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Nicholas De Marino

Nicholas De Marino

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Posts by Nicholas De Marino

The Castle: Annotated Featured Post Paid Post

Directed by Nicholas De Marino

The Castle: Annotated

🪐 Space & Time Magazine

Authortunities

Glad to see that “Space & Time” is sticking around.

It's a storied publication and well worth a trip to the archive. The switch to monthly keeps things fresh, though theme calls are only as interesting as the tenders who field them.

Luckily, Angela Yuriko Smith is a gem of an editor.

I've not been in this pub, but I've submitted a couple of times. No one likes a “close but no cigar” rejection. In fact, those replies are often more infuriating than form letters — think “silver medal paradox,” though the bronze winner part isn't as applicable — but Smith has, at least in my experience, offered encouragement and highlighted poems worth pitching elsewhere.

Anyway, keep an eye out for this newest incarnation of “Space & Time.”

🫠 Ai Weiwei on China, the West and shrinking space for dissent

Reuters

In China, censorship relates to red lines. You cannot cross some red lines. It’s about state policy and discussions (about) state power. It’s also related to what they would call minority or religious issues, which can be very sensitive, so people would not touch those topics. If touched, it could cause you different levels of damage. But in the West, especially now, you also see censorship everywhere— not necessarily just from the state but from companies, from institutions, from schools or museums.

Anything by or about Ai Weiwei (艾未未) is worth a read. He’s dynamic and nuanced, and I don’t always agree with his views, but his passion, compassion, and willingness to speak truth to power are unimpeachable.

A quick reminder, he’s the artist who dropped a 2,000-year-old urn in a series of black and white photos in the '90s.

Historically speaking, iconoclasm is pretty ugly and makes for some craven, manipulative bedfellows, but those urn drop images are still important and potent today.

🤖 From Chatbots to Dice Rolls: Researchers Use D&D to Test AI’s Long-term Decision-making Abilities

UCSD

Of course they’re using bots to play D&D. Who wants to have fun with their own imagination? We’re only on this rock to track metrics, increase productivity, and shape our blobby flesh into copyrighted bionic cogs.

Key phrase in the article: “The simulations focused on combat: players battling monsters as part of their D&D campaign.”

So, you just made a “Diablo” simulator?

Why not just scrape “Tomb of Horrors” and call it a day? Or, better yet, base an entire campaign on that “Sacred Geometry” feat from Pathfinder.

Dollars to princess doughnuts, whoever designed this simulation is no fun to play D&D with.

Remember “Tucker’s Kobolds”? Clearly you missed the point.

D&D mean many things to many people. Not all of it’s optimizing glass cannons and exploiting corner cases. For the love of Carl, please stop trying to make everything I love part of The Matrix!

Even those bots realized you need to spice things up with roleplay. That’s the, you know, play part of the word.

Walden: Annotated Featured Post Paid Post

Directed by Nicholas De Marino

Walden: Annotated