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Weekly cleaning and home improvement series. I'm back into making music and playing the piano. I just played a few covers from Metronomy using one loop from my Pocket Operator drum machine. It was fun. But I can't play piano all day (and my landlord is probably annoyed as his business is directly downstairs). Today I wanted to take a break from this weekly cleaning series... but I said hell no! We're doing this. Weekly cleanToday I'm focusing on the hallway, specifically...
Magical Kitties Save the Day, the game I co-designed with creator Matthew Hanson and Michelle Nephew, is being placed under an open license by Atlas Games! Atlas asked me back to answer some questions about Magical Kitties, the open license, and what my plans are for the future. Check out the full interview!
Hey, Bear. The deployment is scheduled and will happen soon. So I had about 17teen days to rest after 28 days of the previous deployment, which was total hell. Well, it could have been more tbh, considering we have quite a few people resting atm. Whelp, w/e. I feel somewhat rested last week. After a guy brought me to the "local sea". We had a swim session and it added me some energy. I did code a little bit, could be more honestly, but first 10 days I had zero energy. I...
Fortunately, not all of these casualties have been fatalities. The VA will no doubt resist treating those that are just maimings as "service-related" — rather unusually, with substantial justification. The fatality involves the bafflingly (even though wilfully) ignorant Sen Graham. His ignorance extended far, far beyond the usual-for-politicians "I'll viciously attack members of a different
How many things can one do in a round, and how does it change the feel of the game? I am playing OD&D this week, running through Thracia with the amazing d4 hp magic-user, and I love being able to attack twice from range (if I don’t move). The OD&D rules for actions, fresh from wargaming, are odd and a touch fiddly. If we look at the action economy of a few different games, trad games tend to have more actions per round, and OSR games have fewer actions (for B/X based...
Enola Holmes 3 (2026) • View trailerFour stars (out of five); rated PG-13, for violence and dramatic intensityAvailable via: NetflixBy Derrick BangThis series continues to delight on all levels. Director Philip Barantini, new to the franchise, blends its many diverse elements with stylish élan. He’s rewarded, in this third entry, with fine performances from everybody in the cast: most notably star and co-producer Millie Bobby Brown, the driving force behind these stylish...
I’m endlessly confounded (as a user) and fascinated (as a designer) when it comes the shortcut conventions in Google’s professional web apps. They seem… bad, but bad in a strange, inexplicable, enthralling way. Previously, we encountered this: The lessons there were, primarily: don’t… do this, and also maybe don’t show it like this. Today’s entrant, from Google Drive, offers a different lesson: Immediately, I have so many questions. Why a sequenced shortcut instead of...
Still Surfing #5¶ Notes, links, and other things I'd like to share. Could do it through my micro-blog, but that's a bit a nicer format, isn't it? 🎧 Hidden Brain – The Cowboy Philosopher¶ A podcast I enjoyed for so many reasons! It's about archiving and cataloging music, American Folk music to specific. It's about a true American archetype, the conman, huckster, crook and genius. And it contains a link to the Internet Archive, one of my favorite URLs on the internet. This...
It’s been a little over two months since I wrote about wanting to go a little more analogue with parts of my workflow. I bought pens. I bought a notebook. Now what? Have they been collecting dust in a drawer somewhere or have I actually been using them?My current notebook is definitely not dusty, but I also haven’t been using it as much as I would like. So far its been a bit of a on and off relationship. During the periods when I do get into the groove of using it I’m...
Link: Trump dismantled a federal climate website. These women rebuilt it., by Jenae Barnes at The 19thThis shouldn’t have been necessary, but is still wonderful to see. Climate.gov had been the go-to resource for climate data, but it went offline when the Trump Administration radically cut NOAA’s funding. At that point:“[Rebecca] Lindsey joined forces with former NOAA employees Anna Eshelman, and Mary Lindsey, her older sister, to become the core team behind the...
It’s no secret that the Hollywood Comet loves musicals. In 2010, I revealed I had seen 400 movie musicals over the course of eight years. Now that number is over 600. To celebrate and share this musical love, here is … Continue reading →
This past weekend I got to run Tom Mecredy's He Ain't Gonna Jump No More for a group of friends. HAGJNM is "tournament module" (or "capsule game") in which players control paratrooper squads during D-day. Players have 21 hours to complete as many objectives as possible before the main landing force arrives, after which they are scored according to a set of criteria. What I Did to PrepThe module requires chewing. Although the rules for combat and task resolution are very...
Back in Nottingham.Home of Castle Rock, stone lions guarding the old council house, a higher proportion than usual of folks in heavy metal t-shirts, and plenty of houses on the market vacated by ex-Premier League managers.On the agenda for the day were a few 2026 Good Beer Guide pubs that I've missed previously, a Spoons I've not been to before, looking weird taking pictures of football stickers on lamp posts and a bit of live music in the evening.Right...let's head up to...
More links from about the internet - for still more, check out the huge set from the previous list found here or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request. AMONG CATS AND BOOKS shares rootring months later Goblin Archives, Unenthuser & Emo Sludge host LIMINAL HORROR SUMMER JAM 2026 Weeping Stag gives us Learning to Draw and Not Feeling Like Crap About It Troy Press writes...
you make a million decisions in the course of your life, and you'll forget most of them. as i set out to write this, at 4am, it feels very important. that's why i've made the decision to write it. it feels important because it is 4am, because i am a dramatic and idealisitic poet at heart, and because i've been reading a fantasy book about gods and faith and the end of the world, so everything feels a bit portentious. did i decide to be awake at 4am, reading? not really....
From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 118-119: On March 18, 2014, Vladimir Putin delivered one of the most consequential speeches of his career. Addressing a joint session of the lower and upper houses of the Russian parliament—the deputies of the State Duma and the members of the Federation Council, joined by regional leaders and representatives of Kremlin-controlled civic organizations—Putin asked the...
Working with lots of changes in parallel on git can be painful. You end up juggling branches and commits, and running scary rebase -i commands that can leave your tree in a half-broken state if you so much as sneeze. jj, an alternative to git, gets discussed a lot these days (1, 2, 3, 4) and is often pitched as a solution. While I’m very sold on the problems jj is trying to solve, the way it solves them hasn’t quite hit home with me. Every 3 months, for the last 1.5 years,...
I love my ereader. It's lightweight, fits in a pocket, and lets me read on a more comfortable (non-AI-slop) platform than my phone, laptop, or 3ds. It's neither perfect nor the same as a book, but it does the job. I run KOReader on a jailbroken Kindle Paperwhite 7. With the exception of hardware, it's moreso KOReader than kindle. The only time I am in the kindle-interface is when I'm importing books as I prefer to do that over cable rather than wirelessly. I also don't...
This comic was originally funded by members of my Patreon, to whom I am endlessly grateful. If you like it and want to see more, why not become a member yourself? The post Greebo Chapter 5: The Dark Star appeared first on Other Strangeness — merritt k.
I typically tell people my life doesn’t have many high highs or low lows. That my life is one smooth curvature of “alright”-ness. Today was an exception. The day started off very well. It was the annual Israeli game industry convention, and I got to meet many people I already knew, and many new faces. I met some people I only knew online, I got to try out a lot of cool new games, I got to beg several devs to compile their games for linux, the food was good, there was some...
Sharing the video of the talk I gave at GraphQL Conf. 2026 about the fundamentals underlying GraphQL and React Server Components and they ways in which they compete and compose
I will argue that generating documentation with AI is useful, specifically the kind that lives as dedicated documentation files in folders alongside the code, and specifically for business logic and architecture. My thesis is that this documentation is valuable because it serves humans and AI agents…
How to make pork belly burnt endsEnjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
From my phone, I noticed that my website was displaying footnote backlink glyphs as emoji in my RSS reader. It had not always been this way. I opened the same page from a desktop browser and saw what I expected to see: a text-like pictograph, in my article body’s font face. No emoji to be found. I checked the HTML document source: <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink"> ↩ </a> The RSS feed XML contained the same. So, that can be presented as...
Another quick update to Wasat, my Gemini Protocol client library for Python. With v0.5.0 I've added a method for getting the list of currently-trusted hosts, and also added a public property to the client class for getting access to the trust store object. Generally these shouldn't be required, shouldn't be something you'd normally want to work with; I've added them because I thought it might be another useful way of populating the suggested completions facility in the...