Weeknote 12-14/2025
Death in The White House, cataclysmic wrath, faux-Ghibli, getting things in our hands, and just not laughing.
“The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service.”
8 things worth sharing
Of course, we’re enjoying every minute of The White Lotus Season 3 - with Parker Posey filling the void left behind for me by the inimitable Jennifer Coolidge. For something much less intense, we’ve been having huge fun with The Residence, which seems to sit nicely in that same space as Poker Face or Only Murders in the Building. It’s fun, light, twisty, and really neatly put together. It would be great to see Detective Cordelia Cupp in a second season - but where? Death in Downing Street?
I’ve been, slowly, reading Emily Wilson’s masterful translation of Homer’s Iliad, and it’s an absolute knockout. I got a copy of her translation of The Odyssey a while back, and now that I have the pair, I’m looking forward to reading them back to back. I know The Odyssey pretty well, having studied it at A Level and then again at university, but although I read the Iliad a long time ago, I’ve never studied it, so it still feels really fresh and alive. There are some brilliant recordings of Professor Wilson reading parts of her translation for the International Poetry Forum, which are utterly captivating.
There’s been a lot of talk online about the latest image generation tools in ChatGPT and, in particular, people using them to mimic/copy/emulate the style of Hiyao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. There’s a lot to be said on this topic, but one particularly thoughtful, insightful, and philosophical exploration of the issues it throws up came from Erik Hoel’s Substack The Intrinsic Perspective and his article Welcome to the Semantic Apocalypse. I think we’ll be unpacking all of this for a while yet, but Erik’s article managed to pin down something that was particularly bugging me about this:
The semantic apocalypse heralded by AI is a kind of semantic satiation at a cultural level. For imitation, which is what these models ultimately do best, is a form of repetition. Repetition at a mass scale. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Repetition close enough in concept space. Ghibli. Ghibli. Doesn’t have to be a perfect copy to trigger the effect. Ghebli. Ghebli. Ghebli. Ghibli. Ghebli. Ghibli. And so art—all of it, I mean, the entire human artistic endeavor—becomes a thing satiated, stripped of meaning, pure syntax.
If Marshall McLuhan told us that “the medium is the message”, then it’s becoming to feel like there’s only medium, and no longer any message.
One way to fight the draining of meaning from art and culture precipitated by generative AI is to get back to making things in an analogue fashion - with hands, and pencils, and ink, and clay. Austin Kleon’s guide to block printing is a lovely example of just how simple it can be to return to craft and the power imbued in the things we make for one another. I always go back to Adam Savage’s definition of what it means, to him, to be a maker, “setting out to make something from nothing using your point of view.”
Still in the AI conversation - and for someone who is pretty sick of anything and everything being AI, I’m sorry to go back there! - I was really knocked sideways by this article in The Walrus by Troy Jollimore, a professor of ethics, poet, and author, about his experiences of AI in universities. It was a tough, tough read:
That moment, when you start to understand the power of clear thinking, is crucial. The trouble with generative AI is that it short-circuits that process entirely.
One begins to suspect that a great many students wanted this all along: to make it through college unaltered, unscathed. To be precisely the same person at graduation, and after, as they were on the first day they arrived on campus.
As if the whole experience had never really happened at all.
Couple this with Ted Gioia’s Substack article on the same issue of technology in education spaces, which features an incredibly depressing and very bleak account from a high school teacher about her students and the impact technology is having on them - both within and beyond the classroom:
First of all the kids have no ability to be bored whatsoever. They live on their phones. And they’re just fed a constant stream of dopamine from the minute their eyes wake up in the morning until they go to sleep at night.
Because they are in a constant state of dopamine withdrawal at school, they behave like addicts. They’re super emotional. The smallest things set them off.
When you are standing in front of them trying to teach, they’re vacant.
They have no ability to tune in.
They’re not there.
In what is, to me, a related issue I was completely fascinated by this post by Garret Merriam, professor of philosophy at Sacramento State University who, as part of his class on ethics, seeded a fake (and incorrect) copy of his final exam on a well known online “study” forum. Using some simple statistical analysis, he found out that something like 40 of his 96 students used the seeded exam to cheat on their final.
Their ethics final.That’s all maybe a little bleak - AI, the zombifying of the youth at the hands of tech-succubi, and widespread cheating amongst university students - so I think we need two things: careful thought that can bring us hope and silliness. For the first, the ever-brilliant Rutger Bregman talks to Trevor Noah. Bregman is someone who I love for two simple reasons - he went to Davos and told billionaires they were bad people and he fully stares into the harrowing face of today’s world and yet still holds a (qualified!) optimistic view of humanity.
For my hit of silliness this week, I’m turning to Last One Laughing on Amazon Prime. After all, it’s got Bob Mortimer - the man blessed with the funniest bones of any of God’s creations.
We’ve been quite hemmed in by cold or rainy weather the last couple of weeks. It’s made heading outdoors, even just to walk Teddy the Dog, a bit of a slog. Things seem to be taking a turn now, though, so we’re hopeful that full spring weather will resume in due course.
I’ve been plugging away at various work bits and pieces. Getting to do some nice, full design work on a particular project has been a lot of fun, and it’s always inspiring when you’re working with partners who share an exciting vision whilst also bringing new perspectives to the table. I’ve also been sketching out an online workshop that we’re hoping to run just before the summer that will focus on purposeful game design. In particular, I want to look at how you can use experiential games, narrative games, and RPGs/TTRPGs to help facilitate really transformative and impactful learning experiences. It’s a topic near and dear to my heart so I’m hoping we get the opportunity to run the session and have it as a precursor to a potential in-person workshop later in the year. That fuller, face-to-face workshop would give us the chance really take our time to explore the ways in which purposeful games can bring about learning experiences.
I’m also having a ton of fun using my 3D printer to get making things. Whether that’s printing things others have designed, tweaking designs to suit my own needs or tastes, designing and printing things for scratch or —and this is a source of deep satisfaction— printing things to then turn them into something more. In particular, I’ve been having a blast printing and then working on, painting, and weathering props and bits and pieces from films. Check out my key to Bag End from The Hobbit up above.
We’ve been looking ahead to the rest of the year and have been pencilling in some possible travel now that we’ve got some strength back from the early days of newborn care. I’m sure that travel is going to be a very different experience these days, but we’ve also heard that there’s something of a ‘window of opportunity’ to make the most of before the toddler years and things become a whole other level of tricky! We’ll certainly be in the UK in June, which will be such a wonderful chance to introduce everyone to our new addition. We’re also eyeing up a trip to the mountains, a visit to Berlin, and maybe even some time in Italy. Good thing we’ve got his passport ready to go!
- Mitch.