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Hannah Nicklin

@hannahnicklin.bsky.social

6.8K followers 940 following 1.3K posts

10+ years of writing, game & narrative design. Recently worked on: Black Mirror: Thronglets; Saltsea Chronicles; Mutazione. Past Creative Director of gutefabrik.com. Author of writingfor.games. PhD in play as anti-capitalist practice. Bike person.

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Hannah Nicklin @hannahnicklin.bsky.social · 16d

Hi! I'm Hannah Nicklin, award-winning game director, writer & narrative designer (for 10+ years).

💛 Author writingfor.games
⛵️ Creative Director saltseachronicles.com
☄️Writer & ND mutazionegame.com
🃏 Writer & ND – Black Mirror: Thronglets
👩‍🏫 Phd interactive theatre
👩🏼‍💼 linkedin.com/in/hannah-nicklin

a screen capture from Black Mirror: Thronglets

The cover of Writing for Games: Theory & Practice

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Hannah Nicklin @hannahnicklin.bsky.social · 19h

Saw a Barnsley teen watch a middle aged man on a Brompton ride past the other day and scathingly shout “nice bike, where’d you get it, Temu?”

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Hannah Nicklin @hannahnicklin.bsky.social · 2d

We're in a COVID wave in 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿!

- If you can afford a vaxx–do it!
- Studies suggest it's more effective if you get a flu vaxx at the same time
- I use NoriZite nose spray
- Meet pals for walks rather than coffee
- Masking in high risk places is better than not at all

open.substack.com/pub/christin...

England is now experiencing a significant Covid wave, after 10 months of relative quiet

The latest Covid situation in England and a look at where NHS services are as we head into winter

open.substack.com

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Hannah Nicklin @hannahnicklin.bsky.social · 2d

It's a rant. But it's a righteous one. I also want more considered texts on this topic (what does it mean to have a politics in a post-literate society?), but first we've got to describe it. Worth reading for the stinger alone: musgrave.substack.com/p/a-post-lit...

The alternative is bleak—a TL;DR stamping on a human face, forever.

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Reposted by Hannah Nicklin

Juno Rylee Schultz @junoryleejournalism.com · 3d

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems...
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: ...Or saying...
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 2d

Every single AI data center is a toxic investment, with most of its value tied up in GPUs that will be multiple generations behind by the time these things turn on - and then die in 3-5 years.

All to build for AI demand that doesn't exist.
edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo...

Actually, wait - how long do GPUs last, exactly? Four years for training? Three years? The A100 GPU started shipping in May 2020, and the H100 (and the Hopper GPU generation) entered full production in September 2022, meaning that we’re hurtling at speed toward the time in which we’re going to start seeing a remarkable amount of chips start wearing down, which should be a concern for companies like Microsoft, who bought 150,000 Hopper GPUs in 2023 and 485,000 of them in 2024.
Alright, let me just be blunt: the entire economy of debt around GPUs is insane.
Assuming these things don’t die within five years (their warranties generally end in three), their value absolutely will, as NVIDIA has committed to releasing a new AI chip every single year, likely with significant increases to power and power efficiency. At the end of the five year period, the Special Purpose Vehicle will be the proud owner of five-year-old chips that nobody is going to want to rent at the price that Elon Musk has been paying for the last five years. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the rental prices for H100 GPUs that went from $8-an-hour in 2023 to $2-an-hour in 2024, or the Silicon Data Indexes (aggregated realtime indexes of hourly prices) that show H100 rentals at around $2.14-an-hour and A100 rentals at a dollar-an-hour, with Vast.AI offering them at as little as $0.67 an hour.
This is, by the way, a problem that faces literally every data center being built in the world, and I feel insane talking about it. It feels like nobody is talking about how impossible and ridiculous all of this is - it’s one thing that OpenAI has promised one trillion dollars to people - it’s another that large swaths of that will be spent on hardware that will, by the end of these agreements, be half-obsolete and generating less revenue than ever.
Think about it - let’s assume we live in a fantasy land where OpenAI is somehow able to pay Oracle $300 billion over 5 years. Said money is paying for access to Blackwell…

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 2d

Tomorrow: The AI Bubble is built on impossible promises. GPUs die in 5 years, nobody has built a 1GW data center, and they have the power to do so. Stargate Abilene won't have enough power before 2028.

Here's a link for $10 off premium.

edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo...

Everybody is very casual with how they talk about Sam Altman’s theoretical promises of trillions of dollars of data center infrastructure, and I'm not sure anybody realizes how difficult even the very basics of this plan will be.
Nevertheless, everybody is happily publishing stories about how “Stargate Abilene Texas - OpenAI’s massive data center with Oracle - is open,” by which they mean two buildings, and I’m not even confident both of them are providing compute to OpenAI yet. There are six more of them that need to get built for this thing to start rocking at 1.2GW - even though it’s only 1.1GW according to my sources in Abilene.
But, hey, sorry - one minute - while we’re on that subject, did anybody visiting Abilene in the last week or so ever ask whether they’ll have enough power there?
Don’t worry, you don’t need to look - I’m sure you were just about to, and had simply been busy! - but I did the hard work for you and read up on it, and it turns out that Stargate Abilene only has 200 megawatts of power - a 200 megawatt substation that, according to my sources, has only been built within the last couple of months, with 350 Megawatt of gas turbine generators that connect to a natural gas power plant that might get built by the end of the year in the event that one of the multiple construction firms involved . Said turbine is extremely expensive, featuring volatile pricing (for context, volatility fell in Q2 2025…to 69% annualized, meaning that if you had these prices across the entirety of a year you’d see swings of 69% up or down) and even more volatile environmental consequences, and is, while permitted for it (this will download the PDF of the permit), impractical and expensive to use long-term.
Analyst James van Geelen, founder of Citrini Research recently said on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast that these are “not the really good natural gas turbines” because the really good ones would take seven years to deliver due to a natural gas turbine shortage.
But th…

$Stargate Abilene does not have sufficient power to run at even half of its supposed IT load of 1.2GW, and at its present capacity - assuming that the gas turbines function at full power - can only hope to run 370MW to 460MW of IT load. I’ve seen article after article about the gas turbines and their use of fracked gas - a disgusting and wasteful act typical of OpenAI - but nobody appears to have asked “how much power does a 1.2GW data center require?” and then chased it with “how much power does Stargate Abilene have?” The answer is not enough, and the significance of said “not enough” is remarkable. Today, I’m going to tell you, at length, how impossible the future of generative AI is. Gigawatt data centers are a ridiculous pipe dream, one that runs face-first into the walls of reality. The world’s governments and media have been far too cavalier with the term “gigawatt,” casually breezing by the fact that Altman’s plans require 17 or more nuclear reactors’ worth of power, as if building power is quick and easy and cheap and just happens. I believe that many of you think that this is an issue of permitting - of simply throwing enough money at the problem - when we are in the midst of a shortage in the electrical grade steel and transformers required to expand America (and the world’s) power grid. I realize it’s easy to get blinded by the constant drumbeat of “gargoyle-like tycoon cabal builds 1 gigawatt data center” and feel that they will simply overwhelm the problem with money, but no, I’m afraid that isn’t the case at all, and all of this is so silly, so ridiculous, so cartoonishly bad that it threatens even the seemingly-infinite wealth of Elon Musk, with xAI burning over a billion dollars a month and planning to spend tens of billions of dollars building the Colossus 2 data center, dragging two billion dollars from SpaceX in his desperate quest to burn as much money as possible for no reason. This is the age of hubris - a time in which we are going to watc…$

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Hannah Nicklin @hannahnicklin.bsky.social · 2d

That's funny, the US and US pharmaceutical companies are currently trying to force the NHS to pay 25% more for drugs. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

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Hannah Nicklin @hannahnicklin.bsky.social · 3d

aftermath-shop.fourthwall.com/en-gbp/produ...

'Destroy AI' T-Shirt

Support human workers. Support human artists. Unisex shirt in a "natural" colorway. Art by Kim Hu, who rules.

aftermath-shop.fourthwall.com

Hannah Nicklin @hannahnicklin.bsky.social · 3d

Next time maybe :)

Hannah Nicklin @hannahnicklin.bsky.social · 3d

You’re in Lincoln! I’m from Lincoln! Would you like any recommendations?

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Hannah Nicklin @hannahnicklin.bsky.social · 3d

‘Giving children the vote’ actually came from an earlier series but I think I’ve probably changed my mind and/or learned the most from PPF out of all the podcasts I listen to. Delighted to be a subscriber.

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Hannah Nicklin @hannahnicklin.bsky.social · 3d

I’m getting a lot out of @ppfideas.bsky.social’s current series. I was already pretty convinced that we need proportional representation but now I think that should come with mandatory voting & lowering the voting age to 11. With a year of lessons to prep y6 pupils to vote. pca.st/episode/6143...

Fixing Democracy: Compulsory Voting

pca.st

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Hannah Nicklin @hannahnicklin.bsky.social · 4d

It's interesting to me that Danish media are digitally fluent enough to include asking 'will the social media ban for under 15s inlcude Roblox and Fortnite' - arguably social media. www.dr.dk/nyheder/indl...

Ros, men også tvivl: Hvilke sociale medier vil statsministeren gøre forbudt for børn?

Det giver god mening - men også nye dilemmaer - at regeringen vil forbyde sociale medier for børn under 15 år, siger Børns Vilkår.

www.dr.dk

Hannah Nicklin @hannahnicklin.bsky.social · 5d

Sorry for this. What a wonderful long life to have shared. Sending her peace, and you solace.

Hannah Nicklin @hannahnicklin.bsky.social · 6d

Aw thanks, buddy.

Reposted by Hannah Nicklin

Adam Bienkov @adambienkov.bsky.social · 6d

The Greens requested an interview on the Laura Kuenssberg Show with Zack Polanski when he was elected leader, but were denied, with a promise to interview him during Green conference instead.

This was then scrapped citing the Manchester synagogue attack. Polanski is both Jewish and from Manchester

BBC Laura Kuenssberg Show Accused of Anti-Green Bias After Cancelling Zack Polanski Interview

The new Green Party leader was the only major party leader not to have been granted a conference interview on the flagship BBC show

bylinetimes.com

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Hannah Nicklin @hannahnicklin.bsky.social · 12d

My fave radical left podcast has a patreon supporter stream called 'Left on Read' and they've gone through 4 of the books so far and honestly it sounds so much more fun than I imagined

Hannah Nicklin @hannahnicklin.bsky.social · 12d

Okay, but what if... I got really into (the) Master and Commander (books)

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 13d

It is now inevitable the AI bubble bursts. Deutsche Bank and Bain both have said that this era cannot last. Every single "vibe coding" or "power of AI" story perpetuates a myth that will savage our markets and hurt retail investors. It's going to be horrible.

www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-aga...

I Need You To Listen To Me
I do apologize for the length of this piece, but the significance of this bubble requires depth.

There is little demand, little real money, and little reason to continue, and the sheer lack of responsibility and willingness to kneel before the powerful fills me full of angry bile. I understand many journalists are not in a position where they can just write “this shit sounds stupid,” but we have entered a deeply stupid era, and by continuing to perpetuate the myth of AI, the media guarantees that retail investors and regular people’s 401Ks will suffer.

It is now inevitable that this bubble bursts. Deutsche Bank has said the AI boom is unsustainable outside of tech spending “remaining parabolic,” which it says “is highly unlikely,” and Bain Capital has said that $2 trillion in new revenue is needed to fund AI’s scaling, and even that math is completely fucked as it talks about “AI-related savings”:

Even if companies in the US shifted all of their on-premise IT budgets to cloud and reinvested the savings from applying AI in sales, marketing, customer support, and R&D into capital spending on new data centers, the amount would still fall short of the revenue needed to fund the full investment, as AI’s compute demand grows at more than twice the rate of Moore’s Law, Bain notes.
Even when stared in the face by a ridiculous idea — $2 trillion of new revenue in a global software market that’s expected to be around $817 billion in 2025 — Bain still oinks out some nonsense about the “savings from applying AI in sales, marketing, customer support and R&D,” yet another myth perpetuated I assume to placate the fucking morons sinking billions into this.

Every single “vibe coding is the future,” “the power of AI,” and “AI job loss” story written perpetuates a myth that will only lead to more regular people getting hurt when the bubble bursts. Every article written about OpenAI or NVIDIA or Oracle that doesn’t explicitly state that the money doesn’t…

I also believe that the way to stop this happening again is to have a thorough and well-sourced explanation of everything as it happens, ripping down the narratives as they’re spun and making it clear who benefits from them and how and why they’re choosing to do so. When things collapse, we need to be clear about how many times people chose to look the other way, or to find good faith ways to interpret bad faith announcements and leak.

So, how could we have seen this coming?

I don’t know. Did anybody try to fucking look?

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 13d

I need to be very explicit: there is not enough money in the world to fund OpenAI's $1 Trillion in commitments, and that's across the top 10 private equity firms, all US venture capital, and both Goldman and JPMorgan's direct lending funds. This is very bad.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-aga...

The World’s Private Credit and Venture Capital Cannot Afford OpenAI
Here’s some alarmism for you: the longer it takes for OpenAI to die, the more damage it will cause to the tech industry.

On Friday, when I put out my piece on OpenAI needing a trillion dollars, I asked analyst Gil Luria if the capital was there to build the 17 Gigawatts that OpenAI had allegedly planned to build.

He said the following:

No of course there isn't enough capital for all of this. Having said that, there is enough capital to do this for at least a little while longer.
That doesn’t sound good!

Anyway, as I discussed earlier, venture capital could run out in six quarters, with investor and researcher Jon Sakoda estimating that there will only be around $164 billion of dry powder (available capital) in US VC firms by the end of 2025.

In July, The French Tech Journal reported (using Pitchbook data) that global venture capital deal activity reached its lowest first-half total since 2018, with $139.4 billion in deal value in the first half of 2025, down from $183.4 billion in the first half of 2024, meaning that any further expansion or demands for venture capital from OpenAI will likely sap the dwindling funds available from other startups.

Things get worse when you narrow things to US venture capital. In a piece from April, EY reported that VC-backed investment in US companies hit $80 billion in Q1 2025, but “one $40 billion deal” accounted for half of the investment — OpenAI’s $40 billion deal of which only $10 billion has actually closed, and that didn’t happen until fucking June. Without the imaginary money from OpenAI, US venture would have declined by 36%.

The longer that OpenAI survives, the longer it will sap the remaining billions from the tech ecosystem, and I expect it to extend its tendrils to private credit too. The $325 billion it needs just to fulfil its NVIDIA contract, albeit over 4 years, is an egregious sum that I believe exceeds the available private capital in the …

Let’s get specific, and check out the top 10 private equity firms’ available capital!

Blackstone, as of writing this sentence, has about $39 billion available to invest. An article from the Wall Street Journal from April said it had $177 billion available, which means it’s approaching the point where they just don’t have the cash to issue.
KKR has, as of writing this sentence, has $55 billion available to invest.
Carlyle Group has, as of August 2025, has $89 billion available to invest.
Swedish PE firm EQT had around €50 billion as of July available to invest, or around $59 billion.
It’s not clear how much Thoma Bravo has, but this release suggests it’s recently raised $34.4 billion.
As of August, TPG had $63 billion available to invest.
As of March 2025, CVC Capital partners had around 40 billion euro ($47 billion) in available capital to invest.
It’s unclear how much HG Capital has available, but reports suggest it’s been trying to raise €24 billion (or $28.35 billion).
It’s unclear how much Hellman & Friedman have available to invest, but it raised a $24.4 billion fund last year.
It’s unclear how much Clayton, Dubilier & Rice have available to invest, but it raised a $26 billion fund in August 2023.
Insight Partners closed a $12.5 billion fund in January 2025. It is otherwise unclear how much they have to invest.
Assuming that all of this capital is currently available, the top 10 private equity firms in the world have around $477 billion of available capital.

We can, of course, include investment banks — Goldman Sachs had around $520 billion cash in hand available at the end of its last quarter, and JPMorgan over $1.7 trillion, but JP Morgan has only dedicated $50 billion in direct lending commitments as of February 2025, and while Goldman Sachs expanded its direct private credit lending by $15 billion back in June, that appears to be an extension of its “more than $20 billion” direct lending close from mid-2024.

Include both of those, and that brings us up …

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 13d

Newsletter: This is The Case Against Generative AI, a comprehensive analysis of a financial collapse built on myths I’ll dispel, the markets’ unhealthy obsession with NVIDIA's growth, and the fact that there is not enough money in the world to fund OpenAI.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-aga...

The Case Against Generative AI

Soundtrack: Queens of the Stone Age - First It Giveth Before we go any further: This is, for the third time this year, the longest newsletter I've ever written, weighing in somewhere around 18,500 wo...

www.wheresyoured.at

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Hannah Nicklin @hannahnicklin.bsky.social · 13d

Ooh ooh ooh have you read Parable of the Sower? That brought me back from a reading drought last year

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Hannah Nicklin @hannahnicklin.bsky.social · 14d

I’m the subject of this week’s “What’s on Your Bookshelf” column at @rockpapershotgun.bsky.social — they reached out when I was on a week off so got deep-reading me. Revolutions, Egyptian alt fantasy comics, citizen assemblies, Luddism and Stewart Lee abound www.rockpapershotgun.com/whats-on-you...

What's on your bookshelf: Saltsea Chronicles, Mutazione and Thronglets' Hannah Nicklin

Hannah Nicklin tells us about the books they love, have loved, and are hoping to love in the future.

www.rockpapershotgun.com

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Reposted by Hannah Nicklin

Farrukh @implausibleblog.bsky.social · 15d

Nish Kumar, "What is the Green Party's vision for how we redraw the economy of this country?"

Zack Polanski, "The first thing is to have a big conversation about public ownership"

"Nothing we need, and need to use, should be in private hands. All of our utilities should be nationalised"

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Hannah Nicklin @hannahnicklin.bsky.social · 16d

I did! Thank you!