Spoilers, both here and in Walter Chaw’s excellent review. Which is not kind.

Movies reviewed this week: The New Mutants.

I had a great weekend of gaming at a virtual mini-con ran by Paul Beakley as part of the Indie Game Reading Club. (Patreon him up, yo!) I have a couple of general thoughts, then I’ll do a quick recap of the games I played in. In order to deal with the usual “people who are around when registration opens get into all the games” problem, Paul asked people to hold their registrations to one or two games in the first day, and then opened the floodgates a bit wider. That worked really well. He also highlighted games that needed more people, which was cool. The latter probably only works if you have a relatively small population of players/games, but that’s maybe a good idea anyhow. Or you could automate it if there was good free event registration software out there? Alas. Over the course of the weekend, we sort of evolved a practice of posting a thread for each completed game in the Slack. I really dug this because I liked learning a bit about games I wasn’t playing, and I liked seeing what else people I’d played with had been up to. It was great for connections. I played in four games, which was just about right. By coincidence I had Friday off, so I was able to double up on games there, which was a bit tiring but ultimately fine. I booked myself into evening games on Saturday and Sunday, leaving days free to relax and play World of Warcraft and so on.

I played a game of i’m sorry did you say street magic last night with Rye, Nicholas, and Joe, and it was awesome. Quick description: it’s technically a map building game, but really it’s a game in which you build the relationships between places on a map which never actually gets drawn. Unlike The Quiet Year, there are no random elements. I’d wondered if that would result in overly still metaphorical waters, but as it turned out, the game forces interaction between the setting elements you create with just enough strength to prevent stagnation. Also, every time around the table, there’s an Event which must alter at least one element, so that keeps things moving as well. ...

My old boss Steve Makosfky was singing the praises of Scriptable the other day – it’s an iOS app that allows you to run Javascript in a number of ways, including as a widget. It’s also free (but tip the developer if you like and use it). So I modified an existing script that displays random photos from Flickr to replace my clunky Unsplash photo widget. It’s way better than my previous solution. It doesn’t clog up my photo library, plus it’s mildly configurable. (Could be more so, but I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader.) I’ve set mine up such that it only pulls down nature photos, which means I’m no longer seeing people I don’t know on my iOS home screen. ...

So far this month I’ve received a couple hundred email messages from Instagram notifying me that their Terms of Use have been updated. They’re legitimate emails; it looks like someone signed up hundreds of Instagram accounts using randomized innocence.com email addresses. Since I moved my mail to Fastmail, I’m now seeing them all. I poked around a couple of the accounts (hi, kurt.clemons78446!) and the ones I spot checked have all been deleted. ...

I don’t like wearing headphones all day and since I’m lucky enough to have a spare room for an office, I can play music through my Bluetooth speaker. However, I’m lazy, and I don’t want to fiddle around with my music player just cause I’m starting a Zoom meeting. Thus, automation. Zoom provides callbacks when meetings start, but that’s aimed at people writing plugin modules. OK, we can go a bit lower level. I can’t just watch for a process, cause Zoom is always running on my laptop. But I can watch for open UDP sockets! ...

The fine folks at Canlis, the only restaurant in Seattle where you have to wear a tie, ran a scavenger hunt last week as part of their Canlis Community College project. Prize was a $5,000 gift certificate. This attracted the attention of some of my Ingress pals, since driving around the city trying to figure out someone else’s plan is basically our core competency. The first four challenges, we did relatively horribly. But the final challenge, the one for all the marbles, that went differently.

Mikey Hamm is Kickstarting Slugblaster, “A tabletop roleplaying game about small-town teenage hoverboarders who sneak into other dimensions.” I’m a sucker for gonzo plus an old pal of mine is editing it plus it’s a Forged in the Dark game, so I backed it. But what’s really interesting to me is the way Mikey released the quickstart rules. I’ll quote him. “With pandemic-era online play in mind, Turbo is built entirely inside a shared google spreadsheet which includes all the rules, playbooks, dice rollers, shared progress tracks, and monster generators you need.” ...

This is very obvious in retrospect: the reason my WordPress to Dreamwidth crossposting stopped working is because Dreamwidth made security changes and as a result you don’t get to use your password for the API any more. Good change! If you cluelessly don’t pay attention, though, your WordPress plugin will stop working. Solution: go to the Mobile Post Settings page and generate yourself a new API key. Easy. This is a very light excuse for a weekly post but man, this week was kind of disfocused for various reasons.