Kraldum
My great friend Tori Truslow of Tooth & Shore Games is making a solo fantasy mudlarking RPG called Kraldum.
I’m doing some graphic design for the crowdfunding campaign, and will also be involved in the design and typesetting of the game later in production. Tori is one of the most endlessly talented artists, writers and game designers I know. I am so pleased and also terrified that they asked me to be involved. I hope I can do their artistic vision justice.
They are crowdfunding it on Gamefound as part of the RPG Party 2026 event. Here is the blurb from the campaign:
The city is harsh and ancient. The river Kraldum runs through its heart, carrying its trash, its lost treasure, and its history. It’s a desperate pursuit, descending to the shore at low tide to search through the mud, but it’s a living – and it might make your fortune.
Kraldum is a solo fantasy-adventure RPG inspired by historical mudlarks – those who search tidal river banks for valuable items – and by classic dungeon-delving. Brave the tides, hunt for treasure, and get out alive – if you can – to see what your spoils are worth in the city above. Evade the authorities, encounter the denizens of the foreshore, and choose to fight or befriend them.
As you gain in skills and resources, you’ll uncover stories of the city’s past and the foreshore’s secrets. But there are choices to make on the way, and sometimes you can’t help but feel as though the river itself is watching…
A game for solo roleplayers who enjoy dice-driven action alongside imaginative world exploration, featuring an original system and unique card-based item discovery mechanics inspired by tidal rhythms.
The campaign is currently in its prelaunch phase, but if that description whets your fancy as much as it does mine (and I have seen some of the game itself), I strongly suggest you go make an account and follow the campaign to be notified of its launch next month.
And while you wait, you should also go and look at Tori’s other games. There’re even some freebies!
Tout le monde déteste l'IA
I saw this image in a post on Brian Merchant’s Blood In The Machine.
Tools for browsing the Web
In spite of everything, I still believe in the promise of the Web. I believe hypertext is a deeply expressive medium. I believe we can make the Web we want, and in fact that most of the Web we want is actually out there if you look for it.
I’ve started a list of tools I think are essential for using the Web nowadays. I’ll keep the list updated from time to time as I think of them or discover new ones.
Light pillars and sky roads
From the archives of the lovely BLDG BLOG, I found this description of how networks of streetlights can be naturally projected into the sky, tracing out the street map in which the observer stands.
(source)
See also: this phenomenon whereby an observer’s shadow is cast as a haloed ghost onto the horizon.
New paper: Modelling implicit bias in gender–career associations: a systematic comparison of language models
A paper I co-authored has recently been published in the journal of Information Processing and Management, on the topic of the gender–career implicit bias.
Site update
You may have noticed that I’ve not posted here in (*blows dust off the last post to check the date*) about three and a half years.
Bo
(For the ≤1 people who will appreciate this stupid thing I made.)
New paper in Behavior Research Methods: Sensorimotor distance: A grounded measure of semantic similarity for 800 million concept pairs
A paper I co-authored with Professor Louise Connell as just been published in the journal Behavior Research Methods. I previously mentioned the preprint, and you can read more about the content of the paper on that post.
As usual, it should be open-access, otherwise there’s a copy over here.
New paper in Language, Cognition and Neuroscience: Understanding the role of linguistic distributional knowledge in cognition
A paper on which I am joint-first author, which I previously posted here as a preprint, has just (after a long time!) been published in the journal Language, Cognition and Neuroscience.
It should be open-access, but if for some reason you can’t see it properly there, I can give you a copy.
Sharpest smoke kitchen knife in the world
Youtube channel Kiwami Japan has made a pure artform out of creating the same video again and again. In each, the silent protagonist creates a kitchen knife, from scratch, from an unconventional material. Here’s one made of smoke.
If you watch more than one, while the basic premiss is the same every time, they kind of subtly join together part ASMR, part unfolding surrealist world-building.