I was at a party this evening in a no-shoes house. When I went to collect my shoes from the pile, at the end of the evening, I couldn't find them. I did see a set of rather more beat-up ones that looked superficially similar and were the same size, but distinctly were not mine ( Read more... )

Simone Giertz is a lovely person who has lots of fun creating horribly ineffective robots and posting videos of them to YouTube, in celebration of the fact that you don't need to be good at something to enjoy it. She also has a Patreon where she shares videos and also has recently been talking about the process of having a benign brain tumor ( Read more... )

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Tonight was one of those nights where
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I just calibrated my computer monitor with one of those fancy light-sensor dealies. I had hopes that it would improve things, as I've known that everything brighter than a light gray was getting pushed to white -- and, for some reason, this was happening on two separate monitors I had, on two independent computers.

I was surprised how much ( Read more... )

Today was a day that, by the end of it, I rather needed to be smashing some fictional undead hordes. Conveniently, today was a day in which our gaming campaign delivered.

Today was a day in which our gaming battle had a Metallica soundtrack. Literally.

( Today is a day in which this is long, so I'll put the writeup behind a cut tag. )

A person might think that a post with that title was using it as a metaphor. This would be a reasonable thing to expect; it is a quite useful metaphor. However, this post is about the literal meaning of the phrase.

This came up because
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Also in tonight's gaming session, we had an excellent example of the "fail forward" style of gamemastering.

In trying to infiltrate the inner sanctum of the evil cult that I mentioned in my previous post, we needed to acquire some red robes that the cult elders wear. We had two already, but with five of us, that was insufficient even with the ( Read more... )

Our gaming session this evening ended on a bit of a cliffhanger ( Read more... )

Per this article in The Guardian, scientists at the Deep Carbon Observatory have discovered some really nifty life forms deep underground.What I find fascinating is not just that these organisms are living deep underground (where "deep" is measured in kilometers; this is well below dirt levels), but the adaptations that this low-energy environment ( Read more... )