There has been some discourse about hirelings. I felt this discussion leaned more towards "NPCs you recruit to fight alongside you" - i.e. men-at-arms (hirelings) or henchman (different than hirelings). I've already written about henchman in AD&D (and assassins and spies, kind of, cartographers, briefly, and sages - all of whom are "expert" hirelings), so I thought I'd write something about all the other hirelings one can hire in AD&D.Hirelings are different than henchmen. Henchmen are…

Abandoned Barn, Farmersville TX. A friend left the company today, and we had one of those hideous team calls where normal people express sadness. I felt nothing. I felt something two weeks ago, when he told me he was leaving, but this morning, on a global video conference? Nada. What I do in situations like this is make jokes. I said, “Enough about you. What about me? Who am I going to trade crude jokes with in private chat during staff meetings now?” I’m not passionate about my career, so it’s…

They are simple: For Christ’s sake, don’t vote for a single fucking Republican. I don’t have to tell you why, you know why already, but I’ll go ahead and say it: Because the Republican party has a corrupt doddering fascist grifter at its head, who cares far more about lining his pocket than he ever did about the state of the nation, and he’s remade the entire political organization into his image. On his watch and with his approval we’ve gotten into a war we had no plan for, the cost of gas and…

I’m happy to announce I’ve released a new set of free wallpapers you can use on your computer. Please go to my Free Desktop Wallpaper page to download any or all of them. You can see the new images below:I love putting my images up on my computer as wallpapers as a way to always have them in view where I can study and enjoy them. I also like making them available so others can enjoy them as well.These are some of my favorite images that I feel work nicely as wallpapers. They are sized with an…

Alexis de Tocqueville came from France and traveled across the United States in 1831, and several years later published his reflections about Americans and America in the classic Democracy in America. In volume 2, published in 1840, he titled Chapter 13, “Why the Americans Appear So Restless Amid Their Well-Being.” In the chapter, he meditates on why the Americans, many of whom seem so very well-off by the French standards of the time, nonetheless often seem so restless and melancholy. He…

Ben Green has a nice clean writeup of the argument that there are no Siegel zeroes, found in a big OpenAI experiment a few weeks ago. Green’s writeup is itself a product of iterated back-and-forth with another OpenAI model. But it reveals something quite nice; that at the heart of the proof is the good old determinant method of Bombieri-Pila and Heath-Brown! (Except it crucially uses multiple primes at once, so I ought to mention Salberger and Walsh too, and probably some other people.) The…

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. You know the move. You've got a question nobody's SEO farm can answer honestly — which budget tent survives actual rain, whether that weird noise your car makes is expensive, if anyone else's router does the thing yours does — so you type it into a search bar and add one word at the end. Reddit. That one word has been the internet's quiet workaround for years. Skip the listicles, skip the affiliate links, go find the thread where twelve…

Noah C. Lekas - Flowers of Perennial DissentAn uncommonly successful blend of music and poetry, Flowers of Perennial Dissent features Colorado-based writer/musician Noah C. Lekas working with a host of collaborators who provide brilliant sonic backdrops for his spoken word pieces. You’ll know at least a few of these collaborators — Charlie Parr, James Jackson Toth, Ethan Miller, Luther Dickinson and Anthony Pirog all lend a hand with sounds that range from abstract ambient to rambling folk and…

Skreeeooooonk.

The Dance of Death — a very comprehensive old website on this theme in mediæval and early modern European art Pirating the Pirates, or, on the underground of film preservation To grieve, or not to grieve?: Kevin Buzzard on the new era of mathematics Try your own hand at redrawing Europe at the Congress of Berlin! I love the fuckass jaunty tune it plays at the start. A strangely relaxing watercolour playground Some winning entries in this year’s premier microscopic-photography competition…

Thank you for the years of your art. It's given me joy for most of my life, and the words of wisdom you acted out always hit home.

“Mendosa fights for LGBTQ, Ciscomani fights for YOU”. It’s such fun being used as political fodder in recent U.S. elections. I consider myself just one of the letters in the ever changing list of abbreviations labeling people. I have thoughts around the labeling and the list of letters, but I’ll save that screed for a time when my blood pressure is lower. For now, hearing these last minute campaign ads every 10 minutes on television and sprinkled throughout every social media interaction really…

Lex Friedman: “We noticed multiple devices using this subscription,” The New York Times tells me. “I notice I own more than one device, you insane app,” I scream into the void. First of all, let me point out that even if this policy were working as intended, it is batshit crazy. Imagine if I subscribed to the legacy paper edition (gross; newsprint is disgusting). The New York Times wouldn’t charge me extra for handing the paper to my spouse or kid to read an article. But even if we think this…

Last Friday, Reddit had its worst day since its IPO, with a drop of almost 30%1. It didn’t matter that they beat their third-quarter estimates; what mattered most was a weak Q4 forecast and the quote from Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, “Our search referral traffic was down meaningfully in Q3, with the decline accelerating later in the quarter.” He also wrote, “During October, we have seen that search traffic has dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week.” There’s no baseline to…

This advise and opinions are based on my experience. Yours may differ, but I hope you find it valuable nonetheless. Working with agents You will be tempted to throw one or two sentences at an agent and say "go!". That's what I'd call "ai slop". It may work if you don't care about what you're building, but at the very least; you should be deciding your requirements and taking the lead of the project. The outcome depends greatly on how rich (not big) the agent context is when it is working. What…

Lockfiles might be familiar to you if you’ve ever worked with package managers like npm or Yarn (for the JavaScript ecosystem) or Composer (for the PHP ecosystem). A lockfile, as the name suggests, is a data file generated by these package managers that “locks in” or, in other words, records exact dependency versions, cryptographic hashes, or resource-access states. And since lockfiles pin the exact versions and transitive dependencies of libraries, it guarantees that every developer or CI/CD…

Eddie WeldonAlso issued as the Panting Panthera.k.a. “Mr. D.J. USA,” and the “Shooting Star of North America”Cooler Weather(Is A-Comin')E. Weldon, Airlok Music (BMI)Produced by Robert TulakMarly Records 105-a1960The tiny obscure Marly label was from the West Coast Eddie Weldon* * *The following information is from a PowerPoint document found some years ago but now deleted.DIGRESSION: REST IN PEACE? o Clair E. Weldon—a.k.a. “Eddie Weldon,” “Mr. D.J. USA,” the “Panting Panther,” and the “Shooting…

I’ve been loving quxnet, a new community forum with old school web goals, and modern affordances. The Modded Bear blog says it well. Something I appreciate about quxnet’s design is that it all feels very intentional. There’s no push or email notifications by design. It encourages you to build, participate, and be creative. It’s all very refreshing. Come check it out if that sounds interesting.

Bill is on this morning's docket "to be spoken to" and it's listed as a video appearance, which means it'll be brief, and there is a 0% chance that he'll be released today... I would like to believe that there's a 0% chance of him being released on any day prior to his sentencing, mostly because I believe there is a 100% chance he'll run and/or hide again if he has the opportunity, but I'm not that optimistic. His ongoing bail conditions (set after his first arrest in 2024, and expanded earlier…

One thing I keep noticing around Oxford is how much academic culture is about building consensus on how to name things, rather than actually talking about the things themselves. Events become status games: establishing who has authority, who gets referenced, who belongs in the #mainstreaming hierarchy around whatever subject is being discussed. There is plenty of time spent establishing credibility, positioning and agreeing on language, but remarkably little time spent getting to grips with the…

A haiku Source

I have a few friends who are religious, that is, who take their commitment to their religious teachings seriously. One is studying for lay ministry. In response to the entrance committee’s question about when she “heard her calling,” she said that she didn’t “hear a calling,” but that when she asked her god what she should do, the answer was always “Help,” and she did: the hungry, the dying. One friend told me he strived “to be the face and hands of Jesus in the world.” He assists immigrants,…

I remember in high school when I was reading Edgar Rice Burroughs that one of the books I read was Beyond the Farthest Star (or, BtFS). What I found most intriguing about it was that Burroughs had spent time building up a whole planetary system for adventures, the Omos system, which had 11 worlds all […]

As mentioned back in August, we are selling our Tiffin motorhome. See that post for the background.We originally consigned the coach with Poulsbo RV, as the local Tiffin dealer, but they seemed to have made minimal effort to sell it, and ghosted us when we asked for status reports. So after the 90-day consignment period expired without it selling, we moved it to a different dealer that seemed more interested.Our coach is now for sale at Fife RV Center. Check out their listing if you're…

Dan Ayoub will take the helm as President at Wizards of the Coast as they get ready to release Star Trek, the last Magic Set of 2026. The post Wizards Names New President, Star Trek Fully Revealed, and Andrea Mengucci wins Vintage Championship appeared first on Hipsters of the Coast.

Hi. It's been a while. I'm trying to come back to blogging. It's been an absolutely crazy year between work and school and I just...had such trouble getting on a laptop at the end of the day. Not sure how to reinvigorate the want, though.

GALACTUS FANTASTIC FOUR (TOY BIZ) “Feared throughout the cosmos, the nearly omnipotent Galactus must consume the life energies of entire planets to satisfy his burning hunger! Only the herculean efforts of the Fantastic Four and Galactus’s former herald, the Silver Surfer, have prevented the world-devourer from making a meal of the Earth! But, should he return, the future of all mankind will once again be in doubt!” Just before my winter hiatus last December, I wrapped up my reviews of the all…

November 2, 1983 was the date Mary Winchester was killed in a fire in her home caused by a demon. Thus, the events of the series Supernatural were set into motion. The series ran on The WB and then The CW for 15 seasons and 327 episodes. It followed the exploits of "hunters" Sam and Dean Winchester and their circle of family and friends as they traveled the highways of the United States hunting monsters. Or as the series put it, "Saving people, hunting things, the family business."The formula…

Here is the latest selection of indie games I (Josh Bycer) covered on Game-Wisdom:

I said yesterday that I was going to talk about the writings of Ælfric of Eynsham, and I will, but I want to explain the term Euhemerism first. Euhemerism is an an attempt to shed light on mythology by interpreting it as springing from actual historical events. Or, in the words of an American historian, it is "the taking of a cosmic god and placing him at a definite point in history as an actual person who was later deified." It assumes that real events became exaggerated and fictionalized in…