I could swear there’s more talk about role-play­ing games than ever. My gut tells me that pop­u­lar­i­ty is rapid­ly increas­ing. A few facets of thought:

  • Crit­i­cal Role — a show chron­i­cling the dra­mat­ic adven­tures of voice actors lead by the amaz­ing Matthew Mer­cer as Dun­geon Mas­ter — has been explod­ing on YouTube and Twitch.
  • Peo­ple are start­ing to 3D print their own game minia­tures and have built strong com­mu­ni­ties on Red­dit and YouTube.
  • There’s a brand new Dun­geons & Drag­ons starter set com­ing out, and it’s exclu­sive to Tar­get (yeah, where you buy your hand soap and tow­els).
  • LitRPG is a new fic­tion genre that’s only a few years old, but is grow­ing and has become quite pop­u­lar in audio­book for­mat. The genre fea­tures sto­ries about the char­ac­ters play­ers become inside a game, whether they know so or not.

It’s all cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence and intu­ition on my end. What do you think?

What hap­pens when you mix Swedish pop music, Japan­ese visu­al kei cul­ture, and prob­a­bly a few too many Anne Rice nov­els? This — total­ly this.

Com­ing out a year ahead of sched­ule, the new Rasp­ber­ry Pi 4 was released today:

You can’t argue about 3x per­for­mance gains and more fea­tures, all for the same price. Gamers will be eager­ly await­ing what rewards can be reaped from a GPU two gen­er­a­tions new­er on much bet­ter sil­i­con — maybe even usable N64 emu­la­tion on RetroPie?

Uber’s Path of Destruc­tion

In real­i­ty, Uber’s plat­form does not include any tech­no­log­i­cal break­throughs, and Uber has done noth­ing to “dis­rupt” the eco­nomics of pro­vid­ing urban car ser­vices. What Uber has dis­rupt­ed is the idea that com­pet­i­tive con­sumer and cap­i­tal mar­kets will max­i­mize over­all eco­nom­ic wel­fare by reward­ing com­pa­nies with supe­ri­or effi­cien­cy.

Tom Hulme is a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist who says schools should focus on cre­ativ­i­ty and empa­thy instead of sim­ple tasks soon to be dom­i­nat­ed by com­put­ers. He wrote in a recent Wired UK opin­ion piece:

Any job that involves rep­e­ti­tion, and no cre­ativ­i­ty, is at risk of dis­rup­tion — from per­form­ing cal­cu­la­tions to review­ing forms to sort­ing machine parts, and even­tu­al­ly dri­ving. Such roles are the eas­i­est for machines to do far more effi­cient­ly than us. We should pre­pare kids for roles that are tougher to auto­mate — roles like artists, care­givers, entre­pre­neurs or the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cists at the edge of sci­ence.

He even sug­gests the trendy teach­ing of cod­ing skills may be the wrong approach:

Deep machine learn­ing will like­ly auto­mate the writ­ing of code rel­a­tive­ly quick­ly. While it’s use­ful to know what com­pris­es lan­guages or algo­rithms, I sus­pect most of the lat­ter will be writ­ten by machine against a spe­cif­ic human (or even­tu­al­ly machine) query. Cre­ativ­i­ty is going to be far more impor­tant in a future where soft­ware can code bet­ter than we can.

I think Tom is unfor­tu­nate­ly cor­rect with his assess­ment. While there will always be a need for com­put­er pro­gram­mers, even that field is vul­ner­a­ble to the impe­r­i­al march of automa­tion. The fast progress of tech­nol­o­gy will destroy so many jobs that we must change how our soci­eties and economies func­tion in the future.