Quick bits:

• I was about to cash in a €75 voucher this week, but the voucher turned out to be no longer valid. What a waste of money. Grumble.

• For the first time, I attended a course on practicing German with theatre games. It’s fun (theatre games!) and I get to practice my German (I barely ever use my German in Berlin). The attendees exclusively speak German (no falling back to English!) and there is no judgement, and the theatre games are great for loosening up. Win.

• Coming Sunday is my birthday and I’m having a picnic. Are we mutuals? Then you are invited! I’ve likely already invited you, but if not, poke me.

• For the last few days, I’ve been suffering from a stabbing headache. I last had that late last year,¹¹¹ See Week­notes 2023 W44: COVID at last.  at which point I made appointments with specialists to get it checked out. But those appointments are two months from now, so I’ll need to be patient. I’ll need to be a patient patient.

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The job search is progressing slowly. No news this week yet. Next week­notes will be different — probably. Meanwhile, my application for Arbeitslosengeld²²² Unemployment benefit.  is still being processed.

I’ve come to realize that I am good at the stuff I am no longer passionate about. I’m a good software developer, but I’d prefer to apply my energy on more creative, entertaining, and artistic projects.

The problem with doing the latter is that it’d turn my creativity into a career, with all the drawbacks that come with it. Turn your hobby into your career and you’ll not enjoy a single day in your life, you know.

It will be critical for me to make a clean separation between work and personal life. I’ve been getting better at this over the years, but I’m not quite there yet: at a recent Shut Up & Write meetup, I did not work on my fiction writing, and instead prepared a presentation for a job interview,³³³ A job interview which I did not even pass!  and I afterwards realized that this had been a mistake. My Shut Up & Write time is for fiction writing only.

I’ll still have a job as a software developer, I’ll still be good at it, and I’ll still produce results — but it’ll be hard for me to be passionate about something that I have little control over.

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An article on AI-generated content⁴⁴⁴ See my Generative AI note where I collect my thoughts on this technology.  came to my attention the other day, and it had this spectacularly bad image in it:

There are so many things wrong with it:

• This image depicts a 6×6 board.
• Well, not quite — some sides have five or seven squares.
• This type of chess is apparently played with three colors.
• It invents a chess piece with a cloverleaf head.
• It has bishops of different sizes — a hierarchy perhaps?
• It arranges the chess board in a most creative way.⁵⁵⁵ Though frankly, if I had a chess board like this with pieces like these, I would not know how to arrange them properly either. 
• It puts pieces between (rather than on) squares.

But no, the real problem was that the edges weren’t blurry enough.

Literally any human attempt at drawing a chess board would be better than this garbage.

Someone wrote this article, and thought this image was good enough. Not only that, but they thought this image was good enough to use as an example of AI content. No reviewer or editor flagged this atrocity before the article went out.

Thoughtbot, the company on whose blog this was posted,⁶⁶⁶ I have deliberately chosen not to link to the blog post, as it’s not worth your time, and neither Thoughtbot nor the author deserves the exposure.  believes this sort of content is fine. Disappointing.

For a while, I was scratching my head trying to understand how this could have happened. Over on Mas­to­don, damon wrote a take — unrelated to the chess image — that I find insightful:

It occurs to me that you’d only use AI to write for you if you believe you’re not good at writing, and if you’re not good at writing you have no way of discerning if the AI is [writing] well for you, and in the process you’ll never get any better at writing yourself.

AI slop like this comes into existence because people blindly trust AI systems.⁷⁷⁷ I wonder whether this is an outflow of the ugly “tech supremacy” mindset, where software developers believe they are qualified to deal with any topic. The most egregious examples as of late are finance and law (blockchain and Ethereum).  There is no critical thinking.

The person who created this AI chess image has never in their life seen a chess board, let alone seen a chess game in action or played themselves. Yet, somehow this person is fully confident that whatever image has been generated is appropriate.

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My fiction writing is slow because I keep getting distracted by other things. I might be suffering from Shiny Object Syndrome.

This time around, I’m playing around with the idea of running my own TTRPG (table-top role-playing game). As a writer and a storyteller, I’d be in a good spot to be the game master. But unfortunately:

• I have never properly played table-top RPGs. This likely would make me a poor game master. (Still, I suppose that being a game master is quite distinct from being a player.)

• I have not (yet) found friends in Berlin who would be interested in committing a few hours every week.

It’s daunting to set it up and commit to it. The first game/campaign will most likely be rough. But at least I can try, right?

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The other reason why my fiction writing is so slow is because I am distracted by interactive fiction once again. While I was using Ink before,⁸⁸⁸ See Week­notes 2024 W12: Gemüsekebab.  this time around I am writing my own story engine, based around the idea of storylets.

My implementation is very much experimental, and not ready to be shared in any form just yet. Maybe it’ll never end up in a shareable form — and that’s fine. I’m having fun, and that is the most important thing.

The reason why I’m moving away from Ink and creating my own thing is twofold:

• I really like the power and flexibility of storylets. If nothing else, I’d like to get a good understanding of how to use them well.

• Storylets provide the opportunity for creating long-running games that receive updates. Updated versions can be backwards-compatible; they’d work just fine with the qualities⁹⁹⁹ The term “quality” here means (as the Oxford dictionary puts it) “a distinctive attribute or characteristic possessed by someone or something.”  of the old game.

If this exercise ends up in something usable, you’ll hear it.

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Entertainment:

• I picked up Citizen Sleeper¹⁰¹⁰¹⁰ Citizen Sleeper (Jump Over the Age, 2022), published by Fellow traveler.  at a discount. It’s a good narrative game. It’s so neat that I want to make my own game like this now.¹¹¹¹¹¹ Citizen Sleeper is the reason why I started looking into interactive fiction again — see above!  I’m not too much of a fan of the tension, though; I’d rather be playing something without such time pressure.

• I’ve been extremely slowly replaying Divinity: Original Sin II.¹²¹²¹² Divinity: Original Sin II (Larian Studios, 2017), published by Larian Studios.  I keep returning to this for an hour every other week, and I have entirely lost track of the plot by now. I no longer have a clue what I am doing. Do I start over?

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Links:

• Research: When Employees Identify with Their Company, They’re Less Likely to Recognize Gender Discrimination (Harvard Business Review): I am not surprised, but oof — it sure sucks.

Tech links:

• Pure CSS halftone effect (Ana Tudor): Nifty!

• Let’s dissect Apple’s terrible iPad ad and see what it says about understanding your customers (Amy Hoy): That new iPad ad is awful. Amy Hoy explains why.