Contrariwise the Wizardly

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 17:49:24 -0500

Am I deep-frying cubes of spam in a wok?

Technically? Yes.
Literally? Also yes.

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 09:56:39 -0500

Welcome to “how hot is it outside right now?” The only game show where everyone loses and nobody’s happy.

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 09:06:11 -0500

I could (and probably should,) write a whole dissertation on the mahjong scene in Crazy Rich Asians.

Fri, 22 May 2026 15:51:24 -0500

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare.

Hi. Hello. How are you? Good? Fantastic.

Look. This is weird. Can I get weird? I’m going to get weird.

Welcome to my Want Ad For Friends.

You: A person on this bitch of an Earth.
Me: The weirdest person you’ll ever get to know. Probably.

The rest is details.

Who I Am

Game designer. Thousands of RPG books I swear I’ll get to. I invent problems so I can solve them and then build systems to create new ones. I’ve been wrong about everything at least once. Especially this. Big cryptid energy.

Game Designer

I own and run TomeSpire Games with my fiancé.
I’m obsessed with TTRPGs. Even the bad ones. Especially the bad ones.
But I never actually have time to play them.
But I will talk about them at length with you.
This is a threat.

Maker

I think I took a weekend off once. It was horrible.
I’m always doing something. There’s a better than even chance I would like to involve you in it.
100% chance I’m making something right now, and 0% chance I’ve seen that movie or show.

Being My Friend

I have exactly two modes of communication. Drive-by memes or links and whole-ass essays. There’s no middle ground. You’ll either receive the most unhinged image because it made me think about you or approximately seventeen paragraphs about a cool moth I saw. That’s it, those are the options. Gird your loins.

Memes, music links on Youtube, and things that made me think of you are my love language. They’re how I keep the heartbeat going when we don’t have anything to say to each other.

I am always interested in what’s going on in your life.

Positivity, Not Performance

I’m actually this upbeat. All the time. About everything.
It’s not about pretending things are great everywhere, it’s about choosing to face the horrors knowingly and with a smile.
The horrors hate it when you smile.

I’m A Creature

Absolutely zero interest in performative normativity.
Let your entire freak flag fly.
Enthusiasm uber alles.
You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.

Who You Are

Did you ever play a MUD? An MMO before the year 2005? D&D before they started numbering the editions? Why come we aren’t friends already?

Ever play Exalted? Shadowrun? Earthdawn? Same question.

Do you like going places? Doing things? Would you rather go places and do things than catch up on {insert Streaming network here}? Me too! Let’s do that. Let’s do that so hard.

Let’s go to estate sales and make a YouTube channel about going to estate sales and make a podcast about making a YouTube channel.

Do you have a clock guy? Are you a clock guy? Because you got clocks at the estate sales and now you need a clock guy? I’m personally offended you’ve made it this far and haven’t emailed me already.

Look I’m really busy. You cannot be the kind of person who’s going to take it personally if I respond to your message tomorrow because I was busy today.

I will see it, I will respond to it, and I will cherish you. As soon as I’m not juggling these eighteen other plates. And that really cool moth (aforementioned).

On Friendshapes

Are you ready to be in like with me?

I’ve got a range of intensity options to get you into this friendship today.

Once a month penpalships by email? Yes.
Occasional drive-by meming on Discord? 100%.
Micro.blog? BSky? Some other app you’re just now introducing me to? Why not!
Meeting up in strange and foreign lands to foment dissent among the populace? Sure.
Coffee? Always.

Right this moment I’m literally writing this from an airport on my way to visit friends across the country because someone invited me to their birthday party. Invite me to your thing. Who knows, I might show up.

I’m mostly not on the common messengers or social media places, and this is mostly an intentional decision. However, my blog’s federated, and you absolutely can find me. The place is lousy with links to the best ways to do that. You tell me what kind of friendship you’re looking for and I bet we can find a way to make it work.

This is not a joke. I want more friends. If anything here landed and made you think “wow, he seems kind of cool” or “wow, he seems kind of weird, but like in a cool way,” then you’re literally the person I’m attempting to reach.

Obligatory Call to Action

Email me. Email me right now. Don’t wait. You’ll forget.

Don’t want to email me? Then your next best bet is Micro.blog @Contrariwise or Bsky @thewizardly.com.

If you’re into Discord, probably the best way to find me is on the TomeSpire Games Discord.

Say hi. Do it. Do it now.

Sat, 09 May 2026 12:40:26 -0500

Take my wench… Please!

I get no fealty. No fealty at all.

Wed, 06 May 2026 17:53:11 -0500

Presented with the following choice:

My dream home and working for “the man” forever.
A trailer park and working for myself at my dream job.

I pick option #2.

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 08:54:49 -0500

Step three: vibe.

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:19:09 -0500

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:28:59 -0500

Contrariwise is Human and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.

Some Thoughts on AI

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 10:19:34 -0500

This represents my thoughts today. They’re different from what I thought a year ago. They’re different from what I’ll think in a year. Let people change their minds.

AI water usage is overblown. If you think AI uses a lot of water, I encourage you to look into how much water Netflix uses. Or the California almond crop.
1. Lots of people really hate AI and they’re leaning into “but it’s using all the water” as a form of propaganda because the numbers sound really big if you don’t report them with context.
AI power usage is… Not overblown, exactly. Data centers use a lot of power. But again, compare it to something like YouTube. And if you’re still upset, realize this is a failing of our society to be able to build new power generation capacity, not a failing of the miracles of our modern world for needing power.
AI did steal basically all of the creative output of collective humanity. I agree. A better society would come up with a way to compensate the creators. This has happened before, and likely will happen again. That doesn’t make it right and I’m not going to defend it, but I think I can’t quite bring myself to be fully upset about it (even as I’m impacted by it) because we’re in good company.
1. I don’t have much say in what happens. I have near infinite say in how I choose to feel about it. Being angry has almost never been a useful state. Accepting that which I cannot change and learning to use the new tools has measurably and drastically improved my life. Your mileage may vary.
AI can, but that doesn’t mean you have to. Let it do the work in places where you’d rather not, so that you can spend more time where joy is sparked.
1. Do you like writing words? Then keep doing it. Find the parts of writing you didn’t like, and ask the AI to help you. AI is a better editor than I am. I still write all of my blog posts the human way, but I often ask Claude to take a look before I post them, and it finds all sorts of typos.
2. Do you like writing code? Great, lots of AI code lives in the realm of “good enough,” but there are places that need better than that. Write the fundamental primitives the AI will go on to orchestrate.
3. Do you like writing test coverage? I can’t imagine it myself, and I’ve never met the developer who thought this was the fun part of the job. Let the AI do it. Or, if you truly do find this part satisfying, write good, comprehensive, fast tests. There’s a place for this.

Some of the smartest people I know have proposed some potential outcomes for AI that sound like the wildest science fiction. I think the probability of those outcomes is not zero, but I don’t think they’re as inevitable as sometimes reported.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 09:19:25 -0500

“Stick your chest out and go like — fuck it. Let’s try.”

— Bruce Straley, Co-Founder, Wildflower Interactive @ GDC 2026

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 13:55:20 -0500

Tired: Harry Potter houses.

Wired: Winnie the Pooh characters.

Tag yourself. I’m Owl.

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 13:28:53 -0500

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 19:34:35 -0500

Lyft died halfway between LAX and Anaheim. The driver only speaks Mandarin, I only speak English.

His phone is translating to English for me, my phone is translating to Mandarin for him.

He says it’s doing a pretty good job.

So anyway, we live in the future.

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:59:09 -0500

“why am i like this” Digital Art, 2026

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 11:45:41 -0500

Did I go to a book store in the gayborhood? Yes.
Did they have a Dune tarot deck? Yes.
Am I now in possession of a Dune tarot deck?

A lady never kwisatz and tells.

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:06:07 -0500

I’ve never been particularly interested in conforming to society’s expectations.

I learned to fake it, for the benefit of fitting in.

Now, with the benefit of some duly earned confidence, society is welcome to fit in Deez Nuts.

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 09:07:43 -0500

The thinnest naturally occurring material is Free Hotel Breakfast Bacon.

Much could be learned by studying the processes that lead to such delicate structures.

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 08:07:13 -0500

It’s an interesting conundrum. The person I actually am trying to build the person I’d like to be, using the constraints of my known behaviors to try to push on the rudder of the behaviors I’d like to change.

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 08:28:45 -0500

For reasons that defy explanation I’ve been watching a lot of Disney channel this week.

They happen to be running a Zombies marathon.

The cartoon is weirdly compelling. I may become the world’s foremost adult expert on the Zombies mythos.

There’s a giant grasshopper and its name is Mr Paddlesticks.

A Brief History of my Readwise Enrichment Pipeline

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 12:26:09 -0500

I read a lot. Like. A lot a lot.

And most of it is through an app called Readwise Reader. (Not an affiliate link. Possibly not even a recommendation. More on that maybe later?)

Without getting too deep down the rabbit hole, I think it’s the best currently available solution to the me-shaped set of problems, but I don’t find it delightful and I would abandon them the instant a better app came along.

That said, a better app hasn’t come along, doesn’t appear to be on the horizon, and the Reader app has been slowly getting better at my specific use cases for a couple years now. So it’s probably where I’m going to be for the foreseeable future.

I’m going to hand wave a lot of complexity about how I actually use Readwise because it’s not the point of the present conversation. The important thing to know is that eventually, through dark and internecine processes, some subset of documents come to their final rest in my Readwise archive.

I was going to do a header thing based on Genesis but I think I’ve already done that at least twice but you know what? It’s my blog. Ain’t nobody gonna tell me to stop making bible jokes. So anyway…

First, there was Step Functions, and it was… Okay?

Wait.

fuck.

Is this going to make any sense if I don’t explain what it was I was even trying to do when I built the thing?

Okay. So for realsie reals. First, there was the “what was I even trying to do, actually?”

My first Read it Later app was Instapaper. And it was also fine. In some ways it was better. And I was glad to pay like, what, $20/yr? Then they decided to more than double the price to add nebulous “AI Features” at a time when I was not yet sold on the value of AI as a thing I would pay double for.

(Side note, I still won’t pay double for it. This may be hubris but I suspect I am better at building AI features than you, for any company whose main thing isn’t building AI features. Just give me an API or at least a way to bring my own keys and stop trying to charge me double for things I didn’t ask to buy.)

So, incensed, I migrated to Readwise Reader. Who also had AI features. Which were legitimately awful at the time. (Sorry Readwise folks. It’s true. And I emailed you about it. And your features got better, which I appreciate. And you let me bring my own key, which I also appreciate. So thank you.)

And the important thing about that is the way Instapaper worked was everything I read ended up in my Instapaper archive, which meant at least a few years of backlogged “I looked at this, it was interesting,” was sitting in there. Would I ever look at any of it again? Turns out, benefit of hindsight, no. I wouldn’t. But all of that baggage came along when I exported Instapaper into Readwise.

How on earth was I going to separate the signal from the noise?

So I built an Enrichment Pipeline

The basic idea was simple. Take the archived file, get ChatGPT to generate a summary of it. Use the summaries to determine what I wanted to keep. Because ain’t no way I was ever going to re-read all 500+ documents to do that myself. (narrator: this is foreshadowing.)

I explained a lot of this here.

V1 ran on AWS Step Functions, output markdown to S3, which I used rclone to move into my Obsidian vault. And it was fine, except that I did a horrible job of ever actually looking at any of those markdown files. Not never. But not as often as I intended.

Turns out I had a lot of other mountains to move before I would be in a space (emotionally, mentally, physically,) that would let me start to get value from them.

And then I got there. And then I realized. Dumping all that into my Obsidian vault wasn’t actually the play. But I needed to do that, and work with them to understand my real needs, my real constraints. So it was a valuable learning experience.

This is a recurring theme, and a methodology I stand by. Stop worrying about building the right thing. If it’s not obvious what that is, build anything, and the right thing will eventually make itself known.

A brief aside on Digital Sovereignty

I ain’t want Google to own all my data. There. I said it. Or Apple. Or Amazon. Or any of them what thinks they built the future.

They didn’t build it. Kids with beards in computer labs built it, and then FAANG stole it and Google sits on a throne of lies which would be awesome if they were still don’t be evil about it.

So you know what? I’m taking all my data and I’m GOING HOME. You want to play tetherball? You get your own pole Sergei. You can’t come over and watch cartoons and eat pop tarts with me anymore. And also my dad could beat up your dad. At math.

And that’s why I don’t want to play in Amazon’s back yard

Which meant I needed to get my enrichment pipeline off Step Functions.

It was fine. It basically worked. But I wanted it to live on my own infrastructure.

Which Begat V2, n8n + git

I migrated my python + lambda + step function monstrosity to n8n, which has a perfectly cromulent self-hosted version. Except what I don’t have, even though I know I could, is a self-hosted equivalent to S3. I was going to need to rethink the rclone part. How would I get the enriched files from n8n to my computer?

Well. You know what else I’m self hosting? Forgejo!

So I set up a repo for my Readwise enrichment, figured out how to get Forgejo to commit the newly-enriched files to a branch and open a pull request for me to review.

And it worked great for about four days before I noticed that sometimes, for reasons I still don’t understand, Readwise will consider a document “recently updated” and trigger a re-enrichment. And that in so doing, I created a bunch of difficult-to-reconcile changes to files I was potentially actively changing in Obsidian.

However, because the universe has a sense of irony, I had a long weekend precipitated by a canceled work trip, which meant lots of unplanned time to rethink the entire thing. From scratch.

Which Begat V3, n8n + Readwise API

Remember that part where I said the Readwise Reader product has slowly gotten better? One of the ways it got better in the last six months is they have webhooks now. I didn’t need to pull their API nightly to look for newly-archive documents, I could respond to them nearly immediately.

You know what else they have? A native Obsidian plugin. That’ll just do the export directly. And is pretty good, actually, assuming that the data you want to enrich actually lives in Readwise. Which it didn’t. Until now.

You see the thing I had originally started doing with my unexpectedly free long weekend was finally working with some of those files that the V2 pipeline was creating. Putting my own thoughts and ideas in them.

As I was doing that, I developed a sense of what parts of the enrichment were actually useful. And it turns out, if I tilt my head slightly to the side and squint, I could cram that data back directly into the Reader data model.

When a document hits my archive, that triggers a webhook which causes my self-hosted n8n to pick it up and ship it to OpenAI to extract the key points. I find this super useful. A bulleted list of 3-5 main points is useful in a document that might take an hour to read.

It would be strictly better if I generated that list myself, but since I’m usually reading on an iPad mini in situations where it wouldn’t make sense to have a keyboard, the UI/UX on typing that list sucks, actually, and AI is good at this kind of summarization. So I let ChatGPT take a first stab at it.

I cram that back in the “document note” that every Reader document gets, and which I’ve otherwise never used. Again, because the typing experience on the iPad sucks. Seriously. Great reading device. Do not ask me to input data. No. Shan’t.

Then, if the document has highlights (and most of them do), I send each individual highlight back to OpenAI to generate a single one or two-word tag based just on the highlight. No additional document context. I attach that tag to the document, because the Readwise Reader API won’t let me attach it to the highlight. I suspect I could through the Readwise API, but it appears that the Readwise API uses a different ID to reference highlights than the Reader API (at least based on documentation) and I think it’d be difficult to bridge that gap, so I don’t.

Hey. Readwise team. You know what would be cool? If the IDs are meant to be the same between the two APIs, document that somewhere. If they’re different, give me an API that will let me turn one into the other. Thx.

The other thing I do is generate a “summary” of each article, but that’s actually something Reader’s built-in AI will do, as long as you give it an OpenAI key. So I do, and it does a good job.

Now, all I have to do is export the summary, document note, and tags via the Readwise Obsidian plugin, and I get my enriched data with arguably fewer moving parts. And it works great.

Except…

Okay so it’s a webhook now. Which means it’s event driven. Which means the whole process only runs when… I… Archive… Oh no.

So that’s the other thing I’ve been doing all weekend. According to my time tracking, I spent at least 6 hours yesterday alone. Going through each and every document in my Reader archive and CULLING.

Remember the not re-reading all 500 documents? Y’all, I’ve culled so hard.

To be fair, that process mostly isn’t re-reading the entire document. But in many cases it’s at least opening and reading the first / last few paragraphs to remind myself what the document was about.

Fortunately, lots of stuff could just go. At least several tens of documents about COVID that are no longer extremely relevant. Stuff from early AI that’s now been proven or disproven. Interests I’ve moved on from. Let’s say of the 500, probably about 75-100 were easy first-round deletes.

The rest?

Open the document. Does it have highlights? Do I find those relevant and interesting? Send it back to the archive.

Do I remember what it’s about? Does it seem interesting? Maybe send it back for a re-read.

Delete it if there’s any question. My to-be-read is long, and I trust that things will find me again if I need them.

I’ve got about a third of the original documents left to go, and a decent system in place. The enrichment pipeline has been working great, and the exports are now landing in my Obsidian vault in a format that I really like, with data I find useful.

Not bad for a couple extra unplanned weekend days, huh?

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 15:34:56 -0500

Sister Mary Corita Kent

source

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 10:57:13 -0500

POSSUM: Post Own Site, Syndicate Using MUD

I Shouldn’t Start a MUD

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 09:26:30 -0500

Full disclosure for those who know me well. I’ll sometimes start with a provocative statement and all the reasons I know I shouldn’t do something only to arrive at: “but YOLO here we go anyway!”

This time, I think, that’s not the destination. This isn’t me secretly explaining why I’m going to start a MUD in the Year of our Holy Gashapon, 2026. Probably. Maybe. Almost certainly.

But First, I Digress

I like people. Here we must start before all else, because otherwise it might start to sound like I’m a misanthrope. I really truly do like people. I like chatting with my friends. I enjoy whiling away the hours in pleasant company.

The computer programs available to do that on the modern internet? They do not spark joy. Unjoyful™. Joyn’t™.

What I’m left with is a bit of a problem. I want to be able to communicate with the diaspora of friendshapes I’ve made over my many decades on the Information Superhighway™, but the tools at my disposal leave much to be desired.

A Brief Litany On The Topic of Instant Messengers

If, like me, you are old enough to remember the invention of the wheel, you may remember that once upon a time the wild grasslands were cavorted-upon by beasts known as Instant Messengers. AIM. YIM. MSN. ICQ. While there were slight differences, they all shared the feature that you had to log on. Being available to chat was a decision. An action. If the app was open it was an invitation.

What happened if the app wasn’t open? Nothing. You didn’t get to talk to that person. You waited for them to be available. When they logged on no messages would be waiting. Each session was a fresh exploration of the social strata.

It was beautiful, and it was perfect, and we killed it.

How To Contact Friends These Days in 10 Steps (with pictures)

Currently there are four different messengers where I maintain a presence, which is exactly three more than I’d ideally like.

Signal: the upstart. My most security-conscious friends are here. Often in addition to at least one other place. This is the place I’ve tried to center, and the platform I’m most likely to respond on.
Telegram: this one is sticky. I like almost nothing about it, but at least one social community is centered here and it provides a gravity.
Discord: the worst. I cannot imagine the creature that looks at Discord’s UI/UX and thinks, “yes, good.” But at least one other social community is centered here. Worse, it’s one of the main discoverability engines for other communities important to me.
SMS: the barren wasteland of spam messages, family, professional services, and MFA codes from services that won’t let me use TOTP as the lord God™ intended.

Oh yeah, also there’s email (feel free to say hi!)

If I’m on my computer looking to Be Social™ that means I need to have three, maybe four, maybe five different apps open.

Gentle reader, I don’t have that much attention to spare on a good day. Which means, in practice, Signal is open most of the time and I check in on the others a few times a week. And that sort of works, except that as anyone who knows me on Discord or Telegram knows, it’s like being friends with a ghost.

Occasionally I show up to rattle the chains and make your clocks run backwards, but mostly I’m quiet.

Except, wait, that kind of sounds like… Isn’t that basically what I was describing as the Golden Age of Instant Messengers™?

The Revolution of Rising Expectations

Yes. Yes it is. Except for one key difference. Unlike AIM or MSN or YIM or ICQ, on Telegram and Discord people can message you while you are offline. Uncouth! Heathens! Anathema!

Being offline on old-school Instant Messengers was Normal and Expected and when you opened one it was a Fresh Palette™ of Opportunity™.

Being offline on Telegram or Discord doesn’t stop the messages from arriving. Which means there’s a Weight™. A Burden™™. Opening either app is inviting yourself to a dinner where the meal is already in progress and may in fact be Half Digested™.

Collectively we’ve created this cultural expectation that everyone will always be available. Nobody is ever permitted to fully disconnect, and to attempt to do so is to abdicate participation in the Zeitgeist™.

Okay Old Man But What Can We Do About It?

We can make a MUD about it.

Wait, Didn’t You Say You Weren’t Going To Do That?

I did. And I’m not. But I thought about it.

As many people know, I learned to program by hacking on MUDs. Circle. Diku. They’re the pasture to which my soul yearns ever to return.

Here’s my ridiculous idea. I would build a MUD. A place I actually want to inhabit online. I would make it available to any and all, those friends who could be convinced to give it a try. I’d make a web interface, so that it was as easy to use as possible.

And key, I would build a series of connectors from the MUD’s mail system to the other places where friends live.

On Telegram? Send a message to a bot.
On Discord? Send a message to a bot.
On IRC? Send a message to a bot.

Gentle reader we could build it better. Stronger. We have the technology.

Except every minute I spend working on this ridiculous project is time not spent on other, more Ridiculouser™ projects. Some of which are deeply important to me and my planned future.

So I think this idea needs to be allowed to wither on the vine. Right idea(?), wrong time. Probably. Maybe. We’ll see.

So That’s It Then? You’re Just Going To Leave It Like That?

For now? Probably. Yes. But this is a space where my mind tends to return and wander. I’ve also considered setting up an IRC server with many of the same goals in mind. I just don’t think I could convince most of my friends to use it.

But IRC is clearly undergoing a small resurgence thanks to modern easy-to-host servers and reliable web-based clients. I’ve seen more than two communities spring up in the last few months centered on a small ecosystem of self-hosted social media, IRC, and / or forums.

The counterculture is rediscovering the internet we mistakenly left behind and finding it Good™. I think eventually I’ll figure something out that works here. And with any luck I’ll convince my friends to make the Jump™.

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 09:51:25 -0500

If the singularity comes, may it find us doing well.
If the apocalypse comes, may it find us doing well.
If the end times are nigh, may they find us doing well.

Come what may, may we do well.