit in a conventional human mouth. It’s like eating a peacock’s tail. Metaphorically.

(I’m not sure about the correlation element… perhaps it comes in when chefs eat a taller burger at some other restaurant and conclude they should make their own burgers even taller?)

What about cars? Some people feel safer or more masculine if their car is bigger than others. In America where petrol is relatively cheap (so the natural selection pressure of miles-per-gallon is lower), this effect has reached peacock tail levels of madness as cars become ever larger. The correlation kind-of happens here because obtaining a bigger car means other people, whose cars seemed sufficiently big before, now see a need to get even bigger ones.

Thanks to Instagram and similar social media, we get a similar effect for a bunch of things:

  • Treats/drinks that look amazing go viral and drive more sales (and more social posts, driving the correlation) than those that actually taste good
  • Holiday destinations that make for good photo opportunities start to do better than those that are actually enjoyable
  • Getting more abstract: a video/post that has a very high number of views seems like it must be more worthy of our attention
  • Bit of a stretch: a famous person having an opinion seems more compelling than an expert in that domain’s opinion

So as always… watch out for that.

Podcast – The Magnus Archives

The Magnus Archives is a supernatural horror fiction podcast that ran for 200 episodes across 5 seasons from 2016 to 2021.

I got into it essentially by the strength of the writing: I was at a craft fair and found a range of stickers with intriguing phrases like “The sky ate him” and “The world is always ending”.

Unfortunately I didn’t note the artist and the work is not signed!

The framing premise is that the eponymous Magnus Archives takes statements from anyone that has experienced something supernatural, and the Head Archivist is recording these statements out loud to tape in order to log them. In this way it takes a classic “spook of the week” form.

I liked that a lot of the elements of the premise that don’t really make sense end up being narratively justified – with the exception of the very non-diegetic spooky music, which was still excellent (especially the “and then things got really spooky” musical cue in season 1).

The spook-of-the-week setup has two tightropes the author must walk, which author Jonathan Sims talks about explicitly in some of the Q&A episodes: the balance between the weekly spook and a greater narrative, and the balance between raising questions and and answering them. For me, neither one is walked perfectly throughout – but Sims (who is also the lead voice actor) does a much better job of both than I’ve seen before. Even though for me the series peaked around 75% of the way through, I still strongly recommend it if you like spooky business.

Some points to note before jumping in:

  • Episode 1 (styled MAG 1) did not do much for me, MAG 2 is a better bellwether for what the rest is like, so I recommend sampling at least up to that point
  • There is a dedicated subreddit, with a thread for each episode featuring discussion by fans and no spoilers about future content. This can be quite fun for a debrief and help spotting deeper connections between things. (Hub of most of these threads can be found here)
  • There is a dedicated wiki with plot summaries and full episode transcripts, but you need to be very careful because immediately after the plot summary you will see information that spoils future episodes
  • My very favourite bit begins with the word “Hello”. You’ll know it when you get there
  • My least favourite bit is recurring characters that are constantly angry and obstinate
  • Probably avoid if you’re averse to the “endless suffering” trope
  • There’s a follow-up called “The Magnus Protocol” which is still running and I have not yet sampled

The home page with various links is here, but it’s probably easiest to just search ‘magnus archives’ in the podcast service of your choice.

The Androids are Coming

Because I’ve been writing Things for almost 20 years, I can see how some of my posts serve as a marker of developing technology, or at least my awareness of it. For example, I posted in 2015 this Google Research post about neural networks generating images, which is I think the precursor to generative AI art as we now know it.

Back in 2009 I posted about Boston Dynamics’ ‘Big Dog’. Developments in robotics carried on, with bipedal models eventually roaming free of connecting cables and getting increasingly human-shaped. They now seem to be at something of a turning point.

Compare the performance of China’s androids in the 2025 new year show here:

… with the 2026 new year show:

My guess was that android promotional material would shy away from any implication of violence to avoid reminding people of films like Terminator. I hadn’t accounted for the fact that state propaganda might actively want to promote martial prowess, hence the above. At least we can look at what’s coming directly instead of guessing.

Terminator style threats to humanity are a natural fear but I suspect are a low-probability / high-impact event (perhaps more likely in the form of perfectly efficient and numerous state police facilitating a concentration of power into an ever smaller number of human hands, rather than a bona fide machine uprising). Warfare is also a sufficiently incentivised area that bespoke robots (rather than androids) are arising already, starting with drones.

We’ve spent centuries building specific machines to tackle specific tasks efficiently. Building an android to do similar things seems laughably inefficient – a sledgehammer to crack a nut, or supercomputer to play tic-tac-toe. But there is of course a massive efficiency: we have tools, workplaces and entire paradigms built around the human form-factor. Making an android to solve one physical task is inefficient; making one that can do any human task imaginable, with more accuracy / strength / reliability than a trained human, is incredibly efficient.

In December 2024, Citigroup published this forecast of robot numbers by type. Humanoid robots (which I’m referring to as androids) are the most notable leap, getting a foothold in 2030 before exploding by 20250:

The leaps forward in AI, most notably visual processing, seem to have unlocked a major piece in this puzzle and make the above look more plausible to me. Here’s a couple more cases (like the Chinese New Year’s Show example above) that show the improvements in these models over recent years, and so gives an idea of the trajectory.

February 2025: Helix androids putting away shopping very slowly:

May 2026: Helix’s Figure 03 working a production line (and other things):

In a very direct test of a specific skill, there are contests in China in long-distance running for androids. In April 2025, one robot completed the half-marathon in 2 hours 40 minutes.

One year later, a robot completed the half-marathon in just over 50 minutes, beating the human record of 57 minutes (which immediately seems like a less relevant comparison).

I don’t expect this to be quick, so the slow initial commercial growth in the Citi forecast does look reasonable to me. I’m certain there will be massive bumps in the road as public perception and legal / insurance systems navigate around the inevitable accidents and abuses this technology will produce. But I now feel pretty confident that sci-fi visions of robot drivers, plant-pickers, and assistants are not at all fanciful.

I’ve also been reading a lot about what people think will happen to the humans whose jobs have been replaced. To distil everything, the answer is that… the result will be a product of huge numbers of competing systems and feedback loops, and as such is impossible to predict. It’s a bit like this Financial Times prediction of GDP based on different AI scenarios, which is quite funny and frightening at the same time:

Music videos where effort is the trick

This Things is getting a bit heavy, so let’s look at some Music videos in which a beautiful visual effect is achieved, but the amount of effort that must have gone into it is tremendous.

Director: Michel Gondry
Artist: Kylie Minogue
Song: Come Into My World

Once again Gondry finds a way to visualise the repetition of the song in a video that just keeps getting more impressive:

How did he do it? Well, he explains it and the inspiration here

His explanation seems to take for granted an enormous amount of compositing work, all the more impressive given that this was in 2002 when computer-assisted tools were less well developed. That said, it’s Gondry – possibly he found an incredibly efficient way to do this that he’s not revealing here. Or he just takes that “enormous effort” part for granted because he does that regularly.

Director: Nick Goffey and Dominic Hawley
Artist: The Chemical Brothers (with vocals by Beck)
Song: Wide Open
Dancer: Sonoya Mizuno
Effects: The Mill

Starting with a close-up to assure you that you’re looking at a real human dancer, something impossible starts to happen. Make sure to stick around until 3:28 (or just skip there if you’re busy) in which the video casually does something even more impressive.

How did they do it? Surely to do that you would need some sort of motion-controlled camera or real-time movement tracking, re-render almost everything in CG and then carefully composite the live-action with the CG with pinpoint precision?! The answer is yes, that’s exactly what they did:

Director: Páraic Mc Gloughlin
Artist: Weval
Song: Someday

If you take carefully framed photos of everyday objects and architecture with repeating patterns and show them in sequence, you get a strange sort of stop-motion effect. I saw this trick first used in Michael Langan’s 3-minute video Dahlia (2008), then in Thomas Sauvin’s Recycled (2013) (seemingly no longer viewable but described here; a short snippet can be seen from 1’12” in this film festival trailer).  Páraic Mc Gloughlin pushes that idea even further with incredible smoothness, range and synaesthetic effect for Weval’s Someday (2019) music video (after about 21 seconds of build-up):

If you enjoyed that you could also try the video for IMANU – A Taste of Hope (Hallowvale) by Chris Takács and Kevin Rogerson; or enjoy spacelike slicing instead of timelike with the video for Max Cooper – Repetition by Kevin McGloughlin.

The AI Shovelware is here

Also in the category of marking developing technology, last time I wrote about the AI ‘trough of disillusionment’ referencing Mike Judge’s “Where’s the shovelware” article.

Well, true to how the Gartner hype cycle (sometimes) pans out, it turns out we were coming out of that trough.

The financial times looked back into those same trends (paywalled link) in February 2026 and found recent upticks in websites, iOS apps and GitHub repositories:

In April 2026, Naavik did a detailed overview of the topic just for games, showing not much effect on PC (although a rise in AI-discosed games), but a huge effect on mobile (especially on Android), showing the number of publishers is up, and the relative proportions of success have remained about the same.

That last point is particularly interesting because the feeling in games is that there are already way more games than the market can sustain (so the vast majority do essentially no business), so an AI-driven surge in new games could just dilute success and make it even harder for anyone to succeed at making games. The counter-argument would be that with a wider range of games, more niches are filled, so more people buy more games – for example, maybe I buy 6 games a year, but if there were twice as many that were twice as appealing to me maybe I would buy 9. If, as Naavik found, the relative proportions of success are about the same then these two effects perhaps cancel out. Or realistically, there’s lots of other effects and that data isn’t sensitive enough to detect them or their true net effect, and also not enough time has elapsed to feel the effects, so let’s just wait and see.

Still this does put more pressure on the question of ‘discovery’ – I can’t buy those amazing games if I don’t know they exist. Most people who work in video games seem to want discovery to get solved through some clever platform design, but I don’t think that’s very likely:

  • If I knew what I wanted and could find games that meet exactly that, just maybe we could solve it, but people do not know what they want! I would never have searched for something like Outer Wilds or Portal – in fact if I had searched for either of those accurately it would have effectively spoiled the game – but they were exactly what I wanted.
  • This type of problem is approximately solved in social media, where algorithms can serve content people are likely to enjoy (well enough that they keep scrolling, anyway) – but I don’t think people play enough games for you to run the kind of predictive models that work there
  • It might just about work if you took as input everything about you (social media consumption, books read, films watched etc on top of games played), but nobody holds all that data (yet)… and we feel uncomfortable with anyone holding all that data.

So in the absence of all that, we just get marketing.

Or some sort of procedural AI-generated game starts out as what you thought you wanted and evolves into what you actually needed based on your real-time reactions. That sounds a lot like a dream, or perhaps a nightmare, both figuratively and literally.

Perhaps more likely, in the future maybe your household android tracks all of that contextual data about you locally, and can then make perfect recommendations?

  • Transmission ends, stretching for a note of optimism

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Things 2025 Q4: Podcasts, long titles, recursive knowledge

Podcasts

I’ve circled around podcasts without diving in for a long time, unsure of how to navigate the medium. With movies or video games, I’m already looking at places that tell me about new and interesting releases, and I know how to find out if something I’m considering might be good; with movies especially I’m aware of directors, writers or actors I like that will form part of the draw. With podcasts, I have none of that!

Despite that, I’ve found a few podcasts over the years that I liked, so it seemed a good time to round them up.

Blank Cheque

Blank Cheque is a podcast about films (apparently a very popular one but I’d never heard of it, I guess because of my distance from podcasts) specifically about the careers of directors who got ‘blank cheques’, i.e. enough power that they were able to make exactly the films they wanted. It takes the (apparently classic) form of two friends chatting about the subject matter, usually with a guest, but if there was ever a conversation I wanted to overhear about film, this is it. The friends are David Sims, a film critic who is often very funny, and Griffin Newman, an actor/comedian who is also incredibly insightful about films.

They came to my attention through their ‘stunt’ podcast that kicked the whole thing off: “The Phantom Podcast”, a long podcast series diving into Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace in forensic detail, under the conceit that this was the only Star Wars movie ever made and they are trying to make sense of it. They then ‘discover’ later Star Wars episodes one at a time and continue to analyse them as if nothing else existed. It’s quite incredibly niche and nerdy and there’s only one Things reader I would recommend it to, and I already have, so maybe don’t start with that. (I will say the full ~36 hours (!!) of material covering the prequel trilogy does go out on a pretty audacious high with a George Lucas impersonator defending the films against all criticism in front of a live audience).

I recommend picking a well-known director or film you like and searching the wiki to see if they have covered it (they have covered quite a lot of the big ones by now), then give that episode a listen. My favourite part is that they are often fantastic at drawing out ways in which the film’s meta-text resonates with the text. My least favourite part is that they will often talk over and interrupt their guests, especially women. That’s a pretty sharp down-side, so hopefully the fact I recommend them despite that shows how much I appreciate the good parts.

Link to Blank Cheque podcast

Designer Notes

Ok, I got into this one a while ago but didn’t mention it until now. A little like ‘Blank Cheque’, Designer Notes sees Soren Johnson interview game leads that have produced especially interesting games over their career. As an interviewer, he’s fantastic at drawing out the most interesting stories, with a knack for spotting when a fascinating nugget got skipped and asking the guest to dig into it.

Like Blank Cheque, if there’s a game series or game-maker you like, search (maybe like this) to see if they have been covered and start there.

Link to Designer Notes podcast

Gamecraft

Much shorter than any others mentioned here; if you have any interest in video games as a medium, a business, and in how it has adapted and grown over the past four decades, this is a fantastic listen. Mitch Lasky covers most of the material and is incredibly insightful since, through a lot of luck and some good judgement, he was somehow very close to the action at almost every major evolution the business has been through since the early 90’s. Blake Robins plays the ‘straight man’ role, standing in for the audience by asking the questions you’d naturally want to ask or pointing out context Mitch is sometimes too modest to state.

Link to Gamecraft podcast

Mindscape with Sean Carroll

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist with an interest in many different scientific fields, and in this podcast he interviews scientists of all kinds to get a better understanding of their area. He’s a great communicator, and by studying the published materials of his guests in advance he’s able to coax them into explaining it clearly even when they themselves are not quite as eloquent. (Okay, sometimes it doesn’t quite work and he ends up doing most of the explanatory lifting).

Here I recommend scrolling through his list of guests and topics and diving into whichever one you find interesting.

(Random bonus note: I like the way the little intro song has a melody that kind of matches Carroll’s intonation.)

Finally, as an aside, Sean Carroll appeared in Piers Morgan Uncensored to debate Eric Weinstein on the topic of theoretical physics. I’ve seen this characterised as “Jerry Springer for nerds”, notably including the following exchange (only missing a little context):

            Eric: If Sean had actually read my paper…

            Sean: I actually have read your paper! I have it right here!

            Eric: Well first of all, Sean, how dare you…

Someone like Eric is able to get the attention of ‘alternative media’ by sounding very smart and espousing a theory that ‘the establishment’ doesn’t agree with. You need to be incredibly knowledgeable and calm to reasonably debate with someone like this, and Sean pulls it off. I found it fascinating for that reason alone. I even give Piers a little bit of credit for attempting to end the discussion with some grace, given how little he understands the topic (by his own admission).

Link to Mindscape podcast

Useful memorisations

I’m sure a few of you have already done this, but here’s two simple things worth memorising.

First, the numeric position of each letter of the alphabet (a = 1, b = 2, c = 3 etc). In the summer of 2001 I once needed to walk a couple of miles alone and spontaneously decided to memorise this while I walked; I’m amazed how much this has paid off over the years. Admittedly I do move in circles where this sort of thing comes up more often than perhaps is normal.

Second, the ‘major system’ is a simple correspondence between the digits 0-9 and consonants (0 = s, 1 = t/d, 2 = n etc). Once you have memorised this, you can turn any number into a set of letters (e.g. 20251231 = N S N L T/D N M T/D), you then insert whichever vowels you need to make a word or words, which in turn are usually easier to memorise than the numbers because they are a bit weird. This does take a bit of skill, and I’m not very good at it but get by (e.g. NSNL.TN.MT = No SNaiL-eaTeN MuT). Great for PINs or a surprising number of other things. Admittedly sometimes the effort of translating the thing into words and then back again often means I end up memorising the numbers directly, but that’s still a win.

If you have similarly useful memorisations to recommend, let me know!

AI coding trough of disillusionment

In a fast-moving world, this article by Mike Judge, “Where’s the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don’t Add Up” is now a bit old (article date 3rd Sep 2025), but it was a pretty thorough look for signs of AI coding being transformative in terms of software / websites / apps / games and not finding any evidence:

  • The METR study found developers thought AI made them 20% faster but it actually made them 19% slower
  • Mike’s own mini-trial found nowhere near the powerful effect he had subjectively thought was happening
  • There is no evidence of increased releases of apps on iOS, Android or Steam
  • No increase in domain name registrations
  • No increase in new public Github repositories

Mike also then directly addresses the most obvious counterpoints that could be raised.

https://substack.com/inbox/post/172538377?=&aid=recKGiRdTrn0tC0OH

Now, to avoid oversimplifying, we should also consider the following:

  • Generating code is just one part of shipping a product, all the other parts can be quite difficult and annoying, so maybe that functions as a barrier
  • This doesn’t mean nobody sees any benefit from AI in any coding situation. People can be coding for personal use, or improving existing workflows
  • Even if there’s no effect on publishing rates, there could be other effects, such as different levels of quality or hiring patterns

There are also, of course, other ways in which generative AI has an impact – there’s dramatically more to this topic than I’m covering here. For example, it’s a great way to make social media spam, presentations everywhere are getting bespoke illustrations that would have otherwise been just text, and some have seen a decline in job roles for junior positions (for example), so there’s still lots to watch out for.

Films where they actually had to Do The Thing

With editing and special effects, movies can weave a lot of magic. However, sometimes the plot will require the film-makers to actually depict something incredibly impressive without any tricks.

I first encountered this as a theoretical example in the book (recommended to me by Will W), “Adventures in the screen trade” by William Goldman, screenwriter of All the President’s Men and The Princess Bride. In one chapter he writes a short story and then has experts in different aspects of film-making give him feedback on how the story might need to change to be realised on film. Of particular note was that the story hinged on a boy getting a transcendently incredible haircut of unknowable beauty; it is firmly pointed out to him that this is essentially impossible to portray on screen.

What I’m getting at here is skills specifically outside of those you expect for film-makers. An example of what I’m not counting: sometimes a character gives an inspiring speech to rouse people to action and it’s literally inspiring – difficult to write, but movies have professional writers. Or sometimes a film requires stunt work, especially a Jackie Chan film in which part of the appeal is he is performing difficult and dangerous stunts himself – but this is still a fairly normal part of film-making, with Jackie Chan being an apex example.

Where it can get harder is music.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) is a film about a folk singer on the edge of musical success and (more often) disaster. They found Oscar Isaac for the lead, who is not only perfect for it but also a legitimately talented musician. At one point he is brought in to record a novelty song, “Please Mr Kennedy” (with Justin Timberlake as the song’s on-screen and off-screen writer; also with Adam Driver doing a silly voice), and Isaac’s character opts to take the session fee rather than any cut of the song’s profits. As an audience you should read this as a mistake, as the song will probably perform well. As a novelty song, and to the point of this section, it is legitimately good enough that you believe that’s a possibility. (It’s partly based on the original Please Mr Kennedy by Mickey Woods, and as @mooviedude141 notes in the comments on the film’s version, a different Kennedy did pretty much go on to send two of the performers into outer space).

There are plenty of other films in which a song needs to do a lot of lifting and they pull it off (“Remember Me” in Coco (2017); the Cloud Atlas Sextet in Cloud Atlas (2012); a central performance in Sinners (2025)), all of which are impressive, but I know of two examples that go the full distance.

In O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), a surprising through-line is that the escaped convict protagonists end up recording “Man of Constant Sorrow”, and while their hijinks continue the song is becoming popular in the background, to pay off beautifully near the end. Meanwhile in real life, that song (and the film’s soundtrack) legitimately became extremely and surprisingly popular.

More recently Kpop Demon Hunters (2025) features several songs by the in-movie group HUNTR/X (performed mostly by genuine K-pop group Twice among other expert contributors), who are supposed to be extremely popular – and in real life, to quote from the Wikipedia summary, “it became the first film soundtrack on the Billboard Hot 100 to have four of its songs in the top ten, was certified double Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in October 2025, and received five Grammy Award nominations”.

What about non-music?

In The Ring (1998), a particular video will ‘curse’ anyone who watches it. Perhaps making such a video is arguably within the wheelhouse of a horror film director, but the execution of it really stands out. The video is semi-abstract but nonetheless legitimately creates a deeply cursed feeling, which is why I won’t embed it here and also is part of why that film haunted my nightmares for years, only resolving when I dressed as the main spook Sadako one Hallowe’en.

Very long titles of manga and anime that explain the whole premise

This trend has been running for some years in Japanese anime and manga. Some Examples:

  • The World’s Finest Assassin Gets Reincarnated In Another World as an Aristocrat
  • Banished from the Hero’s Party, I Decided to Live a Quiet Life in the Countryside
  • I Got a Cheat Skill in Another World and Became Unrivaled in the Real World, Too
  • The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Genius Young Lady
  • The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn’t Really a Guy at All

I wonder if this becoming acceptable (or even appealing) makes some stories more marketable than they would have been in a short-title paradigm. Perhaps this is partly why the Isekai genre (protagonist goes to ‘another world’, a genre lately overrepresented in general and also in my above examples) has had such a boom in popularity.

We could consider how this might play for major Hollywood films. There have been a few examples with titles changing mid-marketing-push to get longer/shorter and more/less explicit about the premise:

  • “Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)” did not seem to work as a title and had a late pivot to “Birds of Prey”. I can’t help but feel just “Harley Quinn” would have worked better, but that’s a topic for another Things.
  • John Carter was previously to be titled John Carter of Mars, but seemingly Disney thought the ‘Mars’ bit would put people off, so hoped to just… sneak it in there?
  • Edge of Tomorrow sounds cool but tells you very little, so had a late pivot to the much clearer (but equally terse) Live. Die. Repeat.

Perhaps there’s something fundamentally different going on in the marketing strategy though – Hollywood films that aspire to be blockbusters will often signify their intended mass appeal with a very short title such as ‘Titanic’, ‘Frozen’, or ‘Sinners’. Meanwhile, a lot of anime and manga are trying to carve out a niche, and they can best do that by setting out the full premise up front so the people looking for that exact sort of thing will find it.

So, if there’s anywhere we might expect this trend to show up in Western media, perhaps it’s books?

Recursive Knowledge

Laurence once pointed out to me that “you have a vested interest in anyone that has a vested interest in someone you have a vested interest in”, and he remains correct.

In the second book of Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem trilogy, the author dramatises the problem of insufficiently recursive trust. Two groups, who we can label Alice and Bob, have a problem: each of them has the capacity to annihilate the other before there is a chance to retaliate.

  • Alice trusts that Bob will not attack, and Bob trusts that Alice will not attack
  • But, Alice does not know that Bob trusts that will Alice not attack, and vice versa
  • If there’s a chance Bob does not trust Alice will not attack, probably he will attack
  • So to be safe they each should launch a pre-emptive strike

Unfortunately this keeps going even if you can add another level of trust. Consider just Alice’s side in the next level up (using close synonyms for trust/know to try to keep it manageable):

  • Alice trusts that Bob will not attack
  • Alice is also confident that Bob, in turn, trusts that Alice will not attack. Hooray!
  • But… Alice does not know if that meta-confidence is reciprocal. As far as she knows, even though Bob trusts that Alice will not attack, he might not know that she knows that
  • So Alice must consider the possibility that Bob does not know that Alice knows Bob trusts that Alice will not attack.
  • If that’s the case, Bob might be concerned that Alice is unaware that Bob trusts that Alice will not attack. Bob will consider the possibility that Alice does not believe Bob trusts Alice will not attack.
  • If Bob is considering that, it means he worries Alice thinks Bob does not trust that Alice will not attack – and if that was the case Alice, assuming Bob does not trust her, would launch a pre-emptive attack.
  • In this scenario that Alice is imagining, Bob would therefore launch a pre-emptive attack… so Alice had better launch her attack first.

You can see how this keeps going even if you layer on more meta levels of trust. The problem presumably caps out at our ability to compute much further. Unfortunately, if both sides entrust such decisions to AI then this will either become undecideable in the halting problem sense, or they will pre-emptively attack each other while trying to get to the bottom of the recursion just to be on the safe side.

How far can humans really think this sort of thing through? In the previous section I noted there is a manga titled “The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn’t Really a Guy at All”. As you would expect from the title, the drama hinges on the fact that Aya has a crush on Koga who she assumes is a boy, but Koga is in fact a girl in her class who dresses in a very male-presenting way outside of high school.

I don’t think it’s really a spoiler to say that eventually the secret comes out, because it’s very much about the journey rather than the destination (and at the time of writing the series is unfinished). That knowledge recursion is dramatized over a series of stages – Aya finds out about Koga, then Koga learns that Aya has found out but Aya doesn’t know that, and at a certain point Aya overhears that Koga has realised that Aya knows about Koga’s identity – but Koga does not know she knows that! That sounds pretty abstract, but in the moment of reading, the meaning and emotional significance of this highly meta revelation feels incredibly clear. I suppose as social animals, it makes sense that humans can grasp this stuff pretty well when it’s in the context of a story.

While I was thinking about all this I found out that Steven Pinker now has a book out called “When everyone knows that everyone knows”, which deals with ‘common knowledge’; when recursive knowledge operates at a population level.

I should note a slightly distant and dark irony there: we’re going through a kind of ‘common knowledge’ moment right now with the release of the Epstein files. In 2006 Pinker wrote a letter to his friend Alan Dershowitz, who was Epstein’s defence attorney at the time, on the the wording of the “internet luring statute”, and this apparently contributed to federal sex trafficking charges against Epstein being dropped. Pinker says he was unaware this was how it would be used and regrets sending it.

  • Transmission ends somewhat uncomfortably
Categories
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Things 2025 Q1: Muji music, Russian disinformation, Reincarnation

Exercise for the reader, part 1

I found this very simple two-part thought exercise incredibly powerful. It’s more effective to separate the parts out, so I’ll post the first here and the second at the end, along with the source.

In your next life you can choose to be reborn as anyone, with any job, anywhere and any time – what do you choose?

I recommend giving this some thought! Feel free to think of a silly answer and a serious one, or just as many as come to mind.

Unused Muji soundtrack

In 1983 for the opening of their first store in Tokyo, Muji commissioned Japanese music legend Haruomi Hosono to create a soundtrack. As Jen Monro sums up in this excellent overview, the tracks he produced are “not as neutral, or even chipper, as one might expect for storefront use: they willfully stray into eerie, dissociative territory, suggesting hypnosis and foggy, dreamlike states.”

That’s great, but the cherry on the top is that a Youtube upload of these tracks has inspired a pattern of upvoted comments in which people provide whimsical descriptions of what the music (specifically the first track, I suspect) sounds like to them. Samples below, best read while listening to it:

“can only assume this is what it feels like to be a fungus”

fadesblue

“This is the music that plays when you get to the end of youtube.”

Carcosahead

“this is the music that plays as the credits roll on the movie of your entire life, the theater is dark and empty except for you and you know you’re going to have to get up and leave soon and you’re okay with that but you want to sit and watch all those familiar names scroll past for just a little longer.”

midnightcthulhu5551

Use-cases for text-based AI

I remember back when Wolfram Alpha was released in 2009, I tried to figure out how to fit it into my mental model of online tools. For example, as well as conveniently solving some maths problems, you can also just ask it “How old was Mark Hamill when Star Wars came out” rather than go to IMDb/Wikipedia and do some maths yourself. Well, I didn’t manage to adapt to it very well and hardly ever remember to use it in practice.

Now we have a dramatic increase in capability with AI tools of many different kinds, and once again we need to work out how best to use these new tools. (There’s also a huge rabbit-hole of data-source ethics and workforce implications which I am putting to one side for now; if you want a blog that gets more into AI stuff John B recommended Interconnected, so try that!). I feel like I’m being quite slow at picking this up, so I thought I’d share my pretty basic use-cases and ask you, the Things readers – what do you use AI for? Let’s just focus on text for now.

Examples:

  • Answering vague queries, like “what was that film from the 80’s where there was a portal and weird monsters came out of it”
  • Summarising long text (although I’ve found the compromises in accurate insight too great to rely on this)
  • Generating a terse summary of leads on a research topic that you can then follow up via more reliable means (e.g. what are some considerations for building an interstellar spaceship)
  • Code (taught to me by Beinn): Use Windsurf to get some quick game prototypes up and running – in practice I am still so far out of my depth on this that even incredibly helpful AI can’t really help me make what I want!
  • Weirdly, technical help (e.g. I was struggling to find a certain system option on my Macbook, and even Google’s AI had the solution better covered than regular Google search which surfaced irrelevant answers for different make/model/OSes)

Examples I know of others using that I can’t quite get my head around:

  • Using AI to coach you on challenging conversations
  • Giving AI several complicated documents (e.g. small print of different insurance options) and asking it to make a decision for you that relies on understanding the full contents of the documents

So, how do you use text AI?

Animated film sequels: getting worse, doing better

I remember the old rule-of-thumb for sequels was that they would make about 2/3 the box office of the original. This might have been a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy as studios might invest less in the sequel given how reliable that revenue could be regardless.

In recent times, with franchises making so much money, some of that calculus has changed, and my sense is the success of a sequel is much less predictable.

Most notably though I realised animated sequels seemed to almost always make more money than the original. To test out that hunch, I charted the difference in global box office for each of the top grossing animations with sequels, and put it against the difference in IMDb rating. The results are pretty dramatic:

Sure enough, every animated sequel made more money than the original – and with exception of wild outlier Ne Zha and also Spiderverse, was also worse based on IMDb ratings!

It feels like animated films in particular are being chosen by parents who have a strong desire to find something reliably entertaining for their children. The fact a film got a sequel is an endorsement (Ian’s suggestion), and I think children can also show a very strong interest in the orginal in home media, and that gives parents more confidence to take them to the cinema for the sequel. These effects may even artificially reduce box office of animated originals!

The largely consistent decline in IMDb rating of sequels could be covered by the effects I wrote about in Paradoxic Fandom.

Russian Disinformation

I read a long time ago that Russia had state-funded ‘troll farms’ generating content on social media with the intent to manipulate the Western audience towards their own ends. Having worked in marketing, I was doubtful about how effective this could be as I knew how hard it is to shift anyone’s opinion.

But first, a weird tangent before we go on:

  • Web analytics tools will frequently use extra text in a link in order to report information about it, for example adding something like “source=potatoes” to indicate a link came from this blog
  • By default this data is not sanitised, so you can manually edit the text of a URL (for example change ‘potatoes’ to ‘hello-world’), and when you then follow that URL, you can pass through a fake campaign name which an analyst may then see. For example, when I worked at Skype and looked at the web site visitors by source, I saw 1(one) visit from a campaign called “i-hate-bill-gates”!
  • On my own websites, I would routinely see clicks from these manually-faked campaigns where the text they have added is for some kind of website they want me to purchase things from – it’s a spam vector!
  • This problem got so bad I even started to see spam links selling the ability to stop this from happening (meta-spam!)
  • … but to return to the original point, in 2016 I got a wave of these fake campaigns all saying words to the effect of ‘elect Trump’
  • The fact someone somewhere was doing that to such an extent that even my tiny websites were caught up in it tends to make me believe a larger operation was at work, but of course I can’t infer who.

End tangent

The idea that Russia’s online efforts might actually be effective gains credibility for me when I recall two things:

  • Social media has a strong pareto effect: a very small number of people account for a very large number of posts.
  • We often form our ideas about what is happening not by careful consideration of credible sources, but by what we tend to see evidence of repeatedly (e.g. a newspaper repeatedly reporting on a particular type of crime makes people think it’s a big deal, rather than a careful consideration of crime statistics)

If you then combine that with social media’s built-in tendency of pushing inflammatory content (because algorithms prioritise engagement and this is one of the easiest ways to get it), it suddenly becomes much more credible to me that this sort of campaign could help drive the kind of increasing polarisation we’ve seen in the West.

Despite all of that, it still felt a little bit like a conspiracy-theory to me, which is why this Reddit post is very helpful to substantiate the idea – it gives a long sequence of examples and credible citations for each, making the primary contention, “You’re being targeted by disinformation networks”, very credible:

You're being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly more effective than you realize. And they're making you more hateful and depressed.
byu/walkandtalkk inGenZ

Even having read that, I think it’s still easy to forget. For example, I saw a Reddit post by someone saying they worked for the US Government and will soon be fired; their Republican-voting parents’ response was that “there are plenty of jobs at McDonalds”. How heartless! Their own child!! These Republicans!!!

Now, it remains possible that this is a true story (actually because of this very problem), but it does also seem like exactly the kind of thing you might fabricate if you wanted to further polarise things.

At minimum we should remember that this sort of content is anecdotal evidence of behaviour at best, so should be considered relatively low in terms of how much it shapes your opinion on what is really going on.

(Of course, this is just one aspect of Russia’s grey-zone aggression, this Observer summary of interference in democracy in Moldova is quite salutary and has this excellent quote:”Moscow wants to show that it can use all measures short of outright invasion to keep nations it sees in its “zone of influence” chronically destabilised.”)

An ethical interaction with Sugar Gliders

I found this promotional flyer for ‘Cuddly Colony’ in Brighton. I just really love the way they promote this thing – looking at cute animals in a very serious and carefully considered way:

Do note that it’s about £45 for this ethical interaction and I can’t vouch for it personally.

Exercise for the reader, part 2

As a reminder, part 1 was as follows:

In your next life you can choose to be reborn as anyone, with any job, anywhere and any time – what do you choose?

Do you have something in mind? If not, just think of something now! The first thing that pops in to your mind may well be springing from your subconscious!

With that fresh in your mind, here is the second part:

Given you desire that alternative life on some level, and that reincarnation is not real*, what could you do in your own life to get some way towards that desire?

For example, if you imagined being a cowboy, could you at least go horse-riding? If you wanted to be an astronaut, perhaps you could get a telescope? If you want to be an author, could you just write a short story?

The world is so full of incredible possibility (as a random example, you could go to Asda and buy an item for each letter of the alphabet), that it can be very hard to work out what to do, especially over the long run. I found this exercise extremely helpful.

I encountered it in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, a book that Clare got me and I found very inspirational. It is based on Cameron’s long-running workshops to help people be more creative, and to overcome creative block (or really anything that acts as a block to creativity). Like Alcoholics Anonymous, it is a 12-step program, and also like AA weirdly involves God – but Cameron helpfully outlines how the process can be made useful even for an atheist. For example, she might say it’s helpful to have as a mantra “Great Creator, I will take care of the quantity. You take care of the quality”, but instead of God/Creator you can just make it a general trust in the process, or a faith in your subconscious, and the effect is much the same.

I highly recommend the whole book, to everyone, but if you were to just take 3 things from it, one is the above exercise, and the other are these two simple habits that facilitate the creative process:

  1. Morning Pages
    Each morning, write three sides of hand-written text. There is no goal of what to write about, and you should not re-read it or share it afterwards. You just write and see what comes out. My experience is this kind of cleans out your preoccupations that cloud your mind, often turning them into concrete actions for a to do list, and this then leaves space for more creative thoughts. (In practice I only make time for this 2 times a week, but it is still useful!)
  2. The ‘Artist’s Date’
    Cameron’s mental model is that you have an ‘inner artist’ which is very childlike and needs pampering before it can create. To do this, you should take your inner artist (i.e. yourself) on a ‘date’: 2 hours each week doing something nice – something that appeals to you intuitively, something that do on your own, that can be inspirational, or just expose you to new things, to distract you just enough that ideas can come to you naturally. This could be watching a film, going for a walk where you haven’t been before, going to an art gallery – or (I think) a lot of things you might do while listening to a podcast, just without the podcast so you are free to think. This better enables the inner artist / subconscious to create moments of inspiration.


So, when being reincarnated, what do I want to do? A lot of things, but notably I really want to write stories and make weird games. I do already do a little bit of both, but I should do more!

*Reincarnation without memory is indistinguishable from no reincarnation in the life we lead today. Reasons to doubt reincarnation in general are left as an exercise for the reader.

  • Transmission ends