Category: Post
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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…
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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
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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
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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As I’d begun contemplating a modular reorganisation of the rules, I realised I could also improve organisation by collating everything around each topic in a single place. Indeed, the ideal would be for each rules topic to be completely covered on a single page or on a spread of two facing pages. An excellent interview…
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The repressed object at the bottom of the nerd subconscious, the thing too scary to view except through humor, is that you’re smarter than everyone else, but for some reason it isn’t working. Somehow all that stuff about small talk and sportsball and drinking makes them stronger than you. No equation can tell you why.…
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Liquid Glass, especially as expressed on MacOS, is a lightweight poorly considered design system as a whole, and its conceptual thinness is not sufficient to properly allow the Mac to carry the weight it needs to bear. — Read on daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
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In a world of information overload, we have not become more skeptical. We have become more confident that what we know is right and what we do not see does not exist. Institutions designed to limit exposure, protect fairness, or filter noise now appear suspicious simply because they fail to provide visibility on demand. —…
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The modern entertainment business is largely (and increasingly) populated by people who possess social, cultural and financial capital and who enjoy a certain degree of privilege. Ozzy was the opposite of that kind of person. Excellent obituary of the late Ozzy Osbourne here, by a writer who takes a class-based angle. Even after a (massive)…
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What NPCs need isn’t more lore. It’s shape. This is a tool I’m going to use to create NPCs who survive contact with play. It fits on an index card. It works for merchants, villains, allies, and authority figures. And it’s resilient under improvisation. — Read on neillwhyborne.substack.com/p/the-7-sentence-npc Info on writing durable, memorable basic characters.
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Our claim is that in a world of full automation, inequality will skyrocket (in favor of capital holders)…. The relative wealth differences in a thousand years—or a million—will be downstream of who owns the first dyson swarms and space ships. And space colonization isn’t bottlenecked by people’s preference for human nannies and waiters. — Read…
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Vienna is the height of world sophistication at the beginning of the century: Certain cities, during certain periods, exert disproportionate influence on world culture: Paris in the 1920s; New York in the 1970s…Vienna around the turn of the century might just outdo them all. But despite this power, citizens had the sense of “dancing on…
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Since 2000, the story of TVs falling in price is largely the story of liquid crystal display (LCD) TVs going from a niche, expensive technology to a mass-produced and inexpensive one. — Read on www.construction-physics.com/p/how-did-tvs-get-so-cheap
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Deep congruence requires accepting all of the stuff of your life, every particle of feeling. If you are highly congruent, you disown none of your experience. None of it. You agree with what you’re doing with your time. You accept the stubborn approach of death, the arbitrariness of your fortune, your unimportance on the cosmic…
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Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders. More here. I maintain…
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..,despite our problems, life is as good as it has ever been. Especially if you play the game of “imagine you’re randomly born anywhere in the world.” At almost every point in the past that would mean an above-average chance you would be birthed into poverty, hardship, pain, want, and violence, and your adult life…
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1. An anti-drone swarm laser system; claims to destroy 20 drones a minute 2. Our brain’s master editor, constructing our reality (X) 3. Billy Corgan is pretty sure he saw a shapeshifter once 4. Last gasp against nihilism. And then…(X)
Basement Whatever 