I’m talking about interstellar travel. It will never be a thing. It turns out that starships exist on the exact same level of plausibility as wizards and it’s kind of weird that, as a culture, we assume the former will someday be reality.
— Read on jasonpargin.substack.com/p/interstellar-space-travel-will-never
Basement Whatever
Escape the algorithm
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I was extremely happy with the Dolmenwood character generator I built with Replit. I then further updated the multi-prime classes (Magician, Friar, Knight) to adjust the mix, but I over indexed on it. So I decided to fix it.
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In a thousand years from now, all the 11-dimensional charts at that time will show that “the singularity is near.” Immortal beings and global consciousness and everything else we hope for in the future may be real and present but still, a linear-log curve in 3006 will show that a singularity approaches. The singularity is not a discreet event.
— Read on kevinkelly.substack.com/p/the-singularity-is-always-near -
I was frustrated with the existing Dolmenwood character generator, because it doesn’t allow me to iterate levels, and doesn’t show the levels on the character creation screen. I did like the backgrounds though. So, armed with a sense of purpose – a quest, if you may – I set out to see if I could use Replit to build a better character generator for Dolmenwood. I had the PDF of the Dolmenwood Player’s Book, which I purchased from Necrotic Gnome, so with that in hand, I got started.
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“culture is what is left over after you have forgotten all you have definitely set out to learn”
And:
“To be a cultured person is to be a person with some kind of original philosophy… This implies a desire to focus such imaginative reason as we possess upon the mystery of life.“
And:
“The more culture a man has, the more austerely — though naturally with many ironic reserves — does he abide by his own taste.”
— Read on www.themarginalian.org/2015/11/25/the-meaning-of-culture-powys/ -
As soon as February 6, the crew of Artemis II will also head moonward. It will certainly not spell the first human expedition to the moon, but it will be the first since 1972—when the crew of Apollo 17 came home, the Apollo moon program was canceled, and the translunar trail went dark.
— Read on time.com/7346146/artemis-ii-launch-nasa-astronauts-moon-mission/ -
Arnis uses free geospatial data from OpenStreetMap to generate detailed Minecraft maps based on a specified real-world location.
— Read on www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/minecraft-tool-lets-you-create-scale-replicas-of-real-world-locations-arnis-uses-geospatial-data-from-openstreetmap-to-generate-minecraft-maps -
- Millennial fathers spend about the same time parenting as Boomer mothers (X)
- Progressives have a population problem (X)
- Partying is way down (X)
- The most successful film of all time is “Paranormal Activity”
- “The World’s Worst Bet”: Bill Clinton looks back on the world he built. Candidate for best article of 2025.
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Oracle has burdened itself with debt and $248 billion in data center lease obligations — costs that are inevitable, and are already crushing the life out of the company (and the stock).
The only way out is if OpenAI becomes literally the most-successful cash-generating company of all time within the next two years, and that’s being generous. This is not a joke. This is not an understatement.
— Read on www.wheresyoured.at/haters-guide-oracle/ -
The more tech industry experience you garner across various fields, the more patterns begin to emerge—pattern recognition across contexts. In software engineering, programming languages follow similar conventions with each language serving particular use cases better than others. Pattern recognition begins to take hold the more experience you garner, allowing you to discern syntax and identify issues faster—and as a result, pattern recognition removes the self-imposed obstacle of “I only write in [this] language.”
— Read on treysystems.substack.com/p/the-nowhereian-advantage-pattern -
The book’s thesis is Chicago made the Great West, and the Great West made Chicago, and untangling which wagged which is impossible because they needed each other. The other less explicit thesis is that Chicago made great things, and that happened because its leaders and citizens believed in making great things, like turning the dreary Chicago River, a slow-moving silty creek, into the best harbor on Lake Michigan, which even required changing the direction it flowed.
— Read on walkingtheworld.substack.com/p/not-walking-chicago -
Of course nothing is ever simple with TTRPGs – just ask someone to define OSR, whether systems matter, or whether variable weapon damage is the true way (it’s not). Predictably, curating the list sent me down a rabbit hole of questions and categorization.
— Read on uncannyramblings.blot.im/an-osr-community-list-of-settings -
The coming years will not be quiet. They will not be polite. You do not get to price a generation out of housing, bury them in debt, flood their minds with chaos, strip them of meaning, and then expect compliance wrapped in motivational quotes.
— Read on x.com/basedtorba/status/2012698421228875778 -
Merritt helped popularize the idea that the greatest adventures are not across oceans or among the stars, but beneath our feet.
Again and again, Merritt sends his characters downward into hidden worlds. The Moon Pool is perhaps the clearest example. What begins as a scientific expedition soon becomes a descent into a sealed subterranean realm, complete with alien rulers, strange technologies, and layered environments that must be navigated step by step. The story almost reads like a traditional dungeon expedition, with each new chamber revealing fresh dangers and deeper mysteries.
— Read on grognardia.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-original-dungeon-delver.html -
At some point (says Brooks) the meritocrats won and became the new elite. Their anti-bourgeois ideas became the foundation of our modern values. But part of the elites’ job is to run the financial system, and another part is to enjoy being very rich. This was a bad match for bohemian anti-bourgeois values, so they added some layers of irony, detachment, and misdirection.
A meritocrat in good standing must be (for example) a quirky, free-spirited person who happens to have a passion for banking. And in the course of pursuing this passion, they happen to have made $300 million as the CEO of Amalgamated Bank. They didn’t become CEO in order to make the $300 million. They became CEO because they were passionate about transforming banking and expanding its reach to underrepresented minorities.
And they certainly didn’t spend the $300 million on a mansion in a ritzy part of New York with well-manicured grounds and legions of servants. They spent it on a rustic cabin by Lake Tahoe made from locally-sourced pine. Sure, it happened to be 20,000 square feet and have an IMAX-sized media room. But that wasn’t why they got it.
— Read on www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-first-sixth-of-bobos -
The catfish is found in some medieval encyclopedias. It is a monster that lives in rivers. The female lays her eggs and immediately abandons them, but the male stays to keep watch over them until they hatch and the offspring grow large enough to be safe on their own. While on guard, the male builds a kind of structure around his young, and drives away other fish.
— Read on bestiary.ca/beasts/beast107542.htmA directory of medieval beast descriptions. Fascinating throughout.
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What’s scarce now isn’t content or attention. Its coherence with context.
Customers, employees and investors are swimming in information but struggling to understand what it all means. When meaning breaks down, trust exits the building.
Hiring storytellers is a proxy move. It’s a signal that something feels disconnected, but leaders can’t quite articulate what it is.
— Read on martech.org/companies-arent-looking-for-storytellers-theyre-looking-for-meaning/
Basement Whatever 