I missed the blogwagon dates but I’m gonna do this anyhow because I’ve been thinking about it and “how to be a good TTRPG player” is an evergreen theme. Plus I have a hot take. My hot take: a lot of blog entries on this topic completely miss the point by emphasizing how you as a player can make the game more enjoyable for yourself. Which is, yes, a good set of skills to have. But tabletop RPGs are a social activity and if you’re not thinking about how to improve everyone else’s experience at the table you’re missing out. ...

I’m a very old-school UNIX geek; I’m capable of writing Python code using the ATProto library to get at my records, but I like iterating over shell commands too. So I embarked on a journey with the goal of doing something useful with my Bookhive ATProto records. I have two use cases; the first is generating a list of books I want to read with links to my local library search page, for ease of borrowing, and the second is posting to Bluesky every time I write a review. I wanna document because otherwise I’ll wind up with a shell script that I don’t remember building, and maybe someone will enjoy the peek into how I worked through this. Anyhow, let’s see how far I get in one post. ...

Seems like about time for a check-in on the big move, huh? Short form: it’s lovely out here. We have slowly found a routine and are slowly settling into it. Retirement is odd and I’m pretty sure I don’t know how to do it yet but that’s okay, big life adjustments take time. Longer form… Well, let’s start with the cities. We still like them a lot. We accidentally found a great neighborhood in St. Paul and as a lifelong fan of the underdog, it’s kind of fun being in the smaller of the Twin Cities. I’m sure in ten years I’ll have developed a finely tuned explanation for why St. Paul is the right place to be but for right now I’m just gonna wave my hand in generalities. But I’m writing this from Lost Fox Lowertown, a great coffee shop right across from Union Depot in downtown St. Paul, and I love looking out the window and seeing the light rail pull in and pull out. ...

GameHole Con was great! I really like the size (somewhere between 5K and 10K people) and the variety of games was good enough for me to play something interesting every slot I wanted to fill. I did not fill every slot. Also S. and I managed to get into most of our games together, which was nice – I was a bit worried about the signup system resulting in us being split. I made sure to hit the process button within a minute after signups opened up, with a populated wishlist, which probably helped. We’re going back next year. ...

Reposted from Letterboxd because I wound up writing a thousand words on this sucker and I figured that was worth a blog post. This is not a review of the movie because it’s impossible to just talk about what’s going on up on the screen. Like all of Nathan Fielder’s work, it exists in conversation with our cultural moment. It’s not a movie about Elizabeth Holmes, it’s a movie about how we have reacted to Elizabeth Holmes over the course of the last decade. We will always be reacting to Elizabeth Holmes, I guess. A thousand years from now historians will be talking about the strange fertility goddess/demoness Holm, and her relationships with a series of violent war gods. ...

Man, I should really go back and tag all of these posts with relevant directors and so on. But who has time when you’re busy lobbying the Criterion Channel for a Boston Crime collection? And here we are, almost at Halloween, with November’s lineup to discover. I hope you and yours had an October filled with all the horror movies you felt like watching. November is traditionally Noirvember in our household and sometimes Criterion feels the same way. Not as much this month, with the partial exception of a Starring Gene Tierney collection introduced by the always-awesome Imogen Sara Smith. Tierney was just generally great but Criterion’s correct to say she made her greatest impact in noir; I’ve seen all the noirs here but you should absolutely check out Laura and Leave Her to Heaven if you haven’t. I’m putting Rings on Her Fingers on the top of my month’s watchlist, sight unseen, just because I’m a sucker for con artist movies. ...

People reading this via my blog know I’m a tabletop roleplaying fan; for the LinkedIn crowd, here’s a piece of me that you probably didn’t hear a lot about at work. Unless you worked with me at a video gaming company. I have spent a lot of my life playing tabletop roleplaying games: Dungeons & Dragons and the thousands of games of roughly that style. I was introduced to the hobby by a disreputable dude a couple years older than me in high school, who showed me this game called Tunnels & Trolls, which notably supported solitaire play in the style of those old Choose Your Own Adventure books, except with dice. I spent endless hours as a solitary kid randomly generating new dwarves, elves, humans, and so on and sending them into dungeons to live or die as the dice demanded. I still have many of the books I bought back then, sitting a couple of yards from me on my shelves. ...

You’ve heard the Scott McNealy story; this is the rest of my time at Sun Microsystems. I started working at Sun in 1995, directly after I left Netcom. For the first chunk of my Sun employment, I was a contractor through Taos Mountain Software. Taos Mountain was a significant consulting company in Silicon Valley at the time; when I found out how badly Netcom was underpaying me, they were the easy outlet to make a reasonable salary. There was an insane appetite for competent engineers at the time. Those were the days, huh? ...

This is not going to be a surprising revelation. I am writing it down because otherwise I will keep forgetting and being surprised when I remember it and so on and so forth. Sometimes I’m slow. The other day I was noodling on a Frontier Scum one-shot I want to run at Con of the North, because I want to start running more games at conventions and Frontier Scum looks really easy to run and I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about Westerns in the last year. (I will playtest it before I run it in public, no worries.) And I had a great concept about a bunch of scum who get caught between the law and a bunch of people who are even scummier than them, but it wasn’t solidifying. It was a few frames of film in my mind and a couple of NPCs and then… what? ...

The term of art at Amazon for events like Black Friday and Prime Day is “high velocity event.” My entire time at Amazon was a high intensity event. I learned a lot, I appreciate what I learned, I liked the people, I’m grateful to the company, and I never really wanted to go back. Here are some Amazon stories, which I can’t tell without talking about Disney a bit. Bear with me. ...