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.
Last week I crawled the TTRPG thought space and that gave me the idea that maybe I could build a small search engine to do this. “Small” is doing a lot of lifting there. But I think it might be a useful community service to crawl the TTRPG blogosphere and make that easy for people to search. It’s a win-win. Discoverability for small creators, ease of finding for players and GMs.
I spent time during one of my lunch breaks and got the bones of a crawler written. None of the “crawl more links” parts, but I can point it at a single page and get all the needfuls from it. Tested against my own blog, not sure how much further it’d need to go to work against other sites.
Not sure if that project will go further, I’ve been dithering. I think to do anything with it implies setting aside one or two of my other TTRPG projects, which didn’t get any progress this week because WizardHQ exploded all over my original plan.
We’re a couple days over one quarter of the way into the year, so I sat down and worked on a template for planning around my yearly theme.
Part of a yearly theme is not to plan too hard. There’s a reason it’s not a yearly goal or, so help me, new years resolution. But I thought having some sort of light framework for checkin and intention setting would be useful, so that’s what I’m working towards.
Here’s what I’ve got.
1. What Does This Theme Mean to Me Right Now?
Right now, today, I'm focusing on "do we have enough" in the sense of food to carry us through the uncertain times ahead. Even if shortages are not a concern, I think prices are likely to skyrocket, and the more I can insulate us from that the better off we'll be.
When I originally wrote this theme I was thinking about "enough" in the sense of things I often had too much of. I have too many things to do. I eat too much. I spend too much money. I buy too many things.
I think "enough" can be seen from both sides, or a right-sizing of things. Neither too little nor too much, broadly, across all categories in my life.
2. What Am I Exploring with This Theme?
How do I know that I have enough?
How do I add a circuit-breaker to that part of me that gets excited and jumps at opportunities to consider whether I already have enough?
How do I release things when I have too much?
3. What Does “more aligned” Vs. “less aligned” Look Like?
More aligned with the theme:
Depth over breadth.
Saying no.
Thoughtful consumption.
Less aligned with the theme:
Buying things just to have.
Trying to do everything.
Avoiding hard trade-offs.
4. How Might This Theme Show up in Different Areas of Life?
Work
Delegating more, actioning less.
Having energy and focus to spare.
Relationships
More, deeper connections with highly-aligned people.
Health
"Eat not to dullness and drink not to elevation." - Benjamin Franklin
Enough rest. More than I think I need. Rest before it becomes obvious I needed to.
Build sustainable systems.
Time
Live by the schedule so that free time can be truly free.
Waste no time. Leisure is a valid activity, and should be engaged with by design.
Anything that wants to pay me for my time, or worse, that I pay for with my time, should be considered anathema.
Environment
Bring nothing home that has no place to live.
Find the things which no longer spark joy and let them go.
What began as a fear of undue influence transformed into a realization that ideas are meant to be shared, not hoarded—execution is what truly matters in the end.
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.”
Now I can see more and more of the places where not using AI, at least a little, is hurting me. Or at least slowing me down. In some cases that’s fine. I’m typing this by hand right now, and I know Claude could probably do it in about 7 seconds from a bulleted list of the points I want to make. The end result might even be better, in the sense that Claude is generally better at making easy-to-read content than I am.
I type like I speak, and I speak like a college professor. That’s not meant to be a good thing. But it is what it is and it’s who I am.
All that being said, I think I need to revisit my “100% Human Generated” policy. It’s still true, at least as of the time I’m writing this, but I think I’m missing out on an opportunity to at least collaborate with the machine. The sentiment that went into that policy is still absolutely core to my position: this blog is a craft to be honed, not a task to be automated.
I gave a version of these thoughts to Claude, and asked it to help me craft a new policy. Over several rounds of iteration, fixing parts I didn’t like and mulling over suggestions I hadn’t considered, we arrived at something that I think represents a better way to handle the challenges I’m facing.
Human-Led, Collaborative Content Policy
This blog remains fundamentally human-driven. All topics, ideas, and creative direction come from my own artistic sensibility and experiences. I sometimes collaborate with AI language models in my creative process, similar to working with a thoughtful writing partner who helps me refine and articulate my ideas.
When and How I Collaborate with AI:
Refinement and focus: Sometimes I share my rough thoughts with an AI to help extract key ideas or sharpen my message
Editorial dialogue: AI might help me restructure or clarify my existing ideas
Creative exploration: Occasionally, through conversation with AI, we develop phrasings or explanations that effectively capture what I wanted to express
What Remains Purely Human:
All topic choices and creative direction
The initial ideas and perspectives being expressed
The decision of what to publish and when
The overall voice and style of the blog
Transparency:
When I collaborate with AI on a post in any substantial way, I'll acknowledge that collaboration and specify which AI I worked with. I believe in being honest about the role AI plays in my creative process while maintaining my commitment to human creativity and authentic expression.
As mentioned previously, I worked on Claude with that. Claude Sonnet 3.5 to be precise, although I think in general I’m not going to specify exact versions. That gets into the weeds, and is also somewhat meaningless with how the frontier labs routinely update their models in meaningful ways without updating the name.
I’m curious to see what people think about this new policy. I’m open to feedback before formally enacting it. Am I making some kind of huge tactical error by letting AI into my workflow? Are there things I should be drawing a line on that I’m neglecting entirely?
Without exception, the smartest people I know are all in agreement that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is on the way in the next three years. That could mean a lot of things. Good things. Bad things. I think it’s reasonable to assume nobody can predict what the world will look like beyond that horizon.
Let me be clear: the Singularity is the moment beyond which we cannot imagine the future, because it is entirely different from the world we have always known. Dear gentle reader, I think that point is not more than a year or two from now.
But I’m not here to talk about AI or AGI or the Singularity, because that’s one way in which I think people are right to be worried. There’s the part where technocratic oligarchs have bought what remains of the American government, citizens are being deported to Guantanamo Bay, and airplanes are falling out of the sky.
The bad news keeps rolling in, and I think it’s reasonable to expect that it gets worse from here.
There will never come a point where the red tribe will wake up and realize “oh no, this isn’t what I voted for.” This is what they voted for.
I know you desperately yearn for a “leopards ate my face” style realization of the atrocities they’ve caused. Will continue to cause. Are actively rejoicing in causing. That is not coming, and I need you to stop investing energy in waiting for it. There is work to be done.
If you’ll permit me a crumb of silliness in this tryin’ time, I’d like to present a framework that may help you figure out how you can help when everything feels hopeless, when it feels like the world is crumbling.
Please select from one of the following four class options:
Blanche: Charming, debonair, slutty. First in line to shank a bitch out back the Waffle House at 3 AM if they even glance at one of her homies.
Sophia: Wise, sardonic, unstoppable. A force of nature in the Greek God sort of way. Could correct Peter Jackson on what it sounds like when you stab someone in the lung.
Dorothy: Intelligent, charismatic, truth to power. Plans on plans on plans. Why do physical violence when emotional violence works as good at half the price?
Rose: St Olaf Stories as a finesse weapon. Emotional support friend. Can a cheesecake be a familiar? Have some cheesecake. I SAID HAVE SOME CHEESECAKE.
Look. I know it’s hard. But you need to figure out what you can do to help. Even if that’s taking care of yourself today so that you’re here to fight tomorrow.
It’s deeply unfair that we are called upon to fight this battle. Nevertheless, you are called. Nevertheless, you must fight.
