The Stochastic Game
Ramblings of General Geekery

I should be more like Conan when I read articles about regurgitative AI and other stupid new tech trends.

An excerpt from a Conan The Barbarian story: "Murilo realized that the priest must be centuries ahead of his generation, to perfect such an invention; but Conan put it down to witchcraft and troubled his head no more about it."

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And that’s it for our Dragonbane campaign, after ~27 sessions! Azrael Koth lies impaled on a demon statue after being blasted by a Critical Thunderbolt spell worth 46 points of damage! Everybody rejoice! That game was great, and super easy to run.

The end of the last combat in Foundry. Of the four heroic player characters, two were down at zero HP, one was very low on HP and WP, and the final Thunderbolt spell was cast by trading HP for WP, a desperate attempt to finish off the big bad guy before he could wipe out the party!

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This little colour game is fun, but I suspect it depends more on your screen than on your eyes. I got 0.0080 on my phone and 0.0021 on my work monitor. At some point I think I could better see the monitor being dirty and imperfect than anything else.

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More on Star Trek VI: Martia is one of my all-time favourite Trek characters! Iman (the actress) chewing on a cigar here is a stroke of genius. I’d love to see a story featuring Martia doing whatever she did before being sent to the Rura Penthe mines!

Iman was also David Bowie's wife!

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So Vulcans can just extract information from an unwilling person in a matter of seconds? They would make great interrogators! The Federation could be the most effective totalitarian government if they had a Vulcan Gestapo!

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By the way, Kirk trying to explain Spock’s look and behaviour to 1980s people with “He did too much LDS in the 60’s” was quite funny, not just because he gets “LSD” wrong, but because it could also be interpreted as “Mormons are weird”

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More about Star Trek IV: sure it’s got some funny moments, but between “Search For Spock” and this, it seems to be the point where it’s not just Gene Roddenberry’s story anymore, but some studio’s FRANCHISE. Gotta appeal to more audiences! Can I say it now? THEY RUINED STAR TREK!

This alien probe is so fucking random. Is there a whole alien civilization that sends these things, like "hey do you still have dinosaurs, or trilobites, or dodos? because if not we're going to FUCK YOU UP WITH MAGIC TECHNOLOGY" Did anybody chase it afterwards to see who the fuck sent it? I hope there's a follow-up and the Federation Navy acquires the probe's weapons so they can ionize waters on enemy planets or whatever

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Today I’m trying to catch up to any unanswered discussions with #UE5 GameplayCameras #gamedev users who contacted me through various means. Lots of very good feedback there, thanks to all who wrote! If I haven’t replied to you by tomorrow, ping me!

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My first thought after watching “The Wrath of Khan” was that it seems to eschew the “intellectual sci-fi” plots of TOS for some “action sci-fi” blockbuster plot. I wondered if fans originally criticized it and then cooled down on it later, but apparently not? Everybody loved it right away?

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