Seen at the back of a KJ Charles book. What an icon.

Don't threaten me with a good time.

I love this essay, not least because some colleagues and I just a few months ago went to Yestermorrow School of Design Build on a retreat to build democratic benches! “Public benches signify a commitment to public life. They’re a small article of faith in an ideal”

Tramp is a beloved comic artist and early contributor to D&D, having created some of the most iconic images for the game. I can tell you, young Tony D was spellbound by his thick-lined graphic style that seemed one-part classic woodcut illustration and one part beatnik underground comics.

"We don't need your corruption. We have corruption at home!" Odds on favor, materials, facilites, and labor will be cheaper if you help them set up their own. You could, in fact, pay well enough to fight that local corruption and still save money. No idea why this comes to mind.

Interestingly, this is something my friends and I have come up against as we plan networking events for creative folks - it turns out that the majority of people who turn up to events that are branded as "Networking" are folks looking for other people to do work for them.

So, it is difficult for me to justify buying new bags, given the amount of space they currently occupy, but if it turns out that my amazing wife gifts me with a bag that I have been mournfully staring at for ages, it would be absolutely churlish of me to object!

News! Christopher Franke has just released a ton of Babylon 5 soundtracks on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Pandora and others: six large volumes and smaller, six episodic soundtracks. Available yea unto this very moment.

I teared up reading this. Jake really did my story justice and understood my message, when I could have been very easily treated as "just a joke" Let's do this, y'all Time to fight for trans rights with the powers of science and whimsy combined! 🏳️‍⚧️ 🧬 💖 @beyondxandy.bsky.social

Ok, I need to shift my brain away from regular expressions in Snowflake for a bit, so I am going to unpack this particular smartass remark, because for all that I may frame it as such, this one is REALLY important if you would like D&D to suck less.

Normalize rolling “wrong” stats in D&D.

Everybody hates Jira, but everyone who tries to reinvent it produces something so much worse.

I am looking at the work of some TPMs and am torn between “do you not know that the more people you assign to a thing the less likely it is to be done?” And “you know perfectly well how bad this practice is, but it makes you look better, doesn’t it?”

Not overselling: This is fucking incredible

High-IQ society Mensa reveals its top board games after annual four-day judging marathon: boardgamewire.com/index.php/20...

There’s a moment when studying American history when you realize that with less than a handful of exceptions the Presidency has been filled with criminals, grifters, moral deviants, and mediocrities, and the fairly recent development of treating the office like a king is a nation-shattering tragedy.

"it's the efficient markets hypothesis applied to everything, not just stock prices" www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0ns...

When we thought reality TV would be the end of culture in America, I don’t think anyone imagined it would be quite so literal.

do you ever look back at your life and think, "i wish i knew what strange and interesting new snacks, drinks, and cereals came out last year?" i'm here for you, friend. here's my 2025 food garbage round-up: cabel.com/the-snacks-c...

People who can afford to go all in on a bluff and then buy in again when they lose never realize they're actually bad at cards.

This website from the League of Women Voters is a great resource for election info. It includes when and where to vote (including early voting), and Q&A with candidates. www.vote411.org

I really, really enjoyed the My Hero Academia anime when it started. I loved the energy and oddity that came with a world full of supers. I lost interest over time as it got more and more shonen-y, to the point where I still haven’t watched the end of it. Not mad about it, just disinterested.

This is straight out of @edzitron.com's most recent essay. It's a sign that operations aren't profitable, scaling to meet demand burns money even faster, but it's the only way they can get more money to burn, and they're run that ski ramp as high as it can go.

This is going into permanent use.

Exactly this. If you are using AI to plan your tutorials then quite frankly you should go work somewhere other than higher education and leave a job open for someone who cares.

For the curious the original Masters of Umdaar was a 56 pages. The final product here will be a standalone Fate game that is 460 pages. So the original concept is greatly, greatly expanded. This free preview includes character gen plus the Table of Contents so you can see what's coming out in June.

Ok, I will fully cop that it is kind of cool to pick up my phone and find a ton of activity on an old thread that I kind of liked.

Yesterday I spoke at a high school in Calgary, giving the students a quick rundown of my creative career and things I wish I'd known when I was their age. Here's a summary of key points I covered: • My career is nothing like what I envisioned when I was young, but key parts of it shaped my future.

The one curious thing I’ve seen about those areas where LLM have actually been good at things have been areas where there is an abundance of high quality data. This is interesting, but it makes me all the more nervous about its application to areas WITHOUT such abundance, or without understanding.

AI agents fundamentally change tech jobs from writing code or pushing pixels to asking an AI to do it and reviewing the output. This is a fundamentally different skill set and sadly I agree with Nikhyl that many companies will take the shortcut of layoffs and rehiring than retraining their staff.

Ok, I am going to have to listen to this, as it’s adjacent to one of my great, unresolved areas of interest- early American committees of correspondence. Pre revolutionary information science is super cool stuff.

I am a PhD sociologist who works outside academia and I approve this message.

A) This is amazing B) I kind of want to see great matches captured as 3d sculptures, like they did with chess matches.

The video game stupid broke through my bubble, and I am now aware of something that only makes me stupider as I think about it, so I need to go stare at static for a while. Wait. Fuck. I have no idea where to find static these days.

Thief’s Market from Dave Chalker and Pickpocket Games is a treasure-swiping game of dice drafting and manipulation, with just enough thievery to keep things interesting! Find out more in this week’s Game in a Minute! www.gameosity.com/2026/04/19/g...

Don’t just let it be terrible, LEAN INTO it being terrible, because no one’s going to see it. I only bring this up because someone mentioned just this week that this trick is useful, but I *still* 30 years in, when stumped, write this on the top of the page.

Palantir recently published a 22 point manifesto. TL;DR DEI is bad, fascism is good.

FOLKS!!!! @naomialderman.bsky.social has bought Zombies, Run! Yes, the old app a bunch of us used to all exercise together to and do our mini events is back in her hands! Small thing, though. The banks apparently were empty 👀 So there's a couple of things to do to help out (mini thread)

One thing that's worth repeating: There is *zero* evidence that "substack helps you get readers". The only thing that we've ever seen that helps grow an audience is other authors mentioning your blog or newsletter, which is not the platform's doing. Substack just takes credit for that!

When you use AI to do your writing, you are telling your audience: “I deserve your attention, but you do not deserve my effort.”

Look, for my money the absolute game changer technologies right now are batteries and biosciences, not statistically modeling a mid conversation, but you do you.

Honoured to be in great company at the IGDN Indie Groundbreaker Awards! What Should We Have Tomorrow? Has been nominated for Game of the Year and Graphic Design, and owes a lot to @lostwaysclub.itch.io who was responsible for the graphic design and game consulting. www.igdnonline.com/groundbreakers

This doesn't happen when software is designed with a user in mind.

Gamers! My friend Jodi Black of Pinnacle Entertainment Group and Legacy Game Tables is in a hospital ICU, on the list for a lung transplant, and she could use your help. gofund.me/85df234bb

I should’ve called it: The resurrection of expertise Rumors of the death of expertise have been greatly exaggerated Undead Expertise

let's make a cultural value judgment: palantir are a bunch of execrable fascist shitheads and their ideas go against the basis of every civilized country on earth, from which they should be extirpated like the intellectual cancer they are

For a long time, it was really valuable to learn the abstractions around how computers work because it was all new and non-intuitive. It was so valuable that some folks have gotten permanently stuck in the abstractions, and now demand the world follow them into simplification and madness.

And so I will circle around to my constant point: the instinct for a comforting aristocracy is endemic in the human populace, and the job of democracy is to ruthlessly destroy it whenever it appears. Not build a political, legal and moral (prosperity gospel) framework which fucking encourages it.

The statement really drives it home. I don’t know if Thiel’s brain is just completely cooked by this technological singularity notion and he’s cynically using apocalyptic Christian doctrine to further his goals or if he’s mingled the two in his head, but at this point it hardly matters.

You can also tell that this is all just words to cover over gutter racism and not about cultural practice at all, because if the question was productive culture, they'd be praising the Springfield Haitians as a beautiful example of assimilation and adaption, not partnered with ICE to destroy them.