Systems and Stories
Jordan completed her PhD in Artificial Intelligence at the University of New Hampshire in 2012. Since then, she's used AI to solve problems in many domains including security, medicine, & logistics.
Writing is a weird thing to do. Setting words down on a page is massively impoverished next to a conversation. You can’t read the room, or the single person you’re talking to. Chances are you aren’t even there to see it when the message lands. There’s no room to pivot,…
And yet it seems like everyone else knows the rules doesn’t it? They got a fucking manual and we didn’t. Life’s not fair kid, but it’s horrible and messy and wonderful, just like what you’re chasing after.
totally reasonable to expect that I could just post through it, right friends? Abandon everything you’ve ever known, pick up another language, navigate an alien, baroque and frankly mildly hostile bureaucracy, and keep on trucking. Very normal, very reasonable expectations.
There was a moment early on in Koriko: A Magical Year, somewhere between sketching out my little witch-in-training’s emotional baggage and stacking a tower of dice like I’m trying to defuse a goddamned bomb with a mercury switch when I realized I was doing something I almost never really get…
Solo TTRPGs do a very silly thing. They ask you to be surprised by a magic trick you’re also performing. In a group game, a huge part of the joy, on both sides of the screen, is not knowing exactly what’s going to happen next. As a GM, you prep…
Depending on how you want to count, I’ve been roleplaying for over three decades now. Personally, I think the pretend games I was playing with my friends as a young child count, as we were adopting roles and negotiating what happened in a shared fiction. Even if you don’t count…
There’s a certain kind of quiet you only get late at night. The world thins out a little, and your brain starts telling stories to fill in the gaps. That’s always been part of the appeal of solo TTRPGs for me, not the mechanics, not the dice, not even the…
Flip over to TTRPG youtube, and you won’t be able to go more than ten minutes without some creator with more followers and clout than I could dream of saying “Everything is Play”. Why do they say that? Well, a few reasons, but here is what I think the biggest…
“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.” If ever there were a Hoosier, it was Kurt Vonnegut.
Did you know Christmas is a really rotten time to move your family half way around the world? You might suspect it, of course, but until you find yourself either foolish or desperate enough to make an attempt, you have no idea just how bad it is, let me assure…
