The Stochastic Game

The coyote dad/mom (?) of Byrne Creek Park seems busy today. Saw it twice. The good fluffy boy isn’t happy about it (he’s racist against coyotes). Thankfully he’s now relaxing with a ball.

I still remember the sense of excitement I felt upon learning the existence of an animal called the “wombat”, imagining a dreadful winged creature of the night, and the utter disappointment that followed when I saw what it actually looks like.

GenAI is basically shit at everything except for two specific things, and for one of these, “software development tasks”, I think it’s only “good” in the same way that “let’s move all our development to India” seemed “good” in the early 2000s. Check how that turned out in the end.

I played through The Last Of Us (Part 1) a couple months ago and my hot take is that it’s like a David Cage game: it’s more interested in being a movie with vaguely interactive scenes between story beats than being a video game. The difference with a David Cage game is that it’s actually very good.

Think your #TTRPG PC background is too far fetched? Here is Harukichi Shimoi: a Japanese poet, Asahi soft drink entrepreneur, Karate teacher, and member of the WW1 Italian “Arditi” special shock troop whose choice weapons were daggers and grenades, and whose motto was “We either win or we all die!”

Ooooh shit it’s happening! “B.C. to end time changes, adopt year-round daylight time“

I strongly suspect that Canada not giving a fuck about the US anymore played a small part in finally deciding on this.

“A $10-billion AI data centre races ahead in a rural Alberta town, population 9,679”: the project would include a dedicated natural gas facility that produces 1.4 GW per day, equivalent to the daily demand for the entire city of Edmonton.

“A Sober Look at Alberta’s Separatist Surge”: a good primer by the Tyee on what’s the deal with the losers and traitors in Alberta.

By the way, the funny thing about that “Silent Night, Deadly Night” reboot is that if you stick to a three-sentences description of the story, it really sounds like a Stephen King book. Of course, the actual movie treatment and writing style couldn’t be further from it.

Silent Night, Deadly Night (2025) was great fun! It somehow includes a lot of elements from the (rather mediocre if you ask me) 1984 original, but completely and pretty brilliantly re-contextualizes them with a different overarching premise. Plus: a cathartic mass-killing scene for our current times.