iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

What kind of GM are you? I'm sort of nomadic tent city multitudes of psychedelic mushroom people GM.

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I recently installed a new browser and had the rare experience of looking at #YouTube without my normal algorithm - or any browser profile or cookies or anything installed. It was really disturbing and very, very right wing. At least a dozen of the top videos it suggested were attacks on feminism.

110

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

It depends a lot on your environment. Cities aren't good place for cats, but rural areas are generally safe for them during the day time.

200

Reposted by Ben Green

Luke Ontario @coolhand.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Oh shit. THAT is worse than I realized

We are spending almost five billion more on AI related construction and ten billion dollars less on other private construction since 2024

28870294

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Hang on, this "let them eat cake" post isn't a joke? This isn't a satirical account? "It's not that hard?" Life is in fact, extremely hard for many hundreds of millions of people, and you have never in your life had to look for a job. You literally wouldn't know if it was hard.

000

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

By the transitive property of Not_AI_Trash, all of the artists listed are -- or at least were -- not AI also. I feel like there could be a YT scraper that pulls names from these old video descriptions, cross indexes them to build larger catalogues and playlists that's all people?

000

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Police department spends tens of thousands of dollars ensuring local teenagers can't experience the most iconic harmless prank of mid-century America that they bemoan the loss of on social media.

000

Reposted by Ben Green

Claire Willett @clairewillett.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

every day of my life I think about the people using “she” to describe this computer program who still need to be convinced to use it for trans women

6138793686

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

One would think that whatever the POTUS calls "the ban on the free press" would be summarily overturned by the SCOTUS, but this is America so it probably will be allowed to stand and all the media companies affected will pay him a million dollars and promise to kiss ass even more.

000

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

... discovery. It's hard to know really how well known the songs I'm sharing are, but in the spirit of the feeling of stumbling on something unexpected in the stacks of a music store, I'm sharing things I think will be mostly new. Day 2 #MusicVideoTime: www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4fE...

youtube.com

Animal Prince - "Closer to the Stars" Live

YouTube video by Animal Prince

100

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

This is some pretty phenomenal praise of the game and of Ryan. Also I absolutely loved the KS video. Very much early crowdfunding vibes, before it turned into the polished business it is now.

010

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I love this idea, so I'm starting today: MTV hasn't been about music for a couple of decades, and algorithms shape every recommendation the systems give us with little room for Day 1 #MusicVideoTime youtu.be/fTsWKl4zFGY?...

youtu.be

STORES

YouTube video by Ross Bryant

121

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

When I did a long unsupported bike trip many years ago, this was the song I played in my head to pedal over mountain passes.

010

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

"Since it's Thorsday, the fear and shock of lightning is a big emotion and I have a want for every day of the week, this almendro wood I got from..." Meanwhile the other shouts "Vengeance! attack these venal cocks and weak villains!" because words that start with "v" or end with "k" are bad luck...

110

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Then when they want to do some kind of magical effect, they just explain how their character is thinking about and approaching what they're doing. Then the GM reconciles that with out they were thinking about what they were doing and the resolution incorporates those two views.

100

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Maybe the first player starts tracking time and asking about plants and checking to see how everyone is doing, and the other is learning the games the locals play and "testing out words" to find more good ones, and makes little quilted squares with messages hidden inside.

100

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

One person might have an in-world calendar and some sketches of plants and a "wheel of emotions", while someone else has a list of important words, the rules for a drinking game, and quilting supplies.

100

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

What if the character sheets were modular, and you rolled a few times on a d100 table whose results are pieces that you print & cut out and glued onto that section of your sheet, but they might not all fit because they're not all the same size, so you have to cut bits off of something.

120

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I can imagine a game system that has "systemless magic" being a ton of fun, but I could easily see it swinging wildly from table to table and session to session. The game would have to embrace that chaos. What if

100

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I agree with your point is what I'm saying - and I'm holding myself back from vomiting special interest nonsense about what I've been learning lately. That aside! I think your idea is playable as long as everyone agrees that it cannot also be fair.

100

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I simultaneously agree with you that I don't like magic systems AND I read academic papers in fields I have no training in for fun on a daily basis, and it can be at least awe inspiring if not magical.

110

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I think it's a car commercial.

020

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

If you didn't already know what my profile picture was (or it hadn't occurred to you to look at it before), see the Alt text for an explanation:

"It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985. Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist at best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber. Carson's incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one of then on a ceremonial bed facing an altar that appeared to be a means of communicating with the Gods and the other lying in a porcelain sarcophagus in the Inner Chamber, permitted him to piece together the whole fabric of that extraordinary civilization."

"Motel of the Mysteries" by David Macaulay

020

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

AI industry experts who call the risk of human extinction from AI is "serious but manageable" usually say the risk is 2.5-5%. Imagine you had a magic 20-sided die that let you name any real world problem and on a 2+ it was fixed, but if you roll a 1, EVERYONE dies. No sane person rolls that die.

000

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

"You gave us billions to create this technology that we've known was civilization-ending dangerous for decades, and now that we've made it, it definitely might be.... so you should give us billions more to be sure that we keep making it even more dangerous, but responsibly now because arms race!"

000

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

So yeah, even without having to mention that Zionists like Jabotinsky were explicitly racist colonizers who planned for the genocide of the Palestinian people, or that Israel is currently carrying out that genocide, I can still maintain theological anti-Zionism and doing so isn't antisemitic.

100

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

A "Zionist" agenda that is not both universally intersectional - seeking to build a "zion" for all people - and also stateless - one that acknowledges that wherever people are, they deserve to be home in that place in that moment, is one that entirely missed the point.

100

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

By prioritizing the patch of ground of ancient Zion over Zion as the "healed world" which is (in a mythic sense) everyone's home to which we're always returning, we "mistake our fingers for the moon" replacing the struggle to rebuild a better world with the struggle to hold a literal hill to die on.

100

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

But even setting aside critiques of ethnonationalism and Israel, anti-Zionism is an entirely valid Jewish *theological* position. The existence of a Jewish state binds our spiritual practice, culture, and traditions to the crass geopolitical demands of a modern nation state.

100

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

The #IHRA Working Definition of #Antisemitism, by conflating the "Jewish right to self-determination" with the "Jewish right to an independent ethnostate", is itself antisemitic bc it presumes that unlike all other ethnicities, Jews cannot have a right to self-determination without ethnonationalism.

100

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

A key difference being that and what you're bringing up in this thread is that in TRACS, I didn't do away with the character sheet, which players use to show what actions their cards - and combinations of cards (eg. runs, pairs, etc) - represent.

010

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

We talked in rough terms about TRACS in the discord, but this is getting at that exact idea. That all of the game actions turns into card play with regular decks of playing cards. Players can combo off each other like in Rummy, but so can the GM.

110

Reposted by Ben Green

NASA | ESA Space Updates @nasaupdates.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory uncovered a new class of cosmic objects: 84 “hypersoft X-ray sources” scattered across six different galaxies, including Andromeda and the Pinwheel galaxy!

X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Alabama/M. Muhibullah et al.; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk

423355

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

haha, well there you go, I was just writing a comment wondering if cards would work

010

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I'm wondering if instead of a "sheet", characters could have a "deck" where things about them can be played for different kinds of actions.

110

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

When my middle child was 4-5, he joined his big brother's Pathfinder 2 game. Since he couldn't read, I described his druid's abilities and we drew pictures of them on index cards and then drew the dice they used. We used different colors of index cards for different kinds of abilities.

210

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

You can pick the "street urchin" background in PF2e, but if your character never does anything that makes those words meaningful, then it never happened.

010

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

In TTRPGs, I think too often people think of things like "backstory" as a plot hook to give the GM or a justification for skills and attributes. But I told my students that backstories that don't meaningfully affect your characters' lives and choices do not exist.

110

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

An acting teacher I had in college said something like, "real people have the luxury of a lifetime to express their characters. We get to give grains of ourselves second by second and decade by decade. The characters you play have only a few minutes. So let them be desperate to reveal who they are."

210

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

the low-key hilarity of "Massive Attack On Pentagon Page 14 News"

000

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I taught my pre-literate 4 year old to play PF2e (he's 12 now), so I can adapt it for anyone.

020

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

One of the things that blew me away when I started running PF2e, was how well supported I felt as GM. Having mostly run 5e to that point, it was like stepping outside and realizing the room I'd been stuck in stank.

120

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

It won't. Stop normalizing corruption and vote buying. The headline should be something like: "Trump's illegal vote bribing con hopes everyone forgot about the thousands he's already promised."

050

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Holy shit your recent covers are scintillating! I want to eat them and wander around in the woods.

121

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I've had a Gamefound account for a long time. I just noticed that I misspelled my own name. In other news, I put the compost bucket in my trunk. The next day, I noticed the car smelled *terrible*. I didn't know why until my wife opened the trunk and asked why the compost bucket was in there.

000