iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 19h

Another fiddly thing: knowing when to drop tags and just do alternating dialogue lines, and when to pick them up again. Sometimes people do it too early, or carry it on too long, or don't do it enough.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 19h

"How did you get into ttrpgs" Was a dorky contrarian smart-arse teenager.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 19h

Generations are so absurd useless as a reflection of humanity. They're an arbitrary split line across all other cultural contexts that encourages reductive, knee-jerk thinking. It's astrology for people who are too online.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 19h

What is it with him getting his stuff out. Used to get his shirt off all the time on UK kitchen nightmares. Tbh he might say yes to your old "fucked into a restaurant" pitch.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 21h

We're even creating generations faster for more discourse. For the 50 years between 1950 and 2000 you have three generations, and we're 25 years into the 2000s and we're already on three. New gen every 10 years. It's just complete twaddle designed to fuel inane arguments and fuel algorithms.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 21h

Genuinely never once thought about generations as a branded thing until I was in my 20s. Someone told me what millenial meant when I was 18. The degree to which online discourse is generation based in insane and extremely annoying!

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Michael Spicer @michaelspicer.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Most TV is just this now.

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Mike Small @bellacaledonia.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

On 4 October 1936, thousands of Londoners gathered to stop Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists marching through the East End. An Eyewitness Account from Cable Street bellacaledonia.org.uk/2026/10/02/a...

bellacaledonia.org.uk

An Eyewitness Account from Cable Street

On 4 October 1936, thousands of Londoners gathered to stop Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists marching through the East End. As we approach that anniversary, Mark Perryman recalls the role o…

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I felt shocked and disappointed, but I didn't feel betrayed, because I didn't let this person into my confidence. I watched his videos, which is an entirely distant interaction that did not bring either of us into the other's life in any meaningful way.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

But we shouldn't think of them as our safe buddies, any more than we should think of them as predators-in-waiting. I've seen a lot of people talking about trust, and my point is that you're not in a position to need to trust them or not trust them. It's good to remember that you don't know them.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

You have a more substantive relationship with that bus driver than you do with any influencer, so I don't think it's a great example. To answer the question: no, I don't mean that, I mean how we interact with influencers in general. Feeling shocked and disappointed is normal, I felt that way too.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I dunno about schrodingers assaulter, but I do think its a good reminder that every single one of these people are complete strangers, and that we should think of them as complete strangers. We never had a way to tell, and we probably should have acted like it (myself included, btw).

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I feel the same misery. But its either continue doing my best to carve out a niche, as some manage to do when times change, or kill myself. And I don't particularly want to die.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I'm not especially interested in getting into the weeds of that debate, so I'll happily concede the point. However, I still hold that it's small potatoes and a poor substitute for a progressive taxation system.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

This is also what I consider the most likely outcome, to be honest, for one reason or another. Even so.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Honestly my favourite policy mentioned was the one about local councils taking ownership of empty houses and turning them into state housing. That's extremely good and I've wanted that to happen for decades.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

It's extremely good. I can't criticise any of the policies raised. The water utility stuff was all a bit vague so I am reserving my judgement for the moment, but it definitely sounds encouraging.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

One of the biggest failures of the modern age is the failure to treat corporations and other powerful business entities as what they are - political actors. Like any political actor in a democracy, they must be accountable to the public. Instead, they're allowed to act as anti-democratic saboteurs.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I think the triple lock thing was seen as an easy thing to point to as a funding source that doesn't significantly hurt Labour's electability or funding, because it's political poison now to raise taxes or admit you're borrowing. They'll do the latter, btw, because the pension slash won't cover it.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I'm not say I'm like, outraged by it going away. But it's frustrating to see Labour pick away at stuff that doesn't matter at all, while the ultra-rich continue to consolidate their corporate oligarchy.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The triple lock is silly as a thing, but I also don't care about it. It's insanely small potatoes. The pension is already low by the standards of other european countries, so I don't care if it gets ratcheted higher.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Like, rather than cutting pensions and therefore harming people who *do* rely on it, I'd rather just raise the tax rates on the people who don't need it. Offsets the pension costs anyway, and also draws money from non-pensioners to boot.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

D. UK pension is firmly in the lower end of state pensions in europe. We don't spend that much on pensions, it only seems like it because of how bereft of support everyone else is. It's not like, horrific, but I can't take it as a positive. I can't take joy in it when pensioners aren't the problem.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

So like, yes, there's a lot of wealth calcified in the older generation. The issue is that A. That's an average, and it seems bizarrely callous to individuals, B. The level to which the average pensioner is richer than us is not systemically significant, and C. We will one day be pensioners.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I'll take it, even if I continue to be frustrated at Labour's unwillingness to engage with the insane inequality of society, and they'd rather fund one social reform by slashing another. But the stuff itself is good stuff.

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Robin LeBlanc, from work @robinfromwork.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The film is written, directed, and co-stars Hitoshi Ozawa, a legendary Yakuza actor who is a villain in Yakuza 0, who got his fellow legends involved. This was his passion project inspired by one of his best friends, a trans woman, and he worked with the community for representative casting.

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JellyMuppet @jellymuppet.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

www.kickstarter.com/projects/soulmuppet/atrapos We're launching later today, let's fucking gooo

kickstarter.com

Coming soon: Atrapos: A Roleplaying Game of Odyssey

A doomed mythic fantasy roleplaying game of defying fate in an epic world of Gods and heroes.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Haha, shit does indeed happen. The real galaxy brain moment is when you realise if you'd played better you might not have needed to roll the GFIs at all...

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

"I'm afraid we simply don't yet have the technology to pick a random number between 1 and 6."

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Yup. When I play people like this, I try and point out when they had insanely good luck, because often they breeze over it. Like a guy will, on a D6, pass a 3+, 4+, 5+, 5+, 5+ for a score (1.8% with a reroll). Then next turn they fail a 2+ with a reroll and complain about the game's broken luck.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

"They don't generate the dice result in the moment tho, they generate like 5000 dice at the start of the game and players use them in order" And if you could see those 5000 results that would mean something, wouldn't it?

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

"Okay but Laurence I once failed five 2+ rolls back to back." Yeah man! It's not gonna happen much but it is gonna happen eventually. It's not even *that* unlikely.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I'm a big fan of the tabletop game Blood Bowl, and played the Cyanide videogame versions quite a lot. number of times a tabletop or fumbll player has confidently told me that the RNG of the Cyanide games is broken is incalculable, despite the devs sharing the exact widely used python script used

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I found just directing the use of lines/veils and x card inadequate for this, so I made a couple of custom safety tools to layer on top that also directly interact with fiction, which is an advantage of metatextualism. Can't control for everything, as you say, you just do your best to be understood

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Yeah agreed. It's something I've thought about a lot lately, as current projecy is deliberately designed to be challenging in theme and tone. Thing is you're trying to create a square peg for a variably shaped hole. You need the tools and the language there for readers to adjust for tolerance.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

You're not wrong, but I do find the analogy troubling. Physical harm at work is measurable, and a river does not have an artistic voice. In the case of art, there's a responsibility for the artist to be upfront about potential risks, but the decision to explore "dangerous" ground is valid.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Something borked here I think! I had this happen myself on an announcement thread a while back.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I meant to send something but getting a postcard in London generally involves travelling into the centre, which I typically avoid! If I happen to pass a postcard place before end of Nov I shall rectify.

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Ian Danskin @innuendostudios.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

"climate change isn't solved cuz people don't care enough" no the fact it's getting addressed *at all* is because people care a great deal, even though caring is deeply unprofitable!!

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Ian Danskin @innuendostudios.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

we live in a world where "humanity is rotten to the core" is a more tolerable idea than "capitalism is kinda busted" but what I love about "capitalism is kinda busted" is realizing every good thing that happens is in spite of capitalism because humans are that committed to doing good things

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Buy Mass Effect The Board Game! @ithayla.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

players hate being surprised by negative things but they also love choosing negative things on purpose to gain something.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I tried to watch Mad Men earlier this year and found it intensely uninteresting. I spent three seasons waiting for something interesting to happen before giving up.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

8. Mouthwashing is a recent addition, but it's genuinely one of the best written games ever made. Dead serious, it's a stone-cold masterpiece. Go play it, it's only a few hours long. 9. Disco Elysium is so lauded it feels weird to even put it on the list, but yeah yeah yeah it has to be on it.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

6. Vangers: One for the Road was a gift from the bargain bin, given by my uncle when I was like 7. Extremely weird game that set the hooks for me being fascinated by weird, esoteric gubbinz. 7. Return of the Obra Dinn is dazzlingly well designed and cool. Please play it if you haven't.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

5. World of Warcraft has to be on here, I spent like half a year of my life in accumulated hours playing this shite, it's a major influence on me. Not necessarily as something to emulate, mind.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

3. Pathologic. Strangely it wasn't the hbomb vid that introduced me to this, but Spoony playing it on stream many, many years ago. Brilliant, subversive, bizarre. 4. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is my favourite Gamecube game. I like Pratchett and Adams so obviously I like the writing.

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Laurence Bianchi-Phillips - Hardy Roach Games @hardyroachgames.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

1. New Vegas is a no-brainer, I have an insane amount of time spent replaying it. Best RPG. It's somewhat standing in for Fallout 1 & 2 as well, otherwise that'd be a third of this list. 2. Resident Evil 4 was my first 18 rated game. Extremely fun and well written (the goofiness is not accidental)

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