Among the endless fractal conflicts over the boundaries of concepts (such as whether a hot dog is a sandwich) are innumerable arguments over whether two languages are variations of one language or whether they are distinct, separate languages. From what I have seen these discussions are almost uniformly hopelessly poisoned by the motivating issues of politics and identity. But I’m interested in what it would look like to objectively answer these questions.

The main indicator used to judge whether two languages are the same is called mutual intelligibility. If I can understand what you’re saying, and you can understand what I’m saying, then it’s hard to claim that we are not speaking the same language. (The same concept applies to the written word.) The word “mutual” is there because, for example, Dutch speakers can understand Afrikaans speakers better than Afrikaans speakers can understand Dutch speakers.

But immediately following from this invitingly crisp designation is a degree. How much, exactly, did you understand? For this, I think it’s reasonable to take some standard corpus within the language, like the nightly news broadcast. After all, there are plenty of exclusively English speakers such as James Joyce that I cannot understand, due to, um, their being bad at making sense.

In addition to the blurriness of how much one understands, here’s another dimension that I find more interesting: how long it takes to understand someone. Say that you meet someone and you can immediately tell that they are “from somewhere else” (namely somewhere different from you). They have a very “thick” accent. The first few words out of their mouth you will probably not understand. So in that case the intelligibility is zero. But then as they say a couple more sentences, your brain somehow catches whatever vowel or other phonemic shifts they’re using, and you’ll start to understand. There will still be some problems understanding them for a while, as each new word they say has a chance of mismatching in your brain. They may even have a lot of regional vocabulary that you couldn’t figure out without being told. But it will pretty quickly converge to something that you would mark as a “yes” under the metric of mutual intelligibility.

When I visited Paris, I found that I could read a surprising number of signs. I couldn’t understand a single thing anyone said, but the signs were helpful. It turns out that French and English have a fair number of cognates, and so when you pass the sign for “Musée de l’air et de l’espace,” you can know what you’re about to experience. I also have a fairly large technical vocabulary, much of which comes from Latin, and since French descended from Latin, I had higher recognition.

So French has at least some measurable degree of intelligibility to English speakers. And most of the cognates (recognizably related vocabulary) don’t come immediately. For example, the word for “left” is “gauche”. Yes, like the word gauche as in awkward. Being left-handed is “wrong”, socially non-compliant, awkward. This connection does not come after just a few more seconds, as in the opening example of listening to a person’s accent, but it comes relatively quickly, and you can often remember the meaning after only one exposure to the cognate connection.

So intelligibility can be measured in something akin to a half-life: how long it takes before you can understand X% of what they are saying. This time duration is really the length of time you tried to understand, either by seeking patterns, being told patterns, or otherwise deliberately learning things about the language.

On the far side of dissimilarity, Japanese is profoundly and fundamentally disconnected from English in the great tree of languages. It may be that spoken language first occurred at one place and time, and that all languages are ultimately descended from it, but that is not known, and for the purposes of learning and communication, an English speaker can only learn the meaning of a Japanese word by asking, and never through cognates. But even then, learning time is a good measure of similarity. The more novel grammatical structures you have to learn, the more different of a language it is.

I think Scots is a good illustrative case for this measure because many speakers of English cannot understand literally anything a Scots speaker is saying right away. It is much harder to understand than for example a strong US Southern accent. But if you pay attention and try to connect things up to context et cetera, you can, on the order of tens of seconds or a few minutes, catch the phonemic shifts and then understand more like 50% of what is being said. You can then learn some of the more common word replacements, like how “ken” means “know” (the shared k and n are not a coincidence) or how “twa” is “two”. Picking up on the negative contractions is especially helpful: “dinna” for “don’t”, “havenae” for “haven’t”, or “wadna” for “wouldn’t”. Altogether I suspect the differences put its intelligibility “half-life” at a few hours of study to be able to understand the equivalent of a nightly news broadcast. This is very different from a thick accent, and also very different from needing to take a year of classes to understand.

It is the perfect degree of distance to incite maximal argumentation over whether it is the same language or not.

Read Part 1 here.

You’ve heard calls for new literacy before

If you lived though the 2000s and 2010s, this analogy may sound familiar. The concepts of “numeracy” (numerical literacy) and “code literacy” were both popular and advocated during that time.

Numeracy is, to quote Wikipedia, “the ability to understand, reason with, and apply simple numerical concepts”. This includes things like being able to do mental math in the grocery store, understanding the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire, and that conjunctions are less probable than their individual parts.

The “learn to code” movement was, to quote Wikipedia again, “a series of public influence campaigns during the 2010s that encouraged the development of computer programming skills in an economy increasingly centered on information technology”. These skills are often referred to as “code literacy”. The movement was largely a job retraining program, but it was also considered important for the general public to understand how computers and software work, and there are many non-software-development jobs where a basic ability to code is useful.

Many nonprofits and governmental policies were created to measure and increase both types of skills among the general population. I think these are both good things to increase on the margin. But it’s not clear to me that we should aim for a particularly large fraction of the population to have them (aside from basic numeracy, which is as important as reading).

I claim that my call for Lean literacy is fundamentally different for two reasons, and a much better match for the original concept of literacy.

A funny thing about language is that we have two totally different systems for it; a spoken one and a written one. Everyone learns the spoken modality as a natural and necessary part of healthy human development. Spoken language is at least as old as Homo sapiens (~300 thousand years old).

Written language though, was invented. It’s only about 5 thousand years old. And so it must be much more deliberately taught. But what you are teaching is not a bunch of new concepts; you’re just teaching the person to recognize the correspondence between a modality they already know and a new modality.

This is emphatically not the case for numeracy and code literacy. Those are both large collections of arguably unnatural concepts. They are also, I would claim, not concepts that everyone can learn. In contrast, it does seem that essentially everybody can learn to read.

Reading Lean code is obviously a far more niche skill than any of those. But within the population of mathematicians, Lean code is just a different modality of representing the same body of concepts that all mathematicians are intimately familiar with. We could even have a hypothetical world where Lean code is the only modality of communicating mathematics, in the same way that we could hypothetically have a world where humans never spoke, only wrote.

Because it is only a different modality of representing familiar concepts, I have no doubt that all mathematicians could learn to read Lean.

Mathematicians already do this all the time

In fact, I’d claim that mathematicians already know several different ways of representing mathematical concepts.

First is the fact that all mathematics can be expressed in English (and any other natural language a mathematician may speak). Math papers are, despite their reputations, mostly written in natural language, with the symbolic expressions interspersed. If pressed, mathematicians can read the whole thing out loud.

When a mathematician writes down their theorem statement, the amount of it that is in symbols versus languages is a matter of stylistic preference. This is especially true at the level of the logical structure of the theorem (saying “if and only if” versus ⇔, or “for all” rather than ∀) but people also commonly say things like “f and g commute” rather than “f∘g = g∘f”. They also often say it both ways, just to be clear. And complicated properties are frequently given single-word adjective names, which are then used fluidly amongst the symbols.

There’s also the matter of different notational systems for different subfields. Derivatives can be denoted with d/dx or x’. Tensor calculus and differential geometry can make the same equation look unrecognizably different. Many logical statements about objects with certain properties can be alternatively expressed as unions and intersections over the sets of objects with those properties. Is this a product of conditional probability distributions or a compositions of kernels or a Bayes net diagram? Doesn’t matter, mathematicians have it handled.

And then there is LaTeX. Not many people prefer to read and write statements like \frac{d}{dx} \int_a^x f(t)\,dt = f(x), but everyone understands that it’s necessary to participate in the standards of the global mathematics community, and over the last 30 years or so essentially everyone has transitioned to using it.

[Part 3 coming soon]

If you are a mathematician on earth right now, you have probably heard of Lean and its enormous growth and success, especially in combination with LLMs. You may, like many other mathematicians, be feeling very disoriented and uncertain about the future of mathematics. I can’t help much with that; I think the world is and will continue to be fundamentally uncertain and disorienting. But I’m here to encourage one relatively simple action that I think will benefit essentially all mathematicians;

Learn to read Lean.

A crucial part of my claim is that I really do mean read. A lot of people are intimidated by Lean and its whole complicated ecosystem, and I think focusing on literacy can help ease that feeling. Reading is the easiest part — I think also the most important!

To put my money where my mouth is, a few weeks ago I had the research group that I run start systematically learning Lean, by going through the textbook Mathematics in Lean together.

The overwhelming benefits of Lean

I think a lot of readers will have heard this part before, and it has been said better elsewhere, so you can skip this part if you want. But it feels appropriate to at least list the major reasons why Lean is so helpful.

You no longer have to worry about errors in your proofs. And you no longer have to worry about errors in in other people’s proofs. You can stop worrying about whether a proof is correct and focus on what the proof means or how it works.

As an interactive theorem prover, Lean will tell you (via the InfoView pane) the exact state of a proof at any point in the middle. This is useful not only for coming up with proofs, but for understanding existing proofs. It can take a load off your working memory.

Math is much more searchable. If you want to look for existing work on a given conjecture, you can now search for that using the actual formal statement. Any matching proofs you find are instantly verifiable as a proof for your particular conjecture.

With the automation tools built into Lean and the immensely capable LLMs, large parts of your research can now be automated. At present, taking advantage of these breakthroughs hinges on understanding what the Lean code says, that is, being Lean literate.

For more detailed discussions of these benefits, see Mathematics and the formal turn by Jeremy Avigad, or

For many decades, the main reason not to use the existing computer-assisted proof systems was because no one else used them, almost no mathematics had been implemented to build on top of, and they were very hard to learn. In the last few years all three of these barriers have been pulverized, and the floodgates of the benefits are now open.

What do I mean by “read Lean”?

There is a wide variety of ways and depths to which someone could choose to use these new tools. But running through all of them, including the super-powered AI automations, is the simple foundational skill of reading Lean.

By reading Lean I mean being able to pull up a .lean file on GitHub, VSCode or anywhere else, and make any sense of it. I mean thinking to yourself, “right, this is a consequence of the data processing inequality” and then being able to find that inequality stated in Lean (or write it yourself) and then be sure that it is the theorem you were thinking of. I mean reading a paper on algebraic varieties, getting to an appendix that shows the Lean code of the paper’s main theorems, and having a rough sense of how those theorems should look different to apply to your own subfield of toric geometry.

I also mean reading your student’s Lean code and being able to tell that they made a mistake in specifying the order of the limit operators such that they accidentally proved a much easier theorem. Finding mistakes like this is the kind of math literacy that you already employ all day, only now it’s in a fixed-width font where people use less spatial arrangements and more syntax coloring.

LLMs will also make these mistakes, or misinterpret your prompt, or even make adversarial errors. [link?] It is crucial for society that its experts in mathematics train to interface with these new systems, to help the broader effort of ensuring that AI is beneficial. This can be done with an overhead cost comparable to learning to write papers in LaTeX, and I also claim it will be way more fun than learning LaTeX.

Read Part 2 here.

I recently discovered the concept of a journaling RPG, which can be a tool for creative writing. In Act I of these posts I narrate this discovery in more detail. In Act II I narrate how I finally got around to playing one, called Borealis, by overengineering a Lean implementation. As promised, the third post in this series is a transcription of the journaling I wrote in response to the game prompts. (You can read just this post standalone if you want.)

I’ve added the intro text from the game, since that’s essential for understanding the story. I won’t explain all the rules of the game, but they determined whether a given story beat went well or poorly. During gameplay, you flip over cards and reference their corresponding prompt from the game booklet. You start out with two safe cards, the Three of Spades and Six of Spades, and I’ve copied their text here. I also copied the relevant prompts for the later cards I pulled, but I wrote the journal such that those are actually not essential to understand the story. In some cases I kinda ignored part of what the prompt said, to better fit how I felt the story was going — this is considered a good thing to do in journaling RPGs.

Normally I would do a bunch of editing, major or minor, to get a short story into a state that I was very happy with. But I think it’s fun to see how this one turned out exactly as it happened from the gameplay. So the below is not edited at all. I did a tiny bit of retro-editing during gameplay.

The transcript

“This day you become one with the land,” said Elder Mishan. Her wrinkled face looked stern as she repeated the words as she had for all those of the People around us both, just as had elders before her back to before even our oldest writings. “This day you walk with winter, and winter shall learn your worth. May Boreas watch over you and his wind bring you home safe to us.”

I glanced at my mother and father, standing proudly at their place in the circle, the brand of their own walks clear against the skin of their clasped hands. For a sudden awful moment my mind was empty, and I had no idea what I was supposed to say.

“I shall walk with winter,” I said, the words coming back to me, and I remembered my brother standing here on the altar stones reciting the same. “I shall walk in Khione’s care. I shall harm none, neither plant nor tree, bird nor animal. And by this sign shall the winter know me and learn my name and see my worth. All this I promise to you.”

There was a brief intake of breath from everyone. Promise made. And now I had to keep it. The circle parted and my boots crunched against the snow as I set out to find the Borealis.

[Three of Spades]

Your maelnra, or walking stave, is the key tool of the People. Sharpened at one end and carved with runes of knowledge and protection, it can be used to drive through ice, as a pole for a bivouac or skis, or to hold up a weary traveller as well as a myriad of other things.

[Six of Spades]

Your sealskin coat is lined with fur and treated with Elder Imelion’s finest unguents to keep the winter out and you inside, as warm and dry as possible.

As soon as my family faded into the distance I began to feel an immense sense of regret. Not regret in leaving, but regret in not having asked more about what I will experience. Somehow I suddenly feel like I have no idea what will happen, or when I will even know when I’m supposed to do something different. What if I just walk and walk forever, until I freeze? I already know that I won’t go back unless I succeed. It is who I am, but that doesn’t stop it from filling me with adrenaline at the thought.

With only my coat and maelnra, I try to remain calm and walk on.

[Jack of Hearts]

A roaring sound chills you to your bones as you realise with horror that ahead is an ice bear, and it is protecting cubs. The bears are formidable opponents themselves and can act in frenzied rage to defend a family: find a way to proceed, if you can!

My fretting over whether anything will even happen was immediately shown foolish. Though the icy world looks barren, we know it is not. It holds great danger, and there is little natural danger greater than that of an ice bear.

I know not whether she knew the People were close, or whether it is bad luck. But my journey got very desperate very quickly. She does not seem calm or healthy herself. Most animals know that men are a great threat to them, and will run away. But if they are starving, they may attack themselves. And attacking she is.

She runs toward me at a full sprint. My heart sinks deep into my stomach. I can run down a glazelle through persistence, but almost all animals are faster at a sprint than men. And so I know there is no running from her. I must fight.

I meet her challenge, and scream at full volume, bolting directly at her. If I’m lucky, she will be more scared than I, and stop her charge. I am not lucky.

She saw me from a moderate distance, and continuing to run at the bear requires me to renew my commitment over in my heart. Finally, after agonizing seconds, she is within spearing range. Mercifully a bear will not throw it back at you, so it is a safe try. I throw with all my strength, and foolishly, at the cost of control. My maelnra plunges into the snow beside her.

She banks left but keeps barreling toward me. In desperation I try to evade but it’s clear that I must make it past her to get to my maelnra. The hopelessness of my situation is so simple, there is little else to do. I run at her, and as we are about to collide, she jumps to land on me, and something in my heart tells me to dive. I jump under her and roll. The great bear, body emanating heat and musk, flies just over me. As I get back on my feet and bolt toward my maelnra, I realize her back claw has caught on my coat, and it pulls off me swiftly.

As I reach my maelnra and yank it out, I turn around to see the bear starting to trot away with my coat. She has dug her strong teeth into it. I throw again, injuring her, but the maelnra falls out, and she starts running away. It would be foolish to pursue. But I will not last overnight without warmth. A hundred yards away, I see her stop and chew up the coat. It is then that I realize she can smell the sealskin and oils of it. She must truly be starving to try to gain nourishment from it. And when she is done trying, the scraps will be of little use to me. I grab my maelnra again — now the only tool I have against the world — and trot in the opposite direction. I must test my luck again, for the other option is self-sacrifice.

[Ace of Hearts]

The snow grows deep and cold. Draw upon your experience of the ice lands to proceed.

Some of the People find rune-working the most natural thing, more natural than nature. For myself, it’s easier for me to forget that they even exist. I feel that my strength is my body, my strength is my cunning, and the trust that I have built with my family. If I am honest with myself (and I must be, here in the land of Boreas) I distrust the runes. I have seen the runes fail those I love. We have gone hungry because my Uncle trusted the runes, and we lost our third Brother because the runes deceived us. I cannot trust them as I strive to be trusted.

But I am also a fool. I am out here, essentially naked with just a sealskin and stave. Good workings, made for me with love by my trusted ones — but they are not enough. I forget the runes that make my stave a maelnra. I forget the most powerful tool I have.

“Remember,” my mother said, “the runes work not on belief, but on possibility. Do not convince yourself of something unknown to you. And do not forget to acknowledge the possible.”

She said this to me just before I became a man in body. (For I have not yet become a man in spirit.) It was an unusual thing for her to say; though she applies runework daily, she rarely speaks of it. Instead, her work speaks for her, in the way that it keeps her family warm and protected. But that day she expressed that wisdom which I will never forget. Or at least, there will always be a time when I recall it. That time will not always be the fortunate one.

So with the feeling of the rune lines under my freezing palm, I continue walking forward, and open my mind to the possibilities. I search the horizon, I look at the snow at my feet. And I wait.

[Seven of Diamonds]

Huddled in the snow is the frozen form of another traveller. You hurry to their side but this person is long, long gone; another walker with winter, perhaps, but less successful? And then as the frigid form turns its face to you and its eyes flood with a chill blue light you realise that this is how it hunts…

And for my watching, the runes do not reward me. Over the next drift is a huddled body in a tattered coat, not like mine, but one much older. Out of instinct I run toward the Person. No doubt they are long dead. I see in my mind the possibility — is this from the runes? — of taking the coat. At least then it could serve the living. As I approach the body, I place a hand on its shoulder. Suddenly it falls over and my heart skips a beat. No harm done, but I silently chastise myself.

Then I see the eyes. The eyes of the body are blue. Not the blue of eyes, but the blue of the glaciers, vibrant and threatening. I scream, jump back, and run away. No good can come from this disfigured body, if it was even a Person to start with. I run away until I am over the next snowdrift, out of sight of the pale blue eyes. I cannot deny that no harm was done to me, but I do not feel more inclined to trust the runes.

The runes under my palm. Except they’re not. I realize in this moment, in what must be my lowest point, that I have left my maelnra where the body lies. How could I have forgotten my only remaining tool? If I ever see my family again, it will not be due to my worth. I must go back.

[Ten of Diamonds]

Upright in a pillar of ice you find a sword, a weapon of war, designed for killing. Tentatively you touch its hilt, untrained in weapons, when a voice sounds inside your mind. “Pick me up! Wield me! Kill with me!” and you try to thrust the chill thing away as it batters into your thoughts, seeking to make you its unthinking warlike slave. Fight it off to continue!

I make my way to the top of the snowdrift and stop. I see a body. But it is not the body I saw before. I see a weapon. But it is not my maelnra.

What I see is the ice bear. Her coat is my sealskin. That which was crafted by my trusted, I have left in tatters. And into her body is plunged the maelnra, my maelnra, but it has turned to solid glistening ice from my betrayal.

This is not my lowest point. That has already happened, when I forgot the promise I made, less than one day ago. As the sun now sets behind me, sealing my fate, the words echo in my mind. “I shall harm none, neither plant nor tree, bird nor animal.” My first action was to harm the first living thing I saw. On that first encounter, I had forgotten my promise, and I had forgotten that there is always another possibility. I had forgotten the runes.

The winter now knows my worth, and my tears freeze to my face. I fall to my knees, and my wet face binds with the snow, the snow I have tainted with blood. This day I became one with the land.

FIN

Postmortem

During this game, I got quite a bad deck shuffle and pulled only challenge cards. This makes the story kind of brutal, but still pretty coherent. I would almost never write a tragic story like this, so being forced to do so was a good exercise for me.

On my first prompt, I legitimately forgot about the no-harm promise when I chose to attack the ice bear. The fact that this incepted an original sin that could explain my ultimate demise felt so lucky.

On the last card, I had lost the game according to its rules, so I had to end the story there. Instead of introducing all the new details from the prompt into this story that I knew was about to end, I mapped them onto what had already happened in the story.

Overall this was super fun. I won’t likely play this exact game again, but am eyeing several more whose setting aesthetics are more intrinsically interesting to me.

See Act I for an explanation of journaling RPGs.

I wanted to play a journaling RPG but didn’t have a deck of cards with me. Should I ask Claude for help?

It had certainly already occurred to me that I could get an LLM to just make up a cool custom-themed journaling RPG for me. But I didn’t really want to do that. I wanted to have an experience that was created for me by another human. Now though, it was occurring to me that I could have Claude write a simple program that simulated tracking the state of the cards as they would be arranged and manipulated on the table. Then I would still be playing the game that was created for me by another human, just aided by the tool that is the LLM.

It further occurred to me that I could wrap in another one of my current interests, which is Lean, the programming language. Lean was designed for formal verification and is used mostly, at least as of the time of this writing, for proving theorems in mathematics. But it is a fully-fledged programming language, and it can do anything any other programming language can do. In theory you could build a phone game or the next social media platform in Lean.

I am currently extremely enthusiastic about learning Lean, except that I haven’t really done that much of it yet. The reader might see parallels between this and my relationship history with journaling RPGs. But I thought if I can have Claude write this game simulator for me in Lean, then I can use that tiny, self-contained codebase as an object of study for better learning Lean. And also, for finally playing a journaling RPG.

After a few backs-and-forths with Claude, he produced a minimal spec. I then spent several hours reading through and trying to understand each line.

And this worked! I got a bunch more experience reading and understanding Lean syntax for a project where I knew exactly what it should do and where I was motivated to make sure it worked correctly. I learned about lots of little quirks of Lean, like the fact that subtracting natural numbers truncates at zero, or that the set of numbers from 0 to 5 is its own type, Fin 6. (The 6 isn’t special; every such finite set is its own type.)

But more than that I got a little bit more of an understanding of what formal verification looks like. I had asked Claude not just to implement the game but first to write out a behavioral spec for the game’s rules. This is a necessary stage of formal verification and there are parts of it that can feel counterintuitive on first exposure. The specs can sometimes feel like a copy of the implementation, especially with the simple examples one must pass through while learning.

A common class of thing one proves in formal verification is called an invariant, which is some property that holds on every step. For Borealis, the game I chose from the first act, an invariant would be that no card appears in the deck twice, or that the pawn is always on a face-up card. If you prove these properties for the initial deal, and then prove that every legal game action preserves these properties, then by induction you’ve proved that they will always hold true during the session.

After I read through the whole spec and was satisfied that I understood everything, I asked Claude to actually implement the game. This request was, as often seems to happen, over-eagerly responded to, and Claude pumped out another thousand lines of Lean code. Having worked my brain pretty hard to read the first several hundred lines and it being close to midnight, I just let out a big sigh, closed my computer, and went to bed.

The next morning I got up and asked Claude to redo the implementation work, without the features I didn’t ask for, and keeping the Git commit history more fine-grained.

After that came the play testing. I was pretty sure Claude got all the game behavior right on the first try so I wasn’t really testing the Lean implementation. Instead I was back in the mindset of being excited to finally try a journaling RPG and see how I liked it. The structured procrastination had done its job beautifully, and it was time to get down to the real work: playing.

It went so well that my journaling of the session came out as a basically fully coherent story. This has… never happened to me before? To be clear it’s not a story that I love. It does not, for example, treat themes of rationality, cultural heritage, or anything else that I would deliberately write a story about. But I like it, and the fact that it came out so easily on the first try was a pretty strong effect size.

In fact, I liked it enough that my play session journal is the third post of this series.

I don’t remember where I first heard about journaling RPGs but the concept was immediately appealing to me. Nonetheless, it took me over a year before I actually played one. This is my story. (It’s mostly procrastinating.)

RPGs (Role Playing Games, like Dungeons & Dragons) are also appealing to me, but they are a very intensive time commitment. And not just you, but for a whole group of friends. First you have to find a group of people willing to commit who will work well together, and then you have to schedule a recurring event for many weeks. You usually need full attendance for the game to move forward.

I personally am also not particularly attracted to a bunch of common features in RPGs, such as the grungy dungeon aesthetic, or frequent combat. I have played one-shots (or three-shots) with friends before and always enjoyed it, but it’s not something I would go out of my way to make happen.

Journaling is also very appealing to me and yet somehow I’ve never been able to do it. Fiction writing, too is very appealing, and despite the fact that I can generate detailed plot outlines and sophisticated world-building, I have never managed to get down more than a handful of very short stories.

What is a journaling RPG?

Journaling RPGs are a subtype of solo RPGs. So let’s back up a step and define those. A solo RPG is any game very similar to an RPG, but which is designed to be played by one person alone. When RPG players first hear this, it often sounds oxymoronic or pointless. But it turns out they work!

Solo RPGs seem to have had an explosion in popularity over the last 10 years or so, especially in online spaces. Ironically, though (group) RPGs are ostensibly more social by virtue of being a group game, solo RPGs manage to be very social via the hobby community spaces dedicated to solo RPGs, like Discord or Reddit.

Now for the journaling part; because all RPGs require a degree of creativity and informal gameplay (and not just following a rigid set of rules as in many games) they naturally have some overlap with creative writing. A journaling RPG is just a solo RPG in which writing down the fictional content or ideas produced during the game is a large part of the activity and purpose. They can span the full spectrum from what is little more than a collection of writing prompts to what is essentially a solo RPG where you write down what happened.

Window shopping

Many solo RPGs are free, have easy-to-understand rules, and can be played through in just a couple hours. So naturally, I proceeded to research them for several hours.

I googled things like “best journaling RPGs” and “which journaling RPG to start with”, and opened up three dozen tabs. I watched videos with advice, reviews and opinions. I fawned over the beautiful cover art. I hovered my cursor over the “buy” button on some gorgeous physical book editions. I learned about the different subtypes, the award-winning games that kicked off new rule sets, and the games everyone disagrees about. I determined the optimal list of games to start with, given my personal preferences and prior experience with RPGs.

Finally, at long last, I chose Borealis, a game with minimal rule complexity, and which promised a playtime of one to three hours. I bought the PDF.

And then I felt satisfied.

Second wind

Over a year later, I’m traveling away from home for a while. Apropos of nothing a friend mentions they’re playing a journaling game that reminds them of me. I remembered that journaling RPG that I’d downloaded and decided to try it.

The only problem was I couldn’t remember what it was called or what folder I had put it in. I searched in my file manager. I searched in Dropbox. I searched my Gmail. I asked Claude if he had any idea what game I was talking about. Alas he did not.

Eventually I gave up and do a second round of window shopping.

Amusingly it had been long enough that I had forgotten much of what I learned the first time, and this round of window shopping was just as fun. I even went to a brick-and-mortar game store (they only had one). Eventually I found two journaling RPGs that looked really pretty and had themes that appealed to me: Artefact and Tales from the Gods. But I didn’t start either one. They seemed like they would take a while or something. Instead I bought a hard copy of Tales from the Gods, and watched some more review videos.

Eventually, I realized I could search my email for the name of the stores that people use to sell their solo RPGs. Then I was able to find and re-download a copy of Borealis.

Freed from my indecision, I eagerly opened the PDF and began reading the rules. After reading the pretty introductory flavor text for the story, I got to the “Materials” section, which told me that I needed a deck of cards. Given that I was traveling, I did not have a deck of cards nor did I have particularly easy access to one. I kept reading through the setup and play rules, hoping that I could maybe just use paper or use some kind of online card deck simulator. But it quickly became clear that the cards were being used in a very physical way that would not be practical to simulate.

Or would it? For we now live in the great age of LLMs, and they are supremely good at coding.

Act II: Structured Procrastination

From a civilization I’ve never heard of

I was immediately drawn to the stele, in a way that I always am but most people aren’t. It’s a flat rectangular slab, totally blank except for some random text on it you can’t read. Why would that be attention drawing, when the rest of the room is filled with a variety of colors, 3D shapes, depictions of animals and human expression? This particular slab is not even decorated. Not the slightest bit. The only thing that saves it from being the monolith from 2001: Space Odyssey is a very slight taper.

But exactly what excites me about it is the nature of writing itself, the intense abstraction it involves, and the motivations people had for inventing and learning such a craft.

When I approach to read the object label, the one part I can understand, it says “Marble stele with a Lydian inscription”. If I’ve ever seen “Lydian” before, I don’t recall it. Sometimes a category will have few enough things in it that one could reasonably learn what they all are, like countries in the world or taxonomic phyla (not that anyone would…). Sometimes a category has unreasonably many, like the number of cities in the world or taxonomic genera. And sometimes it will have just enough that you always feel tantalizingly close to knowing them all but never quite get it. Writing systems are in that third kind of category, for me.

While the Lydian script is understood to be an alphabet similar to Greek, the label goes on to tell me that the Lydian language itself has not been fully deciphered. So not only do I not know that this stele says, but in fact no living person on earth knows.

(It is in this moment that I wonder whether Large Language Models have been trained on this particular inscription, and the Lydian corpus as a whole, and whether, in the vast latent space of the model’s parameters, it has perhaps already arrived at a representation for the text that lies close to its correct semantic meaning in English. I could not myself investigate this question, but those working at frontier AI companies could. Thus it may be that some non-human on earth knows what this stele says.)

I stare at the inscription for a while. It is very cleanly rendered and preserved, such that if I wanted, I could easily identify the character set and transcribe it. I see a few instances of a character that looks like the Chinese character for king, 王. (Their similarity is of course entirely coincidental.) In this inscription it appears doubled, 王王, most of the time, but not always. I see another distinctive character that looks like if a tilde was a three-leaf clover instead of two. And I see another that is likely the ancestor of the letter A. I start searching for repeated sub-strings, to identify words repeated in the text. I find both a repeated word, and words which share a prefix. Maybe they’re different verb tenses or noun declensions. In a short inscription, repeated words are either extremely common like “the”, or they’re what the inscription is about, like a person’s name.

This is all very pointless of course, as academics will certainly have identified all such frequency patterns long ago. But I get the same joy out of it that one does from doodling a frog, even though humanity has mastered the art of depicting frogs. It’s also quite satisfying to know that, if I kept going, and tried with patterns that weren’t just sub-string frequencies, I would in theory converge on a full understanding of the content of the inscription — at least as far as remains objectively present in the corpus.

Almost all writing in the world is incredibly boring, repetitive, distasteful, or inane. This also goes for stelai, which are quite fond of telling you who owns what or how great the current king is. But I still find myself intimately in contact with a level of appreciation beyond what the authors of the inscriptions choose to write. Inventory tablets are brilliant in part because the sheep could never count themselves. And it’s better for the king to declare his greatness by word, thus dissuading potential pretenders, than to be forced to prove his greatness by blows.

This week I am reading the much-anticipated new novel by YouTuber, unpaid intern at Good.Store, and best-selling author, John Green.

Although John is one of my favorite people, he’s not actually one of my favorite authors. I adore The Anthropocene Reviewed, but I’ve felt only lukewarm about his young adult fiction. To be fair, I read them in my 30s. I don’t read his young adult novels to enjoy them, but instead as an act of love for a person who I deeply respect. But Hollywood, Ending is not a young adult novel.

I’m only going to talk about the first chapter here, which is 4 quick pages. If you want, you can listen to John read them to you, as is his pre-release tradition. I did so, but when I got the book I reread them anyway, and somehow noticed several more things.

I’m in a phase of my life where I’m annotating books by default. It’s not very natural for me to annotate — indeed, to write things down. (If I’ve already had a thought, why do I need to write it down? If it was true or useful I’ll probably remember it, or regenerate it next time I read this.) So usually my books end up with just a handful of annotations scattered across three hundred or so pages.

But with Hollywood, Ending (or H,E as the Nerdfighters are calling it) I seem to be doing something closer to Bible study. “If this sentence had a secret message for me, what would it be?” or “Didn’t so-and-so say something that contradicted that earlier?” or “Why did John choose to tell us this detail, in this place?”

Here are some things I noticed in the first chapter. The book is about some actors during the filming of a movie about Andy Warhol. So while the book isn’t about Warhol, he’s a major presence.

• The very first line gives the very first name in the book, Matthew Malone, which is the actor playing Warhol. I noticed that “Matthew Malone” sounds a lot like “Marylin Monroe”, the subject of one of Warhol’s most famous works.
• On the second line, we get the name of the movie; Andy Warhol Never Gets Old. Presumably this refers to the fact that Warhol has remained iconic. But (I see from reading Warhol’s wikipedia page) Warhol died at the age of 58. This is arguably before “old age”, so he arguably never got old.
• The introduction of a character on the second page sprinkles the paragraph with color. Andy Warhol’s work is known for being very colorful.
• Two pages in, and I notice that there have been a lot of brand names: Uber, Altoids, Moleskine, AirPods. Warhol’s work is known for bringing branding and consumerism into the realm of art, and causing us to question their presence in our lives. Is Green doing the same?

This is a pretty fun way to read a book. I crank up the pattern-matching, puzzle-solving part of my brain.

I’ll just give you one more; the first-person narrator, Juniper, is not unambiguously gendered. There are plenty of indicators of Juniper’s gender, but no one says a pronoun, nor “girl”, “boy”, etc. But we also don’t get any indication that this book is about transness, or even gender. John tends to do some kind of easter egg thing in each of his books, so I can’t help but wonder if the easter egg for H,E is that Juniper is never gendered.

I’m thrilled to read this book, and I hope you will too. It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten to participate in a book release as a cultural event.

On the way to the Met, you get a good slice of NYC atmosphere.

Let’s say you take the 4, 5 or 6 train to the 86th street station. Once you find your way up to street level, you’ll be greeted by some sidewalk sheds, and then you’ll have to figure out which way is west. If you can see the super skinny-tall 432 Park Avenue, that’s south. Walk one block west, and you’ll cross Park Avenue itself. It’s a two-way street, and it has a big median down the middle that’s filled with trees. I’ve always loved the way this double-wide canyon opens up to show more of the city in one view.

You’ll know when to turn left, because suddenly in front of you will be all green, with blue sky above. As you walk down 5th Avenue, you have a charcuterie board of Manhattan architecture on your left, and the vast greenery of Central Park on your right. If it struck your fancy, you could step into that park, head down one of the many footpaths, and spend a lovely evening lost among the trees and rocks and fields nestled inside one of the highest population density areas in the world.

But we’re here on a mission, so you keep straight. The sidewalk below your feet is oddly something resembling cobblestone. It’s pretty, and not quite made for walking, and it does a good job indicating that you’re not on just any sidewalk.

As you get closer, the food trucks get louder and more numerous. You’ll find the New York classics like hot dogs and gyros, and plenty of variety besides. You’ll also encounter the rows of people selling their own art. It’s never been clear to me how many of these stalls are genuine hand-made crafts made with love, and how many are tourist traps designed to feel like hand-made art. But I have a fondness for them nonetheless. Long ago, when I lived in New York, I considered spinning up a little art stall myself. I had some clever ideas for making art from wires, combining an aesthetic of industrialization with a feeling of optimism. But I’m not a doer, so I never did.

When you’re almost there, you’ll see a little playground. And wouldn’t you know, it’s a Met-themed playground, complete with pyramid and obelisk. Whenever I see it I think, “I should go check out that playground” before I realize that solo adults aren’t really supposed to do that.

Then you cross the next street. It’s kind of two streets, actually. The first one is just a street into Central Park. But the second one is 30 feet of road that then dives, understatedly, half a floor under ground level, into a dark little cave that is clearly not meant for you. I like to imagine that all the wonders of the museum have passed through this threshold, tucked away in an average-looking van or truck. In reality there are probably several loading areas into the museum. This is probably one of them, but I’ve never investigated; it feels like you’re not supposed to look directly at it. Just mind your business, and cross the street. Nothing to see here, just city stuff.

And now you’re reached the eastern-most cornerstone of the museum. Just on the other side of that limestone are some truly ancient treasures — the Egyptian wing. To get in there, you’ll have to walk a ways further, to the entrance at the top of the steps. But you wanted to do that anyway; they’re a worthy sight of their own.