Blog

This is my bi-weekly “newsletter” delivered straight to your inbox with at least one guaranteed typo I’ll catch after hitting send! If email collectors’ items aren’t your thing, don’t hesitate to switch to the RSS feed. There are only five links (the others are easter eggs for hardcore tea sippers) and I promise they’re usually more interesting than just being excuses for my own ranting!

NOTE: I always forget how rough Winter is until I’m in the middle of another one, but this year seemed colder and rougher than usual. Or maybe I’m just getting old? Either way, I’m glad Spring is finally on the horizon, and I’ll be able to get outside more often, because the hermit and treadmill life has its limits  — even if it means more time for gaming (and reading, too, I guess).

_ONE

The Myth of Objective Data | Melanie Feinberg

The students think that data is a matter of describing things as they are, and that there is no art to it and certainly no fashion. They very much want to let things speak for themselves when they approach a project like designing a schema to describe a set of things. What my students paradoxically fail to realize, in their zeal to be responsible, is that describing things by certain characteristics rather than others merely because those characteristics are countable is a profoundly subjective decision.

Market research is one of my favorite activities, and I’ve learned a lot about constructing surveys over the years to identify and account for various biases that can skew the data. You can’t eliminate bias completely, but knowing that the questions you ask, how you frame them, and who you’re asking all influence the data you’ll collect — which will also influence the analysis and eventual findings you report to internal and external stakeholders — is critical to ensuring you’re conducting useful research. Assuming that’s actually your goal.

Some people use this knowledge to craft survey tools that are designed to capture data that “reveals” their preferred findings, while others ignorantly amplify those findings because they don’t understand how to evaluate and question methodology. (*cough* BookTok *cough*) Feinberg does a great job of debunking the myth of objective data with clear examples, and I wish I could force every journalist to read it.

The only thing I like more than conducting my own research is identifying the flaws in other research initiatives, but I wish there were more opportunities for the former than the latter.

__TWO

ROI vs. VOI: Smart Marketers Look Beyond the Numbers | Amanda Natividad

A successful marketing strategy doesn’t just drive revenue—it builds a brand, fosters trust, and creates long-term customer relationships. If you ignore VOI, you risk undervaluing initiatives that contribute to sustainable growth. You miss out on the opportunities that strengthen trust and credibility with your audience.

“Value on Investment” (VOI) isn’t a concrete metric that’s going to impress non-marketing executives who only understand spreadsheets, but it’s an invaluable concept that every experienced marketer should instinctively understand. It also aligns with one of my favorite Cluetrain quotes: “Some of these conversations ended in a sale, but don’t let that fool you. The sale was merely the exclamation mark at the end of the sentence.”

If you only live in spreadsheets and focus on efforts that can be directly measured for non-marketers, your marketing efforts might be effective — but their potential upside is going to be limited. You can communicate the underlying value of harder-to-measure initiatives if you truly believe in them, but if you’re just following someone else’s “playbook,” chances are your marketing isn’t very effective anyway, nor is it adding much as value as your KPIs claim.

I always play the long game, balancing the easily measurable with more intangible value metrics (not KPIs, but also not just VIBES), constantly monitoring both to ensure they’re complementing each other as much as possible, and not letting my own biases against certain channels color my analysis. (*cough* BookTok *cough*) Worst case scenario, your boss doesn’t believe in VOI at all and you’re stuck in a KPI-focused role that doesn’t interest you, pretty much guaranteeing your marketing won’t be effective and your days (and probably the company’s) are numbered.

___THREE

How to disappear completely | s.e. smith

The process of picking and choosing what to include must have been agonizing and fraught, limited not just by storage considerations, but politics, pressure, and cultural hegemony. The result is a highly fragmented, erratic, selective view of what it means to be human, more a testimony of our limitations than of our potential, a reminder that archival work is not neutral, and a powerful case for diversifying the way we preserve information.

Another thoughtful take on the fragility of our digital infrastructure, an evergreen topic that’s become particularly timely in 2025. I’ve been slowly updating dead links on my own site via the Wayback Machine, and it’s always disheartening to discover how much good writing has been lost in the past two decades because it was on a site that didn’t get fully archived, or in the case of so many personal blogs, not archived at all.

It’s a reminder that history is written by the victors, and a warning that it’s getting even easier for them to REwrite history on a whim.

Meanwhile, my old LiveJournal lives on, sending me an “achievement” every October to celebrate another anniversary. It’s apparently a Russian platform now and my very old, definitely insecure original password doesn’t work, but I’m afraid to reset it and engage with the platform at all because we live in the dumbest timeline.

____FOUR

‘I would potentially sacrifice my life to strangle you’: A Sentiment Against AI Art | Ben Passmore

Their necks are all but unreachable, so we end up running through their various rhetorical mazes in order to appeal to their sympathy, decency or sense of humanity. But these are not decent people. They are looming voracious leviathans that gobble up anything remotely beautiful and shit out its remnants on our heads. And the shit isn’t even free, there’s a tier subscription for it and definitely some fucking Wayfair ads.

I’m tired of talking about AI, and hopefully you’re tired of hearing about it, too — but I’m always interested in hearing actual artists’ informed opinions about how some of these tools impact them. Passmore’s take on a conversation between Sam Altman and someone named Android Jones at Burning Man is not something I’d have expected to be a good read, and yet here I am sharing it with you.

One thing I’m really sick of hearing is the claim that these tools “democratize” the creation of art. Art is already democratized; anyone can pick up a pencil or pen and draw or write anything that comes to mind, especially if they can afford access to a computer. They can even freely post their creations to one of dozens of websites that will let them share that work with other people, bypassing the “gatekeepers” who might deem their work unworthy and deny them the audience they crave.

AI does NOT “democratize” the creation of art; it simply let’s lazy dilettantes pretend they have artistic ability by “synthesizing” and remixing the stolen work of actual artistic people. They’re not old school DJs intentionally and meticulously creating brand new music that stands on its own merits (and giving required credit for any samples used), they’re more like some random Ensign using a replicator to order a meal and pretending they’re a Chef. FOH.

_____FIVE

Diegesis, Mimesis, and You | Aaron Marks

Roleplaying games provide a singular experience combining mechanics of play with elements of narrative. It is the interaction of play and narrative that provides the unique experience; wanting one or the other generally means you’re best served by a different sort of game or different sort of media.

I’ve recently been analyzing what kinds of games I like the most and how that’s changed over the years, and my recent deep dives into the Shadowrun and Warhammer 40k settings have me wondering how different my interests would be today if I’d discovered either of them when I was younger, instead of D&D.

I’ve always enjoyed reading about the settings and creating characters more than role-playing in/with them, and the handful of times I’ve actually played any TTRPGs (mostly D&D), I was always more into the tactical aspects of the game than role-playing the narrative itself. I like Bards, not because I want to role-play a charismatic character who can freestyle poems, but because I like the interesting combination of stealth and magic in combat.

When it comes to video games, I love RPGs with strong stories and consequential decisions that personalize the experience (to varying if not always satisfying degrees), but similar to tactical and turn-based combat mechanics, I’m making interesting choices within a clearly defined framework, not actually pretending I’m a Voidborn Noble Officer and improving narrative encounters on the fly.

Marks’ insightful breakdown of a few new-to-me terms combined with Uncle Atom’s Wargaming Campaigns vs. “ROLEPLAYING” video commentary made me realize that I’m actually a wargamer rather than a role-player when it comes to the tabletop, and that’s clearly reflected in video games, where I’ve always preferred tactical turn-based and action RPGs over open world narratives. I’m still not ready to paint miniatures, but I’m definitely inching closer to experimenting with playing a miniature wargame…

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