Okay, this one was a disappointment. Not that bad but not good either. 3 out of 10. Having an ingenious timeline and a clever solution and an eccentric detective and a very video-gamey setup are all plusses in my book. The meta-stuff “let us admit we are characters in a novel and not make excuses” is tired now but...

In my lefty ancom bubble I’m sometimes seeing anti-meal replacemeent rhetoric, but I’m not on board with that. Some brands have a low climate impact per calorie. It’s so much better and more empathetic than the usual “carnivore” trends pushed by the fash. While I don’t necessarily recommend them (as always, be...

There’s only a decade between Lord of the Rings and Dune but the latter is way more post-modern. Not that LotR isn’t pomo, because it is, but Dune takes it a couple of notches further. It’s so wild to me that this book came out in 1965, a few years before the six days war and on the bleeding edge of LSD...

I’m writing this a few years before Bitcoin’s twentieth anniversary as one of humanity’s biggest mistakes. Bitcoin is three things: The ledger (perhaps useful) The tokens (artificial scarcity) The mining (an unprecedented environmental disaster making Chernobyl, Deepwater Horizon, or Exxon Valdez look like jokes by...

Klimatminister Romina Pourmokhtari (L) vill avskaffa ett av de mest omstridda klimatmålen—det så kallade transportmålet—och i stället införa ett annat mål. Hon dömer ut det nuvarande målet som orealistiskt. Pourmokhtari anser att det nuvarande målet »har brister och fokuserar väldigt mycket på vad som inte ska...

The other day, someone told me that “Discord is a good product”. And I’m grateful for that phrasing because it helps me explain why I’m having such a cow about Discord. Because it’s not a good product. The worst part about it is how mandatory it is. As an analogy, let’s take some soda… what’s a really gross one?...

In the seventies Frappé popularized an idea that vegetarians should combine protein sources, i.e. eating grains with beans, just like traditional food cultures have done for longer than recorded history, is a complete amino acid profile as opposed to just eating grains with more grains or eating beans with more...

There are situations where the word “NIMBY” applies. It’s short for “Not in my backyard”, like someone might think needle exchanges and refugee housing are great but don’t want them in their own neighborhoods (FWIW, I used to live in a neighborhood that had both and it was great). When something is good for everyone...

Let’s say a land wanted to make burglary illegal. They notice that a lot of people who do breaking and entering wear shoes when doing so. So they make wearing shoes illegal. That’s sort of how many EU laws are. I’m getting a li’l frustrated with how my particular headphones and DAC and app combo I can’t hear...

I don’t want to paint or write long-form fiction in the age of AI. This isn’t me going on strike or anything. It’s just a report from my soul-crushed inner landscape of not feeling like making art and not having felt like making art for the past few years. Doing everything by hand feels pointless and tedious like...

One unexpected game design lesson from Rebirth’s Ireland side for me is this: The game has random distribution of “Tower” powers and in a two player game, a random eight of the twelve goals will be public and a random two will be available as private goals and two won’t be in a game (in a four player game all twelve...

When I first got started with Magic I only had one deck, a huge pile of I dunno 120 cards or something (Revised and Fallen Empires), I’m not sure. There were enough lands in there to cover everything too. So my neighbor and I played the then–well-known “both players draw from the same deck” format for a while and it...