Chase Taylor-Carter
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chasecarter.bsky.social
Chase Taylor-Carter
@chasecarter.bsky.social
3.9K followers 810 following 1.4K posts
Co-owner of Rascal News. Tabletop and internet culture journalist. Avoiding unhealthy use this time around.

✉️: chase@rascal.news

https://www.rascal.news/
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chasecarter.bsky.social
The people in charge of the platforms that small creators must rely on to survive have very different beliefs on how they should be run.
Message from Regis Bonnessee, the creator: To be fully transparent, it was actually Gamefound who advised us to set an easily achievable initial goal, to help build confidence among backers at launch. According to their experience, setting a higher target often slows campaigns down in their first few days. We trusted their expertise, with no bad intentions, believing we were following sound advice based on thousands of past projects. Looking back, we understand that this choice may have been perceived negatively, and your reaction is completely valid. We can’t undo what’s been done, but we can assure you that there was never any intent to mislead, only a misjudgment in how we presented things.
November 4, 2025 at 3:02 PM
chasecarter.bsky.social
Noting the €50,000 crowdfunding goal for Seeds of Unity, and the note on the Gamefound page describing it as more than 1,000% funded, Equinox said, “The funding goal displayed on Gamefound is symbolic, as it usually is in crowdfunding campaigns. “It’s chosen to help build early momentum but doesn’t reflect our actual needs. Setting the bar too high sometimes makes a project feel out of reach, while a more accessible goal helps get the collective energy moving right from the start.”
November 4, 2025 at 2:31 PM
chasecarter.bsky.social
The person behind the official Instagram repeated this explanation, specifically mentioning the application of low-rank adaptations, or LoRAs, to ComfyUI in order to replicate Ruggeri’s preferred style. As artist and programmer Joseph Wilk pointed out in response, both tools require a pre-trained model that likely contains millions of publicly scraped images. In a separate comment, the official account claimed the team “trained a model with some of my old art and some from my wife and other acquaintances.” It later admitted that the wife and friends were not credited on Kickstarter nor within the book because “not all artists like to be associated with the word ‘AI’, so I didn’t even feel comfortable asking them if I could use their names in the credits.”
November 3, 2025 at 5:05 PM
chasecarter.bsky.social
discord screenshot from me (Chase), that reads: "Thomas, this is so fucking funny ho my lord."
October 30, 2025 at 5:01 PM
chasecarter.bsky.social
Great article from Nicole here about who gets to "police aesthetics" and how everything online is morphed into a business model. This quote rattled every bone in my body:
“Music consumption is shifting,” a Lofi Records label manager, who goes by Berrkan Bag online, told 404 Media in an email. “Short-form and scroll-driven platforms have changed how people engage with lo-fi. Some of the long-form, narrative visuals that helped define the genre are being challenged by algorithmic trends.”
September 10, 2025 at 3:26 PM
chasecarter.bsky.social
Sandwiched inside this interview is WotC president John Hight once again delivering two thumbs up for LLM-generated material in the company's games. He's gonna feed players however much slop they'll allow.
He's open, however, to the use of AI to come up with ideas. "But the final product, the thing that you see, will be made by a human being. And that's our position on it. So we're not using generative AI to create the artwork for our cards or games." He thinks that AI could be used to help out in the development process, though. "Absolutely, we're looking at that." He stresses that any uses of AI will be examined "on a case by case basis" that questions how it's being used. "Is this displacing the human soul, spirit, creativity in doing it? Because we don't want derivative work. We want that innovation. We want things that people have dreamt up. "But on the other hand, is it allowing us to explore different things? Is it allowing us to take the drudgery out of things? "For instance, generating an audio performance so that a writer can hear their words before we go into the recording studio I think is going to help us make those recording sessions go a lot faster and smoother." The idea here would be to see how players respond to AI-generated lines first and to examine how the dialogue works in game, with the recording sessions with real actors being left as late as possible in the development process – so by the time the sessions happen, the dialogue is honed and complete, enabling the actors to give the "best performance". He also thinks machine learning could be useful for checking for errors in code, thus helping to avoid 'breaking the build' when introducing new elements into a game, or highlighting problems that could occur further down the road of development. "AI is really good at that," Hight says. "Humans, it's a little bit clunky for us to figure out." Dynamic difficulty is another area where he thinks AI could be useful. "Right now, it kind of stinks," he says in regards to difficulty settings, with binary choices between, say, easy or hard difficulties that don't allow for nuance. He gives an example. "I'm pretty good at puzzle solving, but I'm kind of crap these days on dexterity stuff, and yet I like games that have both. So wouldn't it be great if the AI was analysing a little bit about how I'm playing?" He suggests the game could, perhaps, increase the difficulty of puzzles but reduce the difficulty of dexterity challenges if it sensed the player was breezing through the former, but struggling with the latter.
September 5, 2025 at 3:34 PM
chasecarter.bsky.social
“I'm worried for my colleagues and all the indie developers who don't have a stateside shop set up. You shouldn't need to have that,” Nohr said. “It also fucking annoys me to have to comply with Trump and do what he wants in terms of producing more within the states. But I don't know what else to do right now, really. A majority of our customers are in the USA. We have to sell there. Somehow.”
August 29, 2025 at 2:30 PM
chasecarter.bsky.social
This story earned us our first (implied) legal threat from a subject. Neat!
“It is no coincidence that staff who left the company years ago, suddenly started a campaign against Zatu in the same month that the individual was arrested,” he added. Rascal was not able to verify this information with police. They also added that “the publication of any defamatory and untrue information published about Zatu and/or its employees will expose Rascal to legal action (including but not limited to a defamation claim).”
August 21, 2025 at 2:10 PM
chasecarter.bsky.social
Dr. Friedman raises some great criticism of the linked piece, but I wanna hit it from the journalism side. These pieces are always reductive, astonished windows for a non-existent layperson to gawp through. Perennial trad media pablum that bins nuance in favor of, well, this:
"This is the age of Dungeons & Dragons" As more people watch D&D for entertainment, more people seem to be playing it too. Though an exact number of players is hard to track, Bilsland said something like 85 million people have engaged with the game, associated video games, and the movie Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves over the past few years.
August 7, 2025 at 1:09 PM
chasecarter.bsky.social
An issue with hypertextuality is linkrot, which is another thing you gain from having the blog published. I'm worried about blogs, especially my blog — I don't think that Google can be trusted to maintain that forever. At some point they're going to pull the plug on blogspot, and there's going to be a lot of writing lost. It's going to be a burning of the Library of Alexandria. Having my writings living in a book means it can survive. My blog uses Squarespace. I'm sure at some point they could go bankrupt and sell all my stuff.
August 6, 2025 at 4:20 PM
chasecarter.bsky.social
Oh, I'm familiar.
Text reads: The Realm of Radia LAND OF ADVENTURE Long ago, Radia was home to the Aura, a good people that ruled over the land with fairness. Then the scourge Vardas appeared, destroying the realm of the Aura and plunging the World into Desperation. The goal of the game is to travel all over the World to bring Hope back to the realm of Radia. After collecting enough Hope, the Champions will be able to open the Fortress of Evil, where they will face Vardas in an epic battle. But first, they need to find a way to get their hands on the legendary Twilight Sword, an amazing power that takes on a different form depending on who wields it.
August 1, 2025 at 1:42 PM
chasecarter.bsky.social
Two Little Mice's new tabletop RPG, Twilight Sword, is unabashedly Legend of Zelda in both art direction and play: awakened heroes and fabled swords in a world full of monsters, landmarks, and sidequests.

If you're gonna transmute a video game, do it with your whole ass!
August 1, 2025 at 1:39 PM
chasecarter.bsky.social
Cocks assured everyone on the call that “Magic’s engine of growth is durable; it is diversified; it is accelerating,” but also admitted that the TCG’s 70% men demographic was a place where they could “do better.” How? Would you believe their plan involves more UB sets? “Don’t be surprised if you see us poking into romantasy or K-Pop in future IP releases,” said the CEO like he’d just revealed his family’s pasta sauce recipe. Hasbro is about 20 years behind other entertainment media in believing Barbie will bridge the consumer gender gap, but it also reveals a callous relationship with their players. We are no more than an itemized list of special interests they can monetize, one by one — settings on the money-printing machine to spit out an endless stream of blorbos, nostalgia, and (apparently) BookTok special interests.
July 28, 2025 at 3:42 PM
chasecarter.bsky.social
Concluding that people must not be feeling economic pain because a highly monetized hobby juggernaut continues unimpeded perhaps falls into the "willfully ignorant" segment of business analysis.
The second conclusion is that the American consumer may not be as bad off as originally suspected. The economic outlook is clearly uncertain for the remainder of 2025 (thanks to tariffs and higher prices), and consumer budgets are supposedly tightening. Yet, miraculously, droves of TCG fans still have $714.42 to spend on a Final Fantasy Collector Booster Displays. While it might be true that the average American household is feeling the pain of rising CPI caused by tariffs, higher wealth individuals seem to be making up for that by dropping thousands of dollars on non-essentials (like high-priced Magic packs). How long that dynamic lasts into the future is unclear, but for the near term, it will likely continue.
June 12, 2025 at 2:02 PM
chasecarter.bsky.social
B2B outlet ICv2 publishing the inner monologue of every Hasbro investor and c-suite employee. Only scalpers and speculators are "gladly" paying inflated prices for cardboard with Lightning and Sephiroth on it.

icv2.com/articles/new...
For one, it basically gives WotC carte blanche to keep increasing prices on Universes Beyond Premiere sets. And, why shouldn't they? Apparently, the maximum amount the typical TCG fan will spend on a Magic Premiere set, with a popular IP attached to it, hasn't been breached yet. It is possible that WotC is actually undercharging for their products and could get away with raising the prices on future Collector Boosters to $49.99 and the Play Boosters to $9.99. If a strong IP was attached to these boosters (like Marvel), it's a solid bet that fans would gladly pay it and demand more.
June 12, 2025 at 1:47 PM
chasecarter.bsky.social
An obvious goal of all those shitty AI addons to every single piece of software we use is not to make our lives better, but to wear us down into resignation. To cede ground to a fucking tech investment bubble until young children view it as ubiquitous to reality.
It has made my job much, much harder. I do not allow genAI in my classes. However, because genAI is so good at producing plausible-sounding text, that ban puts me in a really awkward spot. If I want to enforce my ban, I would have to do hours of detective work (since there are no reliable ways to detect genAI use), call students into my office to confront them, fill out paperwork, and attend many disciplinary hearings. All of that work is done to ferret out cheating students, so we have less time to spend helping honest ones who are there to learn and grow. And I would only be able to find a small percentage of the cases, anyway.
June 4, 2025 at 10:37 AM
chasecarter.bsky.social
UKGE haul, minus the conversations, pints, and memories. A good first taste of the scene on this side of the Atlantic.
Twelve RPGs and tabletop games of various colors, mostly black,arrayed on a white duvet.
June 2, 2025 at 9:31 AM
chasecarter.bsky.social
“Regardless of what number comes before the percentage this time, the overall picture is still chaos, instability, and unpredictability — all words that drive daggers at the heart of business,” Hicks said. “Economic chaos as made manifest by this administration means we have to dial in our ambitions.”
May 16, 2025 at 2:13 PM
chasecarter.bsky.social
Ursula K. Le Guin writing about speculative fiction in The Left Hand of Darkness.
"Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive. Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge), by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets), and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying. The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you’re like—what’s going on—what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your" "The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you’re like—what’s going on—what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don’t tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies."
May 10, 2025 at 7:32 AM
chasecarter.bsky.social
lol. lmao even.
"The suit alleges that when the true nature of WotC’s cancelled agreement came to light via unredacted documents on April 17, Diamond “feigned outrage”, calling the termination “shocking”, “coming out of nowhere” and a “slap in the face” given its 25-year relationship with WotC. AENT’s filing claims Diamond’s falsehoods were finally laid bare on April 21 during a video call between the pair and WotC, with the latter reportedly confirming Diamond were aware of the termination last December, and adding that it was due to WotC’s business with them having declined more than 8% over the past four years – despite rising sales from WotC’s four other distributors."
April 29, 2025 at 1:53 PM
chasecarter.bsky.social
Tomasso De Benetti of @theworldanvil.bsky.social remains confident that Bitter Chalice, a boxed RPG with plenty of board game DNA, won't be affected by US tariffs.
“I'm not convinced that whatever the Trump administration decides will last for more than a few weeks because that guy is just not reliable at all,” he said. “Listen, if nothing changes the American people will have much more serious problems than getting my roleplaying game."
April 29, 2025 at 1:22 PM
chasecarter.bsky.social
Digging through old thumbdrives and found this screenshot tucked inscrutably among my masters thesis research and old RPG downloads
Screenshot of an old children's computer game. A blue robot stands in a cave, with a T-Rex skeleton in the background and a green frog in a bowl in the foreground.
April 28, 2025 at 7:35 AM
chasecarter.bsky.social
While Cocks didn't say much about layoffs, we can read between the lines. He will use tariffs to astroturf layoffs later this year despite MTG continuing to make more money than god. Christmas 2023, part II
“Even with Hasbro’s relative strength and flexibility, logistics are becoming more complex and changes in receivables and shipping dynamics present a challenge,” Cocks said. “Ultimately, tariffs translate into higher consumer prices, potential job losses as we adjust to absorb increased costs, and reduced profits for our shareholders.”
April 25, 2025 at 2:35 PM
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Universes Beyond is an unalloyed win for Cocks, Goetter and investors. Why would they stop doing more of it, especially now that it's expected to float Hasbro's still flagging toy sector through tariff pain?
“We feel really good about the back half releases as well, especially the new Universes Beyond sets. It’s very clear to us that Universes Beyond as a strategy has increased the active install base of Magic players,” Cocks said. “Final Fantasy will be the best-selling set of all time on day one. It already is.”
April 25, 2025 at 2:27 PM
chasecarter.bsky.social
When I imagine a tabletop game supporting roleplay, this is what I mean. Give me walls not expressly built for vines, but still perfect for climbing.
I wrote the first five commanders—a legate, an archbishop, a grand princess, a king, and a khan—but each subsequent commander is randomly generated. New subordinate commanders get a relationship to their superior commander (often, but not always, family), their age, and a few traits—older commanders get more traits but are worse in hand-to-hand combat (a relatively uncommon occurrence). These basic tables have resulted in some remarkable dynamics and relationships: one faction is entirely composed of family members of a dead former king; another involves a secret parent-child relationship; another still is composed of no family at all, just work colleagues trying to get along. My players love these relationships. While Cataphracts could basically be played entirely in clipped sentences and spreadsheet math, so far, every single one of my twenty-three has, to a greater or lesser extent, gotten into character and spent a lot of extra time and effort in their letters and messages to each other.
April 24, 2025 at 7:47 AM