Sakura in Saitama, Spring 2026

Links

How Markdown Took Over the World

An essay about how the text formatting language became so ubiquitous but also about how tech is developed and the cultural attitudes that fuel that process. There is a particular part that I want to highlight:

…but at the time this was a terrifying glimpse at how much power a couple of young product managers in a conference room in California would have over the media consumption of the entire world every time they made a seemingly-insignificant decision.

It is concerning that digital space, a whole place where a great amount of human civilisation takes place, is shaped so greatly by individuals and private companies that have little to no accountability. It works out in the case of things like Markdown, which is public, well intentioned and adopted by its merit of being useful, but there are many examples where implementations of technologies become dominant through some kind of network effect or monopolisation, subjecting us to the whims of those who control the technology. Like how architects are held to the societal expectation that they design structures within the best of their abilities to not harm us, I hope that we move towards a world where digital spaces are designed with the same kinds of expectations in mind.

HATSUBOSHI GAKUEN – Unknown Unbound

Gakuen Idolmaster is the latest entry in the Idolmaster series and has been steadily growing in traction since its launch back in 2024. Something that sets it aside from other 2.5d media works like it is that they consistently have different influential producers write music for the characters who bring their own unique style to the series and gives a depth to the music. The producers are also matched up very well with the characters. This song is by one of my favourite vocaloid producers, Iyowa, and features one of my favourite characters in gakumas, Hiro (in a duet with China). Iyowa did the lyrics, instrumentation, arrangement but also as they usually do for their own songs, drew and animated the music video.

The critical window of shadow libraries

Anna’s Archive was in the news recently for being sued for 13 trillion dollars by music companies in response for their scraping of Spotify. I find data preservation both important and interesting in its mechanics and politics and this post gave me a lot to think about the dynamic between text which has a relatively fixed file size and the ever decreasing costs of data storage. At the same time I am reminded that our knowledge does not exist solely in the text but in how the text is read as well. The living people who can and do interact with the knowledge, making it part of themselves is as (if not more) important than the text, and the cultivation of cultural attitudes that value human understanding is even more tricky than saving the books.

The Post-American Internet

This one is looooong. But it is a great summary about the state of the centralisation of the internet, what can be done about it and what progress is being made right now. A takeaway I had from this is the confirmation of an old adage that progress often accelerates in the war’s wake.

Isekai: is a genre of fantasy now

Isekai (Japanese, 異世界, translation: other world) as a genre in otaku culture takes a lot from RPGs in that a majority of isekai works use logic derived from RPGs — levels, skills, ability scores — as the literal logic of the usually fantasy worlds that the main character is transported into. In recent years, I have also started to see some non-isekai fantasy light novels being written with this kind of logic as well. Ideas originating from fantasy shaping a new genre coming back to influence fantasy.

There are a number of ttrpgs released on itch that refer to themselves as works of isekai, such as This World Summons Too Many Heroes!!, Isekai Goes Wrong and Shark Girls Run the Food Stall?!. Particularly, Sharkgirls was an interesting one for calling itself “cozy isekai – that isn’t an isekai” which indicates to me that the word “isekai” is being used less as an indicator of that particular genre of fiction but rather a flavour of fantasy that the author wants to evoke. While not explicitly isekai inspired, games like Fabula Ultima and Break!! are by their nature of taking great influence from Japanese RPGs, work in adjacent/slightly overlapping spaces. As the influence of Japanese media in English speaking cultures continues to grow, I expect for more of these particular influences to continue expanding as well.

With Japanese TRPG design being so insular and little of its influence flowing into the English-language side of things, I find it particularly interesting when ideas from Japanese media do find they way into EN TTRPG design…

The meta: embedding itself into the mechanics in League of Legends

I am going to assume you, dear reader, have a basic understanding of League of Legends so as to spare you my surely inadequate text-only explanation.

When League was first released, the roles (i.e. which lane you would go to and what priority to gold generating sources you would have) that each player would play as were not codified by the community or the designers of the game — there could be two ADCs, no jungle, any kind of combination that the players could think of. As time passed however, the community found what became accepted as the optimal combination of champion types and roles to play in a match. The developers began to design around these five roles — a durable top laner, a jungler, a mid lane carry, ADC and then support in bottom lane. However, this remained unacknowledged within the explicit rules of the game for a long time. Players had to use the text chat function to call dibs on which role they wanted to play and disputes over roles would occur frequently.

Beginning with the introduction of the jungle items and gradually across years of incremental updates, League would begin to inscribe the five roles into the fabric of the game. An update to the matchmaking system allowing for players to pick from two of the now explicit five roles and be put into a team of five players who are all preassigned one of their two chosen roles was significant for ensuring that League would be played in this format. However, other than the jungle/support items there was still no in-game mechanics that referred to these roles until 2025 in which Lane Swap Detection was implemented. LSD was an extremely inelegant way of preventing teammates from swapping lanes during the early game when it could be strategically advantageous. It was clear that Riot wanted League to be defined by the 5 role design and for the early game to characterised by players of the same roles facing off against each other.

As someone who has been playing League on and off since the open beta days, I had always disliked the five role meta as it was enforced by the player base because it always felt like there was the possibility that it is not the optimal choice but due to the limitations of solo queue, it was the safe default to simply adopt the meta.

Then in 2026, Riot introduced Role Quests, which gave each player a set of goals and mechanical rewards for completing those goals that was based on the role they were assigned during matchmaking. This became the default way of playing the game across unranked, ranked and professional play, thus finally defining the roles through a quest that could only be completed by performing actions that matched with their role and gave unique rewards tailored to what Riot has defined as the niche that each role occupies on the team.

Role Quests, alongside the rest of the changes made in the 2026 patch of the game, made the game feel much more cohesive between the explicit design and the socially codified ‘correct’ ways of playing the game. Not only did it solve the problem with roles being stuck in-between socially mediated and mechanically existent within the game, but it also solved problems with lane swapping and further defines the flow of each match as due to the high impact the role quests have, players are now greatly incentivised into staying in their lane during the early game in order to complete their role quests as quickly as possible. And I think most significantly, the role quests are a realization of the roles within the game in a way that gives them real mechanical weight (as opposed to primarily social weight in how the game is ‘meant to be played’) and allows for players to experiment and express their skill in using the system in new and unexpected ways.

I ran: Mausritter and “Tower of Soot” from “The Estate”

Mausritter is a game that I have had my eyes on for quite a long time as one of the games in the ‘pretend to be a mouse’ genre of RPGs. I will abbreviate a full description of the game but it is important to note that it is in the OSR/NSR range of things and is built in large part on rules from Into the Odd. What I find fun about OSR style games is finding the creative approaches to the problems that a module will pose and how that mental gymnastics results in interesting interactions and character moments. I think the setting of being in a fairytale-esque animal world as a mouse has tremendous synergy with OSR style play in that your fragility just makes sense when say, your party of five mice are forced into fighting a lion. The game’s inventory system where each item is represented as a physical tile (or in my case a square of paper I cut from the PnP sheet) that the GM hands the player highlights items in a way that invites the player to use the items they have. Item logic when you are a mouse is also novel and amusing in a way that items like the ten foot pole are less, now that fantasy dungeoneering shenanigans are an established genre of actions onto their own.

While a perfectly serviceable module with a cute premise and fun ideas, “Tower of Soot” put me in a bit of conflict with the core system of the game. Mausritter is a d20 roll under your stat game when it comes to saves, and mice have from 2-12 in each of three stats, averaging around 6 or 7. This means that on average, a mouse has an around 30 ish percent chance of succeeding on any check. This works in a style of play where rolling is seen as a failure state and values clever narration. However, Tower of Soot is written in a way where, starting from the first point of interest that is unavoidable for progression, it will place mandatory DEX saves that each PC has to clear to move upwards in the tower, lest they fall into burning ashes below. This is problematic in a game that does not want you to roll unless you are in spectacular danger. There was always someone who failed the DEX save, which resulted sometimes in interesting interactions where the ones who did succeed scrambled to save or help the others up but more than not it forced awkward split parties and the players kind of just wanted to be able to move on.

Dev Log

Since the last newsletter, I have been working on an rpg that is in the genre of VRMMORPG anime like Sword Art Online or Shangri La Frontier — I wanted to make a system that would produce narratives that worked with the kind of logic and plot beats that are particular to that kind of story. I have been taking every single opportunity to call it the “VRMMORPG TTRPG” but realistically I will give it a title that is easier to say.

The core of the game is a tag-like system, where PCs are in part defined by the Powers that they have, which are divided into four different categories (Abilities, Skills, Artefacts and Allies). The loop of the game is centred around how these Powers are set up and then revealed during important moments, a way of expressing how the story beats in a VRMMORPG anime unfolds.

After playtesting just the core idea of the tags, it became apparent that the next step that I need to take is to write more of the setting and worldbuilding before coming back to how the mechanics can support and scaffold that as well. It being a work about the idea of VRMMORPG and digital beings written in the year 2026, I am very interested in engaging with the genre from its older touchstones and also seeing what can be said our current moment through them. The good thing is that I am very happy to be doing a ton of more setting based writing so that is part of what I will be working on now.

Acknowledgements and Pleads

And that’s a wrap on the second issue of this newsletter — now that we are in the multiples of this, I would say that we have something going on here. It is also being released about three months after the previous one which is not far from the ideal cadence of once every two months that I had set out for myself, so I am taking the opportunity to be a little proud of myself. I am sure not many people will read this but if you are, thank you. I would be over the moon if you subscribed to this newsletter by entering your email below so you can be notified when I have something else out. This newsletter will continue to evolve, so come back to see whatever’s new that I can think of putting in here.

It’s difficult times out there so wherever you are, I hope you stay safe. See you in the next one!