Originally Published June 20th, 2000 This is how you write a supplement. Why? Well, for starters, what makes a good supplement? First off, the book should be good enough that you want to buy it – but the underlying system should have been designed well enough that you don’t need to buy it. In other words, the supplement should live up to it’s name: It should supplement the gaming process, and not be an integrally necessary piece of it. Second, the book should contain a wealth of background…

Guy Adams (editor)RebellionMax goes worldwide!London's Maxwell Towers have long been under the control of Max - an all-seeing AI intent on punishing wrongdoers and wicked tenants by sending them to the Thirteenth Floor, where unspeakable horrors come to life. Now, Max's coding has been embedded in computer systems all over the world, and there is no escape from his nightmarish reign.Featuring thirteen brand-new stories by A. K. Benedict, Angela Slatter, Mason Cross, Una McCormack, Lavanya…

Hey there. Here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week: #1. Eight TLS certificates were compromised (3min) and the whole internet goes on alert. #2. AI has exploded the amount of code written. Now imagine how fast Claude and other AI companies do it. Here’s how code review looks at scale at Anthropic (14min) #3. Maybe you’re being “pushed” to use AI for productivity or speed, but it’s still OK to enjoy programming (4min) #4. Now Apple removed icons next to every menu entry (2min).…

Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe for free.I sat down with New_ Public to talk about building in the open, local news, the open social web, and more. I enjoyed the conversation very much; here it is.The News + AI Field ReportThe News + AI Field Report for 2022-2025, produced by Djordje Padejski in conjunction with ASU’s Knight Center for the Future of News, is a landmark…

I discovered Bear at the time I was righting my life to suit my most basic needs. Writing my thoughts about our lives was one of these basic needs. The van did/does/will allow me to get to feel places and people. Bear allows me to feel another kind of place, full with (mostly) people, and their thoughts (and sometimes slop, for it's now part if our lives and here to stay). The stuff I read makes me think and reflect about my own life and others' – but never about the author's life. I don't know…

I do agree. Absolutely.I agree that we move around this great big world and we travel in circles. I know it. I know this both deeply and intimately.I know there is a trick to this, somewhere.And me?Yes.You are right. You have always been right about me. I completely agree with this idea, and I further believe that we can go around the world a thousand times, just to come back to the beginning. Even kids grow old and come back to their birthplace in one way or another.Young love is always young…

23 Dapper | INDEX | 25 Fracture Self-imposed constraint: Use the letters of the prompt word inside a 2-inch square to illustrate its meaning. Hongdian Black Forest fountain pen, EF, black ink on 120 gsm paper.

Much like the Killa Kan I made a bit ago, I got an idea in my head to make an ork food truck based on this comic. I have exactly zero need for an ork food truck. Or an ork trukk of any kind... and yet the idea would not let me alone. And so, I got to work. I wanted to keep it simple and relatively small, and so I based the body of the truck on the sprue of an ork tire. I used graph paper to make sure that it would be about the right scale for Warhammer or Space Gits or Stargrave minis (no…

Dinosaurs were not all scaly giants with fearsome teeth and thunderous footsteps. Some were small, beautifully feathered creatures with striped tails, delicate plumage and more in common with the birds visiting our gardens than the monsters of Hollywood.One remarkable fossil discovery from northeastern China helped change how we picture these ancient animals. Meet Sinosauropteryx prima, a little

Starting new job, reading more British mysteries, playing video games, listening to new music. I've had my first two training shifts for the new job. Day shifts are definitely more boring than nights. And there are still a lot of questions I don't know the answer to. But it's a chill atmosphere and low stress and the managers have been good to me so far. I wouldn't say I'm enjoying it as much as Previous Job, but also I'm already sliding into winter malaise and general discontent and that won't…

Well, I'm way past the 30 day mark, and I only actually made it to the 9 day mark. What a way to show the world how completely incompetent I am at finishing things. So here's what happened: I was waiting until the last second each day to both write and write up my blog post, meaning I wasn't starting until bedtime, and which means I was staying up far too late, which means I was exhausted by the time I hit day 10. The problem is, I feel the most creative after dark, which is fine when I don't…

I always liked the idea of fitting as much story into as few words as possible, so let's see if BAKERS can scare us in, say, 10 words or less. Eh?BEGIN. "You know, most of that is technically edible." (It's the ones that are true that are the most terrifying.) "What misspellings?" "Everyone can relax, I fixed it!" "That'll be $65.99." And perhaps the most frightening thing of all to hear from a baker:"Hey, can I borrow your shoe?" (Yes it's a real shoe. Because of course it is.) Thanks to…

(Kimberly (she/her) took the express train down the fountain pen/stationery rabbit hole and doesn't want to be rescued. She can be found on Instagram @allthehobbies because there really are many, many hobbies!.) By the time I figured out that I could make it to the 2nd BunguLA Stationery Expo, the tickets for Friday and Saturday had already sold out, but Sunday tickets were still available. I booked my plane tickets and pounced on the opportunity to go on Sunday morning with my SoCal shopping…

I needed a keyboard. I stood at my reserved desk on the 7th floor of Salesforce’s tower in Vancouver around 9am. There were a pair of monitors mounted to the desk, a power strip, and a chair. Even a mouse. But no keyboard.The office was mostly empty, with a few people taking calls in phone booths. The Salesforce mascots leered vacantly from omnipresent wall murals. “TechForce is on the 5th floor,” the receptionist told me from behind her face mask when I asked where I could get a keyboard for…

Since learning about the effects of high CO2 concentration on attention and cognitive performance—especially at levels much higher than 2000ppm—I've started monitoring CO2 and other air quality indicators in my house, at my studio, and even on the road. I have a few other air quality monitors I'll be covering in the future, but today I wanted to focus on one I only heard about in the comments on a recent video tearing down a cheap no-name 'Air Quality Detector' from Amazon.

2026-10-23Hello! Short article today.This is a similar photo to the historic market I photographed in Lancaster County, and in a far-too-easy spot-the-difference game, this one in New York City is more modern in graphical design and architecture. The lit roof makes it look grand and city-like, separate from the farmer/factory ambience of Lancaster County.I got up to the upper floor outlook where the tables for sitting and eating were. It was then that I realized I lost my storage card, and I…

Small Sip Seven This is intentional rather than confessional, but I notice how all my post titles that have the word 'bear' in them get loads more views than others... They have EVEN warranted getting on the discovery feed. This has been alluded to in the past by other bloggers, but now my statistics prove it. I'm not complaining. We all love Herman and his blogging platform! And it's natural - indeed part of the creative urge - to share... But perhaps there's just been a wee tendency here to…

Here’s what’s happening in the thriving tech scene in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, October 26 through Sunday, November 1! This list includes both in-person and online events. Note that each item in the list includes: When the event will take place What the event is Where the event will take place Who is holding the event This week’s events Monday, October 26 Tuesday, October 27 Wednesday, October 28 Thursday, October 29 Friday, October 30 Saturday, October 31 Sunday,…

Life Godot Darek didn’t come the next day. Or either of the days in the week he said he would. But on Sunday he finally made it. He claims to have fixed the leak, but we now have two new plumbing-related issues that he’s suggesting are coincidental. Seems unlikely! I think what’s going to happen is we’ll come to the end of the three month warranty period for the work and then get a proper plumber in. Perhaps we should just be doing that now, but Darek’s so charming it’s hard to resist getting…

Life Godot Darek didn’t come the next day. Or either of the days in the week he said he would. But on Sunday he finally made it. He claims to have fixed the leak, but we now have two new plumbing-related issues that he’s suggesting are coincidental. Seems unlikely! I think what’s going to happen is we’ll come to the end of the three month warranty period for the work and then get a proper plumber in. Perhaps we should just be doing that now, but Darek’s so charming it’s hard to resist getting…

Allison Pottern Under Review:Fold Catastrophes. Peter Watts. Tachyon, September 2026. A friend recently invited me to join a reading and discussion group on the nature of consciousness. As a science fiction author and reader, it feels especially relevant to have a deeper understanding of the implications of consciousness and intelligence. With large-language models and AI generation engines creating believable simulacra of people, stories, and conversations, it seems just a short step to…

If you ask a group of people a philosophical question or present them with a challenging thought experiment, it’s often the case that they will express very different views about it. We quite naturally interpret this as different people having different intuitions. But is that what’s going on? In “Conflicting Intuitions,” published earlier this year, Joshua Knobe (Yale) takes up this question. Having imagined posing a question about free will to a group of students who express disagreement over…

Down The Road Introduction Well, I am finally getting back to writing. My excursion into refreshing the 435+ articles on The CerebralRift has concluded. But, I promised that I would let my obsession with blogging and our websites go. So I’m not going into any of the details about the journey here. (I may write about in on The CerebralRift over the weekend though.) Tonight, for the first time in over a month, I sat down and started working on a new article for this site. Alas, I wasn’t able to…

The IndieWeb Carnival topic this month ‘pages’ is fascinating. Unfortunately for me, nearly everything I wanted to say, others have said better: Steve wrote about infiniteness and free-form writing, Nadja wrote about the page as a historic object, JTR digitised the page and Fran brought on the endgame turning her webpage into a palimpsest. I had all but decided not to write anything this month because there was nothing I had to say, until I realised, just this morning, that nobody had talked…

Over the winter holidays, Stephen and Holly spent some quality time in the land I call home. Tokyo I give instructions to the lovebirds on how to reach my apartment from the airport. I must not be very sneaky, though, because when I show up at the airport to surprise greet them, they are not shook. They are thrilled to see me! But not shook. I wear a Phoenix Suns tank courtesy of my brother (at the time) in Chicago, to represent AZ. In the summer, showing shoulders is already weird, but in…

Manuel Moreale writing in Thinking about privacy and webmentions: This is the web after all, and the web is all about linking pages. So unless I’m completely misunderstanding this document, the…

A Friday Hodgepodge1. "The Midterm Elections: Trump's Abettors Have to Be Removed," by Peter Schwartz (Peter Schwartz):Trump did not like how the 2020 election turned out, and tried to forcibly nullify it. What will he do about the next election whose results he does not like? He has said that his biggest regret about the 2020 election is his failure to send the National Guard to seize the voting machines. Will he rectify that failure in response to the upcoming midterm elections? Or the 2028…

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wanted a 30-inch floor globe used by Dwight Eisenhower during World War II moved to his office. Rather than wait for specialist movers, his staffers tried to move it themselves,… More

Cover version of the month #124Beats International cover The S.O.S. BandLove is a game of chancesSo I'll take my chance with youEarlier this year I started a new night / club/ event / community called Uddingston Vinyl Lovers Club (find us on Facebook/Insta). The first night was held at The Rowantree Inn on a Saturday back in May, and then returned for a Sunday Social, afternoon into evening in August. September saw an incredible night of music and dancing in the Cricket Club with Gerard Love…

In the previous part, I took a wander around Sim Lim Square, the premier IT mall in Singapore which focuses mostly on electronics and computers. It was a slight disappointment to see how many units were vacant and closed, but that’s not all, because there’s another nearby destination – Sim Lim Tower (SLT) which pre-dates SLS and has more of an electronic components focus. History & Information What follows is an abridged summary of Wikipedia’s article on Sim Lim Tower as it seems the is no…