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Nicholas De Marino

Nicholas De Marino

6 posts

Posts by Nicholas De Marino

🪐 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

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🫠 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

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🇭🇰 Jimmy Lai: Hong Kong pro-democracy tycoon gets 20 years' jail under national security law

BBC

Meanwhile, in China…

This isn’t a “count your blessings” moment. It’s a preview.

Fun FAKE NEWS Fact: During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln curbed freedom of speech by suspending habeaus corpus.

🇭🇰 Jimmy Lai: Hong Kong pro-democracy tycoon gets 20 years' jail under national security law Read more

🤖 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

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🧠 Healing Together Conference

An Infinite Mind

I love “Fight Club,” “Shutter Island,” and “American Psycho.” (The movie and comic adaptations, too, for that matter.) Unreliable narrators are sublime. I don’t begrudge authors or filmmakers playing fast and loose with complex, poorly understood mental issues for the sake of a good story.

Having said that, Dissociative Identity Disorder — i.e. “multiple personalities” — isn’t nearly so bombastic. The real thing looks and feels different. And it’s really challenging.

Rant aside, here’s a conference about DID this weekend that’s got some interesting speakers and topics.

It’s probably too late to

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