I wanted to share this funeral photography I captured in 2019 for a woman whose beloved Friesian mare had passed away. I still think about this experience often, it was such a privilege to be part of that moment. There was deep sadness, but also an incredible amount of love and even laughter.

Just added the first pattern written by someone else to the OSR Adventure Pattern Language. It's "One, Two, or Three Exits" by @samseer.bsky.social, and it's a really good one! #ttrpg #osr ttrpg-pattern-language.vercel.app/one-two-or-t...

You've started something, you mad wizard. My contribution is below. [An OSR Pattern] One, Two, or Three Exits sam-seer.blogspot.com/2025/08/an-o...

ttrpg-pattern-language.vercel.app/npc-quotes/ #ttrpg #osr

"You can't strike, you're too important" from a judge or government should instantly make you side with the people striking. They're *that* important but they get treated like shit? Nah. Naaaah. Let the government force better conditions.

Yo, you, stop what you're doing. I just learned that there's a version of the Hobbit illustrated by Tove Jansson!

There's a genre of advice that's basically "if you want to do X, read/do things outside of X," which I feel gets misinterpreted a lot as "don't read/do X". But the advice really is that you should read/do things both inside and outside of X. So... read/do many things is what I'm saying, I guess.

I think understanding the existence of, and differences between, playstyles should be one of the earliest concepts to learn when getting into TTRPGs. This video does a great job of summarising and expanding on The Retired Adventurer’s post on the topic!

This post is a thought experiment, but one I would love to see explored further and for other gameplay styles. It would be incredibly interesting to see what a work based on this model looks like, and even more so as points of comparison between pattern languages!

A wrote a few words on what A Pattern Language for TTRPG/OSR adventure design might look like. dungeon-merlin.leaflet.pub/3lw2nzp6yls2y #ttrpg #osr

My recommendation is, very strongly, that you learn to code if you want to and think it'll be fun, because in 20 years you'll be one of a dwindling number of people who actually know how anything works.

Why is everybody always talking about Huizinga's magic circle and whether it's a good or useful concept, when they could also talk about the fact that the opening of the book fucking rules?

Hex Kid progress report #003: basic grid in place, including offset and orientation selection #ttrpg #osr

Why am I reading portrait PDFs on my landscape monitor? RPGs could embrace digital-native design with tooltips, integrated dice rollers, and responsive layouts instead of treating screens like worse paper. dicegoblin.blog/why-the-fuck...

Hex Kid progress report #001: elegant hover animations ✅ #ttrpg #osr

“Nobody loved the library more than Dan.” A meticulous list kept by Dan Pelzer from 1962-2025, cataloging all the books he borrowed and read from the Columbus Metropolitan Library, shared by his daughter. I could not could not love this more. Dan's book list (all 109 pages) at what-dan-read.com

This week for @leaflet.pub's summer pub club, I let @bastionland.bsky.social's Mythic Bastionland inspire me create & publish an early version of a set of hex tiles based on paintings from The Met collection: jonasmerlin.itch.io/the-met-coll... #ttrpg #osr

My timeline's friendship with holes ended. Now small flying creatures holding staffs are its best friend.

Dreading that feeling of having to come up with a sweet mobile lair concept on the spot? Not anymore! #ttrpg #osr dungeon-merlin.leaflet.pub/3lt6dz5j5bc22

New month, new Carouse, Carouse! This time, I'm getting spicy about subtweeting (and a lot of people write more interesting things). www.carouse.blog/july-2025-ju...

Explorateur #9 is live and over encumbered with design links. www.explorersdesign.com/the-explorat... I'll share some of the standouts here on Bluesky...

Instead of penalizing being overencumbered, what if there was a reward to carrying fewer items than your capacity? Would this make encumbrance tracking something players want to do instead of a chore? Read the thought experiment #osr #ttrpg

Just released my first little TTRPG thing: jonasmerlin.itch.io/robot-bee-be... It's a science-fantasy themed character background for Cairn 2e, inspired by this great jam, which has a whole bunch of super flavourful backgrounds: itch.io/jam/cairn-ba... #ttrpg #osr

My friend Yannick is building the ultimate version of Ultimate Tic Tac Toe over at @bejofo.com If you like having fun, like... at all, you should give it a try. Or, play against me: bejofo.com/ttt/HuQ1PqH0 But be warned: I'm very, very bad!

What's a poster you had up in your room growing up? ... 🤷‍♂️

Hey, look, it's my hometown, and it never looked so cool! (Really. It hasn't. Ever.)

Turned Doctor Curious, VII's semi-official, @idlecartulary.itch.io approved #zungeon Table into a small webapp to quickly roll a theme: zungeon-theme-generator.vercel.app

Kinda want to build a service that sends you a printout of an RSS feed or a Blue Sky account's posts once a week or month via real world mail...

Please stop attacking me.

If you're looking for a weekly newsletter about the technical aspects (mostly) of creative coding, @gorillasun.bsky.social is basically all signal. Recommended!

Just finished reading "A Wizard of Earthsea," and while my edition's illustrations by Charles Vess are beautiful, in her afterword, Le Guin writes that for her, the first edition cover by Ruth Robbins – depicting a Ged with "copper-brown skin" – was the definitive one. And I kind of have to agree.

I wrote a thingy about ideas. @jonasmerlin.bsky.social wrote a response to it. And this is my response to that response. It is my response response. https://www.todepond.com/wikiblogardenite/how/change/happens/

I started aggregating my media reviews from different services on my website and haven't automated that process yet, so I add them manually using my editor. This has led to the very bizarre feeling of seeing Copilot come up with whole reviews in my voice, incl. which movie it thinks I have watched.

Felt it might make sense to explore my thoughts on this a bit further www.jonasmerl.in/blog/what-i-...

The number of people in this thread who don‘t get that this is meant to be a joke is actually concerning. These differences in understanding add up over time. It‘s not just Fox News viewers and people being actively manipulated who live in what essentially amounts to a different reality.

I regret having to inform you that the Sabrina Carpenter Netflix christmas special is, indeed, slop.

Thinking about Arkane doing Dishonored, Dishonored 2 and Prey back-to-back-to back made me think about great imperial phases in gaming. Sadly, Arkane itself isn't an example, since the financial success wasn't there for Dishonored 2 and Prey.

I'm using LLMs everyday, but some part of me can't help but think of all the cool and interesting things that would've been built if they didn't completely capture the minds of 80% of the tools for thought and future of coding community 2 years ago.

157 - Home Workshop As the decentralization of work becomes more and more effective, the workshop in the home grows and grows in importance.

If you‘re quick to disagree with people, try to offset it by being really fucking supportive if they say something you agree with. Otherwise you‘re not doing anyone (or any cause) any favors.

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Used val.town for the first time to create my silly bot @theproblem-bot.bsky.social @stevekrouse.com et al. have been cooking, huh? Really makes a whole class of web tasks that historically had a lot of accidental complexity attached trivial.

98 - Circulation Realms * In many modern building complexes the problem of disorientation is acute. People have no idea where they are, and they experience considerable mental stress as a result.

Every now and then, when writing JavaScript, a thought suddenly pops into my head: "I wonder what TJ Holowaychuk does these days?"

So I uh... did a thing: @thethingbot.bsky.social

@jtchapman.bsky.social's new video on the "intellectual" (ideological) history of Silicon Valley is my favorite video of his to date: www.youtube.com/watch?v=nST5... If you like it as well, I can highly recommend reading "What Tech Calls Thinking" by Adrian Daub: www.adriandaub.com/books/what-t...

Pavement tiles 16th–17th century Spanish, Seville https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/187917

Been foraging mushrooms almost every autumn since I was a little kid and my parents taught me how to identify bay boletes. It adds this whole other layer to your stroll through the woods, like a lens you view it through, that keeps you actively engaged with your surroundings.

The next billion user app? Mushroom pokédex.