April 17th, 2020 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- This one is going to be a bit of a longer post, I've got lots of thoughts this go-round. First, the topical stuff. I'm back at my house for a bit so that my girlfriend and I can have some time to ourselves for a while, which has been pretty nice. I had almost forgotten how nice it is to run on my own schedule and not have to coordinate--if I end up back at her place for a few more weeks, I'll likely try to broker some changes in our routine. All that said, the last month or so has been really phenomenal; I got to spend a ton of time with my person, did a ton of cooking and baking, and made serious tracks on my homebrew RPG. Speaking of, let's spare a few words for that. === I'm calling my game HUSK, and it is about building a new life in the shell of a ruined megacity (NEO-OZ) after its godlike, hyperintelligent AI is destroyed. The characters work to improve their communities and personal situations while navigating the thorny factional relations that are present in NEO-OZ. For the ruleset, I've developed for what I call a 'rules kernel': SEED. SEED is a set of setting- and genre-agnostic resolution mechanics for tabletop roleplaying games. It shares a lot of DNA with 0D&D, Troika!, Whitehack, and Norbert Matausch's Landshut Rules. It is essentially the germ for larger 'common-law' rulesets, as discussed by Alex Schroeder and Eero Tuovinen. In SEED-based games, you begin with the explicitly defined SEED rules. The referee then adds any rules that are vitally important to the setting. From there, new rules are added as they emerge in play. The process looks like this: 1) The referee makes a ruling (just as in most OSR games). 2) If the players decide that the ruling is particularly apt, the ruling is recorded. 3) If the ruling is referenced and implemented two further times, it goes up for review by the whole table. 4) If the players and referee all agree, the ruling is cemented as a rule. In this way, the ruleset gets tailored to each individual group. This is, of course, just a slightly more codified version of houseruling, but I believe that baking it into the system with a minimum of initial rules will allow good refs with good players to make a ruleset that they can really feel at home in. I will publish the early versions of SEED and HUSK on this gopherspace once I can be arsed to make them all tidy. My priority right now is on getting the supplemental materials to my group and designing their initial scenario. Updates on the game itself may pop up here on the phlog, but I have no interest in producing session reports. === Tangential to the post-cyberpunk of HUSK, I just finished reading Philip K. Dick's _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_ yesterday. While the style was a bit clunky and some things hadn't aged too well (notably, the portrayal/description of female characters), I found it overall to be very engaging and compelling. I've never seen any of the Blade Runner films, so I had very little idea of what to expect going in. If you don't want this book spoiled for you a bit, I suggest you skip to the next section of this post. I found several elements of the book to be particularly notable. First, Dick's treatment of the idea of androids shows a firm grasp of nuance. PKD establishes that androids exist in varying degrees of human-ness, with the Nexus-6 android being the closest to humanity. By the end, though, we know pretty clearly that even the Nexus-6s completely lack empathy for other beings--though it is implied that they may have a degree of empathy for other androids. Instead of giving us a clear "androids bad" answer, though, PKD leaves the reader to grapple with several questions. Could a being that is essentially human but devoid of empathy coexist with humans in society? Are androids truly much different from mentally ill humans with deficient empathy responses? Do they deserve their status as third-class citizens in PKD's fictional society? It seems that most of the trouble with androids stems from their direct oppression by humans. Those that were free to live their own lives, by posing as humans, seemed simply to follow their dreams. I also found Mercerism to be of interest. I see it as a sort of abstraction of traditional religion more broadly--a group of people unite in their following of a messianic figure's self-sacrificing struggle, even though it is entirely fictional. In the abstract, PKD's Mercerism helped me to become a bit more sympathetic towards religion; if I could use a box to connect myself to the hearts and minds of others, who seem themselves as part of a greater struggle, I would probably grab those handles. In practice, though, most organized religion remains something I can't really stomach. Notable exceptions for me include Quakerism and Unitarian Universalism, which really seem pretty alright. I've been attending a class at a UU church, and it has helped fill that void where community belonging used to be. I'm increasingly believing that human beings need a community/tribe that's more than a few people wide. One of the things that I adored while reading the book was Dick's talent for writing scenes where reality seems to be at a breaking point: 1) When Deckard is being gaslit at the Mission Street Station 2) When Isidore breaks down into the Tomb World after witnessing the mutilation of the spider/the mood-altering alarm triggering In both of these scenes, PKD's writing is psychedelic and evocative. I could really feel the characters losing their grip on certainty, the wildness that comes with unknowing, the despair of non-identity. Last, I want to share what I thought was one of the most poignant passages in the book, and possibly one of the more poignant things I've ever read: "The old man said, 'You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.'" I'd recommend just about anyone to read DADoES? if they get the chance to. PKD's short story "The Little Black Box" is also a solid read if Mercerism catches your fancy. === Outside of building HUSK, my other main project lately has been running through Nisan & Schocken's _From Nand to Tetris_ course. The course teaches the foundations of computing by having students build a virtual computer from two basic chips: NAND (for combinatorial logic) and a DFF (for sequential logic). The end goal is to write a Tetris program for this virtual computer. I have implemented most of the foundational chips, including the ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit) and the 16K RAM chip. I am now on the chapter that introduces programming in Assembly language, before implementing the CPU and unifying the disparate chips into a working virtual machine. I cannot give a full review of this course, as I have not finished it, but so far I am enjoying it immensely. I have a very modest background in computing--I can implement HTML and gopher pages, I live in the Linux terminal a decent chunk of the time, and I've farted around with C and Java before--but it seems to me that even a total tech neophyte could make their way through this course if they were persistent enough. My brain is being stretched in very pleasant ways by this course. After I have finished, I'll likely set myself to learning C, for real this time. === That is enough of my babbling for now. I hope everyone reading is staying safe, healthy, and sane. ~slothbear .