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Category: Post
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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
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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
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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…
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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…
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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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