Fourth Wall Break #2: Formatting in the Technical Sense, Formatting in the Creative, and AI Content

Pictured: a photo I took of a pumpkin by a fountain where the water collected in the stop and there was this strange "blue eye" effect with lots of little bugs climbing around inside.

It has been a moment since I did my last "fourth wall break" so I figured it would a good time to do another. Three topics generally have been bouncing around in my head for a minute and I kind of wanted to get them out there for myself to have a kind of marker so let's do it. 

Formatting in the Technical Sense

For a while the colors on this blog were rough on the eyes in some places. The text was a dark gray, links were a bright green, and the background was white + light gray. It meant some text was pretty hard to focus on and I had tried playing with changing colors and font sizes for specific posts but it was not really working out so I went back and did some universal changes to make the fonts a little bit bigger, a bit darker, and generally a more readable format and color palette. I will need to work on it some to get it right. 

Secondly, I am playing around with the notion of internal markings to better delineate mechanical from narrative bits (see the recent The Bleak + The Pearl post to see some attempts). I am not 100% satisfied with that AND with at least some feed-readers, most screen-readers and blogger set-ups it is all for nothing because those will just replace the fonts with the default (or it will not make it easier for folks using assistance). 

I will look into what blogger has for this and make the best I can of it. 

Formatting in the Creative Sense

This is all slightly a moot point because I think over the next few posts I will be shifting the gears more and more back towards the original format (some series like The Alabama Weird will be an exception since that is creative writing with a solo rpg framework so that I work on the story in the context of the rolls and the prompts and such). This will reduce some of the back and forth of mechanical with narrative bits as the narrative bits are more part of an obvious recap while the mechanical bits are the primary focus. 

The best example I have of what I mean is a recent The Bloody Hands post. The actual play is in the "Raw Mechanical Notes" portion while the front end is more about a write-up, adding in some more creative elements, and generally recapping. The thing is, I think I will actually tone down that write up even more. 

Why? In short, because I adore solo roleplaying but blogs like this make it more performative to the point that at its peak I was spending around three times writing stuff for this blog than I was actually playing and as I got busy with the start of the academic year the blog partially stopped because I had time to play, but not write-up stuff, and that's silly. 

There is a paradox of solo roleplay that I have talked about before: RPGs are such a social space for a lot of us that when we do solo stuff we almost immediately go into a mind-space of figuring out how to share it. This is exacerbated by the fact that a lot of us find out about solo play through someone else sharing it so that aspect of playing becomes inherent. I have even seen a post on the solo roleplaying subreddit saying they would like it if people sharing cut the game out entirely and just tell a fully fictionalized story. That got me thinking. Not that turning all solo roleplay let's plays into narrative fiction writing contests is a good idea, but kind of my place in the broad share-a-solo-sphere. 

A lot of people work on making the story primary with glimpses into the mechanics to explain their actions, especially in blogs (possibly hot take, but it seems easier to blend the mechanics and the story together in a video format where the visuals of the dice can help to synchronize the audience's time). However, what I enjoy most is ad hoc rulings, coming up with ways to map out my story, figuring out ways to expand up on the tables and the oracles. Sometimes I have a lot of energy and try to make it detailed fiction and sometimes I am low energy and just want to goof off and play a few encounters or roll some oracles to see how something goes. This blog sort of stole this latter mode from me. As much as I love having an audience, even if it is mostly imaginary or in-potential, to keep me honest and to challenge some of my assumptions and to make me think about some of my decisions the real audience for my games would benefit most from seeing how I actually play the games. 

I am going to work on taking that back and I am going to invert the balance of what feels like the usual/"normal" solo-LP. A lot folks share a lot about their narrative elements. I kind of want to be blog where I share a lot about my mechanical decisions. Not for every game - the Alabama Weird stuff is different, sure, and I like my SoloDark campaign's blend of GM-mode plus Player-mode - but for the majority of content. 

Solo roleplaying is about our personal space. This blog will be less about me forcing a shared space and more about an actual glimpse into my own style. Warts and all.

Reducing/Removing AI Content

I do not use a lot of Generative AI for the blog. None for the writing except I think I've used it generate a table or two when it comes to needing some real world names and did not have my standard oracle books around. Some of the art for sure, though. I mean, the banner is initially AI that I kind of digitally painted over to make it even more surreal. I've used it for very specific elements because sometimes it is hard to illustrate those elements otherwise. 

The first post I used it on was the first Eustace Delmont outing because I needed a quick image for a back of an electronics store. It was not a great picture but it helped to kind of establish the black and white "court drawing" aesthetic. Overall, though, every use in that story took away from the actual mental image I had. I slightly liked the "added oracle" of it but it also frustrated me. I next used it on a post trying to show the Monolith of the Cyclops and again it worked but also was wrong and a lot of the times just had a very same-y vibe to it (a reason why some of the modern epic fantasy games do not sit with me, I do not like how a lot of fantasy art defaults to this kind of TITANIC BUT CLEAN SPACE vibe. I only used it in a handful of posts but so many had this kind of over-filled, mass-produced vibe that did not really fit the campaign. Probably the only use of it that has actually improved a post for me was the one that showed Jonias Grunkheart's very symbolic painting of the Lighthouse. It felt like a piece of artwork I would not create myself. A non-Doug artifact. The rest have generally been less fun to work with and find and create than just using stock art, Creative Commons, and my own drawings. The only other exception is a not-yet-published piece where I had ChatGPT create a fictional book series. That will likely stay as the final piece of AI art on the blog whenever I get around to finishing that post. 

I am not automatically anti-generative-AI and I feel like the tools have a lot of potential (but also a lot of work to do things correctly) but I am cautious about its overuse and impact on the creative work. Besides that, I would generally prefer bad artwork I create myself to work. There's something kind of cathartic about using photos and art pieces not directly related, mostly through mood, such as the Gareth Hendrix series. 

This is not my personal statement against generative AI. That's a much bigger topic than a blog as small as mine is...but this is me saying that I tried it and I don't think it's more for me. Rather than spend 5 minutes getting a prompt to be close enough I'd rather spend 30 minutes crafting something up even if it sucks. The former feels like treating this blog as a worksite. The latter helps the blog to feel like a space where I give myself the grace to create. 

And that difference is deeply important.