Contrariwise is Human and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.
Those That Are Included in This Classification
I Shouldn’t Start a MUD
Full disclosure for those who know me well. I’ll sometimes start with a provocative statement and all the reasons I know I shouldn’t do something only to arrive at: “but YOLO here we go anyway!”
This time, I think, that’s not the destination. This isn’t me secretly explaining why I’m going to start a MUD in the Year of our Holy Gashapon, 2026. Probably. Maybe. Almost certainly.
But First, I Digress
I like people. Here we must start before all else, because otherwise it might start to sound like I’m a misanthrope. I really truly do like people. I like chatting with my friends. I enjoy whiling away the hours in pleasant company.
2025 Year in Review
With apologies to Robb Knight, from whomst I stole the format.
General
Continuing and, indeed, accelerating the trend of the previous year, 2025 was marked by a significant amount of travel. Short trips, long trips. At times it felt like I was gone more than I was home, although the statistics don’t bear that out.
My blog is read almost exclusively by the friends who I directly link to it (thank you!) although it looks like one sentence on each place in Europe that I’ve been broke containment, for an extremely small definition of “broke containment.”
Orienting Toward Wizard
Some of the concepts and terminology I’m about to use, as well as the title of the blog post, were lifted directly from here.
Having said that, I think I’m going to end up at a very different final destination than the original poster. So, credit where credit is due, but don’t feel compelled to read the original to understand my point.
King Power
King Power is money. I think the original article would try to lump in other things, like status, but one of my foundational operational primitives is that all of those things are fungible with money.
A Personal Interest Rubric
Have you ever lost something and then spent the next ten years trying to find it?
I have. It’s an essay about the fall of the Roman Empire. Did the average citizen know the empire had fallen?
No. It took them about 200 years to figure out, but you’re just going to have to trust me because all the kings horses and all the king’s men haven’t been able to find that paper again.
The Wizard's Workbench Friday, April 4 2025
I wanted to try something new this week and give an end-of-week status report. No idea if this is something I’ll keep doing, but the best way to figure out if it’s useful (to me or anyone else) is to give it a try.
The majority of this week has been spent working on the website for WizardHQ, a project that all my friends know about, but if you don’t know me personally this is the first time you’re hearing about it. I don’t intend to try to advertise it at this exact moment, please excuse me being vague for now. More to come on that in the next few weeks, but for right now it’s eating up a considerable amount of time.
Working with AI
My thoughts on working with AI have evolved a lot over the last year or so that I’ve been actively using them.
I’ve gone from “this is an interesting toy, but it doesn’t seem very useful” to “wow, people are using this all the time and it gets important things wrong” to “actually if you’re smart about how you use it this can do some really useful things” to “I’m using this more and more every day, it seems unlikely that’s going to change.”
I’ve added a 100% Human Generated policy to my blog.
[…] AI is here. It’s going to “win” for many definitions of win, and some definitions of lose. But that doesn’t mean we need to abandon our crafts to it. The Luddites “lost” for most definitions of lose, but people still make things at home that could come from factories. […]
_February 2025 Update: I’ve replaced my 100% Human Generated policy with a Collaborative AI policy, available here: thewizardly.com/ai-collab…
I have a new blog theme! It’s entirely possible you’re witnessing it right now, with your very own eye-holes. If not, you might want to click through and give it a taste.
I wish there were a way on micro.blog to write different kinds of posts. I forget the terminology but I’ve used hugo in the past to have a few distinct category of records. I want to do something like that for EG media reviews.