The Stochastic Game

Ramblings of General Geekery

The fluffy good boy is always proud of the bandana they give him after a grooming session.

A golden retriever with a bandana lying down on a couch in a very cute way.

For our latest family trip I busted out my old Canon camera for the first time in a couple years. I had forgotten how much more fun it is to take pictures with it than with my phone! Muscle memory kicked right back in (physical buttons FTW!) Love it.


Review: Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground

I didn’t really expect to be interested in this book. “Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground”, by Stu Horvath (of the Vintage RPG podcast, among other things), is a book that looks at the history of tabletop roleplaying games “from D&D to Mothership”, as it says on the cover.

It’s not that I’m uninterested in the history of roleplaying games — I’m very much interested in it, and I have at least half a dozen books on the topic. I just wasn’t necessarily interested in having one more book on that topic. But I got it as a gift a couple months ago, and… I love it. It’s been sitting proudly on my living room table since then, ready to be picked up every now and then for a few minutes of reading some pages picked at random. Let’s dive in!

Read more…

So, I had a look at a handful of competitors to Adobe Lightroom and they rank from mediocre to bad. No wonder Adobe can continue being Adobe. Does anybody have any good recommendation I might have missed?


Seeing people defend big tech companies against government regulation reminds me of the research into why lower-income people vote against policies that would benefit them (for instance, this one). But also, I guess, a lot of tech pundits are simply free market capitalists 🤷🏽‍♂️


You can tell what the priorities are for Apple, Google, and other big tech companies by comparing their reaction to government regulation in China vs Europe. I may really like some of their products, but I definitely don’t like *them*.