some-frond
2026-04-13
hello. my sort of newsletter is here again with another installment. im betting everything on this newsletter becoming a cool place to hangout because by god i cannot let myself become reliant on instagram. i was always a twitter person and i was happy to cede the meta corporation to slow typers and dinner photography, but it turns out that's where all the normies are - the fatted turkeys. the ticket buyers. the in-person attendees. the mentally stable. extroverts. exomorphs. in their gilded cage of promoted posts.
when i was doing the bone show at soho they asked if i could make some vertical videos for instagram. i sent them three videos and they rejected them all. admittedly, what i had sent them included the audio of me recounting a time id become scared my skeleton was growing faster than the rest of my body overlaid over some footage of a woodlouse excreting an extreme amount of mucus onto some frond. when i was in year 3 i got my arms stuck in the wrong armholes of my school jumper while changing for PE and they sent me with my arms still stuck to the year 6 classroom as punishment. i had to knock on the door with my arms the wrong way round to sit next to the oldest kids in the school while they took turns to read passages from Mrs Doubtfire. after 20 minutes of wriggling, I'd freed both my arms, but my hands had gone red from being pinned awkwardly for so long and the knuckles looked bright white and prominent against the flesh. i was looking directly at my skeleton. id never realised before. it was like when you see the shadow of a great fish, a megalodon, pass under the surface of a small fishing trawler. some vast primordial being was in there, ready to crest the surface tension and bear witness to the world.
anyway, they didn't want that. they were very polite about it. when i asked for an example of what they could accept they sent me an example video of two young american women talking incredibly animatedly about a play while looking directly down the camera lens. they were stood in a liminal space. their skin was immaculate. this was real showbiz. it was blinding. they were selling. they were giving.
yesterday i found the last easter egg in big tescos. it had been reduced from £15 to £3. i ate half of it while watching the dan olsen youtube video about beast games. it made me feel sick.
I'm Building A Mandarin Learning App Inside Minecraft
你好! 我的名字是 Sean Morley. I'm building a mandarin-learning app inside minecraft. This is a story about a livestream.
I've been livestreaming on twitch since the pandemic.
In january 2026, I rolled out a new webpage called What Next where users ('people' ('community members' / denizens)) could submit and vote on ideas they'd like to see for future streams. the page also contained a target for concurrent subscribers which, if met, i'd choose one of the most popular ideas and turn that into a future stream.
in february 2026, in honour of groundhog day, i attempted to do the exact same stream approximately 10 times in a row. i notated and scripted about 150 minutes of dialogue. it was wildly unpopular. everyone vocally hated it and spent every afternoon i spent doing it urging me to stop. out of desperation people flooded the what next portal with the suggestion i stop doing groundhog streams and subscribed en masse to hit the goal. reluctantly, i stopped the groundhog day streams, but to ensure this experience provided something additive - i also chose the second most popular suggestion: bring back morlcraft.
Morlcraft was a stream I did in 2021 during what would turn out to be the final lockdown. It was a stream premised on three things.
1: There was a minecraft server I could only enter once week for the stream, but everyone else had access constantly.
2: There was a wheel of random events. People could donate to populate the wheel, or spin the wheel to activate an event.
3: Chat would vote on a long term objective that would dictate play and the stream's overall lifespan.
Morlcraft Season 2, which is now underway, has returned with the same rules. But now the random events are powered by the parallel development of a custom mod which I'm building alongside the streams powered by Minecraft Bedrock's Scripting API. however, the overall tone and aesthetic would not be determined until the objective is chosen. The objective has now been chosen: learn chinese and re-enact new labour.
so thats why i made a pinyin chinese language learning app inside minecraft. it's just a simple flashcard app at heart (though honestly im convinced thats the best way to learn languages) it shows you the pinyin and you need to say what it is in english. if you get it right you get heals (or a diamond if you're at full health) and if you get it wrong you take damage. the fun thing is that people are actually using it. they just want the minerals, really, but the side effect is that they're learning chinese and i think that's very funny.
anyway, im not trying to encourage you to watch these streams. i know better than anyone that my livestream output has gone from niche output into something that feels like it isnt for any actual existing people but it's every friday evening (7.30pm) at www.twitch.tv/seanmorl.
Normal Game
It's been a long time coming - Normal Game Live is happening! Just a couple of Work-In-Progresses so I can see how it all works (or doesn't).
Normal Game is a comedy medium-tech live gameshow. A multi-faceted mega quiz. No trivia, no rote learning. It measures your relationship with society. Do you understand the world you live in? Do you know where you are right now? Do you feel OK?
WIP #1: Sheffield, Sunday 14th June, 2:30pm (2pm doors) - tickets. WIP #2: Manchester, Sunday 28th June, 2:30pm (2pm doors) - tickets
recc: anthology of the killer
ive long since wanted to want to play more narrative games. after all, books are for bookshelves and bookshelves are for zoom call background decoration. it's 2026; i want to press buttons.
anthology of the killer is deliriously colourful and generously segmented. its a perfect nook for someone whose eyes blur when confronted with multiple paragraphs. the game is a zine composed of ten parts. each part is a short horror story. though its horror as structure, horror as a genre convention, horror as a medium. the spooks are light. the stories are sometimes condensible to 'what if a swimming pool was haunted'. the flavour lives in the texture: bright prose, lurid colours and thick scribbly billboardified art. whatever autobiography lies at the heart of these stories is genuinely unclear. lovingly smothered by a desire to tell short lighthearted technicolour stories about social dislocation. and it is not a big commitment of price or time!!