Oh hey! It’s that time of year again, meaning the time of year that I remember that there are 100 of you who subscribed to this list that I haven’t written to in a while.
Here is the major Ben Brown related news: I made a short book! It is a science fiction novelette called LIBRARY. I apologize if you have already heard about this one million times.
Library is the story of a hacker who goes by the handle @nein. He is the type of hacker who knows how firmware works and how buffer overflows can be exploited. The story opens with him sneaking into an office building to steal a signing certificate by infiltrating a corporate network.
During the course of the story, he hangs out in a shipping container, hangs out with l33t hackers, and punches a corporate goon in the face. The story has resonated with a lot of people out there, and if you liked my past work, I FUCKING GUARANTEE you will like this.
Anyways, there are still copies of the book if you would like one! Or you can read the story online for free.
OH HEY! I remember when I set this email list up, I promised that I would post sometimes, and then not for a while, and then again after a long period of silence, and so I feel pretty confident that I am fulfilling my promise to you right now.
Hey! I hope you are still alive. I am.
I have a projects I would like to tell you about! If you liked my previous projects, you will probably like this!!
Fiction Quest: Ben’s new MOO-like text adventure game
an AI-generated image of a hologram of Ben that greets players
My latest project is an ai-assisted text adventure game called FICTION QUEST. This is a pretty exciting project for me, as I have tried several times in the past to build multi-user adventure chat environments before, but the application of recent language model and image generation technologies really opens up some new doors.
Fiction Quest started out as an experiment where I was chatting with an AI-powered goat character. It was way too much fun and I started posting about it on the socials and people were interested, so I decided to push it further and see if I could connect the goat and other characters into an environment like the ol’ interactive fiction games of yore.
It worked shockingly well — so well that the people I showed it to ended up playing for hours on end. So in typical Ben fashion, I poured a bunch of nights and weekends into fleshing out the game into something a bit more real. The game world now consists of three distinct zones, a dozen AI-powered characters, and all sorts of weird situations to explore. There’s a cyberpunk corpo district, a desert wasteland, a spooky underground. And bars. Lots of cool bars.
To play, you login to a web-based chat room. The world is described in text, and you can interact with it by issuing commands or questions. Other players are in the chat room with you, along with NPCs who have their own agendas and rudimentary memories. You can gather an inventory of supplies and set out on adventure, or just sit around and chat withe bartender.
It is kind of an amazing experience - like having a lucid dream. The AI can guide you to some weird stuff, but you can also push back and create a world of your own imagination. The power of the machine language generation mixed with your ideas and the pre-built game world characters and locations has surprising results!
this is what the fiction quest game looks like
To support the development of the game world, I have launched a Patreon. Joining the Patreon gets you access to the game world 24/7 as well as regular posts about the development process and my observations working with the LLM and image generation technologies.
Plus, I made cool glittery stickers… and I may or may not be working on a set of limited edition trading cards. I CAN’T HELP MYSELF.
Learn more about Fiction Quest and maybe sign up for the Patreon at https://fiction.quest/
To get a sense of what the game is like, you can see a feed of the images generated by gameplay. https://feed.fiction.quest/
It has been a while since I last emailed, so here’s a quick tldr of things you may have missed:
I am 100% off Twitter. You can now find me at HACKERS TOWN living my best life. I post a lot, you should follow me on your own Mastodon instance.
I also built my own single-user Fediverse server called SHUTTLECRAFT - if you are looking for a way to host your own social, this is a great option! It can run easily on Glitch. I run my instance on a $5/mo. You can follow me there too - social.benbrown.com
And if you somehow missed this, there is also HAPPY NET BOX, a retro social experience based around the arcane FINGER and GOPHER protocols. You can get an account for free and post weird ascii art for people to see. I post to my happy net box profile almost daily, and have done so for months. In fact there are 60,000 words hidden in my archive! Are you following along? Open a terminal and type `finger benbrown@happynetbox.com` to get the latest.
ALRIGHT Y’ALL
I appreciate you and hope you are doing well. The theme of the projects I am working on these days is “The internet is a toxic hole and the world is not much better, lets try brick by brick to restore what used to be great about it.” You have a choice of how and where you spend your time online! Find a community that you love that is not owned by a megacorp and invest in it!!
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Episode 5: Tim and Ben go to the Ren Fest
benbrown.substack.com
Nov 15, 2021 • 1HR 10M
Episode 5: Tim and Ben go to the Ren Fest
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Episode 5: Tim and Ben go to the Ren Fest
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Two lifelong friends discuss their passion for the nerdiest stuff on earth!
In this episode, Ben travels to Maryland to attend the Renaissance Festival with Tim. Featuring audio recorded live during the trip. With a twist! What is this, a true crime podcast??
Whenever my best friend Tim and I would have sleepovers as kids, we would make an audio tape together. Huddled in someone’s basement around a tape deck from the ‘80s, we would record silly skits and rambling stories and the sound of us laughing and burping and being 13.
Oh, how I wish I still had those tapes! But alas, I do not. In true pre-digital fashion, those tapes probably got recorded over with songs from the radio and eventually lost to history.
Well, Tim and I are back at it 30 years later - now 43 years old, but still children at heart. I somehow convinced Tim to cohost a weekly podcast with me where each episode, we sip craft beers while discussing our various nerdy hobbies and obsessions like Conan the Barbarian comic books, Pokémon cards, and the multi-media output of Keanu Reeves. It sounds nerdy, and it is! But it is also heartwarming and more drama-filled than you would expect to hear two grown men talk about going to Target multiple times a week.
In the last month, we’ve recorded FOUR complete episodes of the podcast, along with a SECRET BONUS EPISODE ZERO that has not yet been released. If you have somehow avoided finding out about this podcast by steadfastly ignoring everything I post on ever other social channel, now is really the best opportunity you have to jump on the bandwagon and become a lifelong fan and subscriber to…
Episode One: Nerdpocalypse - Our first official episode, with tales Conan the Barbarian and Pokémon cards
Episode Two: Optimus Prime is Jesus - How do you keep a rare Pokémon cookie in a good enough state to sell on eBay? Also, old cartoons like Silverhawks and Thundarr the Barbarian.
Episode Three: The Pokémon Court of Law - Can Tim sue Mark Zuckerberg for blocking access to Pokémon go? Also, a live unboxing of a Pikachu “play mat” that causes two adult men to moan in ecstasy.
Episode Four: Do Not Approach the Unicorn - The hunt for 25th anniversary Pokémon cards has the guys pounding the pavement and fighting scalpers in the aisles. Also, the universal truth of asking out that cute barista.
Two lifelong friends discuss their passion for the nerdiest stuff on earth!
THE HUNT IS ON. Ben and Tim are on the trail of the elusive yet pre-orderable-in-bulk Pokémon Celebrations cards. The guys fight bandits in the aisles of big chain stores while scrambling to get their hands on the precious, precious shiny cardboard. There are unicorns, leprechauns, barista boyfriends and douchebag 20-somethings along the way.
