Matt Weber's Blog, page 2

Out of the blue

I soft-quit Bluesky around the inauguration due to the concentration of American political news and discourse. As always: I don’t begrudge anyone their topics of conversation, and I don’t hide from the news in general; but that’s not what social media is for, for me.

Anyway, I tried going back a couple weeks ago. My new mute words weren’t particularly successful, but my ability to moderate my feed’s content wasn’t the only issue. Within a day, it was full of both sides of a conversation about a small press’s financial problems, which were related to accounting practices that may not have been great. That’s the kind of topic I’m interested in—but the discussion swiftly got vicious, with authors piling on the press for not setting royalties aside, and the owner of the press providing the kind of response that only really reassures folks who trust you already. I don’t remember seeing this intensity of discussion on something like, say, Audiblegate, or #DisneyMustPay, where the bad actors are players who set standards in the industry, not struggling small business owners.

And so, more or less, it went. There’s of course no shortage of lovely art to repost and fun shitpost games to play. And I’ve gotten more visibility for my books on Bluesky than I have anywhere else (not that that’s saying much). But… authors versus publishers, liberals versus leftists, incessant dunking on AI and Trump and Elon—dunking that I agree with, and wish more people would understand—combined with the drumbeat of horrible news at home and abroad, and the stream of pleas for help from endless Palestinian refugees with nowhere else to go…

And through it, I found myself refreshing more often than I wanted, not to look for new posts, but for engagement on my old ones. Which… I mean, at my level of Social Media, this is just stupid. But it’s hard to avoid, for me.

It took a day or so to sink in, but I think the final nail was this:

https://bsky.app/profile/paleofuture.bsky.social/post/3lleyiummfc2n

I’m not embedding it because it’s an appalling image and I want you to choose whether to look at it. It’s an image of an ICE agent handcuffing a weeping brown woman, created by OpenAI’s recently released Studio Ghibli plagiarism machine, as posted by the official White House X account.

And I’m just.

No shade to the poster, who is only documenting the cruelty of the American regime, the smugness of Sam Altman, the hollowness of genAI. It’s all true, it’s all on the public record, it’s all another item in the list of bills that’ll come due, somehow, someday.

But getting that stuff thrown in my face Is just…

… I can’t spend my time like that.

“Can’t.” The probability that I’ll be back at some point approaches 100%.

But the prospect is less and less inviting. I was extremely reliant on Facebook and Twitter for a long time, but not so reliant that I ever want to see them again now. The more I post, the more it feels like work; and the more I read, in the long run, the worse I feel. So who knows? Maybe this is the quit where I discover I really don’t miss it.

Currently reading: THE REVISIONARIES, by A. R. Moxon (almost done!)

Waiting to be seen. Waiting to be acknowledged.

I’m linking a recent edition of Magen Cubed’s newsletter mostly for my own bookmarking purposes: Some Strange Things You Can Watch Right Now.

Currently listening: AUTONOMOUS, by Annalee Newitz, read by Jennifer Ikeda.

What is, and what could be

Here’s a fact some of the survivors of this moment will want you to forget:

What’s happening in government right now is what every member of the majority wants to happen.

This is a very simple analysis. The courts are, by and large, doing their job, issuing decisions pointing out the very clear facts that the President’s gutting of executive agencies and impounding of funds is illegal. The President, for his part, is predictably taking the Jacksonian path of “now let them enforce it” and is continuing to do things he’s been ordered to stop doing. The first way for Congress to stop this would have been to decline to confirm toadies and bomb-throwers. The second way, which is still available, is to remove him from office. The majority in both chambers is slim; the number of Republicans who’d have to join with Democrats to get this done isn’t large. A small number of Republicans could do this whenever they felt like it.

This is all very obvious shit, very much the stuff of white liberal wish fulfillment, and the reasons it won’t happen are well known to everyone. I’m not here to suggest any hopes get pinned on this. But in thinking about politics—or any large-scale collective behavior I guess—we can allow our (correct) identification that a problem is immutable to make us forget it is the result of a choice. Republicans in Congress have chosen to allow the President to take their body’s power and reverse its decisions, all illegally. They could stop it; and if they didn’t want him to do what he’s doing, they would stop it.

This is, of course, dereliction of duty; Congress has been all in on that for a while. They will tell you, when this moment is over, that there was no other way it could be. They will be lying. We invested them with the power to stop this very thing from happening. They will not do it, because they want it to happen.

There are things to be said about Democrats too, obviously. But everyone else seems to be lining up to say them.

Currently reading: THE REVISIONARIES, by A. R. Moxon.

An aspect of ludicrousness

… there was, as Nachtwey puts it, an aspect of ludicrousness in the fantasy role-playing game that the fantasy novel, if it could not eliminate it, had tried to discourage. Tolkien, in his 1947 essay “On Fairy-stories,” had written that fantasy was the province of literature, where the natural glamour of the written word could make anything plausible. Dungeons & Dragons was more akin to the Gothic plays put on by the March sisters, whose magical proceedings are undercut by amateur stage effects, collapsing scenery, and unintended farce.

I’m not sure this essay on D&D by Andrea Long Chu exactly hangs together, but it sure says a lot of things I like.

Later on, Chu observes, “… it is difficult to develop a proper aesthetic account of D&D. It is less like reviewing a book and more like reviewing a book club.” This is right; but I wonder if the “aspect of ludicrousness” is what makes some book clubs better than others.

I’m a fan of Dimension 20 but I keep bouncing off Critical Role—even Exandria Unlimited: Calamity, run by Dimension 20’s Brennan Lee Mulligan. And it’s hard not to come back to the fact that EXU: Calamity is principally epic, while Dimension 20 is principally funny. There’s a lot of Dimension 20 I haven’t seen, but Fantasy High and Burrow’s End deliberately deflate the epic impulse of high fantasy in their premise alone (high school kids; small forest animals) to say nothing of their realization (“Hoot! Growl!”; “It’s mammalian grooming time!”). But I just watched A Court of Fey & Flowers, whose courtly intrigue premise could easily be played in great seriousness… and even though the fragile romance between Hob and Rue is a genuinely heartwrenching romantic throughline, it’s the humor that keeps the whole thing going: the filth and absurdity of the Goblin Court (and the incongruity of Hob as its straitlaced foil), the social bumbling of Andhera, the chatter-drenched surreality of the Lords of the Wing, the running bit about The Green Hunter (Lord Airavis’ pseudonymously published thriller, which grows from an offhand joke into a full stage play starring a kidnapped Jeremy Renner).

Or… maybe. This framing places the humor in competition with the more serious aspects of the game—and, yeah, there’s a no-gods-no-masters subplot going that the players seem to have agreed on as the Big Theme, the dragon of social injustice that they’re here to slay, and it’s easily the weakest part of the campaign. Even the end battle to slay it is weirdly quick and easy.

But of course Andhera’s stammering and missteps only heighten the moments when he comes into his own. There’s something really deft in the way Omar Najam handles Andhera’s first victory over his sister, leaning into his established haplessness to lure her into a vulnerable position and then springing a trap that shocks the entire table because no one thought Andhera had it in him. And the Lords of the Wing reveal their own hidden reasons and passions behind the bird puns; and of course Hob’s ill fit for goblinhood is ultimately what makes him understand Rue, another fey who’s risen above the ridicule of their peers by substituting usefulness for belonging.

The idea that humor can elevate seriousness, or that in general the presence of contrast can elevate one or both of the contrasted things, is commonplace enough that maybe all this rehearsal was a little much. The thing I think I’m getting at is that maybe an art form as emergent as a role-playing game can’t be played for pure seriousness, or at least can’t achieve its highest satisfactions that way. The dice will have their say, and sometimes what they say is dumb as fuck. But the first rule of improv is “yes, and”; and the only way you can say yes to dumb as fuck is with a laugh.

“… this is precisely what Dungeons & Dragons offered that the fantasy novel never could,” writes Chu (among many other great lines, you really should read the essay): “the chance to enter an imaginary world with one’s disbelief miraculously intact — to be Quixote and Sancho at once.” The chance, and arguably the obligation.

Currently listening: A NATURAL HISTORY OF EMPTY LOTS, written and read by Christopher Brown.

Make aspirational shit again

From a recent PENNY ARCADE:

Autosarcophagy as an organizing principle has a sell-by date.  You can’t operate a deconstruction machine indefinitely; ultimately, the machine is all you have left to take apart. We need to make aspirational shit again so we have something to deconstruct later. It’s not a mysterious process, it’s just the opposite of what we were doing before.

—Jerry Holkins, “Opfor”

Having said all that, Gillen & Wijngaard’s THE POWER FANTASY still rules.

Currently listening: A NATURAL HISTORY OF EMPTY LOTS, written and read by Christopher Brown.

So much to be had from a negotiation

Personally, I really enjoy building dice rolls and the conversation surrounding them. There’s so much to be had from a negotiation about how this or that skill, talent, item, weapon, assist, or circumstance might apply…

“Previously On: Mothership,” by Jim Rossignol, from Old Men Running the World

… I was going to post this quote with just the barest wisp of commentary, but then I read this article by Polygon’s Em Friedman on Critical Role’s Season 3 finale:

Actual play can get away with far more than traditional forms and go to weird and wonderful places because “the dice tell the story.” Once you remove that, eliminating evidence of chance through editing or by loss of gameplay friction, the contract changes. Then, you’re back to being judged by expectations from more traditional media. And that’s where we end up as dice rolls begin to dwindle well before the game shifts into epilogue. Notable elements like [spoiler maybe] were literally handwaved, no roll — or even argument — required. And as consequences receded, what has always felt like a complex, breathing world — with light and shade, with “adult” themes that went beyond sex jokes and millennial references — got just a little flatter, just a little more washed out by high-wattage brightness. In a game and show that had imbued player choices with heft, payoff felt thin on the ground — or off in the far horizon.

Both Rossignol and Friedman here place value on the role of chance in steering the story of an RPG… but there’s a bit of a bait-and-switch in Friedman’s argument, maybe, in the conflation of chance and consequences. (Rossignol is arguing something different, I think, in locating the value in the conversation inspired by a dice roll—the depth of consideration about the scene at hand—rather than the quality of the fictional dream.) Friedman’s own comment on the end of Critical Role Season 1 provides the distinction (spoilers):

[Sam Riegel’s] character, Scanlan, casts Counterspell at the highest possible level—no dice roll needed. The villain cannot flee.

The other players at the table rear back in shock, pleased. It’s a home run, a touch-down, a fadeaway from beyond the three-point line. The Dungeon Master looks stunned. So does Sam Riegel, who now slowly folds into himself on the table.

In parallel, so softly the microphones almost don’t pick it up—wouldn’t have picked it up when the show first began streaming—Sam Riegel, still smiling, mutters “I was going to save Vax.”

…

[Liam] O’Brien’s character, Vax, is a dead man walking. In high-level D&D, Vax is a rarity: a character for whom death has real weight. Because of his bargain with the Raven Queen, the Goddess of Death and Fate, Vax will die irrevocably once the world-ending villain is defeated. Riegel’s character, Scanlan, has been saving his highest-level spell in the hopes of changing that fate. But to win their current battle, the last of a years-long campaign, he must sacrifice that ability for the greater good.

Consequences, but no chance. Scanlan learns that he must let the villain go or doom his friend, and makes his choice. It’s an effect of Scanlan’s 100% deterministic spellcasting capacity, not a die roll.

I’m barely acquainted with Critical Role, but this general cluster of themes brings to mind one more anecdote, from the finale of Fantasy High: Freshman Year. The battle against Kalvaxus, the big bad, is going poorly for the Intrepid Heroes, in no small part because their cleric, Kristen, was sidelined early and is unconscious although IIRC stable. At some point in a grim battle, Ally Beardsley (Kristen’s player) asks if they can gain a hit point (and thereby consciousness, and thereby actions, and thereby access to the advanced healing and defensive magic that only Kristen can use) on a natural 20. Brennan allows it, Ally gets it… and the entire battle turns around.

And this is interesting, if it’s interesting, because it only feels a little bit like cheating; whereas if Matt Mercer had allowed Scanlan an extra spell slot for the asking, it would have felt a lot like cheating. You can break the rules, but only if you beat the odds.

I accused Friedman of conflating chance and consequences earlier, and I might be locally right on a technicality, but the relationship is probably closer than I gave it credit for. Whether it’s making the die roll or running out of spell slots, the common factor is submitting to an external judge—not the Dungeon Master, whose motives are as irretrievably compromised as the players’, but one that’s truly impartial.

Which is funny, of course, because the players and DM can and do consistently find ways to end-run around that impartiality. But there’s some magic in that judge’s gavel that makes it all feel real. Which is essentially what Rossignol finds wanting in Mothership:

Actions, rules, and abilities that other games had provided were both a prompt for what to do (by giving you a good chance of pulling it off) and a spice to heat things up by being offbeat, weird, or personal in a way that wasn’t down to fear or guns. In Mothership there’s nothing other than awkwardly applying a save to make a roll anything that isn’t fear, guns, or your limited range of skills. There just weren’t any good avenues for the resolution of those particular struggles.

“Good avenues for the resolution of… particular struggles” is a concept I might mull over for a while.

Currently reading: THE POWER FANTASY vol. 1, by Kieron Gillen & Caspar Wijngaard.

Transcripts of the moment

Letters from an American , by Heather Cox Richardson, February 16, 2025The Element of Fire, by Martha Wells

The Serpentite Ridge

From Angela Hsieh’s newsletter:

LU & REN’S GUIDE TO GEOZOOLOGY is available for preorder now. I saw some illustrations from it at SPX and it looks amazing.

Currently reading: GOODNIGHT PUNPUN vol. 2, by Inio Asano.

The e-commerce recommendation systems have gone woke

Goddamn.

See also:

Data never takes the wheel

I’m grateful to Jessica Hullman for writing about this very wonderful and relatable essay by Rachael Meager on the gap between how we think about data and how we think we think about data. It’s a massively quotable piece, and Jessica pulls some great ones in her commentary; the one that rings through the years for me, though, is Meager’s quote or paraphrase of an anonymous grad student on learning that the chi-square test had shortcomings typically ignored by practitioners:

BUT MEDICAL PEOPLE USE THE CHI SQUARED TEST he moaned. It’s true. If we were right then, in our interpretation, it does seem bad that only a handful of people even knows that there should be either some check, or some adjustment. Nobody seems to care that there are probably many cases where this test is not functioning at all.

… and look, I have been around too long for this defect in chi-square to come as a surprise, but it is nonetheless news. I didn’t know about it, have never once adjusted for it, and wouldn’t (at present) know what to do if I wanted to adjust for it, or in what circumstances I should. I don’t even fully understand the problem. And it’s a common test! All over psychology for sure, and definitely present in reports I’ve written for work.

The thinking behind BUT MEDICAL PEOPLE USE THE CHI SQUARED TEST is what led me to my worst professional misstep ever: Joining an applied research group with an expectation of increased methodological rigor. It’s a forgivable thought, or at least I tell myself it was at the time: If your colleagues are using quantitative research to make decisions that affect real people, surely they must be more careful about their research than basic scientists publishing for purely theoretical interest.

IYKYK. For the rest of you, I regret to inform you this is flat backwards. For the most part, the people who are making big decisions based on data believe one of two things: Either they know better than the data, or they don’t need to worry about the subtleties of data analysis because the signals in the data are so clear. Given the noisiness of most data, option 2 usually amounts to believing you know better than the data.

And when I say “the subtleties of data analysis,” please bear in mind I’m the guy who didn’t know about the problems with chi-square. I’ve been a data scientist for some time, and I’ve developed a nose for data smells, but that’s very much not the same thing as a solid formal foundation in statistics. Sometimes it’s better… but not always, not even close. The things I think of as “subtleties” are table stakes for people like Jessica Hullman and Rachael Meager. Things like, “where you have more people, you have more of everything associated with people.”

… I have more thoughts in this general area, but I think I’ll close this post off for now. Part II in a bit, maybe.

Currently listening: A Court of Fey & Flowers S1E7, “The Masquerade Ball”