Recently updated blogs

This week, we are looking at a map of the area south of Petten in the province of Holland (now North-Holland) in 1730. The water board commissioned the map from Jan Spruytenburgh and Hendrik de Leth. The map tells the history of the landscape, and reclaiming the land to create polders. On the left side, we see the smaller polders surrounding by dikes, created in the medieval period. On the …

Two more adventure locations on the Judas Sea in Krevborna! The first one, Fathom's Reach, was invented as a location the characters visited in my previous Krevborna campaign. Flotsam, on the other hand, was inspired by the (criminally underused) Saragoss from the Ravenloft setting and the floating city of Armada from China Mieville's novel The Scar.Fathom’s ReachThough its presence is unknown to most, Fathom’s Reach is an accursed city lurking …

Will our writing all converge to a generic AI style? Let's take a quick detour into LaTeX. Back in the late '80s, before LaTeX was the standard, there was TeX—a system with no default formatting, which meant everyone had their own unique style for papers. Then LaTeX arrived, and suddenly all our papers looked polished and professional. But the catch was, LaTeX only got you about 80% of the way …

By Luisa De la Concha Montes We all spend too much time on our phones – there is no doubt about it. So, how can phone addiction be explored, in 2024, without relying on redundant tropes? Phone, a play written and directed by Sam Taylor explores our overreliance on digital media through the distant, yet loving relationship between four siblings: Helen, Issy, Harvey and Luke. They find themselves in a …

Here are some useful tricks for getting the most out of random encounter tables. Roll Twice Roll twice on a random encounter table and mix the results together. Maybe the characters find two groups fighting each other. Maybe they find one who just wiped out another. Maybe the two groups are allies. Mixing two groups together adds significant and meaningful complications to what otherwise might be a single boring encounter. …

This blogpost is about The Albanese morphism for hyperelliptic varieties. If you just want mathematics and not some of the backstory, you can click the link to immediately get to the preprint. Background Back in March 2023, Andreas Demleitner and Pedro Núñez gave seminar talks at the University of Luxembourg, with the talk by Andreas being on hyperelliptic varieties (the talk by Pedro, whilst interesting, has no relevance to this …

The last two, three years of the reprint renaissance have been especially kind to the legacy of Christianna Brand as Green for Danger (1944), Suddenly at His Residence (1946), Death of Jezebel (1948) and London Particular (1952) appeared back in print – reissued in the British Library Crime Classics series. Death of Jezebel came in as an incredibly close second in the 2022 Reprint of the Year Award, before going …

I read a post that was, to sum up a more nuanced thing, about how rest is not resistance, it's a privilege not afforded equally in capitalism. Now I am not linking, because this is not intended as a dunk. But having read Tricia Hersey's Rest is Resistance, that was kind of the point. Capitalism makes rest hard, (again summing up an entire book here, go read the book). So …

I joined Freja with Redox to talk about the state of US politics and white supremacy following Donald Trump’s second election. It’s partly in Danish, but my contributions are in English. Have a listen!

Who? You might be more familiar if I write Eoghan Ruadh Ó Néill as Owen Roe O'Neill. But I won't because he was Irish, not English. Although there is some confusion if he was Eoghan Rua or Eoghan Ruadh. I'll stick with Eoghan Ruadh.Now please bear with me, as there's rather a lot of Ó Néills running around Ireland in the 1640s.Eoghan Ruadh had at least eight brothers and four …

I couldn’t sleep this morning, so I got up sometime, ate, exercised, showered and finished my ATProto/Bluesky integration in GoBlog. You can now follow me there too: @jlelse.blog. But I think I will only use it very passively and only post my links there automatically. Interactions & Comments

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.

When I was younger, I thought DDR was a game exclusive to arcades but how wrong I was! planet clue examined DDR controllers throughout gaming history, from PS1 to a DVD “game” that doesn’t actual require any of your inputs (planet clue rages about this in the video).

Our Edinburgh bookshops purchases: (yes, I am very behind in databasing new books, but hoping to catch up soon!)Amusingly, on that one morning we bought two different books, in two different bookshops, by two different Daniel Chandlers. Neither appears to have a disambiguating middle name.

The New Moon is Sunday December 1. In the evening Venus leaves Sagittarius behind and is close to the thin crescent moon on December 5. Mercury is lost in the twilight. Saturn is in the north western sky coming closer to Venus. Jupiter is now visible in the evening sky along with Saturn and Venus. In the morning Mars and Jupiter continue to draw apart. Mars is close to the …