books – Dan Q

Ten Weird Games

This has been a draft blog post since ~2019, with minor additions since then.

Perhaps it’s finally time to share these ten weird… “games” (or game-adjacent media)… that I’ve seen.

Maybe you’ll “get” them. If not, maybe they’re just for me.

1. It is as if you were playing chess

Where could I possibly start this list if not with eccentric games-as-art proponent Pippin Barr. Created in 2016, It is as if you were playing chess is an interactive experience that encourages you to mimic the physical movements of playing a digital chess game, without actually ever looking at a chessboard.

Years later I’d argue that the experience of its… sequel?… It is as if you were on your phone, is very similar. Especially to an outside observer, watching you tap and swipe at your mobile device as if you were using your mobile device: it’s almost like an alien’s guide to blending-in with humans.

Is is even a game? Pippin himself mused over this in a blog post¹. He went on to make several others in the same genre, of which It is as if you were making love is perhaps the most off-the-wall. Give that a go, too.

It really is almost as if I were on my phone!²

Whether or not they’re games, these are art, and they are compelling.

2. Hard Lads

Back in 2016, a video briefly trended on YouTube called “British Lads Hit Each Other with Chair”.

It’s a 67-second portrait video featuring four partially-dressed young men somewhere in what looks like Tyneside. Two of them kiss before one of the pair swigs from a spirits bottle and takes a drag from a cigarette, throwing both onto the floor afterwards³.

Finally, the least-dressed young man (seemingly with the consent of all involved) repeatedly strikes the drinker/smoker with a folding chair.

It’s… quite something.

In his blog post Hard Lads as an important failure, the game’s creator Robert Yang describes it as “neorealist fumblecore”, and goes into wonderful detail about the artistic choices he made in creating it. The game is surreal, queer, and an absolute masterpiece.

3. Top Ten Games You Can Play In Your Head By Yourself

Let’s sidestep a moment out of video games and take a look at a book.

Top Ten Games You Can Play In Your Head By Yourself, edited by Sam Gorski (founder of Corridor Digital) and D. F. Lovett and based on an original series of gamebooks written pseudonymously by “J. Theophrastus Bartholomew”, initially looks like exactly what it claims to be. That is, a selective reprint of a very-1980s-looking series of solo roleplaying game prompts.

Except that’s clearly a lie. There’s no evidence that J. Theophrastus Bartholomew exists as an author (even used as a pen name), nor do any of the fourteen books credited to him in the foreword. The alleged author only as a framing device by the actual authors: the “editors”.

Superficially, the book presents a series of ten… “prompts”, I suppose. It’s like reading the rules of a Choose Your Own Adventure gamebook, or else the flavour and background in an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons module.

Each prompt sets up a premise and describes it as if it would later integrate with a ruleset… but no ruleset is forthcoming. Instead, completing the story and also how to go about completing the story is left entirely up to the reader.

It’s disarming, like if a recipe book consisted of a list of dishes and cuisines, a little about the history and culture of each… and no instructions on how to make it.

But what’s most-weird about the book (and there’s plenty more besides) are the cross-references between the chapters⁴. Characters from one adventure turn up in another. Interstitial “Shadows and Treasures” chapters encourage you to reflect upon previous adventures and foreshadow those that follow.

There’s more on its RPGGeek page (whose existence surprised me!), along with a blog post by Lovett. They’re doing a horror-themed sequel, which I don’t feel the need to purchase, but I’d got to say from what I’ve seen so far that they’ve once-again really nailed the aesthetic.

I have no idea who the book is “for”, but it’s proven surprisingly popular in some circles.

4. Mackerelmedia Fish

I reviewed this game shortly after its release in 2020 by the ever-excellent Natalie Lawhead. At the time, I said:

What is Mackerelmedia Fish? I’ve had a thorough and pretty complete experience of it, now, and I’m still not sure. It’s one or more (or none) of these, for sure, maybe:

A point-and-click, text-based, or hypertext adventure?

An homage to the fun and weird Web of yesteryear?

A statement about the fragility of proprietary technologies on the Internet?

An ARG set in a parallel universe in which the 1990s never ended?

A series of surrealist art pieces connected by a loose narrative?

…

What I can tell you with confident is what playing feels like. And what it feels like is the moment when you’ve gotten bored waiting for page 20 of Argon Zark to finish appear so you decide to reread your already-downloaded copy of the 1997 a.r.k bestof book, and for a moment you think to yourself: “Whoah; this must be what living in the future feels like!”

…

Mackerelmedia Fish is a mess of half-baked puns, retro graphics, outdated browsing paradigms and broken links. And that’s just part of what makes it great.

Mackerelmedia Fish reports: WARNING! Your Fish have escaped! — Historical fact: escaped fish was one of the primary reasons for websites failing in 1996.

Just because I wrote about it before doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t play it now, especially if you missed out on it during the insanity of Lockdown 1.0.

5. Ha-bee-tat

It’s a bitsy game thrown together in 9 days for a game jam, by Cicada Carpenter.

Three-colour pixel-art square game screenshot showing a bee flying amongst flowers and butterflies. — It *looks*… well, like a pixsy-to-bitsy game. But it’s got more going for it than that.

I wouldn’t even have discovered this game were it not for the amazing-but-weird blog post “Every bee videogame reviewed by accuracy”, by Paolo Pedercini, who wrote:

As an amateur beekeeper, semi-professional game designer, and generally pedantic person, I decided to play all the games I could find on the subject and rate them according to their “realism”. The rating goes from one (⬢⬡⬡⬡⬡) to five (⬢⬢⬢⬢⬢) honeycomb cells.

I intentionally avoided all the games in which bees are completely anthropomorphized or function like a spaceship, and games in which bees play a secondary role. I did include short and semi-abstract games when they referenced the bees actual behavior. Realism is not a matter of visual definition or sheer procedural complexity. In my view, even a tiny game can capture something compelling about this fascinating insect.

Ha-bee-tat is one of only four games to which Paolo awards a full five honeycombs. And Paolo is picky, so that’s high praise indeed for the realism of this game, which is – get this – also surprisingly educational on the subject of different species of bee! Neat!

6. Shadows out of Time

This Twine-based adventure was released for my last Halloween at the Bodleian, based mostly upon the work of my then-colleague Brendon Connelly. We were aiming for something slightly unnerving, slightly Lovecraftian… and very Bodleian Libraries.

Splash screen showing a woodcut of the Radcliffe Camera at some point in its history, titled: Shadows Out Of Time - A Bodleian Choose Your Own Destiny Story. — The Bodleian’s Comms team and I came up with all kinds of imaginative and unusual ways to engage with the wider world, of which this was just one.

Obviously I’ve written about it before, but if I can just take a moment to explain what we were going for, which didn’t come out in any of the IFDB reviews or anything:

The story is cyclical: the protagonist keeps waking up, completely alone, in a seemingly abandoned world, having nodded off half way through The Shadow Out of Time in a Bodleian reading room. As they explore the eerie and empty world⁵, the protagonist catches vague glimpses of another figure moving around the space as well, always just out of reach in the distance or beyond a window. There are even hints that this other person has been following them: a book left open can be found closed again, or vice-versa, for example.

Eventually, exhausted, the character needs to rest, waking up again⁶ in order to continue their explorations, and it gradually becomes apparent that they are the ghost that haunts the library. The shadows they’re witnessing are echoes of their past and future self, playing through the permutations of the game as they remain trapped in an endless and futile chase with their own tail.

7. Metropoloid

When I first wrote about this video, I remarked that it was sad that it was under-loved, attracting only a few hundred views on YouTube and only a couple of dozen “thumbs up”. Six years on… I’m sad to say it’s not done much better for popularity, with low-thousands of views and, like, six-dozen “thumbs up”. Possibly this (lack of) reaction is (part of the reason) why its creator Yaz Minsky has kind-of gone quiet online these last few years.

Screengrab from Metropolis as the workers riot. — I always thought that this staircase looked like something out of an early *Zelda* game. Now it can sound like it too.

So what it is?

Well, you know how you’ve probably never seen Metropolis with a musical score quite like the one composer Gottfried Huppertz intended? Well this… doesn’t solve that problem. Instead it re-scores the film with video game soundtracks from the likes of Metroid, Castlevania, Zelda, Mega Man, Final Fantasy, Doom, Kirby, and F-Zero, among others.

And it… works. It still deserves more love, so if you’ve got a spare couple of hours, put it on!

8. Wolf

Like Ha-bee-tat, this is a realistic, pixelated, educational video game about nature. It came out in 1994 but I didn’t get around to playing it until twenty-five years later in 2019, when I accidentally discovered it while downloading Wolfenstein to my DOSBox.

The game itself isn’t what makes this item weird. The weird bit is this 2018 review of the game, which reads:

AWOO AWOOOO. AWOO AWOO AWOO AWOOOOO.

AWOO AWOO AWOO AWOOOO AWOO. AWOO AWOO AWOOOO AWOO AWOO AWOOOO. AWOO AWOO AWOO AWOOOOOO AWOO AWOOOOO. AWOO AWOO AWOOOOOOO AWOO AWOOO AWOO AWOOOO AWOO.

AWOO AWOO AWOO AWOO AWOOOOO AWOO AWOO AWOO. AWOO AWOOOOOO AWOOOOOO AWOOOO AWOO AWOO AWOO AWOOOOOOO AWOO AWOOOOOO AWOO. AWOOOOOO AWOO AWOOOO AWOO AWOOOO AWOO AWOO. AWOO AWOO AWOO AWOOOOO AWOO AWOO AWOOOOO AWOO AWOOO AWOO. AWOOOO AWOOO AWOOOO AWOO AWOO.

…

It continues like that for a while.

What you’re seeing is a review of Wolf… but for wolves. I’m not aware of any other posts on that entire site that make the same gag, or anything like it. That’s weird. And brilliant.

9. Real World Third Person Perspective

People have done similar thinigs in a variety of ways, but this was one of the most-ambitious:

As part of a two-day hack project, these folks put together a mechanism to mount some cameras up a pole, from a backpack containing a computer, connected to a VR headset. The idea was that you’d be able to explore the world with the kind of “over-the-shoulder cam” that you might be used to in some varieties of videogame.

Theirs was just an experiment in proving what was possible within a “real world” game world. But ever since I saw this video, I’ve wondered about the potential to make what is functionally an augmented reality game out of it. With good enough spatial tracking, there’d be nothing to stop the world as-shown-to-your-eyes containing objects that aren’t present in the real world.

Like… what if you were playing Pokemon Go, but from a top down view of yourself as you go around and find creatures out and about in the real world. Not just limited to looking through your phone as a lens, you’d be immersed in the game in a whole new way.

I’m also really interested in what the experience of seeing yourself from the “wrong” perspective is like. Is it disassociating? Nauseating? Liberating? I’m sure we’ve all done one of those experiments where, by means of mirrors or props, we experience the illusory sensation of our hand being touched when it’s not actually our hand. What’s that like when you’re able to visually step completely out of your own body, and yet still move and feel it perfectly?

There are so many questions that this set-up raises, and I’m yet to see anybody try to answer them.

10. Counterfeit Monkey

Finally, I can’t resist an opportunity to plug – not for the first time – my favourite interactive fiction game, Emily Short‘s Counterfeit Monkey, a game that started as an effort to make a tutorial on making a “T-Remover” like the one in Leather Goddesses of Phobos but grew into a sprawling wordplay-based puzzle adventure.

What makes it weird? The fact that there’s not really anything else quite like it. Within your first half hour or so of play you’ll probably have acquired your core toolkit – your full-alphabet letter remover, restoration gel, and monocle – and you’ll begin to discover that you can do just about anything with anything.

Find some BRANDY (I’m don’t recall if there is any in the game; this is just an example) and you can turn it into a BRAND, then into some BRAN, then into a BRA⁷. And while there might not exist any puzzles in the game for which you’ll need a bra, each of these items will have a full description when you look at it. Can you begin to conceive of the amount of work involved in making a game like this?

It’s now over a decade old and continues to receive updates as a community-run project! It’s completely free⁸, and if you haven’t played it yet, congratulations: you’re about to have an amazing time. Pay attention to the tutorial, and be sure to use an interpreter that supports the UNDO command (or else be sure to SAVE frequently!).

I remain interested in things that push the boundaries of what a “game” is or otherwise make the space “fun and weird”. If you’ve seen something I should see, let me know!

Footnotes

¹ The blog post got deleted but the Wayback Machine has a copy.

² Note you don’t get to see a video of me playing It is as if you were making love; you’re welcome.

³ Strangely – although it’s hard to say that anything in this video is more-strange than any other part – one of the “hard lads” friends’ then picks up his fag end and takes a drag

⁴ This, in case it wasn’t obvious to you already, is likely to be a big clue that the authors’ claim that each chapter was “found” from somewhere different can be pretty-well dismissed.

⁵ I wanted it to draw parallels to The Langoliers, a Stephen King short story about a group of people who get trapped alone in “yesterday”.

⁶ Until they opt to “stay asleep forever”, ending the game.

⁷ Or into a BAND and then into a BAN, maybe?

⁸ Counterfeit Monkey is free, but it was almost charityware: if it turns out you love it as much as I did then you might follow my lead and make a donation to Emily’s suggested charity the Endangered Language Fund. Just sayin’.

Taskmaster: 220 Extraordinary Tasks for Ordinary People, by Alex Horne

I recently read Taskmaster: ~~200~~ 220 Extraordinary Tasks for Ordinary People by Alex Horne, and was… underwhelmed.

The meat of the book is a collection of Taskmaster-style tasks either for individuals, or groups, or teams. If you played human jousting, or blindfold doughnut fishing, or leaky-guttering-water-transporter, or any of the other games Ruth and I hosted at Ruth & JTA‘s Stag/Hen Party way back in the day… you’re thinking in the right kinds of ballpark. The activities presented are similar to those shown on the Taskmaster TV show, but with fewer prop requirements.

Perhaps one in ten to one in five of the ideas are genuinely good, but if you want to run your own Taskmaster-like game with your friends… you’re probably best to just adapt some of the games from the show, or sit down for an hour or two with a notepad, a pen, some funny friends, and a supply of whatever chemical stimulates your imagination!

One part of the book I did enjoy, though, was the accounts of parts of the TV show that didn’t make it into the final edit. I really love the TV show, and it was great to get the inside scoop on what tasks worked and didn’t, what got cut and why, and so on. This bit of the book, hidden at the end and using a much smaller typeface as if it’s ashamed to be there, was excellent and highly enjoyable.

Perhaps a future edition could have much more of that – there’ve been many more seasons since the book came out! – and drop some of the less-interesting tasks!

Hello World by Hannah Fry

I’m not certain, but I think that I won my copy of Hello World: How to Be Human in the Age of the Machine at an Oxford Geek Nights event, after I was first and fastest to correctly identify a photograph of Stanislav Petrov shown by the speaker.

Despite being written a few years before the popularisation of GenAI, the book’s remarkably prescient on the kinds of big data and opaque decision-making issues that are now hitting the popular press. I suppose one might argue that these issues were always significant. (And by that point, one might observe that GenAI isn’t living up to its promises…)

Fry spins an engaging and well-articulated series of themed topics. If you didn’t already have a healthy concern about public money spending and policy planning being powered by the output of proprietary algorithms, you’ll certainly finish the book that way.

One of my favourite of Fry’s (many) excellent observations is buried in a footnote in the conclusion, where she describes what she called the “magic test”:

There’s a trick you can use to spot the junk algorithms. I like to call it the Magic Test. Whenever you see a story about an algorithm, see if you can swap out any of the buzzwords, like ‘machine learning’, ‘artificial intelligence’ and ‘neural network’, and swap in the word ‘magic’. Does everything still make grammatical sense? Is any of the meaning lost? If not, I’d be worried that it’s all nonsense. Because I’m afraid – long into the foreseeable future – we’re not going to ‘solve world hunger with magic’ or ‘use magic to write the perfect screenplay’ any more than we are with AI.

That’s a fantastic approach to spotting bullshit technical claims, and I’m totally going to be using it.

Anyway: this was a wonderful read and I only regret that it took me a few years to get around to it! But fortunately, it’s as relevant today as it was the day it was released.

F-Day plus 3

It feels inconceivable to me that we’re only at F-Day plus three; that is, three days since a flash flood rushed through the ground floor of our house and forced us to evacuate. We’ve been able to visit since and start assessing the damage, but for now I figured that what you’d want would be the kinds of horrible pictures that make you say “wow; I’m glad that didn’t happen to me”.

These pictures are all from F-Day itself (which happened to be Friday the 13th; delightful, eh?):

A particularly horrifying moment was when the seals on the patio doors gave way and the dining room began to flood, and we had to pivot to laying sandbags to protect the kitchen from the dining room rather than to protect the house as a whole. (Eventually, every ground floor room would be affected.)

We’ve had a few nights in Premier Inns, but it’s a new week and it’s time to hassle the insurance company to come and have a look around. And then, maybe, we can start working out where we’ll live so the repair work can start.

Ugh.

Imajica by Clive Barker

Clive Barker’s Imajica has long been one of my favourite fantasy novels. The heft of the single-volume edition renders it both unwieldy and intimidating, which is probably why my most recent reading of it was only the fourth time I’ve enjoyed it from cover-to-cover. But enjoyed it I did, and I’m sure I’ll pick it up again in a further decade or so for another adventure.

I’m aware that it draws comparison to his perhaps more-widely-read Weaveworld, but somehow that never did it for me in the same way. Perhaps my mistake was reading Imajica first, way back when I was a teenager, and so satiating my appetite for “curious flawed everyman explores adjacent reality alongside magical woman, faces horrors”; just an unfortunate coincidence that I picked up Weaveworld right after!

I also fully accept the critics who observe that it’s exceptionally drawn-out, at times. But where it does seem to drag, it does so with a certain gravity; an inertia: the slower parts of the story are full of intention, and meaning, and – frequently – foreshadowing. I still find new expressions of its themes in it, each time I read it. This time around, for example, I found myself finding a plethora of reflections of protagonist Gentle’s role as a forger: unable to create anything novel as an artist (for reasons that become apparent in the long run) but only able to copy beautiful things belonging to others. This self-inflicted curse shows up again and again in innumerable subtle ways before the truth of it is (finally, eventually – did I mention how weighty this fat book is?) exposed… and with such an epic tale it’s little wonder that it’s impossible to remember all of the indications that preceded it!

I’ve long appreciated how Imajica plays with gender and, to a lesser-extent, relationships and sexuality, in a way that was revelatory for me on a first reading and which with the benefit of hindsight I can see is incredibly progressive for its age. Gentle and Judith exist each to further the plot in their own ways, not as romantic “goals” for one another… despite not only tropes in the genre but also the ways in which their characters are presented within their world – by which I mean: this isn’t a story about how they “get together at the end”, and that subverts both the expectation of how they’re introduced in the writing and also the destinies with which their characters seem to be imbued. Pie’o’pah presents, depending on the circumstance, as either male or female but also as some other gender entirely. Gender is a huge overarching theme, with a oppressive patriarchal power that’s threatened by a mysterious feminine energy playing a key role that, like everything else, is quietly echoed throughout the novel.

But perhaps my favourite part of this wonderful book is its world-building, which – through the eyes of an outsider – paints a rich picture of each of several fantastical dominions. Over the course of the adventure a character draws a map to chart the wonders of the story’s universe, but it’s ultimately incomplete (and perhaps impossible to complete). That’s what it feels like to me as a reader, too: like being given a glimpse of a wider and even-more-wonderful world just beyond the horizon: a fantastical creation too large to ever fully comprehend. While retaining a focus on the story of three-or-so core characters, Barker teases us with the idea that there’s “something more” just beyond our peripheral vision. And that’s flipping amazing.

The Beer Token [Video]

This post is also available as an article. So if you'd rather read a conventional blog post of this content, you can!

Also available:

The Beer Token

Duration 11:16

Podcast Version

This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

This post is also available as a video. If you'd prefer to watch/listen to me talk about this topic, give it a look.

1979

The novelisation of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy came out in 1979, just a smidge before I was born. There’s a well-known scene in the second chapter featuring Ford Prefect, an alien living on Earth, distracting his human friend Arthur Dent. Arthur is concerned about the imminent demolition of his house by a wrecking crew, and Ford takes him to the pub to get him drunk, in anticipation of the pair attempting to hitch a lift on an orbiting spacecraft that’s about to destroy the planet:

“Six pints of bitter,” said Ford Prefect to the barman of the Horse and Groom. “And quickly please, the world’s about to end.”

The barman of the Horse and Groom didn’t deserve this sort of treatment, he was a dignified old man. He pushed his glasses up his nose and blinked at Ford Prefect. Ford ignored him and stared out of the window, so the barman looked instead at Arthur who shrugged helplessly and said nothing.

So the barman said, “Oh yes sir? Nice weather for it,” and started pulling pints.

He tried again.

“Going to watch the match this afternoon then?”

Ford glanced round at him.

“No, no point,” he said, and looked back out of the window.

“What’s that, foregone conclusion then you reckon sir?” said the barman. “Arsenal without a chance?”

“No, no,” said Ford, “it’s just that the world’s about to end.”

“Oh yes sir, so you said,” said the barman, looking over his glasses this time at Arthur. “Lucky escape for Arsenal if it did.”

Ford looked back at him, genuinely surprised.

“No, not really,” he said. He frowned.

The barman breathed in heavily. “There you are sir, six pints,” he said.

Arthur smiled at him wanly and shrugged again. He turned and smiled wanly at the rest of the pub just in case any of them had heard what was going on.

None of them had, and none of them could understand what he was smiling at them for.

A man sitting next to Ford at the bar looked at the two men, looked at the six pints, did a swift burst of mental arithmetic, arrived at an answer he liked and grinned a stupid hopeful grin at them.

“Get off,” said Ford, “They’re ours,” giving him a look that would have an Algolian Suntiger get on with what it was doing.

Ford slapped a five-pound note on the bar. He said, “Keep the change.”

“What, from a fiver? Thank you sir.”

There’s a few great jokes there, but I’m interested in the final line. Ford buys six pints of bitter, pays with a five-pound note, and says “keep the change”, which surprises the barman. Presumably this is as a result of Ford’s perceived generosity… though of course what’s really happening is that Ford has no use for Earth money any longer; this point is hammered home for the barman and nearby patrons when Ford later buys four packets of peanuts, also asking the barman to keep the change from a fiver.

A pint of light-coloured beer on wooden board, with the sea in the background. An orange towel sits alongside. — Beer’s important, but you also need to know where your towel is.

We’re never told exactly what the barman would have charged Ford. But looking at the history of average UK beer prices and assuming that the story is set in 1979, we can assume that the pints will have been around 34p each¹, so around £2.04 for six of them. So… Ford left a 194% tip for the beer².

1990

By the time I first read Hitch-Hikers, around 1990, this joke was already dated. By then, an average pint of bitter would set you back £1.10. I didn’t have a good awareness of that, being as I was well-underage to be buying myself alcohol! But I clearly had enough of an awareness that my dad took the time to explain the joke… that is, to point out that when the story was written (and is presumably set), six pints would cost less than half of five pounds.

But by the mid-nineties, when I’d found a friend group who were also familiar with the Hitch-Hikers… series, we’d joke about it. Like pointing out that by then if you told the barman to keep the change from £5 after buying six pints, the reason he’d express surprise wouldn’t be because you’d overpaid…

Stock photo of a barman serving two patrons, annotated with speech bubbles. One patron says "Keep the change." The barman, smiling, says "What, from a a fiver. Fuck you sir." — In his defence, Ford’s an alien and might not fully understand human concepts of inflation. Or sarcasm.

1998

Precocious drinker that I was, by the late nineties I was quite aware of the (financial) cost of drinking.

Dan, then with long black hair, sits with another young white man in a garden, in front of a table laden with several bottles of wine and around 80 cans of beer. — Sure, this seems like a responsible amount of alcohol for a party thrown by a couple of tearaway teenagers. Definitely nothing going to go wrong here, no siree.

And so when it was announced that a new denomination of coin – the £2 coin – would enter general circulation³ I was pleased to announce how sporting it was of the government to release a “beer token”.

With the average pint of beer at the time costing around £1.90 and a still cash-dominated economy, the “beer token” was perfect! And in my case, it lasted: the bars I was drinking at in the late 1990s were in the impoverished North, and were soon replaced with studenty bars on the West coast of Wales, both of which allowed the price of a pint to do battle with inflationary forces for longer than might have been expected elsewhere in the country. The “beer token” that was the £2 coin was a joke that kept on giving for some time.

Close-up of a 1998 £2 coin; bimetallic, with an inner ring of cogs expanding outwards into several interlocking spirals. — The one thing I always hated about the initial design for the bimetallic £2 coin was – and this is the nerdiest thing in the world with which to take issue – the fact that it had a ring of **19 cogs** to represent British industry. But if you connect a circuit of an odd number of cogs… it won’t function. Great metaphor, there. Photo courtesy of the late Andy Fogg, used under a Creative Commons license.

2023

As the cost of living rapidly increased circa 2023, the average price of a pint of beer in the UK finally got to the point where, rounded to the nearest whole pound, it was closer to £5 than it is to £4⁴.

And while we could moan and complain about how much things cost nowadays, I’d prefer to see this as an opportunity. An opportunity for a new beer token: a general-release of the £5 coin. We already some defined characteristics that fit: a large, heavy coin, about twice the weight of the £2 coin, with a copper/nickel lustre and struck from engravings with thick, clear lines.

And the design basically comes up with itself. I give you… the Beer Token of the 2020s:

It’s time for the beer token to return, in the form of the £5 coin. Now is the time… now is the last time, probably… before cash becomes such a rarity that little thought is evermore given to the intersection of its design and utility. And compared to a coin that celebrates industry while simultaneously representing a disfunctional machine, this is a coin that Brits could actually be proud of. It’s a coin that tourists would love to take home with them, creating a satisfying new level of demand for the sinking British Pound that might, just might, prop up the economy a little, just as here at home they support those who prop up the bar.

I know there must be a politician out there who’s ready to stand up and call for this new coin. My only fear is that it’s Nigel Fucking Farage… at which point I’d be morally compelled to reject my own proposal.

But for now, I think I’ll have another drink.

Footnotes

¹ The recession of the 1970s brought high inflation that caused the price of beer to rocket, pretty much tripling in price over the course of the decade. Probably Douglas Adams didn’t anticipate that it’d more-than-double again over the course of the 1980s before finally slowing down somewhat… at least until tax changes in 2003 and the aftermath of the 2022 inflation rate spike!

² We do know that the four packets of peanuts Ford bought later were priced at 7p each, so his tip on that transaction was a massive 1,686%: little wonder the barman suddenly started taking more-seriously Ford’s claims about the imminent end of the world!

³ There were commemorative £2 coins of a monometallic design floating around already, of course, but – being collectible – these weren’t usually found in circulation, so I’m ignoring them.

⁴ Otherwise known as “two beer tokens”, of course. As in “Bloody hell, 2022, why does a pint of draught cost two beer tokens now?”

The Huge Grey Area in the Anthropic Ruling

This week, AI firm Anthropic (the folks behind Claude) found themselves the focus of attention of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

New laws for new technologies

The tl;dr is: the court ruled that (a) piracy for the purpose of training an LLM is still piracy, so there’ll be a separate case about the fact that Anthropic did not pay for copies of all the books their model ingested, but (b) training a model on books and then selling access to that model, which can then produce output based on what it has “learned” from those books, is considered transformative work and therefore fair use.

Compelling arguments have been made both ways on this topic already, e.g.:

Some folks are very keen to point out that it’s totally permitted for humans to read, and even memorise, entire volumes, and then use what they’ve learned when they produce new work. They argue that what an LLM “does” is not materially different from an impossibly well-read human.
By way of counterpoint, it’s been observed that such a human would still be personally liable if the “inspired” output they subsequently created was derivative to the point of violating copyright, but we don’t yet have a strong legal model for assessing AI output in the same way. (BBC News article about Disney & Universal vs. Midjourney is going to be very interesting!)
Furthermore, it might be impossible to conclusively determine that the way GenAI works is fundamentally comparable to human thought. And that’s the thing that got me thinking about this particular thought experiment.

A moment of philosophy

Here’s a thought experiment:

Support I trained an LLM on all of the books of just one author (plus enough additional language that it was able to meaningfully communicate). Let’s take Stephen King’s 65 novels and 200+ short stories, for example. We’ll sell access to the API we produce.

The output of this system would be heavily-biased by the limited input it’s been given: anybody familiar with King’s work would quickly spot that the AI’s mannerisms echoed his writing style. Appropriately prompted – or just by chance – such a system would likely produce whole chapters of output that would certainly be considered to be a substantial infringement of the original work, right?

If I make KingLLM, I’m going to get sued, rightly enough.

But if we accept that (and assume that the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California would agree)… then this ruling on Anthropic would carry a curious implication. That if enough content is ingested, the operation of the LLM in itself is no longer copyright infringement.

Which raises the question: where is the line? What size of corpus must a system be trained upon before its processing must necessarily be considered transformative of its inputs?

Clearly, trying to answer that question leads to a variant of the sorites paradox. Nobody can ever say that, for example, an input of twenty million words is enough to make a model transformative but just one fewer and it must be considered to be perpetually ripping off what little knowledge it has!

But as more of these copyright holder vs. AI company cases come to fruition, it’ll be interesting to see where courts fall. What is fair use and what is infringing?

And wherever the answers land, I’m sure there’ll be folks like me coming up with thought experiments that sit uncomfortably in the grey areas that remain.

Bored Gay Werewolf by Tony Santorella

What can I possibly say about Bored Gay Werewolf, which caught my attention with the garish colours of its front cover when I saw it in Waterstones and whose blurb suggested that it might, perhaps, be a queer fantasy romp with a Buffy-esque sense of humour.

Werewolf? Sure, it’s got a few of those. There’s even a bit of fun, offbeat humour each time the protagonist reflects on their curious monthly cycle and tries to work out whether they attacked or even killed anybody this time around. But mostly it’s not a story about werewolf: it’s a story about a slacker who gets suckered into a pyramid scheme, with just a hint of lycanthropy around the fringes.

Gay? I mean: the protagonist’s gay, and many of their friends are queer… and while the representation is good, sexuality doesn’t feel like it’s a particularly significant issue to the storyline. I enjoyed the parallels that were drawn between Brian’s coming-out as gay versus his (for most of the story) closeted werewolf nature – which even though I saw them coming from the first chapter onwards were still well-presented – but apart from that it almost felt like gayness wasn’t a central theme to the story. A smidge of homophobia, some queer culture references, and a throwaway Grindr hookup with a closeted MSM dude do not contribute enough homosexuality to justify “gay” being the largest, pinkest word on a novel’s cover, if you ask me.

Bored? I was, at some points in the book, but I’m not convinced that’s what was intended. The pacing’s a little inconsistent: a long and drawn-out description of an exercise routines overshadows an exploration of the impact of werewolf super-senses, for example. And a long-foreshadowed fight scene finale feels like it’s over in an instant (with a Van Helsing ex Machina twist that felt simultaneously like the brakes being slammed on and a set-up for an inevitable sequel).

I sound pretty negative about it, I’m sure. But it’s not actually bad. It’s just not actually good, either. It’s a passable, middle-of-the-road time-filler with an interesting hook, a few funny set pieces (I laughed out loud a couple of times, for sure), and a set of misfit characters who spend most of the book feeling a little… incomplete? Though it’s possible that latter point’s at-least partially deliberate, as this is without a doubt a “Gen-Z Grows Up” story. Maybe if I were younger and didn’t yet have my shit together the story would appeal better.

Note #26550

What’s that, girl? Two children are lost somewhere in this bookshop?

Yeah, I should probably find them and take them home for lunch.

Note #26217

For a little while I got to lie in the sunshine and read my book in quiet solitude. But before long I found I was sharing it with a small child and his noisy games console.

Still delightful, though, and it feels wonderfully Spring-like out there today.

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers

As soon as I finished reading its prequel, I started reading Becky Chambers’ A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (and then, for various work/life reasons, only got around to publishing my micro-review just now).

The book carries on directly from where A Psalm for the Wild-Built left off, to such a degree that at first I wondered whether the pair might have been better published as a single volume. But in hindsight, I appreciate the separation: there’s a thematic shift between the two that benefits from a little (literal) bookending.

Both Wild-Built and Crown-Shy look at the idea of individual purpose and identity, primarily through the vehicle of relatable protagonist Sibling Dex as they very-openly seek their place in the world, and to a lesser extent through the curiosity and inquisitiveness of the robot Mosscap.

But the biggest difference in my mind between the ways in which the two do so is the source of the locus of evaluation: the vast majority of Wild-Built is experienced only by Dex and Mosscap, alone together in the wilderness at the frontier between their disparate worlds. It maintains an internal locus of evaluation, with Dex asking questions of themselves about why they feel unfulfilled and Mosscap acting as a questioning foil and supportive friend. Crown-Shy, by contrast, pivots to a perceived external locus of evaluation: Dex and Mosscap return from the wilderness to civilisation, and both need to adapt to the experience of celebrity, questioning, and – in Mosscap’s case – a world completely-unfamiliar to it.

By looking more-carefully at Dex’s society, the book helps to remind us about the diverse nature of humankind. For example: we’re shown that even in a utopia, individual people will disagree on issues and have different philosophical outlooks… but the underlying message is that we can still be respectful and kind to one another, despite our disagreement. In the fourth chapter, the duo visit a coastland settlement whose residents choose to live a life, for the most part, without the convenience of electricity. By way of deference to their traditions, Dex (with their electric bike) and Mosscap (being an electronic entity) wait outside the village until invited in by one of the residents, and the trio enjoy a considerate discussion about the different value systems of people around the continent while casting fishing lines off a jetty. There’s no blame; no coercion; and while it’s implied that other residents of the village are staying well clear of the visitors, nothing more than this exclusion and being-separate is apparent. There’s sort-of a mutual assumption that people will agree-to-disagree and get along within the scope of their shared vision.

Which leads to the nub of the matter: while it appears that we’re seeing how Dex is viewed by others – by those they disagree with, by those who hold them with some kind of celebrity status, by their family with whom they – like many folks do – share a loving but not uncomplicated relationship – we’re actually still experiencing this internally. The questions on Dex’s mind remain “who am I?”, “what is my purpose?”, and “what do I want?”… questions only they can answer… but now they’re considering them from the context of their relationship with everybody else in their world, instead of their relationship with themself.

Everything I just wrote reads as very-pretentious, for which I apologise. The book’s much better-written than my review! Let me share a favourite passage, from a part of the book where Dex is introducing Mosscap to ‘pebs’, a sort-of currency used by their people, by way of explanation as to why people whom Mosscap had helped had given it pieces of paper with numbers written on (Mosscap not yet owning a computer capable of tracking its balance). I particularly love Mosscap’s excitement at the possibility that it might own things, an experience it previous had no need for:

…

Mosscap smoothed the crease in the paper, as though it were touching something rare and precious. “I know I’m going to get a computer, but can I keep this as well?”

“Yeah,” Dex said with a smile. “Of course you can.”

“A map, a note, and a pocket computer,” Mosscap said reverently. “That’s three belongings.” It laughed. “I’ll need my own wagon, at this rate.”

“Okay, please don’t get that much stuff,” Dex said. “But we can get you a satchel or something, if you want, so you don’t have things rattling around inside you.”

Mosscap stopped laughing, and looked at Dex with the utmost seriousness. “Could I really?” it said quietly. “Could I have a satchel?”

…

That’s just a heartwarming and childlike response to being told that you’re allowed to own property of your very own. And that’s the kind of comforting joy that, like its prequel, the entire book exudes.

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is not quite so wondrous as A Psalm for the Wild-Built. How could it be, when we’re no longer quite so-surprised by the enthralling world in which it’s set. But it’s still absolutely magnificent, and I can wholeheartedly recommend the pair.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

Duration 5:42

Podcast Version

This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

I’d already read every prior book published by the excellent Becky Chambers, but this (and its sequel) had been sitting on my to-read list for some time, and so while I’ve been ill and off work these last few days, I felt it would be a perfect opportunity to pick it up. I’ve spent most of this week so far in bed, often drifting in and out of sleep, and a lightweight novella that I coud dip in and out of over the course of a day felt like the ideal comfort.

I couldn’t have been more right, as the very first page gave away. My friend Ash described the experience of reading it (and its sequel) as being “like sitting in a warm bath”, and I see where they’re coming from. True to form, Chambers does a magnificent job of spinning a believable utopia: a world that acts like an idealised future while still being familiar enough for the reader to easily engage with it. The world of Wild-Built is inhabited by humans whose past saw them come together to prevent catastrophic climate change and peacefully move beyond their creation of general-purpose AI, eventually building for themselves a post-scarcity economy based on caring communities living in harmony with their ecosystem.

Writing a story in a utopia has sometimes been seen as challenging, because without anything to strive for, what is there for a protagonist to strive against? But Wild-Built has no such problem. Written throughout with a close personal focus on Sibling Dex, a city monk who decides to uproot their life to travel around the various agrarian lands of their world, a growing philosophical theme emerges: once ones needs have been met, how does one identify with ones purpose? Deprived of the struggle to climb some Maslowian pyramid, how does a person freed of their immediate needs (unless they choose to take unnecessary risks: we hear of hikers who die exploring the uncultivated wilderness Dex’s people leave to nature, for example) define their place in the world?

Aside from Dex, the other major character in the book is Mosscap, a robot whom they meet by a chance encounter on the very edge of human civilisation. Nobody has seen a robot for centuries, since such machines became self-aware and, rather than consign them to slavery, the humans set them free (at which point they vanished to go do their own thing).

To take a diversion from the plot, can I just share for a moment a few lines from an early conversation between Dex and Mosscap, in which I think the level of mutual interpersonal respect shown by the characters mirrors the utopia of the author’s construction:

…

“What—what are you? What is this? Why are you here?”

The robot, again, looked confused. “Do you not know? Do you no longer speak of us?”

“We—I mean, we tell stories about—is robots the right word? Do you call yourself robots or something else?”

“Robot is correct.”

…

“Okay. Mosscap. I’m Dex. Do you have a gender?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

These two strangers take the time in their initial introduction to ensure they’re using the right terms for one another: starting with those relating to their… let’s say species… and then working towards pronouns (Dex uses they/them, which seems to be widespread and commonplace but far from universal in their society; Mosscap uses it/its, which provides for an entire discussion on the nature of objectship and objectification in self-identity). It’s queer as anything, and a delightful touch.

In any case: the outward presence of the plot revolves around a question that the robot has been charged to find an answer to: “What do humans need?” The narrative theme of self-defined purpose and desires is both a presenting and a subtextual issue, and it carries through every chapter. The entire book is as much a thought experiment as it is a novel, but it doesn’t diminish in the slightest from the delightful adventure that carries it.

Dex and Mosscap go on to explore the world, to learn more about it and about one another, and crucially about themselves and their place in it. It’s charming and wonderful and uplifting and, I suppose, like a warm bath: comfortable and calming and centering. And it does an excellent job of setting the stage for the second book in the series, which we’ll get to presently…

For anybody who could use a break

Third day of being ill with what’s probably a winter vomiting bug, with one child home sick from school… and just having had to collect the other kid who started throwing up on his school trip… I finally got back to my bed and picked up the next book on my pile, Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Willd-Built.

The opening page reads: “For anybody who could use a break.”

Yes. Yes, please.

The Blind Piemaker

Ruth bought me a copy of The Adventure Challenge: Couples Edition, which is… well, it’s basically a book of 50 curious and unusual ideas for date activities. This week, for the first time, we gave it a go.

Open book showing a scratch-off panel, whose contents read: Find your favonte pie recipe and gather the ingredients. Blindfold your partner. Now, guide them through the process of making a pie. No instructive sentences are allowed, you can only guide them with your hands. (Don't say "pick this up" or 'drop that", find a different way to communicate - only through touch). You can only touch your blindfolded partner's hands or body - NOTHING ELSE (ingredients, utensils, dishes, etc). IMPORTANT: this challenge works best when you follow these instructions as strictly as possible. — Each activity is hidden behind a scratch-off panel, and you’re instructed not to scratch them off until you’re committed to following-through with whatever’s on the other side. Only the title and a few hints around it provide a clue as to what you’ll actually be *doing* on your date.

As a result, we spent this date night… baking a pie!

The book is written by Americans, but that wasn’t going to stop us from making a savoury pie. Of course, “bake a pie” isn’t much of a challenge by itself, which is why the book stipulates that:

One partner makes the pie, but is blindfolded. They can’t see what they’re doing.
The other partner guides them through doing so, but without giving verbal instructions (this is an exercise in touch, control, and nonverbal communication).

Dan, wearing a black t-shirt, smiles as he takes a selfie. Alongside him Ruth, wearing a purple jumper, adjusts a grey blindfold to cover her eyes. — I was surprised when Ruth offered to be the blindfoldee: I’d figured that with her greater experience of pie-making and my greater experience of doing-what-I’m-told, that’d be the smarter way around.

We used this recipe for “mini creamy mushroom pies”. We chose to interpret the brief as permitting pre-prep to be done in accordance with the ingredients list: e.g. because the ingredients list says “1 egg, beaten”, we were allowed to break and beat the egg first, before blindfolding up.

This was a smart choice (breaking an egg while blindfolded, even under close direction, would probably have been especially stress-inducing!).

Dan takes a selfie showing himself, smiling, and Ruth, wearing a blindfold and balling up pastry on a wooden worksurface. — I’d do it again but the other way around, honestly, just to experience both sides! `#JustSwitchThings`

I really enjoyed this experience. It forced us into doing something different on date night (we have developed a bit of a pattern, as folks are wont to do), stretched our comfort zones, and left us with tasty tasty pies to each afterwards. That’s a win-win-win, in my book.

Plus, communication is sexy, and so anything that makes you practice your coupley-communication-skills is fundamentally hot and therefore a great date night activity.

Plate containing four beautifully-browned but slightly lopsided pies, held in a woman's hands. — Our pies may have been wonky-looking, but they were also delicious.

So yeah: we’ll probably be trying some of the other ideas in the book, when the time comes.

Some of the categories are pretty curious, and I’m already wondering what other couples we know that’d be brave enough to join us for the “double date” chapter: four challenges for which you need a second dyad to hang out with? (I’m, like… 90% sure it’s not going to be swinging. So if we know you and you’d like to volunteer yourselves, go ahead!)