Week round-up: May 25
Hooja: The Game - The Swedish Games
This post from the web's best/only Swedish games history blog digs into the cultural context of a particular comedy musical group from northern Sweden - a group which also published their own branded game. I found it a fascinating read.
Raku firing workshop - Graham
Graham writes about Raku pottery firing techniques, and what the experience of actually, physically doing this stuff is like for artists who work in that field. I had some dim understanding of what went into Raku, but this is a wonderfully sensory writeup about it.
Counting the wreckage - Andrew Plotkin
A very interesting post about "game websites" - the website a developer or publisher creates to hold all the information about a single game. This is a distinct thing that people do, but you rarely hear anyone talking about the work that goes into it, or the benefit you might gain from making one. Most games I've worked on have had their own website at one point or another, and many are still up years after the fact. Skin Deep has a site. Where the Water Tastes Like Wine still has a site. Even the Ruined King site is still up. Andrew looked through his records and did the math on how many game sites he'd linked to are still up and running. There's also a lot of interesting observations here about why he likes these sites and what the burden of building or maintaining them might be.
Apologies, this post is about AI - v buckenham
V tries, for a moment, to take seriously the bloviating "forecasts" that AI shills on social media often make about their imagined future daily life with AI. If you really had an "agentic" AI reserving restaurants and bowling alleys for your kid's birthday... who the fuck would put up with that? What impact would that have on regular people? How much more difficult would it make it for regular people to solve unusual problems in their daily lives? And how much more valuable would it make networks of personal connection?
Star Wars name generator - Nic Tringali
A simple way to create your own Gulp Shitto.