I can’t for the life of me remember anyone’s phone number from the past twenty years. The smart phone has ruined me. The contact list and its abstraction has left me looking for a name and a face, not a name and a number.
I still know the home numbers of friends from my childhood though. I can still sing you the Empire Carpet jingle. Put me in front of a school locker and I can even spin the dial to my high school combination.
Those numbers though weren’t abstracted away from their source. Not like the way phone numbers are today. The association in the mind became a strong, almost unbreakable bond.
Who knows? When it all starts to go to mush, the last thing I might remember is some grade school friend’s phone number.
I worry about this abstraction effect. Anyone whom has worked with me knows it is a personal bugbear of mine. Cory Doctorow has his enshitification theory about the world, which I don’t disagree with. That said, I believe the key contributor to what made it possible is abstraction.
The more layers you place over how things work, the harder it is to understand how they work. The harder it is to understand how things work, the more smart sounding nonsense you are willing to swallow.
There has been a slow creep of this effect in every aspect of society. What makes our systems and machines work is a mystery to us. It might as well be magic to most people now. Broadly speaking, we have built systems that aren’t so much maintainable as they are replaceable.
Go ask anyone if they know why coltan is important. They will assume you are talking about some unfortunately named kid.
Personally I am seeing this accelerate the computer engineering space at a speed I wasn’t expecting. Agentic coding can be a seductive tool, providing lots of efficiencies. But there is a cost for that, and I don’t mean the tokens.
The best way I have been able to describe how injecting agentic assisted working models into engineering practices looks is by comparing it to logistics. I have some experience in that space, and seeing some things unfold recently was eye opening. The size and shape of it reminded me of some recent history...
Using the logistics metaphor, agents represent a modern, efficient supply chain. They let you create very clean, streamlined, efficient lines of delivery. Material goes from point A to point B with little waste. The problem with hyper efficient supply chains is they are fragile. One bad turn, and they collapse.
What happens when they collapse? Panic because no one knows what to do. They have forgotten how things used to work or never knew how they worked in the first place.
Remember the impact of COVID on our highly tuned supply chain? Agentic coding is shaping up to become that in the development space. All because it abstracts away the understanding. A house of finely tuned cards more fragile than even the global reliance on COBAL.
This is my fundamental issue with the overuse of abstraction in all things. It can have value, but it has become a crutch we refuse to put down. It is the easy path.
On the last night of GenCon, I was a part of a heated discussion regarding this very subject, but as it relates to roleplaying games. As with all discussions of this type, it didn’t resolve anything. What it did do was help me sharpen my position...
The act of writing an idea has more inherent value than the act of selecting an idea from someone else’s list.
Does this eliminate a level of abstraction between you and the idea? Absolutely. It makes that idea one hundred percent your idea alone.
Does it fix the idea in your head with permanence? Well, all the games that I have played that do this I remember. The others, I don’t.
Is it harder? Yes, but why do the easy thing?
Easy things are boring.
Weekly Roundup
So much editing has been done, two launches at GenCon, the panopticon continues, and ALEX TOTH!!!!!
My Work
As of this moment, thirteen booklets and five handouts for the Mystery Box have been edited. Ten of them have art completed and a first pass of layout done. Only one booklet remains to be written and edited. After that it is art and manufacturing. Lots of manufacturing.
There have been a couple of developments in my creative process. Turns out, I am going to make 5 special copies that come bundled with copies of the core Torchbearer set in a handmade and hand-painted slipcases. The other boxes will either be hand-painted or lino-printed. Depends on how the ink takes to the boxes. I haven’t decided yet if I want to do a non-handmade version.
Gaming
Middarmark and SPG Interceptor both released at GenCon and if you didn’t get a copy there you can still get in on the action. I believe both should be shipping by September. I know that there is a limited number, so get in on the action now if you want a copy. Link
Technology
The panopticon continues to expand to watch our every move. This crap and the nonsense that comes out of the mouths of the techno-autarchs convinces me more and more that these idiots don’t actually understand the technology they embrace. Link
Creativity
Nate Piekos is making a typeface based on Alex Toth’s lettering! I can’t be more fucking excited about this. Link
