Recently updated blogs

Peter Bagge is on my shortlist of my favorite cartoonists, and Hate is perhaps my favorite comics series of all time. Since ending the series in 1998, he's periodically returned to these characters in roughly real time, as the series leads Buddy and Lisa had a kid. Bagge has said that Buddy Bradley is a version of him, approximately ten years in the past, so it's been interesting to see …

Four-Gone Conclusion It’s just before 5pm on a Saturday afternoon and the Fourpure Brewing Co taproom is quiet. Very quiet. A space that could easily accommodate 400 customers contains about 25 mostly middle-aged men. Much of the noise - beside a generic rock soundtrack - is coming from a group sitting on the mezzanine level, whose banter (they’re wearing identical straw hats) occasionally rises to near raucous levels.

Yours Truly and Gill from Realweegiemidget Reviews proudly present the John Saxon Blogathon! In the world of character actors, there are a select few who stand out. Mr. Saxon (born Carmine Orrico in 1936) left an indelible mark on cinema and television, commanding attention whenever he was onscreen. The Italian-American actor often played his roles with intensity and conviction. Often typecast in authority figure roles (frequently as a police detective), …

I guess I'm going to have to change my mystery game tagline. I'm playing more of these and getting better at them. Or maybe more designers are picking up the Obra-Dinn-ish static deduction model, which is the format I'm most simpatico with. (Speaking of that model, the next Golden Idol game will be November 12th. And the revamped Roottrees is coming on January 15th! With new material and new puzzles. …

So I was filling out this week goals today and I realized I’m about 50% into a refill, and thinking: already?! Then I started to look into it and realized it probably will last me like a month or 4 weeks. I think it is a good length. But it also highlights why I want to replace this with a binder soon ish. Now I’d have to re-write my yearly …

As designers, our imaginations are the most powerful tools in our toolkit. They help us bring static mocks to life by thinking about how a user might interact with our ideas. Imagination can also hold us back sometimes, as it can be very challenging to communicate these interactions to others. It can also only get you so far when working with data because data visualizations can surprise us. It’s generally …

One of the mysteries about pop is its repeatability. The way that repetition of a song doesn't dim its power, or only at extreme degrees of repetition (absolute blanket radio coverage causing you to get temporarily get sick of a song). A great song is that seemingly contradictory thing: the repeatable surprise. The classic pop single as a radio drama that never wears out.This degree of repeatability is not unheard …

There are plenty of ways to use LLMs ineffectively. For best results, lean into your own intelligence, experience, and creativity. Delegate the boring and routine stuff to closely supervised assistants whose work you can easily check. Mix Human Expertise With LLM Assistance for Easier Coding Part of the LLM series at The New Stack.

I’m not technically a boardgame designer, but I will be at the Hythe Community Games Day on Saturday 9 November taking place inside St. Leonard’s Church in Kent. I’ll mainly be hanging out by the Frostgrave table run by some friends. I expect it to … Continue reading →

About last weekend …

I’ve put up another Austin Philips story on Dark Tales Sleuth. This one is supernatural! In “The Missing Word”, an old telegraph operator regales his colleagues on a stormy midnight, about the night that he “heard” his fellow telegraphist’s murder–over the wire. The murderer’s never been found. Yet. This is the story that Mike Ashley collected in his 2018 anthology Glimpses of the Unknown. It’s quite a good one. I …

I write this review in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Milton's devastation of parts of Florida. Milton followed Helene, just a week or so earlier. Both hurricanes cut a swathe through parts of North America, leaving death and destruction in their paths. John Vaillant's recent book Fire Weather is subtitled a "true story from a hotter world" and the story of hurricanes Milton and Helene

The Geezers and friends enjoy a trip to Eastbourne

Design for Real Life is now available, for free, in its entirety, at dfrlbook.com. If you like what you read and want a personal copy, or just to support Sara and me, print-on-demand and ePub versions are also available from a number of sources. There are some countries where the book is not yet available, which we hope will be fixed soon. We’ll update the “Buy the book” page as …