iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 18h

I've been poking around the APA site, and really enjoyed the bit in character creation which basically says "no! you can't be a wizard! we're in space! stop it!"

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Happy Birthday to #OVER/UNDER ! The flickering digital ghost of Mister Eyes has been spending the last year sourcing a new physical shell, so that he can enact a convoluted and ill-advised revenge scheme. Best of luck to him, I say.

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Reposted by Calum Novak-Mitchell

Thursday Garreau @keftiu.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

happy one year anniversary, Dreamers! #OVER/UNDER

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

A story about a conspiracy of male violence, with manipulative cult-leaders and secret indoctrinations but *crucially* also the sort of nudge-nudge-wink-wink conspiracy that everyone sort-of knows about and everyone is basically ok with or at least willing to ignore. Metaphor!

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

I re-read Aickman's The Swords on the bus this morning, which meant I had a bus ride of shadowy grubby dread. When Aickman was on form he really did write better ghost(???) stories than anyone else.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

This post led me to this wikipedia article, which led to the revelation that Salesforce was first revealed to its designer in a dream. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of... Personally, I reckon Crab Currency is better than Salesforce.

en.wikipedia.org

List of works based on dreams - Wikipedia

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

More travelling through the Garden of Ynn this lunchtime, and I think I've maybe made a mistake in setting a clear goal for the players deep in the garden. A nice time is being had, but there's less incentive to poke at things and get involved, because the optimal move is usually to Go Deeper.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Immediately hearing this in his voice.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Ben Lerner's Transcription or Simon Leys The Death of Napoleon are both incredible, short, and are Full Of Stuff To Talk About

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I *do* like reading aloud, but it's infuriating when the toddler becomes obsessed with something terrible. We've got some barely readable Numberblocks books bought in a 10-for-£10 pack in costco, and she's bafflingly attached to them.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

This was a craze at my school! Kids would make them on the library pcs at lunchtime. Choose-your-own-adventures, quiz games... and then someone realised you could have hyperlinked clip-art fly across the slide, so that the player had to click on it quickly before it disappeared: a shooting mechanic!

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Not sure why purely narrative concept albums are such a tough nut to crack when Opera and Musical Theatre exists, but it does seem like concept albums based on Vibe and Theme have a much better track record.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The only two story-based concept albums I can think of where the band/artist is at the top of their powers are Quadrophenia and Everybody Down. I love The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and The Hazards of Love, but the bands have put out much better stuff.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Chris is very good at writing about music

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

That thing about paranoia and Proust, and cultural doors opening through pop art and stupid jokes? That’s exactly how I feel about early-2000s PC Gamer magazine. For me Wittgenstein is forever associated with a “Return to Castle Wittgenstein“ back page joke.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Pitiful! The score of a chump! Defeated 84-41

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I am expecting to be annihilated

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I have had *so much wine* and my wife who is not drinking has decided we are playing a game with a scoresheet that looks like this.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

(In this case, the players dropped a mind-controlled squirrel into the fountain to see what would happen to it if it took a coin, and I had to scour the text to see whether this would affect the players, or just the squirrel)

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I’m using the processes and descriptions in a text to determine What Happens Next.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

And even though this fountain is A Concrete Thing In The Setting, rather than an abstract external mechanic (e.g. roll d20+whatever against a target to see if you hit), what’s happening in my head when I interpret player actions against the reference material is exactly the same in both occasions.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

So, to clarify - here’s the well! (Actually a fountain, I’d forgotten). This is from Emmy Allen’s excellent adventure, the gardens of ynn. And my point is that when I’m running this location, I’m cross-referencing this procedure in the books against the players actions.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Yeah, I instinctively am Way To Easy on my players, and always feel more relaxed by systems that handle consequences for me (Heart is brilliant at this, whereas in Blades in the Dark coming up with consequences is the gm‘s main job)

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Basically, I reckon RPGs are structures that mediate improvised storytelling, and the difference in structure between a crunchy rule and a diegetic setting element can be pretty small

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

E.g. I was recently running a dungeon with a natural-language description of a magic well. When the players interacted with the well, I was referring to this description to determine action-outcomes in exactly the same way that I would interpret a more structured procedure in Blades in the Dark

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I think this is true, with the caveat that in a rules-light system with a carefully designed world. If I’m running a rules-light OSR game, Im referring to the text of the adventure in Exactly The Same Way that I would refer to a rulebook.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I watched the first episode of that near-future war-with-russia reality tv show where Michael Gove is prime minister, and my main problem was that the game design was non existent? None of the politicians make any decisions! They're just reacting to documents and videos brought in by the producers!

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

A recap of session 2 of Blades in the Dark: I feel like I'm getting more of a hang of how to run it. The games' prescriptive structures mean that a *lot* of plot can happen in a two hour session, and it's pretty much all relevant to the wider story.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Of course, this wasn't a fault of the game design. Or really more than tangential to what KG says in his post

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

(Knowledge of both what structural misogynistic oppression *feels* like, and also, like, how wartime aeroplane logistics work). Lots of the emotional beats landed, and I'm glad I played it, but the whole thing felt slightly *off*.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

And we were all very earnest and took it seriously, but it's tricky not to make something feel like a flattened, cartoonish, contradictory borderline slapstick version of the past with a bunch of players who are improvising towards and around a bunch of knowledge they don't have.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

The Night Witches section is particularly interesting here, and intersects with some of the difficulties I've had playing serious and historically informed ttrpgs. Night Witches is about soviet female fighter pilots in WW2. I played it with a group of men who didn't know much ww2 history...

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

This is fantastic. There should be more thoughtful art criticism of theme parks. Do you know of anywhere else with theme park writing like this?

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Some good Folk Horror resonances in this wikipedia article about a painting that may contain a hidden portrait of the devil en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_(...

en.wikipedia.org

Salem (painting) - Wikipedia

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I was expecting something like maybe Oates in her full gothic pomp - but this is bouncing along with clean pacy prose, gory spectacle, and earnest family drama. It's like King, or Barker, or (much as I hesitate to bring him up these days) Gaiman. It's good! It's not what I thought it would be!

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Two thirds of the way through Enriquez's Our Share of Night, and it's a lot of fun, but it's weird that its been sold as serious literary fiction (published by Granta, Ishiguro quote on the spine, I first heard about it in an LRB review) when it's clearly a pulpy horror melodrama.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Work lunchtime TTRPG has descended into crazed psychedelia. I'm not complaining. (currently running the Gardens of Ynn in Cairn)

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Just found your blog liked it! Seems like there's barely any theme park analysis on the internet that comes from an art-criticism/culture-studies perspective. There's stuff about history, or technical descriptions, but your post is unusual in thinking seriously about theme parks as art.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

This book is getting sufficiently under my skin that receiving this email at work felt like a jumpscare (@benpester.bsky.social )

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Yeah, I wondered whether to put that as a caveat. It doesn't help that for a long time he was held up as something of a saint, and the movie about him and the DT Max biography portray him as a much more uncomplicated figure than he was.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Are Consider the Lobster, or A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again too obvious as suggestions? I know Wallace is pretty unfashionable now, but my god what a prose style.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Ben Pester's The Expansion Project is a horror novel about two things: fatherhood, and modern corporate culture, so reading a chunk of it on the bus between dropping daughter off at nursery and sitting down for my office office job feels like I'm doing the 4d immersive experience version.

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Reposted by Calum Novak-Mitchell

Anthony Etherin @anthonyetherin.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

LAMENT OF A CARVED WOODEN OWL (Palindrome) Too honed, am I not? I sleep, I do. Owl as a basal wood. I peel, sit on.... I made no hoot.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Ha, it took me several reads of this post to realise that this description of the singing was a criticism. (My immediate reaction: "Yes! That's exactly what it sounds like! Isn't it great!")

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Or sometimes the opposite: My mum was a massive SF fan; I remember her saying that the friction she experienced when trying to get friends to try e.g. Le Guin is that non-SF people disliked being thrown into a strange place with different rules and having to work it all out without clear guidelines.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

It is… really unnerving how much visible fascism you can see on the streets of Oxford these days. This stuff only started showing up a few years ago.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Guy Garvey is *extremely* good at interpreting this stuff. Entangled is lovely. Weird that every time he's singing every other singer's microphone appears to be turned right down?

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