Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Howdy, everyone!

    In any case, I'm pretty happy to be here—it's cool to have a hidden spot on the net, and I plan on just hanging out and chilling. Owing to a lack of math typesetting and stuff, I don't think I'll be able to do much of anything talking about some in-depth physics or math, but that's alright—I wouldn't want to risk ruining the napkins here with my chicken-scratch.

  • 🔤SpellBinding — IMOPSUY Wordo: CIVVY

  • Day Off

    My partner needed to get to work a little earlier today. Something in that caused me to wake up, let the dogs out as usual, get our breakfast going - and then I looked over at the clock. 6:10? Must be running out of batteries. I go get a AA from the basement, replace it in the clock, look over at the stove to see what the actual time is. 6:12 now. Oops.

• Science

  • Why i'm a member of 3PBS community music radio

    As i mention on my “About me” page, i'm an enthusiastic supporter and member of 3PBS, a community-run radio station based here in Naarm/Melbourne. It's primarily music radio, not talk radio - and it's good for my mental health.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Secret-keeping is the DM’s most important job

    Of all the stuff that a DM does, the most important one is to be the keeper of the secrets. To know (or have a way to find out) the off-screen canon game state. Like, the characters have a treasure chest that they haven’t opened. It’s your job as DM to know what’s in there.

    If you’re playing a kind of game where you’d just be making it up, or roll randomly every single time, your group doesn’t need a DM. Now, random generation is something I do use a lot; it's a necessary tool for bigger game worlds. But I don't use it literally 100% of the time.

  • 50 Years of Text Games

    This is a great book, as it shows where various games and types of game came from, how they developed, passed away, how techniques were lost and reinvented as computer systems came and went. Personal computers were that much more limited than the mainframes or even minicomputers: how about that 20 minute load time just to start the game? The reach of these games was often beyond the ability of the computer, though some struck a fine balance between being too simple (and thus boring) and not too complex (and thus never finished).