Like a lot of you, I recently upgraded (or downgraded, if you’re being unkind-but-fair) my iPhone OS to the new one, iOS 26, which has the biggest UI shakeup they’ve done for years. Gone is some variation of the semi-flat Apple UI elements, replaced instead with semi-transparent floating all over the application or web page’s content, floating in and out like that stoner at your friend’s house party.

I had briefly tried a beta of this new on OS on my iPad Pro (which is these days my primary portable computing device, unless I need to do a bunch of actual C++ game dev) but found the aesthetic and interface changes ruined almost every aspect of my work flow. I returned it to its original state, and as of this moment have no plans to sully my actual mac or iPad with the new system.

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Social media has a lot to answer for. Along with everything else truly terrible about it, we also have to suffer the indignities of the existence of Letterboxd. Beyond the horrid misspelling of the word, this service has resulted in friends at parties saying, “Did you read my letterboxd review of that new Marvel Film, Chongusman? Here, let me read it to you.”

In practice, of course, this is no worse or better than any other “Oh have you seen the new Clint Eastwood film?” conversation at a party. If you hadn’t figured out by my pre-coffee snarkiness, I am not on this service. Jokes aside, I recognise why people like it. I’m sure partly it’s the inherent voyeurism of knowing what friends and parasocials are watching. But it’s no doubt also that for the handful of people who follow you, you get to have a platform to espouse your opinions about films.

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Part of my time in my recent two week micro-blogging absence has been spent writing. Quite a lot of writing, in fact. But also writing in a way that’s a bit different than my usual method.

As I’ve been working on Deck & Conn, I kept thinking back to the kind of materials that games like this might have had if they were released in big boxes back in the ’90s. Nice fat manuals full of background material too big or nuanced to be inside the game. Perhaps some designer’s notes. Hell, some of the O.G. MicroProse games had absurdly detailed material in their huge manuals. Hell, in the wonderful manual for the Gothic Germany-set RPG Darklands, there was a full bibliography, where the designers showed what books they’d used as research material for the game.

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This is not my first blog. It’s not even my first blog that’s actually running. My main blog is over at elissablack.com, where I mostly talk about my game dev work. And that’s fine, of course. I even used to write personal blog posts there, though not in a while.

So how did this come about, and what is it?

I spent the last week or two offline. No social media, beyond browsing pixelfed because it’s quite relaxing to just look at photos. (Remember that? What Instagram used to be before it vanished up its own posterior?)

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