It’s time for a work update! I recently moved on from producing Computer Says Maybe, and as such I’ve had a lot of time to think about what I want to work on; I’ve both started and finished a few things and I’m sharing some of them below.
This extra time also means I now have capacity to work with YOU. What are you working on right now and what do you need help with? Hopefully you all know my skills by now: writer, storyteller, content marketer, etc. — let’s work together!
Events you can and should attend
If you’re in London in November, I am running an event with one of my favourite collaborators, Ben Whitelaw, about the proposed teen social media ban in the UK. As you all know, I have strong opinions about online safety and all the ways policymakers misunderstand internet culture — but luckily for you, you won’t have to hear me repeat those opinions on the night. Instead we have a line up of expert speakers. The below poster explains everything. RSVP here.
If you can’t make it to London for National Explosion Night (the 5th of November), come and listen to me speak at this event about disclosing AI use, with The Merl Initiative. It’s on the 5th of October at 5pm BST — and it’s online so you don’t even have to get dressed, wow! I will essentially be building on my piece about the Anthropic watermark:
Writing Through the End of the World
The kind of writing I do for Horrific/Terrific is investigative and analytical. This is extremely fun and rewarding but, sometimes I want to produce something less serious that itches a different quadrant of the brain. Some of the best writing happens when you don’t overthink it, and I love going on and on about apocalyptic technologies while barely thinking. Those who know my work VERY well will have read Mutual Dislike and understand what I mean (more about Mutual Dislike further down this post).
So I thought I’d start a new section to Horrific/Terrific called Laughing at the Apocalypse. This will be a series of absurdist vignettes on the aspects of the tech industry which are spiralling us into doom; these vignettes straddle fact and fiction, and help us laugh at the elites who think we can prevent the heat-death of the universe.
Essentially this is silly fun that draws on all the things you’re probably interested in: AI governance, the horrors of accelerationism, our rapidly decaying media ecosystem, and a generalised reality dysphoria that just won’t go away.
Laughing at the Apocalypse will happen weekly — I haven’t auto-subscribed you because I’m not a monster. Go here to receive Laughing at the Apocalypse posts, as well as the usual Horrific/Terrific pieces (which you already get).
I made a game about being sad
Because of personal things, I’ve had a rough couple of years. I got depression for the first ever time (wow!) and worked through my feelings making a game about being sad. In the game, the world hates and you and everything is unpleasant. But it’s not all bad: while I was making it, I realised that the ending should be happy — and that I was not equipped to actually make the ending until I felt happy enough to do so. Which is why this took two years to make and is finally finished! It takes five minutes to play and it’s just a bit of depressing fun.
Mutual Dislike — a zine of dystopian fiction
Mutual Dislike is a quarterly zine of hilarious flash-fiction, printed on a tabloid newspaper. This is actually something I’ve been producing since around 2019, but because of the aforementioned depression I had to take an unofficial hiatus. The trauma clogging my brain is finally getting cleared out, and as such I’ve been writing stories again.
This isn’t a huge launch, this is just a reminder that Mutual Dislike does exist and you can in fact buy it. When the new issue is ready you will all be the first to know.
These last two things are very random and impossible to categorise
Maybe that’s what art is? Anyway I started playing around with a kind of ecology map of social media posts (video above). Each symbol represents one post on a certain social media site, and a symbol appears based on how frequently posts on that site happen. Can you guess which symbol is which?
This is just a video of a prototype, which is not yet plugged in to real data — but tbh a lot of the fun was deciding on the relative frequency, virality, and decay of social posts, depending on platform. The next step will be to visually represent cross-posting.
And finally: one of the first things I did after leaving The Maybe was make a custom Magic: The Gathering deck based on the techno-dystopian parts of our society. View it here. I put all my ex-colleagues in there as double agents. FYI for those who actually play MTD: this isn’t a real deck you can use, I just made this to entertain and distract myself while going through a big life change.
Thanks for reading and see you next time in a normal issue of Horrific/Terrific!