The Stochastic Game

Ramblings of General Geekery

While throwing away old CDs, I found a couple of very old cassettes from when I was a kid and didn’t have a CD burner to copy stuff! Here’s my copy of the soundtrack to the cult 1994 movie “The Crow”! Can’t do this shit with MP3 files.

A cassette case with the list of songs from the soundtrack to The Crow, and a shitty drawing (by teenage-me) of the titular character.

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The 2026 Ennie Awards nominee list shows how large the hobby has become. Years ago, I would have heard about more than 2/3rd of that list. Now, I’m not sure if anybody who isn’t a TTRPG journalist or something would know that much. This is GOOD by the way.

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After throwing out old programming books, I sadly started also throwing away all my old CDs and DVDs. Remember when music came with a beautiful, little artsy booklet with very hard to read lyrics? Good times!

Booklet for Pink Floyd's The Wall, with psychotically written lyrics
Nice concert photos from Pink Floyd's Pulse
The booklet for The Cooper Temple Clause's Make This Your Own
A booklet from one of David Bowie's Best Of albums.

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More old programming books to be thrown away! “Why Scrum Works” 🤣😅 But hey, at least I read that book. Unlike half of the managers I worked with who *thought* they were doing Scrum but were really just doing performative bullshit.

Agile Project Management with Scrum, by Schwaber
The foreword to the book, "Why Scrum Works"

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I recently sorted and threw away a bunch of old programming books… it was a blast from the past, looking at some of those. Like, do you remember when you first learned about C++ RAII or template meta-programming?

Computer Graphics by Foley, van Dam, Feiner, and Hughes. The C++ Programming Language, by Stroustrup.
Code Complete 2 by McConnell Windows PowerShell Cookbook by Holmes. Programming WPF by Sells and Griffiths. Applications = Code + Markup, by Petzold.
Framework Design Guidelines by Cwalina and Abrams The Pragmatic Programmer by Hunt and Thomas
Exceptional C++ Style by Sutter C++ Template Metaprogramming by Abrahams and Gurtovoy C++ Coding Standards by Sutter and Alexandrescu Exceptional C++ by Sutter Modern C++ Design by Alexandrescu More Effective C++ by Meyers Effective C++ by Meyers

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Oh hey here are some pictures from a couple months ago when I spent a day in Deep Cove with the fluffy good boy. He is *not* afraid of cliffs, somehow.

The good fluffy boy is standing atop Quarry Rock, overlooking the Indian Arm.
The good fluffy boy is standing atop Quarry Rock, overlooking the Indian Arm.
The good fluffy boy is waiting atop a few stairs on the Quarry Rock trail.
The good fluffy boy is waiting on the Baden Powell trail somewhere above Deep Cove.

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Reading Classic RuneQuest: Basic Role-Playing

I’m back to reading the classic RuneQuest 2nd edition boxed set! See the first and second articles in the series if you missed them. Today we are reading the “Basic Role-Playing” booklet, written by Greg Stafford and Lynn Willis, with a couple illustrations by William Church.

This “introductory guide” to fantasy role-playing (FRP) and the Basic Role-Playing system (BRP) is a 16 pages-long booklet that, we are told, presents a “whole game system”. So in theory, you could completely ignore the rules in the bigger RuneQuest book and just play BRP directly from this. The BRP rules differ quite a lot from the RuneQuest rules, in that they’re much simpler, but you can tell they share the same chassis. I wonder how many early 1980s players decided to simplify aspects of RuneQuest by “downgrading” select rules to their BRP equivalent?

Anyway, let’s dive in!

Read more…

∞ in Reading Classics