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Temporal Liminality
This week, I’m staying at a house in the middle of nowhere in Northern Arizona, after a visit to Las Vegas. When I walk from the upstairs bedroom down to the ground floor kitchen, the time zone changes. This is reproducible, reliably. It took me a couple days to notice, since the purpose of this…
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The Year of 14Whatever
Imagine the TV show Connections, but it’s a stream of consciousness series of errors because I’m an impulsive idiot. I’d call it Missed Conceptions. 1491, a book that came out in 2006, is a reframing of what the Americas (continents North and South) were like before Columbus arrived. Contrary to general colonist perception, the people…
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Let Me X That For You
It happened. I asked a technical question in a forum. A day later, someone I don’t know responded “would this work?”, with a short link to them copying my query directly to a text-based AI. The AI’s response was completely irrelevant and unusable, despite giving the standard “verbose confident technical” aesthetic. 10-15 years ago, it…
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“Billiards, but they’re People”
I just finished nearly a whole month of travel, the last bit of which was in Latvia where I participated in a week-long game jam in a castle. Fellow game dev Charlie Behan made a great mini-documentary of the event. I’ve done a lot of game jams, and with this one, I needed to get…
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1px VR
I have always had slightly dry eyes. This has made wearing contacts difficult. During the pandemic, I gradually became inexcusably annoyed at having to choose foggy glasses or blurry vision when wearing a mask in public. Independently, it occurred to me in The Year of Isolation that this would be an ideal time for some…
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Species-Wide Imposter Syndrome
Have you ever had that moment where you’re walking from one meeting to another and something clumsy happens – like you trip over a chair corner, you realize your shirt is undone, or you sneeze inelegantly. And then the entire facade of civilization comes crashing down. We’re barely different from the apes messing around hanging…
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Taekwondo does not support Double-Jumping
I started Taekwondo in November 2018. I’ve wanted to try a martial art for years, but it’s been one of those hobbies in the backlog that required a chance encounter to nucleate. I used to do more cardio and cognitive intensive physical activities: gymnastics, figure skating and parkour (amateurishly), but the last few years have…
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Player Character Bios in Participatory Media
Originally published in Escape Character’s Newsletter. Question: What’s the best way to hack someone who’s never LARP’d[1] before to get into character? Our goal here is to have the player buy into the stakes of the show before they cross the threshold [2] into the space of the show. In Escape Character’s projects where the…
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Telepresence Immersive Theatre with Mice instead of Voice
This past year at Escape Character has been quiet, but very busy. Me + several collaborators have been iterating on telepresence interactive theatre. We have written and debuted three scenarios and are in the middle of writing our fourth. We’ve put on in-person shows in San Francisco, Toronto and London. We just started remote invite-only…
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POV Edit: Star War’s Obi-Wan Kenobi
I’ve taken Star Wars I-VI and cut out every scene that Obi-Wan Kenobi didn’t directly witness. I wasn’t trying to make a movie, and the end result has some bumpy transitions, but in the spirit of this upcoming standalone film, I wanted to get to know Obi-Wan Kenobi’s life better. I’m calling this a “POV…