2025: The Bundle of Holding year in review (Beyond the Bundle blog): beyondthebundle.com/2026-01-01/2...

#Classical ringtones - phone tunes arranged in convincing pastiches of Bach, Mozart, Schumann, Rachmaninoff, & Ravel by Josep Castanyer Alonso: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnmB...

I like hearing music on Christmas Day so I can see the little Santa hat on the VLC Media Player icon.

Ravel's Bolero performed on nine homemade 8-bit chiptune instruments (Linus Akesson): linusakesson.net/music/bolero...

1. Life is unfair, but you really don't want it to be "fair." 2. You can get pretty far in life just by showing up. 3. A lot of success just takes time. 4. Some big advantages come from negative personality traits. 5. You don't know what you want until you get it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-iL...

9,175 game industry layoffs in 2025 (so far!) (GamesIndustry): www.gamesindustry.biz/games-indust...

live long and prosper (if you have a billion dollars)

Congrats to Daniel Cook ( @danctheduck.bsky.social ) and David Edery on the return of Spry Fox to its natural home! (Game File): www.gamefile.news/p/netflix-se...

Works that will enter public domain in 2026 (Wiki): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_in...

Alan Moore profile (Metropolitan Review, 26 Nov 2025 - 11,500 words): www.metropolitanreview.org/p/giant-of-t...

Paraphrases (1887): Set of 40 variations on "Chopsticks" by four Russian composers for piano four hands, where a virtuoso is playing alongside a small child. Compositions by Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Liadov, & Cui, plus a prelude by Franz Liszt (!): www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x--...

Coping with burnout by learning ancient Sumerian (Mind the Nerd) - attn @jessnevins.bsky.social : mindthenerd.com/why-im-learn...

Never heard anything like Verse 2 of OJ the Alien's 2023 space-gangsta-rap-comedy track "Wiseguys on Mars": www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgIA...

"How I View the US After 13 Years Living in Europe" (Evan Edinger, 06 Oct 2025): www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1Qv... /1.7M views, 13.6K comments, all supportive

"It feels incredible to return to [Montreal] where my career began in 1999, back when the gaming industry was just taking off.” Ah yes, that primordial epoch of 1999, the misty glimmering dawn of computer games. (Variety): variety.com/2025/gaming/...

The supermarket music system started playing "Never Gonna Give You Up," and reflexively I looked around, checking to see if I'd been pranked into visiting the wrong store.

On Tues 23 Sept I'm doing a Reddit r/rpg AMA about my 28-year freelance career, the Bundle of Holding, and my new D&D sourcebook "Manse Magnificent": www.reddit.com/r/rpg/commen...

Mark Rein-Hagen did well enough at White Wolf to buy a painted-lady landmark house in San Francisco. Of course he was both designer and publisher. Can't think of any RPG just-designers who made serious bank off a game published by others.

Not to add to the discourse, but… It’s ‘toe the line,’ not ‘tow the line.’ It’s ‘free rein,’ and not ‘free reign.’ It’s ‘eke out,’ not ‘eek out.’ It’s ‘sleight of hand,’ not ‘slight of hand.’ It's ‘Anchors aweigh,’ and not ‘Anchor's away!’

"In 1994 Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti suggested people have always endured commutes of 1 hour/day, 1/2 hour each way, on avg. Improvements in urban planning and transport haven’t shortened travel time; they’ve just permitted us to live further afield." www.futilitycloset.com/2025/07/31/m...

The other day I drew a subway-style map for The Hobbit, and it was very well received. Some of you asked if I could do one for LoTR, so I have! Forgive the eel watermark; I'm working on making these something you can buy, if you like.

Just updating the data fueling my games industry layoff tracker dashboard and noticing we just hit another grim milestone. I now know of as many layoff waves happening in 2025 so far as I know of from 2023 in its entirety. It is currently July 8. Tell me again who said this was getting better?

95 untold cases Sherlock Holmes or Watson allude to without explanation (Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia - via Futility Closet): www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/Ca...

Dutch weather forecaster accuses Belgian wind farms of stealing Dutch wind (Brussels Times): www.brusselstimes.com/1595046/belg...

Patrick Stewart, the actor, canonically exists in the Star Trek future, and Jean-Luc Picard is aware of him (Ironic Sans): ironicsans.ghost.io/proof-that-p... /via Jason Kottke

We’re excited to announce the four winners of this year’s Diana Jones Award Emerging Designer Program!

"People who actually left the US, are you happy?" (Reddit r/AmerExit, 28 April): www.reddit.com/r/AmerExit/c...

A loyal citizen reports his experience playing FIASCO using the ALPHA COMPLEX playset by @crisperthanthou.bsky.social based on Paranoia. Thread includes a download link to the free playset.

"For 25 years [at Vanity Fair], I was contracted to produce three articles a year, long ones, typically ten thousand words. For this, my peak salary was $498,141. That's not a misprint -- $498,141, or more than $166,000 per story." (Bryan Burroughs, Yale Review): yalereview.org/article/burr...

This is high art

In 1856 Andrew Scott Waugh, British Surveyor General in India, measured the height of Mt Everest at exactly 29,000 ft. But he publicized the figure as 29,002 ft so it wouldn't look like an estimate. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_E...

Actor Keye Luke, who had hundreds of film-TV roles in a 50-year career, started as a professional illustrator. He broke into acting by drawing ads for film studios. (Silver Scenes, March 2015): silverscenesblog.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-...

#Project2025 Tracker - check how far they've got, what's next - currently 34% complete: www.project2025.observer /via Jason Kottke

FixTheGulf.com - Google Chrome plugin that fixes "Gulf of America" on Google Maps

TTRPG freelancers, please make your email easy to find, ideally in your bio 😭

Biochemist Derek Lowe on organic chemicals in asteroid Bennu - "The molecules of life are everywhere... If life is uncommon in the universe, it's not for lack of starting materials" (Science): www.science.org/content/blog...

"Yesterday was apparently National Moose Day and I have no idea what anyone is supposed to do with that information. Do you buy someone a moose and if so, how do you wrap something with antlers?" www.newsfromme.com/2025/01/26/h...

So, I reviewed the whole line of Paranoia XP books. If you're interested in old RPG book reviews, enjoy. (I mostly posted them just to goad myself into finally reading them all and noting what I thought about each book.) www.gordsellar.com/2025/01/26/s...

2024 - The Bundle of Holding year in review (Beyond the Bundle blog): beyondthebundle.com/2024-12-31/2...

"A new class of magnetism called altermagnetism has been imaged for the first time in a new study. The findings could lead to the development of new magnetic memory devices with the potential to increase operation speeds up to 1,000 times." (U of Nottingham): www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/researc...

Sugar plums, the Victorian confection, have no plums, take months to make (Tasting History): youtu.be/q5Nk0evkBpE?...

Warhammer 40K Nurgle-scented candle: merch-usa.warhammer.com/products/war...

2024 currently has more known games industry layoffs than 2023+2022 combined. 2024 is roughly 600 layoffs away from doubling 2023. There is still plenty of business days left in the month. I can't emphasize enough how extreme these last few years have been. So far.

Hello, gamers! Happy to be here on Bluesky!

The most stressed out I've ever been about Christmas was when I was 16 and I got my first ever job, working at M&S in Dundrum. As soon as I started I kept hearing these myths about the Christmas Eve Waste Sale, where all the food that wasn't sold on the 24th was marked down 90%.

Lengthy, grim analysis of indie videogames in 2024 (Andrew Johnston, Superjump): www.superjumpmagazine.com/the-state-of...

Travel guidebook publisher Arthur Frommer dies, age 95 (CNN): www.cnn.com/2024/11/18/t...

NASA's new Globbo Space Telescope. (Image by Duane Beck)

Vacation idea for board (bored?) gamers: The Tabletop Inn, a board game-themed bed & breakfast in Marion, North Carolina: www.tabletopinn.com