Practical Low-Effort PCG: Tracery and data-oriented PCG authoring by Kate Compton (@galaxykate on Twitter). There were two parts to this talk, one on Tracery (https://tracery.io) and another on AI techniques in general ( Read more... )

Angband by Erik Osheim and Robert Au, two of the current dev team. This was an interesting insight into being a maintainer of a codebase not originally your own. In fact, the very first Angband authors passed it on nearly immediately--- because they were graduating from college. This system broke down around 2005 when the transition from one ( Read more... )

Last weekend I attended the Roguelike Celebration (roguelike.club) at the Eventbrite headquarters. All the recordings are available online. Each session is short, only a half hour each, but the conference did have to split into two tracks. Here are my notes from ones I attended in person.

A Love Letter to Hack by George Moromisato, author of ( Read more... )

I attended the MinneAnalytics "Big Data Tech" conference on Monday. I think my session choices were poor. What I wanted was success stories about using various technologies. What I got was mainly pitches in disguise (despite being forbidden by the conference organizer ( Read more... )

This was the 7th Minnebar, the 4th I've attended, and the third I organized a session. Minnebar is an "unconference" with content driven by the attendees, although it's a bit more structured than most Barcamps with a schedule created ahead of time. But there was a whiteboard open to schedule some of the empty rooms at the last minute ( Read more... )

1. I mostly don't attend cons with Marissa. But I will be attending 4th Street Fantasy Convention. (Conveniently located on 34th avenue!) Maybe you should too.

2. Math philosophy makes me happy. Scott Aaronson muses on the difference between unsolved math questions which might actually impact us and those which seem less likely to do so ( Read more... )

What is Minnebar? Picture a SF con with less-experienced panel moderators and volunteer-driven programming. The geeks attending are mostly computer science and design professionals (and thus primarily male ( Read more... )