Ice cream
and layoffs.
Games flicker.
Mechanics parse.
The collapse
is ambient
in 2025.
Develop 2025
I was down in Brighton this week for Develop Conference. Mostly serving as professional wing man to the founder at the Indie Games Company I’m currently at.
Rich was in nonstop meetings with publishers pitching a game we’ve been working on.
I meanwhile, spent 2 days pretty much just wandering around, chatting to people, eating ice cream, talking about AI and LLM’s harness pipelines, using SLM’s as general purpose ‘intelligence engines’ and the mechanics you can build with them, and pointing publishers towards Rich whenever I encountered them.
The Indie Treasures fringe event was full of beautiful looking games from small teams or solo creators. Lots of innovation there, I bumped into Rob who’s book I blurbed which was a nice surprise, we went for a beer. The whole time I was down there seems like a whirlwind. A very good time!
I have lots to say about the general mood and my assessment of the conference, but in short it chimes with what I said earlier this year on funding in the creative arts in the UK, and rhymes with the wider woes of the tech industry at large. Morale is at all time low, and people are losing their jobs.
To illustrate this point, whilst I was standing outside the hotel having a coffee with some folks from a big AAA studio, they literally all lost their jobs one by one over the space of 10mins as the redundancy emails rolled out across the company they work(ed) at. It was one of the craziest work related things I’ve ever experienced. I also bumped into a former colleague who is (was) at Xbox and found out from her that she’s not there for much longer. It’s just where we are I guess. The entire industry has really bad structural issues, exacerbated by the state of the UK economy.
Folks who remember the conference and accompanying zine I helped organise last year, at Develope we ran a small fringe event called ‘weird worlds’ a the Loading Bar on the last night of the conference. Lots of pals showed off their little worlds/games/experiments, we had about 80 people come by.
My friend Stef also came down and showed off her Belatro/luck be a landlord inspired wedding planning deck building game for the first time. It’s called Wedding Planic, and was a big hit!
On The Blog
Following a conversation at Develop, I was encouraged to all my AI posts on personified agents as ‘Little Guys‘ all into one category here on the blog. So that’s what i’ve now done.
June 2025 | Photo 365
Photo 365 2025. Year 4 Month 6.Photo-a-day for the month of June 2025.
Also, A Hundred Notes on Storydwelling continues to unfold over on my leaflet pub.
Permanently Moved
King of Mind
The glowing screen does not possess you. You merely have rehearsed the reflex of the infinite scroll.
Full Show Notes: https://zexulo.xyz/2025/07/12/2518-king-of-mind/
Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/
Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
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Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- 2 Days in Brighton for Develop. It was really fun. Had loads of conversations, caught up with some old friends, ran an event. But it was exhausting.
- SLOP MACHINES: more noodling, but on the train to Brighton I did a complete edit pass on Chapter 4
- Made some moves on whats next for 301.
- Working on SSRZ. its now late to print and i’m annoyed with myself.
- Calls about the game projects i’m working on.
Terminal Access
Huw wrote about the prescription of Palestine Action here in the UK for the the LRB.
I don’t often talk about it, but I have a criminal record. After the Labour government declared war on Iraq in 2003, I skipped school to join a protest in the nearby town of Kendal. I was sixteen. Four of us went to Oxenholme, a train station on the West Coast main line, to continue our protest. We waited for the train from Glasgow to pull in and, when it had come to a stop, we jumped onto the tracks and sat in front of it. I can’t remember how long we were there: perhaps only half an hour. Eventually, the police negotiated with us. We’d made our point, and given the rising tensions that day, they’d had orders from above not to charge anyone who had engaged in non-violent civil disobedience.
When my mother found out, she gave me one of her frank, no bullshit talks.
The article has resonated very deeply with people cross my social circle, I’m seeing it posted and reposted in all sorts of places. If you read one piece of commentary about the current Labour government’s crackdown on free speech make it this one.
I believe there is a moral case for disarming the machinery of war that is killing innocent civilians in Gaza with the complicity of the British government. I believe that damaging and destroying weapons of war is one way of waging peace: I can only conclude that for the British government, the waging of peace is terrorism. And I believe that the proscription under the Terrorism Act of groups that seek peace through non-violent means is political repression of the freedom of conscience. Resisting the destruction of human life and the perpetuation of a genocide against the Palestinian people is not wrong. It is the law, and this government, that is wrong.
I love it when my friends write/do amazing things.
Dipping the Stacks
How Batteries Are Making the Electrical Grid More Reliable
They have also been installed in Ireland, Australia, Germany, and the UK. Grid-forming inverters will allow for very large levels of wind and solar penetration while maintaining grid stability: Ireland has achieved up to 75% of renewable generation in part by using grid-forming inverters and synthetic inertia. If properly designed, grid-forming inverters also let batteries provide other critical grid functions, such as black start (starting a grid from a state of zero power).
He spoke with Jason Yeung, the original creative director, who said that the attempt to remake Dungeon Rampage was a cool project, but that he needed to speak with Mike Goslin, who had run Rebel Entertainment, the original Dungeon Rampage developer. One thing led to another: He spoke to Goslin on the phone, who then introduced him to the CEO of the parent company—and he got his license agreement.in
Our society is in the thrall of dumb management, and functions as such
The reason that executives can move between the top echelons of society even after serial failure is because of regulatory capture and the resultant lack of punishment for white-collar crime. If we rinse-and-repeat this kind of behaviour enough, we end up with money moving to the top of society at the expense of the rest of us.
why men need girlfriends more than women need boyfriends
Friends, or a lover. It’s a hard question. Almost every single man I have asked this question has chosen the lover. Almost every single woman I have asked this question has chosen friends.
Blood, soil, and Jeremy Clarkson
Then, the week before the November farmer protests, Clarkson wrote that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves ‘want to carpet bomb our farmland with new towns for immigrants and net-zero windfarms’ and ‘ethnically cleanse the countryside of farmers’
Reading
I finished reading Practice of the Presence: A Revolutionary Translation by Brother Lawrence, translation by Carmen Acevedo Butcher. Fantastic book. If you are looking for a book about making meditation/prayer part of all aspects of life. This is the book for you.
I also read The Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena this week. It was a very interesting read. You can feel the current / connection pulsing though her throughout the book. History is just full of realised people.
Following straight on from St. Catherine I listened to The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry. A short but very well done re-framing of ‘the dark ages’ as anything but. It collects lots of threads of medieval history I was already aware of in to a compelling story. Worth a read, you could read it in a day if you were on holiday by the pool.
Music
Circa Waves – Cherry Bomb
Via webcurious comes this bit of guitarpop dross that sounds like everything else in the genre. Sharing mainly because the music video was shot along on Margate seafront and in brief moments throughout genuinely makes the place look somewhat nice.
Remember Kids:
Don’t waste time following people online just because you think it’ll get you somewhere. Don’t talk to people you don’t want to talk to, and don’t talk about stuff you don’t want to talk about.
Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon
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