Posts Tagged "computing" from 2024

Don't mind me, just hanging out with the boys at Ultra Secret Homebrew Club.

A coincidence involving a book club led me to make the acquaintance of David McEnulty, one of the two people working on Convoke, an RPG support application which has just entered (very early) beta testing. McEnulty said he'd read my master's thesis and wanted to get my opinion of his app. We had a pleasant video call that lasted almost three hours. I've already privately given him feedback on design, functionality, and marketing aspects of the tool. Below, I explain what it is and assess how applicable it seems to be for the average DM.

What Convoke Is

Convoke is an RPG support application designed to let the DM and players carry out certain parts of gameplay in between a typical group's regularly-scheduled game sessions. DM-facing functionality includes:

This is what all technical tutorials should look like. Well-composed and generally free of grammatical errors, spends just the right amount of time explaining each new topic as it is introduced, comes with full code samples, and includes visual samples of what the code does. Also, lengthy enough to treat the material in depth, while still being sufficiently self-contained that I can follow along -- without having read part 1 and without more than a few months of Common Lisp under my belt from a couple years back (tho I've done a decent amount of Clojure and Emacs Lisp.)

Bravo, awkravchuk/Andrew :^)

My job search of half a year has finally come to an end. I've accepted an offer from Epic Systems to be a Server Systems Engineer! Roughly speaking, half of the job is being a sysadmin; the other half of the time, I'll be a sort of engineering consultant for sysadmins and DBAs at hospitals that use Epic's health-record software.

I'm excited about the job itself, and also excited about moving to Madison, Wisconsin. I've never been there, but it seems to be a bit like Portland, Oregon, where I lived for seven years during and after undergrad at Reed.

Hi, MatthewDailey. Couldn't find your email so I'm contacting you here.

I don't recall how I found you and your projects -- probably HackerNews -- but I was intrigued by your GPT DND. You aren't the first to do "AI as Dungeon Master", but you are the first I've seen to add voice to the equation, so kudos.

I thought you might be interested in my gm-trainer project, which comes at things from the other direction: using LLMs as pseudo-players, rather than the GM, to provide GMs with a sort of training sandbox. Still early days, and not as configurable as I'd like it to be for other people. But to my knowledge I'm the first to flip things around like that. (Which makes sense if we consider that most people working in the nascent "AI + RPG" space seem to want to replace the "scarce resource" that is GMs/DMs).

It's been a long time since I've written here. In 2022, I was fairly busy with my master's studies and attending Recurse Center. Then, from fall of 2022 all the way through to the end of 2023, the lion's share of my time went to writing my master's thesis. Because I'm still dealing the hand injuries I sustained in 2019 and 2020, I often had to limit my time spent at the computer to just what I needed for working on my thesis. Writing for recreation was a no-go zone.