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Ego Hunter is amazing one-shot scenario for the equally amazing Eclipse Phase roleplaying game: The PCs are all different forks (copies) of the same person who, upon returning home to be merged back into their alpha, discover that their alpha has instead been killed. I loved the adventure so much that I remixed it, creating prep notes and maps that expanded the adventure material and also reorganizing material and creating player handouts to make the running the adventure...
23:09 - Not sure if I'm feeling like shit because I'm overwhelmed with everything or if it's because I forgot to take my meds today. Cried for "no reason" again. I don't know.
Nitsuh Abebe, the new NY Times On Language columnist (see this post), has a new column (archived) on the word scam. Most of it is about how the word is more popular than ever and has expanded its remit to cover “any system, however legitimate, that ends with somebody profiting at your expense”; while mildly interesting, this is just another example of language change at work, and you’d have to be a dedicated peever to work up much outrage about it. But he includes a...
It looks like AI scrapers have been using a surreptitious method of making their marauding presence appear legitimate, this time by appending a bogus query parameter, or tracking tag, to the URL of the webpage they are targeting. In the last month or so, I have seen a stack of page visit items looking something like this: https://disassociated.com/?ref=yourwebsitepage/213page/page/page/14page/16page/page/2page… I’ve replaced the actual website name with the generic...
August 2026. Frome. Pub 6, or 7 (seven) for those on our Frome Roam who had popped off to Palmers Bottle Shop after Just Ales. I can tell you nothing about Palmers, which means it is guaranteed to make the next GBG. The pace was relentless, and some of our group went MIA, or possibly AWOL. Most of us made the Lamb and Fountain, my highlight of the day, the archetypal West Country cider pub. Once again, I refer you to Kentish Paul’s blog for the detail on this heritage pub...
The result of the latest Classics Club Spin has been revealed today. The idea of the Spin was to list twenty books from my Classics Club list, number them 1 to 20, and the number announced by the Classics Club represents the book I have to read before 4th October 2026. The number that has been selected is… 18 And this means the book I need to read is… The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham It started with fireballs raining down from the sky and crashing into the oceans’ deeps....
Taken whilst waiting for my son to finish work at Eweleaze Camp Site As I write this the temperature is slightly lower than it has been and we’ve even got rain forecast for next week. Maybe an end to this constant heat is finally in sight. 🥵 ☀️ Speaking of the sun, it was the eclipse week this week. You can see my photos from that here 💪 Decent gym week this week. Hit some PB’s on arm workouts and have increased my weight across some workouts. Just need to get the cardio...
Published in 1976, this book is subtitled "Doorway to Another Dimension" and it is a fascinating snapshot of metaphysical culture in the Windy City. When I found the book, the author's name rang a bell, but I couldn't quite place him. Turns out that Brad Steiger has written more than 170 books, many of which are of a similar bent, so I'm quite certain I have read his work before. (Aside: Wikipedia's entry for him is lazily incomplete. It only lists five books, but admits...
This journey starts like most of the things I've been doing this year, as an experiment to run a website 100% unattended with an agent. Ideally this post won't go down as an epitaph in a future where robots hunted down unsuspecting humans named Josh. I'm aware of "claws" and I know I could probably just boot up Claude Code with a /goal or /loop prompt like: build and maintain an awesome website, autonomously. seriously don't freakin' bother me, like ever. you're the boss...
The main thing this week has been GopherCon UK - an expensive week, and unfortunately not as good as previous years - but you can see my writeup for more info On Tuesday night when I got in, I went over to Monohon Ramen which was nice A bit of delays on the way home didn't help after a busy few days 🥱 Recorded a Fallthrough episode with Kris and Matt when I got back on Friday, but feel that I shouldn't have tried to get it in after being at the conference - I was pretty...
They seem to have integrated co-pilot into Word, and this is one place I appreciate having AI. I hate Word. I don’t want to think in Word. I want to just say, “here is my org mode file, you go ahead and turn this into a Word doc.” Hit enter. Minimize. Leave me alone. Done.
Friend-of-the-blog (well, mainly just friend) Adi Akavia has asked me to publicize that she’s helping to organize an exciting CS conference called Mind-IL at Tel Aviv University on October 26, in memory of the Israeli-American Turing Award winner Michael O. Rabin, who passed away in April. Please note that October 26 is the day before the Israeli election, for any Israeli citizenship holders living abroad who might want an academic excuse to come to Israel and vote.
If this title does not make any sense to you at all that is fine. At the end of this post it will. Mostly. Maybe. Last week I wrote about rebuilding my blog. Looking back at nearly 27 years of blogging I have pretty strict opinions on the software I am using. Not having the first 18 years of archives anymore is one of the reasons I am pretty insistent on having data available, backed up and readable. (Technically I could extract the old posts, but as they are all written...
The One Page RPG Jam 2026 is coming to an end and people around me have been busy! I’m not sure if the game design community around me is growing or if I’m just meeting the right people now, but it definitely feels like there are more and more games being released around me! I have collected those I know of here and hope you’ll see something you like and maybe leave them a review, comment or maybe even a donation. Any Questions?Game Designer: weglasern Itch Link:...
Two basketball sessions this week, and I gave myself plenty of time to warm up before each one. Not that warming up made any difference to my jump shot. I seemed to go through streaks of makes and misses, where there were more misses than makes. Frustrating when for large proportion of those shots I'd been left wide-open. I had some new noise cancelling headphones and earbuds arrive this week. Compared to the last pair of noise cancelling headphones I had the newer ones...
Still from Dracula (1931) featuring Frances Dade as Lucy Westenra and Count Dracula as himselfFulfilling my own prompt, reviewing another's blogpost, for Glaugust 2026. I actually found it difficult to find the right sort of post to respond to, since there's many great posts in the glog scene that I just have unvarnished appreciation for, and so there's little engaging in my review of it. Vivanter's December 2024 review of a class by Zmia Garina, the Completely Normal Girl...
Shhh… don’t tell my reading group, but I’ve also been seeing other books. In fact, I just got done with a pair of books by British writer Jem Calder. Reward System (2023) is a set of interlinked stories, and this year’s I Want You to Be Happy is Calder’s first novel. The two share a similar focus, centring a relationship between a man in his mid-to-late thirties and a woman in her early-to-mid twenties. Throughout both, Calder shows compassion for his characters where it...
lips touching so lightly it's almost not even a kiss at all yet it carries something so vast the rising sun the next morning won't be the same but it will witness what comes next the timeline rocked out of its course it won't matter what comes next the world just shifted for the better
In about 5 hours, I’m going to conduct my first photoshoot. I’m taking photos of my friend’s daughter and boyfriend, two kids I’ve known for years, and I’m both nervous and excited. I told my friend I was nervous, and she said, “I am betting that you are going to be very good at this,” and if that doesn’t instill a man with confidence, I don’t know what will. in: notes tagged: community friends good people photography