I’ve used a bracket system for combat opponents in my home campaign for a while now. It’s been useful to pull stats and moves out of my butt without having to design monsters ahead of time, but sometimes it’s still a bit painful—I won’t extend the metaphor further than it has to go. I don’t like having to refer to the table in my head, and I imagine others wouldn’t like to refer to the table in the book either. The general problem of D&D combat is that ape together strong: many smaller…

AI content is too perfect… and soulless. Em dashes were a clear giveaway of AI-generated content. But you can instruct your LLM of choice not to use them and still sound robotic. It’s. Not. That. It’s. This. Beep… Beep… Maybe typos and imperfect sentences are a sign of human-written content. To show there was a human behind my words, I stopped using AI to proof-read my writing. You can instruct your LLM to add typos too. Apart from personal stories and an interesting life, brevity is maybe the…

“Wall Street sheds $3.2tn as Democratic midterm sweep triggers brutal AI rout”: The Democrats’ win in Congress was “a horrible day for America”, said a US portfolio manager with large positions in tech companies including Anthropic. A: Gobsmackingly idiotic. Q: Which two words best describe 2020s finance?

Wie lange hält ein Handy? Heute hält es oft so lange, wie der Hersteller es unterstützt. Das sind drei, fünf oder auch sechs Jahre. Vielleicht will ich zwischendurch den Akku tauschen. Danach kann ich das Ding weiter benutzen. Das war nicht immer so. Beim Motorola Milestone, dem Mühlstein, oder beim HTC Desire vergingen gefühlt sechs bis neun Monate, bis das nächste Gerät so viel besser war, dass ich das alte kaum noch haben wollte. Der Mühlstein kam 2009, das Desire 2010. Das iPhone hatte die…

To hold my own on a broken shore, where the blue waters meet the blue sky on a line I can't reach. While behind me, outside doubts strafe the hillsides: ending lines, mines and outpourings. Lately, I have taken to carrying a barometer so that I might know about these cold winds so that I might grind them into butterflies.

“Please, easy on the goblins.” FROM: modernerd Hacker News Source In these days of wrangling hordes of agents and sessions and taming the flood of changes, I’m thinking more like a techpriest.

Link: Creating a New Internet Bargain to Preserve Fair Use and Protect the Commons, by Lisa Macpherson and Anna Tumadóttir in Tech Policy PressThis should be required reading for everyone in news, but also anyone who cares about a healthy knowledge commons:Two of the most important organizations advocating for a healthy information economy, Public Knowledge and Creative Commons, have produced an important document that describes the threats and some potential solutions.I particularly…

funny how it always comes back to this i like the sense of control, i like the rules and clear expectations, i like the incentive my most recent relapse happened after i overate one night - because that's all it takes apparently. i went back and forth with myself and eventually gave in and purged it all away. that feeling is so horribly comforting purging is a line i promised myself i would never cross again after previous health complications so since then i've been good and kept all of my…

…is an essay I wrote in 2020 about font fallback and all these mysterious “missing character” characters like �. If you are curious, too, you might find it interesting! It was fun researching this, and I ended up going in unexpected directions, including emoji and “Unicode fonts.” The essay pairs nicely with text.makeup, as that’s the tool that can help you investigate a suspicious string to see what exactly happened. (The writing is on Figma’s blog, but it doesn’t talk about Figma-specific…

Luis Natera asks:Can you share your writing playlist? I'm always looking for good music to have in the background and don't distract me that much from writing and thinking.I've been hoping someone would ask me about this.The overly literal answer is: I don't have one consistent writing playlist. I use Spotify and am generally pretty happy with what I get from its algorithmic recommendations, so I'm usually listening to something different every day. Sometimes I will listen to my "liked" songs…

A short walk away from Hatsudai station is Murrma Coffee Stop, a tiny roaster and coffee spot. The best thing about Murrma is that the prices are really cheap for coffee in Tokyo! Both their pour-overs and espressos only cost 480 yen. The other cool thing is that the name of their store - Murrma - comes from an Aboriginal Australian word meaning “wade through shallow water using your feet to search for something”. Although the owner chose the name just cos he liked the sound of it, later on he…

I finished Keith Rosson’s Crone today. Excellent book; a solid 4.25 stars. My rating criteria? Vibes. It did what it said on the tin, and that’s a welcome change from the shit I’ve been forcing myself to read lately. From the author himself on Goodreads: It's a crime novel. It's a witch book. It's a crime/witch book. Thanks for reading. Fucking spot on, Keith. I appreciated that the plot was coherent without being paint-by-numbers. Expectations were subverted. Plenty of times, I stopped and…

Twin Peaks went on a brief hiatus in mid-February 1991 following a significant decline in ratings. Thanks to a dedicated fan base and a coordinated letter writing campaign, ABC Television brought the show back for its final six episodes beginning March 28 that year. But the ratings continued declining so the network pulled the show... The post Twin Peaks Publicity – Windom Earle and Annie Blackburne appeared first on TWIN PEAKS BLOG.

Discord is finally giving up on Electron, the cross-platform framework that lets developers build desktop apps using web technologies. Electron web apps are notoriously heavy on system resources, and Discord is now moving its desktop app fully to Rust — a modern programming language designed for speed and memory safety. Electron was a solution when developer time was the resource bottleneck and you wanted to leverage that as much as possible. Rust + native UI elements are an interesting…

In 2023, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) started to develop efforts towards defining open source AI. As an academic working on “AI” with an interest in claims of openness, I followed these developments with interest. In our own work on openness and transparency, me and Andreas Liesenfeld had documented the growth in nominally “open” large language models (‘Opening up ChatGPT‘, CUI 2023), built the first systematic evidence-based AI openness index, and documented clear evidence of open-washing…

Timeless and true, Fiddler on the Roof remains one the world’s most beloved musicals and this deliberately pared back staging allows the musical itself to truly shine. Opening at the crest of the Golden Age, 1964 Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof won nine Tony Awards (including Best Musical) and was at one time the long running musical in Broadway history. Winner of the 2025 Olivier Award for Best Revival of a Musical, this unique production of Fiddler on the Roof originated at the Open Air…

If you’re looking for a big movie with big themes and epic sweep, Ramayana: Rise of a Legend should fill the bill. Loaded with plot twists, spectacle, and characters, Ramayana has a simple spine that pits good against evil and operates on the cosmic mythic levels. What? You wanted something bigger? I’ll offer as brief a synopsis as possible. Before Ram (Ranbir Kapoor), the seventh incarnation of Lord Vishnu, can take over the kingdom of Ayodhya, he's forced into a 14-year exile with his wife…

Read The Elevator Café now!What's your go-to morning beverage?Yes, it’s coffee. I have a bit of a black coffee addiction. I drink maybe 5-8 24 oz. iced coffees a day, and an occasional hot coffee to help me calm down before bed. This is not remotely a joke. How refined is your taste for coffee?I own at least a dozen methods of brewing coffee. I have my drip machine, two French presses, two cold brewers, two sizes of Bialetti moka pots, two percolators, an aeropress, a chemex, a Turkish coffee…

Order #135 is dated 2 or 3 Dec. 1784 [*] and is signed by Adam Smith (top signature), Basil Cochrane (middle), and David Reid (bottom). Like the other orders in my sample, this order is addressed to the Principal Officers (Collector and Comptroller) at the Port of Inverness and involves a routine accounting matter: “Having received your Letter of the 27th instant, inclosing an Account of Disbursements, amounting to One Pound fifteen Shillings & Fourpence [£1 15s. 4d.], by David Anderson…

These tendon glide exercises fucking ACHE. But, my hand doesn't reek of splint anymore. And I can play shmups and wash dishes again. And yesterday I ran to the tanks and back and it was glorious. And the plastic bag isn't invited to showers anymore. The one finger and its base are still somewhat swollen, but the swelling in the rest of the hand isn't super noticeable at this point. There's still some (mostly yellow) discoloration throughout the hand from all that hematoma. comments

You are invited to the book launch and exhibition opening for WOMEN AT WORK on Thursday 19th November from 6:30pm at Four Corners Gallery, 121 Roman Rd, E2 0QN (a five minute walk from Bethnal Green tube). CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THE LAUNCH PARTY & EXHIBITION OPENING A few tickets remain for Sarah’s illustrated lecture in which she will be showing her pictures and telling the stories behind her photographs at this year’s Bloomsbury Jamboree on Saturday 14th November at the Art Workers’…

Tokyo-Chiba based musician otom* has been releasing music since 2004. He cites The Beach Boys, The Velvet Underground, Flying Saucer Attack, Slowdive, Galaxie 500, Cocteau Twins and especially My Bloody Valentine, as youthful sources of inspiration – as well as the noise and melody of folks such as Fennesz. Taping into the techniques of Third Eye Foundation, Oval and William Basinski. His latest long-player, “Fortunia”, collects 12 tracks from his archive, reworked and re-recorded. The…

Today’s recording starts with the end of the National Lottery Draw. There’s a trail for Turn Back Time: The High Street. Gregg Wallace alert. A trail for How Not To Live Your Life. And a trail for a Psychoville Halloween special which YouTube has blocked. Sorry. Then it’s a seasonal movie, Halloween: Resurrection. This one comes a few years after Halloween H20: 20 Years Later and opens with Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode who’s in a mental hospital after having a breakdown on learning that the…

Here is an interesting tidbit from Politico’s Canada Playbook newsletter. Nick Taylor-Vaisey, Mike Blanchfield, and Mickey Djuric: Meta says it hopes to restore news on Facebook and Instagram in Canada by year’s end, Rachel Curran, director of public policy at Meta Canada, told Playbook. She said it will “very likely” be resolved through Canada-U.S. trade talks. “If we are able to reach agreement post-midterms — and it sounds like there’s activity in that direction — the news stuff will be…

When new sidewalks are poured they are stamped with the year and construction company, presumably so that if they aren’t properly made they know who to blame. Our family has taken to playing a “game” where we try to find sidewalks from our birth years.The dynamics of this game are mildly interesting. You have the most matching sidewalks at the end of your birth year and it only goes down from there as they slowly get replaced. (Also for some reason only the ends get stamped, so once the two…

… A FINALE SIGN-OFF FROM THEATRECAT.COM AFTER 13 YEARS This, written largely on a diverted 453 bus on the night of the Regent St lights switch-on, is the last review on this theatrecat.com site. It has been fun, and interesting, and wonderfully supported with press seats for which I am grateful. But being free -to-air it has become hideously expensive in travel – – I live 100 miles from London and still further from other centres of the art – and expensive in time and energy too. So alas, no…

I’m trying out a new setup in the Jeep. I now have a small seat and a little desk so I can sit in the back of the Jeep, even on a rainy day, and enjoy some geek time out and about in Mother Nature. I’m trying this while sitting in the driveway. So far the arrangement is working quite well and I feel quite comfortable. I feel like I could sit in this position for a long while. My legs are straddling the desk, so they’re raised up a bit more than what I would have if I was working at a desk,…

Sir Patrick Stewart died on October 28, 2026, at the age of 86. He had Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia. Although best known for playing Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Professor Xavier in the X-Men movies, he appeared in a wide variety of roles, from Sejanus in I, Claudius to Gurney Halleck in Dune (1984).Patrick Stewart was born on July 13, 1940 in Mirfield, Yorkshire. He attended Crowlees Junior and Infants School in Mirfield and then Mirfield…

I’m bored of my home network SSID but the thought of reconfiguring devices to find a new network is overwhelming.