Don’t call it a comeback

2022-08-20 ✢ website ✢ links ✢ updates ✢ A/V ✢ music ✢ gallery ✢ tchotchkes

Site’s back. Between leaving school and the Global Pandemic I stopped running and playing tabletop RPGs almost entirely. (I like the idea of online games, but I’ve never enjoyed one in practice.) Just started getting back into the hobby on a smaller scale, and I missed sending people my RPG campaigns page again. Also, I missed having and using my own website.

I’m not really into long text conversations most of the time. My favourite way of interacting with people by message is to send them links. With that in mind:

Site updates

• Finally made a proper Linkroll.

Audio/Video club

“You shouldn’t let poets lie to you.”

John Fahey goes electric. Check out the rest of the album, and see also the liner notes.

Tchotchkes

• Travels With John Conway, in 258 Septillion Dimensions. Obituary for the mathematician which focuses on his love of mathematical games and puzzles. What’s striking is how much he seems like everyone’s fun uncle.
• angels. Related to above: game/puzzle based off Conway’s Game of Life. Find and click on the invisible 3x3 ‘angel’ moving steadily across the board. At each step, the angel toggles the alive/dead state of the tiles she covers, “acting as an external influence on the regular Conway’s life simulation.” Created by weepingwitch on tumblr.
• Cyanometer on Wikipedia. “An instrument for measuring ‘blueness’, specifically the colour intensity of blue sky.” (Here’s a charity one for Ukraine.)
• Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers. “It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used.”
• Break Jesus Out Of Babylon. “The year is 66 A.D. Something is terribly wrong.” Have not been able to stop thinking about this post since I read it two years ago. RPG campaign where Jesus was kidnapped before the Crucifixion.
• Weizenbaum examines computers and society. Wikipedia calls Joseph Weizenbaum “one of the fathers of modern artificial intelligence.” Here he talks sceptically about the social role of computer technology. “It is much nicer, it is much more comfortable, to have some device, say the computer, with which to flood the schools, and then to sit back and say, ‘You see, we are doing something about it, we are helping,’ than to confront ugly social realities.”

Gallery

Ad Reinhardt, from ‘How to Look at Art, Arts & Architecture’, 1946