I’m super honoured to have recently been featured on the “Uses This” website! I don’t know how I ever ended up in such a cool place, given how most of the other people there are so talented, famous, or both, but hey, I’m there, so if you’re interested in my home and work setup, here you go!
The Stochastic Game
Ramblings of General Geekery
Ah the good old days! Rolemaster is what got me into “crunchy” TTRPG systems back in high school! It’s fun to dig back into it…
Gamer Stats from White Dwarf in the 80s
Over at the ENWorld forums there’s a thread based on a tweet by TheDiceMechanic about an 80’s reader poll from White Dwarf, a very popular UK gaming magazine from back in the days. I totally love how the Judge Dredd RPG shows up in the top 5 most played games… so 80’s British! Also notable is that the Toon RPG is in the top 20… which is probably about right since I haven’t played that since high-school. Oh the good ol’ days…
My T-Shirt Collection
According to my wife, I have “too many t-shirts” (as if that was a thing). Turns out that’s far from accurate since I don’t even have a hundred t-shirt: I barely have 80 of them.
And I know that because I counted them when I made the important decision to switch from them all being folded on shelves to them being all on hangers.
While sorting through my t-shirts, I found a couple, ahem, “collector’s items” that I haven’t worn in decades… like one I got for 3dsmax 4’s release in 2000 back when Discreet was the publisher (remember when Autodesk didn’t own everything?), or the one I got with Wing Commander 3’s “premier” edition (which came in a replica of a 35mm film case, with a “Behind the Scenes” VHS tape!).
Anyway, along the way, I started collecting a few stats about my t-shirt collection and, well, this is my blog, so if I want to post completely useless graphs about the type of t-shirts I own, this is definitely the only place where I can do so without having to justify anything!
Without further ado, here it is:
The chart is organized by theme, so some t-shirts are sometimes counted multiple times – there’s no point adding the numbers together. A funny t-shirt about Cthulhu would be counted in “Funny” and “H.P. Lovecraft”.
Some more notes:
- “Company/corporate” are generally t-shirts I got for free through work or some convention.
- “Convention”, however, are some t-shirts that I bought at a convention and are about that convention (both t-shirts here are actually for VanCAF).
- “School” are t-shirts I got at school (high-school or university). In most cases, I actually helped design those t-shirts!
- The rest should be pretty self-explanatory.
Of course, these stats are going to get out of date pretty quickly since, now that I know I don’t have a hundred t-shirts yet, I might go a shopping spree. Don’t tell my wife…
Free Geek Vancouver is apparently in need of funding and are asking for money (including a newly launched Patreon). I got rid of old electronics multiple times thanks to them so consider donating! https://www.vancouverisawesome.com
A lost Lunar hoplite encounters a horny Broo. Still gotta work on so many aspects of drawing, mostly not being impatient. But at least, reading Glorantha/Runequest again is giving me inspiration!
So, in case this is your type of convention, I just learned about Geektopia, which is apparently happening this week-end! https://www.geektopia.ca/
Nice, Sandman is going forward as a Netflix series… although I’m not so excited at the creative people attached to the project so far, except for Gaiman executive-producing, of course. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/
Addendum to last post: the only “algorithm” I ever wanted in an RSS reader is the ability to separate “high frequency” and “low frequency” feeds, so irregular blogs don’t get drowned by big websites. Fiery Feeds, for instance, does that.
Joshua Emmons replied to Brent Simmons’ No Algorithms post with a couple of very good tweets, which Brent quoted back on his blog. They summarize well what people have been saying about centralized, algorithm-driven social media for a while now.
When you read Facebook or Twitter everything that “bubbles up” to you are things that “register” on the algorithm’s requirements list: sometimes it’s funny or important things, but most of the time it’s just outrageous and/or outraged posts. This near constant flow of high emotion content takes its toll on people after a while if you don’t carefully trim the people you follow… but even then, if the platform decides to show you updates from people you don’t follow, or reorder those updates based on some obscure criteria, that’s not going to change much.
Compare that to getting your news and entertainment from RSS feeds, where you not only control your sources (the people/organizations you “follow”), but also control the platform (the way those updates are sorted, filtered, and displayed). If you don’t like one platform, you can always change to another one. You’re in control and, ultimately, that keeps you more sane.