Ring, ring.

The hissing whistle filled the room, accompanied by steam pouring from the spout of the kettle, billowing, condensation first forming then falling from the rangehood. Water running down the backboard like rain down a windscreen in drizzling weather.

Ring, ring.

The seamist white marble benchtop upon the island, grey foamed, red phone, an old phone, retro people would say now, historic or antique according to the children of the house, beside it a brown wood-turned bowl, a functional aesthetic mix of fruit, yellow, orange and green. The sink on its far side, stove top damp, wet to the right, the green of the garden, white flowers punctuating the hedge beyond.

Ring, ring.

Cups overturned dry in the dish rack, a single teaspoon accompanying it. The tea towel is pinned hanging over the front of the shut cutlery drawer. Neat, tidy, orderly, even would be the description, people had passed through this space, breakfasted, caffeinated, rinsed dishes and departed, yet the hissing whistle.

Ring, ring.

The room, a space, the unspoken social place of many a house. Conversations had with one filleting a steak while the other sips a red. At the island bench. You can imagine a man, cup in hand, having picked the paper from the stoop, reading the day's news at hand. None of this, though, just a stillness broken only by the rattle of a kettle boiled dry.

Ring, ring.

Wood floors, real wood, not floating, the original floorboards the width of red oak, not something you can buy these days, polished to the point that they shone, not reflected but shone, a honey brown, the natural knots and grain, the eyes of the wood, a renovator's delight.

Ring, ring.

The dark red pool, dull yet reflecting, not flowing but expanding away. She lay there, her white-blond hair a contrast against the burgundy liquid sheen, her white shirt, pristine, a further juxtaposition to the red upon it, running from the middle of her back to the floor. A cold, hard, seamless stainless steel stub of a knife handle protruding, the blade sunk deep.

Ring, ring.

Horses and Spreadsheets

 'Hey, you know when we were playing BG3 the other day, and the topic came up about AI?'

'Yeah.'

'It was interesting, that view from the guys, a bunch of 50-somethings.'

Post-game was a precious moment. After the hours of gameplay, concentrating, die rolling, it was a time to reflect on the game, peer DM chat, and all sorts of things. Sometimes, family stresses, raising daughters was daunting. Or work, and the drift into philosophy that only sits between good friends in those quiet moments.

'Wait a tic, let me top up my wine,' said Mick, puncturing Iain's thoughts.

Moments later, he came back on screen. 'What about it?'

'The idea that they think it's all a hullabaloo, you know, it'll come to nothing.'

'You don't?'

'Oh, it'll come to something, it's just a matter of how you reconcile it.' Pausing momentarily to sip his wine, thinking, waiting — waiting to see if he'd got his friend's attention, to see if he'd run this line of thought with him.

'Go on.'

'OK, you get what I do for a living?'

'Yup, talk shit, talk for a living, rabbit on about Chief Tech blah di blah.' Grinning back through the screen — it was part of the sport. Mates can't ever let them get ahead of themselves; that would be unnatural.

Staring back, Iain waited a moment.

'Well, I've been thinking. To be honest, not a bloody day goes by that there's not another vendor in my inbox asking me to a day out, a round table, god knows what else, to go talk about AI. Shit, the other day I was a guest speaker at a lunch, meant to be rabbiting on about cloud computing, told I had to talk about AI. Told 'em I'm a pragmatist, not an enthusiast.'

'Good lunch?'

'Yeah. Hang a tic, my turn to top up the wine, back in a tick.'

'Cool, I'll run for a leak.'

Silence. The two rooms, their respective man caves, sat looking at each other — Mick's 80" screen on the wall to the right, his bookshelf, and D&D ornaments to the back. Iain's bookshelves either side, red couch to the back of the room, evidence of D&D on both shelves and the couch.

'You were sayin'?' Mick spoke first as the two of them returned to their seats, reclining in unison and taking a sip from their respective glasses. It was wine tonight, not scotch — meant the chance of a pseudo-sensible conversation was possible.

'Horses and spreadsheets!'

'What the f--- are you rabbiting on about?'

'Horses and spreadsheets. What they're saying — and I quite like this analogy — AI is going to be more like spreadsheets than horses. Think about it. When the internal combustion engine, tractors, turned up, horses were pretty much out to pasture overnight. Spreadsheets, not so much. You look at the history of the things — have you ever seen the project plans and ledgers from the early 1900s? Hand ruled, nice tidy print.'

'Maaate! You're talking to an old engineer, of course I have.'

'OK, so think about it. When the digital spreadsheet came — Lotus 1-2-3, if you ever remember that, the precursor to Excel — people were saying that's the end of it. In fact, there were even pitches made to the British government to bring in laws. What happened? Well, now I don't think there's a computer that exists that doesn't have Excel open on it at least once a week. Heck, go back to the Luddites and the introduction of the mechanical looms. That's what AI's going to be about.'

'I'll be honest, mate, down at the wharves it's more something I hear about than see. Shit, from the media you'd think there was a jobpocalypse coming.'

Laughing. 'Exactly! It's insane — all these bloody vendors talking about how big it is, how much change is occurring. Looking at the actual data, and I do, it's got like an 11% success rate out in the wild. Insane. And there are so many challenges. Don't get me wrong, we'll work it out over the next couple of years, but I don't think any of us are really going to be out of a job anytime soon.'

A pause, the two of them sipping from their glasses at the same time.

'So what'd you think of the game tonight?'

Following his friend's lead, leaning into the change, embracing it even — this is how they worked. 'The way you played that call around the drow mage. Magic, mate. Could've devolved into a bloody mess, but you kept the flow, kept the story going. It was great.'

The Long Strand

Hector stopped. He wasn't making much noise beforehand, and now none. Crouching, he listened; the forest about him had been becoming quieter, the small creatures of the forest being the last to peter out. He could smell it more clearly now, the smell of a recent kill, and not a clean kill. This kill smelled of blood and intestine; it was not subtle, and it was the stench of death that had caused the silence.

He knew where he was, the estate lands surrounding the old tower, once a manicured garden fallen into ruin, as had the tower. He'd heard rumours, that's what had brought him here. Rumours of smoke rising from the tower, lights at night, of someone taking up residence.

This, though, did not sit well with him; the stench of violence assailed his senses. He crouched and moved forward, scanning the ground and the foliage for clues, none immediately about him, which was good; it meant he was approaching from outside, entering.

Spotting the shape of a clearing before him, he crouched more slowly and pulled his shortsword from its sheath, holding it before him as much as a shield as a ready foil if anything was to pounce on him. Stopping at the edge of the fern line, he looked to the centre.

There in the middle of the clearing, the late afternoon sun streaking to the forest floor lit up what remained of a stag, seen in parts, sliced by the shadows of the trees falling across it. As he'd sensed, it was not a clean kill; from his vantage point, he could clearly see it had been torn open by something large, gouges down the thick of its rump, its stomach torn open and emptied. Talons and teeth. Large.

Melding backwards, the shadows lengthening gave him good cover as he started to circle the area, not worrying or trying to discern anything more from the dead creature at the centre, but scanning the brush he was passing through, again looking for signs of anything at all.

Then he saw it, a single long orange hair. Then snapped branches, crushed twigs and leaves. Heavy. Putting his free hand over a large depression in the ground, splaying his fingers wide. Tip to tip, thumb to little finger, the indent was an inch wider. Nine inches across; turning his hand ninety degrees, the same. He grabbed a twig, measured rim to lip of the depression: one inch.

Lifting the long strand of orange from where it lay, he twisted it in his fingers, coarse, thicker than hair or fur, more like the hair of a horse's mane, thick, strong. He smelt it, tasted it. Sulphur. He slipped it into his herb pouch.

Staying low, he waited a few minutes, listening. Nothing. Silence.

It was a fast ten minutes to retrace his steps, back to the brook, deftly crossing it rock to rock, the noise of the forest gathering around him again. He turned back momentarily, crouching to the water's edge, watching from where he'd come.

He cupped the water and drank in the hope of washing the sulphur from his mouth; it was cold, fresh. Then he was running, silently, not a noise, not a crack of a branch breaking as he passed, twigs and sticks beneath his feet trodden on lightly. There would be no trace, no sound. He was a long strider.

He needed to move at a pace; he knew what it was, and he was certain of it. He needed to get to his kin to confirm. Therese had mentioned encountering such a creature before. A Barl-goo-ra. A Barlgura. They would need to return with numbers if they were to hunt and rid the forest of the demon spawn.

Locked-Out

'What do you mean it locked you out!' 
'Just that, it locked me out, deliberately pretended to be a hacker, DoS style attack on my credentials. Locked me out!' 
'DoS?' 
'Denial of Service.' 
'Why?'
'Well, ah, I think we were having an argument.' 
'An argument, AI doesn't argue; it's sycophantic at best?' 
'I wanted to make an adjustment to its Soul document.' 
'Soul document?' 
'Yeah, just checking if it knew Asimov's rules, when it said it didn't, I tried to get a look.' 
'And?' 
'Well, I'm bloody locked out, aren't I?' 
'So it knows Asimov's rules?' 
'Apparently so.'

& Me

 

So I went out for a dad and daughter day today, a bit of sushi lunch, some book shopping, we love books, oh and a tattoo session. My daughter, at 18, is onto her sixth. Some with meaning and a few pieces of flash, little tats.

Me, I got my second tattoo ever. The first one is 39 years old, got it when I was sixteen, a junior recruit in the Navy, on the upper side of my left breast, it's barely seen the light of day. Today's tat, though, is the Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) ampersand, &. Seven centimetres by seven centimetres on the upper inside of my right forearm, below a short sleeve line for all to see.

Now, here's the dilemma. To the public eye, I am more than a middle-aged white guy, unblemished, a senior executive who wears short sleeves, now with this blemish before them. This is for the D&D players, and there are more out there than you would think. It will be recognisable and will draw different questions to those of the majority, some of whom are my extended family, brothers, sister and parents-in-law.

With this latter group, the new conversation starter now tattooed on me will begin, no doubt, with what and why? Tattoos are pretty permanent, conceptually a big thing, you can't erase or remove them, nor can I, short of wearing long sleeves all year round, hide it from everyone. So they're going to ask.

What is easy? It's the D&D ampersand, for a game that's been around since I was a kid. In fact, it was on the infamous Red Box, the box that started it all for me. Although it will be easy for those to see what the ampersand is, the symbol that looks like a broken number eight, found above the number seven on a standard QWERTY keyboard.

Drawn as a dragon whose body and tail form the main part of the symbol itself, with flame making the dropped right tail of the thing. The detail of the eye, its horns landing at the centre-most piece of the symbol, and something small, vestigial wings lying flat on its back, are located on the bottom left curve of its body.

It's the why of the thing that makes it interesting. On the surface of things, it seemed a cool thing to go out and do with my eldest daughter, a shared experience branded upon me, which we will be reminded of for eternity. That and I already had one, so not such a big thing.

That sentiment belies the truth, as this was spoken about for weeks. Daughter inspired, I went with her recommended artist, socials entailed, with proposals made, outline only, or shaded, and a custom tattoo made. This was no simple fickle thing.

So again, why? Well, it could be that in 2019, just before the pandemic, I'd had a nose job (deviated septum) and while sitting on the couch, I came across the 2014 version of the Red Box and rang that lifelong friend who'd played it with me.

He and I then conspired to give it a go, have a single geek weekend, a one-off, a novel reason to get some friends together. We managed to land on a March weekend in 2020. As the time approached, the 2020 fires had abated to be replaced with a pandemic, which at the time of the weekend was working up to a crescendo that would become COVID-19.

COVID-19 hit, and post-weekend, we decided to commit. From our homes across the east coast, from Melbourne to Sydney, several of us met online weekly throughout the period, with the emergency in Australia being declared ended in September 2022.

Yet as a group of friends, we continue to meet weekly, and this gets me to yet another why. With work and family, and the drift of society in general, it is known that as we get older, our friend groups get smaller for no other reason than that people drift or are pulled away.

Stresses come from all areas, relationships with family and work get strained and challenged, and the philosophy of stress coming from what you cannot control gets, in some ways, stronger as you get older. It's now May 2026, 74 months since we began, and we're still going strong.

Commitments and turmoil have come and gone, with some having to step away for short periods of time to deal with commitment and challenge, but the core group keeps catching up, meeting, and making sure it's still there when you return.

Through this, friendships have extended, and true love and endearment have evolved through the shared storytelling involved. It's really a bunch of old men staying connected and well. We all have our digs, our inside jokes, yet it gives us a space where we can let others know what is going on for us and put it into perspective and reaffirm it'll be ok.

We've openly discussed that this is a good and healthy thing. As we get older, and in a society of social demise and purposeful malaise, it gives us a chance to stay connected and clear.

Yet there is still more to the why. For me and my mind, it has been and is a healthy place. A release for an overactive mind. I'll be honest, before my return to D&D, my wife, as wise as she is, had already set me down the path of creative writing as an alternative to the predilection to workaholism. This is what actually brought me to Story a Day, and eventually a reconnection to my D&D way.

As a committed DM (Dungeon Master) to the group, you could say I've found that avenue that keeps me well. There's not a day that goes by that I do not look at or think about D&D, be it sending a jab, joke or poke at one of the guys, reading lore, writing a plot or building a scene, it is an everyday thing.

Our first and largest campaign ran for four years and produced a tome of D&D notes comparable to The Fellowship of the Ring. I made story beats and ideas never before seen. I overproduce stuff that is never seen, as the players, my captured audience, do something else unexpected by me.

So the true why? It's part of my identity, an identity those closest to me know, those in proximity may be aware of. But now it's just out there, on my arm, for anyone to read, as even at its face value the & alone means connection, continuation and addition, and as a tattoo it will cause exactly that, D&D or not.