Category: Post
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The original game cover looks exactly like what a Star Wars movie poster should look. When I was in seventh grade, Star Wars and Dungeons & Dragons occupied roughly the same amount of space in my brain. My friend, Jennifer, and I spent much of that year doing homework with the original Star Wars trilogy…
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I purchased Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities after hearing its author, Kevin Kelly, talk about it in a podcast. Kelly is a really interesting guy (he co-founded Wired and wrote the semi-religious book What Technology Wants), so I thought it would be worth the investment. You can see in the picture just how many…
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In 1862, a man named Luther Kountze left Omaha with a massive, fireproof safe. Twelve oxen pulled that safe across the open plains until reaching Denver, which was a frontier town only four years old, merged from three mining camps. The town mainly served prospectors, with saloons and gambling halls. Within a year of Kountze’s…
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This morning I dragged my suitcase through Times Square, on the way to a morning meeting. People were setting up tables, and it was largely empty except for the early morning commuters like me, streaming by on the sidewalks. I’ve spent a lot of time in Times Square over the last thirty years. I know…
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Eventually her daughter contacted me and it turned out that she couldn’t read and needed me to do everything for her so she could keep doing her psychic calls. She was apparently close to eviction. I knew she was a bit of a scammer but it really messed me up and was really hard for…
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Just went for a long walk while using ChatGPT Voice with plugins on my phone, and I think it’s a more consequential update than it might seem at first glance. On my walk, I talked through my calendar, email, and to-do list. I had ChatGPT read through my emails and triage them. Then, we added…
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Skill trees are essential to role playing games, allowing you to spend experience points to level up your character however you want. The Maker Skill Tree Project extends this concept to real life. Download skill trees on topics ranging from Adventure to Fishing, as each skill tree guides you through increasing levels of skills to…
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I’ve seen House countless times, and nearly every time I get something new out of it. My experience has gone from “bizarre and WTF did I just watch” to “a very goofy, charming horror comedy” to “a goofy haunted house movie that’s also an emotional fairy tale about the effects of WWII on everyone young…
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Heilung call their genre “amplified history”, and no two words describe it better: throat singing, bone rattles, war chants and human pulse, performed in ceremonial paint by a collective that opens every show with the same ritual blessing. Where Wardruna reconstructs, Heilung possesses: their concerts are less performances than séances with a light rig. The…
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I was waiting in line at the airport and the guy in front of me was taking so long to figure out something on his phone with security that several people in other lines passed us by. Whatever challenges he was having with his boarding pass, it never resolved before I jumped into another line…
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Liberalism is an answer to the Wars of Religion. How do we stop people killing each other over their version of the good life? Liberalism answers by building a neutral framework that allows people to pursue their individual versions of the good life. The key components of that framework are: Individual rights. Each citizen is…
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The idea is simple and intuitive: The more power a man acquires, the more his empire expands, the more he depends on other people for information about everything from his own court to the furthest reaches of the empire. And yet through fear or awe or self-preservation, those people often become less willing to tell…
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many people who have a superficial understanding of topic assume that the topic is as complex as their understanding of the topic instead of realizing that only knowing a bit about a topic means that they’re missing an understanding of the full complexity of a topic. — Read on danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/
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“It’s the first-ever fully AI-generated entertainment to hit mainstream provincial satellite prime time,” writes Mandy Wong. After seeing Bytedance Seedance 2.0’s (AI text-to-video model) release earlier this year, the team behind Journey to the West felt there was an opportunity to make a long-form series and break through a market “saturated with uninspired short-form dramas.”…
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I get the sense that I feel far less affronted by AI slop than some (or possibly many) of you do. I don’t like AI slop, but I don’t feel as viscerally annoyed about it as many people do, and it struck me that one possible reason is: I just found very large parts of…
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I’ve never been to Scandinavia, but of the countries that I have visited, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the Netherlands seem most similar to Wisconsin in a cultural sense. Lots of Germans settled there after the failed 1848 revolutions (the same year that Wisconsin achieved statehood). There were also lots of immigrats from Scandinavia. I…
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I’ve had multiple conversations with young people who say they want to be rich. I ask them what that means. They say they want a house and to be able to take two nice vacations per year. That’s not rich. That is middle class. Have we as a country established that no one is going…
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The Prediction Archive is a public database of tens of thousands of world predictions. Using AI it tracks predictions over many decades and marks to market. — Read on marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/09/the-prediction-archive.html
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One of the best things about the DCC system of D&D is the funnel. Making the players sweat for their 1st level characters. Starting them as 0-level peasant nobodies and putting them through a meat grinder. Most will die but some will survive and go on to become actual character classes (wizards, thieves, clerics, whatever)…
