Recently updated blogs

Last season's SeeStar shot...Muchachos, your old Uncle had been keeping a weather eye peeled—literally. The forecasts for Christmas Eve had been gyrating wildly: “clear” to “partly cloudy” to “mostly cloudy.” Then, back to “clear,” but segueing to “RAIN” as the 24th of December approached. So what? If you’re a veteran reader of the Little Old Blog from Possum Swamp, you’ll recall one of my yearly astronomy rituals is taking a …

♪ You better watch out,You better not cry,Better not pout,I’m telling you why:History is coming to town. ♪ These days, it’s not hard to make Santa’s “nice list,” especially with a spy, er, elf always looking over your shoulder. But in centuries past, the holiday season could bring worse fates than coal in your stocking. Read More

(Ark of Time)GM: Matt MorrisonType: RPGSystem: D&D/Arduin GrimoireEdition: 5e (2024)Players: 7Provided: Characters may be provided by GMPower Level: Levels 9-12Variations: If you bring your own PC, 2014 5th edition characters are acceptable.Rules Knowledge: UsefulGame Content: MainstreamThe Ark of Time, a metropolis-sized object, traverses hyperspace paths coterminous with the intra-planar locations of your adventurers. Byproduct from hyper-relativistic passage of this vastly powerful deific-level being, force, or mag-tech forms a Rabbit Hole …

From Opus Unranked, in more or less the order I saw them. If reviewed, I linked. If not, trust me. Happy New Year! Origin (Du Vernay) Richard Brody is right on about this one. About Dry Grasses (Ceylan) Limbo (Sen) Pictures of Ghosts (Filho) Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus (Sora) The Beast (Bonello) Last Summer (Breillat) All You Need Is Death (Duane) Kidnapped (Bellochio) In Our Day (Hong) What You Wish For …

The blog is about building a small fictitious terminus based on a location in Oberfranken, it is merely an amalgam of features of existing locations in Fränkische Schweiz, in short, a plausible fiction. It is presumed that there was a further extension beyond the existing terminus at Behringersmuhle to line known as the Dampfbahn Fränkische Schweiz. The map below shows its route. A short description The facts The line, also …

Dumb tax, bad tax… It’s September 2005; towards the end of the Blair era, a few months into his third term, long after the thrill of the great millennial project has faded, spavined by a series of shockingly bad decisions. The Labour government, re-elected with a much-reduced majority, is unpopular but, somehow, the Tory opposition is even more unpopular. The Conservative party’s leadership campaign is about to begin. One of …

As this will be the last blog until 2025, I thought I’d make it a bit more substantive than usual. Normal service will be resumed in 2025. I started writing about how the UK and US under right wing leadership had become a kind of plutocracy in 2017, after the Brexit vote and the election of Trump. [1] That was relatively unusual at the time, because most of the discussion …

A lot of games pass through my doors every year. I think this is everything that arrived in 2024! And a peek at what I’m expecting to arrive in 2025 at the end. What a time to be alive and loving tabletop roleplaying. This is a very long list! Settle in with some eggnog or whatever else you’re drinking this holiday season. Best New Games Deathmatch Island: Okay, jeez, I …

ProjectHere is the O scale barbershop for my Fn3 Oahu Sugar Company layout. I removed the mullions from the Grandt Line Victoria Window to give the structure a more modern appearance depicting the 1940s. I used a photo off the internet for the interior which I printed on one label per sheet label stock by Avery and affixed to card stock from a stationary box. I found barbershop signs on …

Things I watched, read, played, got into, enjoyed, or did and would do again, in 2024.

When I set out to make Zinc I had a few goals in mind. A large portion of those goals were around engine ergonomics and “making happy developers,” but one very specific technical goal was “make it work on the web”. I didn’t know how to do this. I didn’t even really know how to approach the problem at the time, or even really understand how web builds would (or …

Everyone seems to have one of these – hope mine is useful to someone – I visited in November 2024. If you have backups running on your phone and a non-Japan plan, disable roaming before you get there or it’ll cost you. We got an eSim (I used Sakura) for £35 for 2 weeks for unlimited data. Internet works in tunnels and on the underground lines. Wheeee! If you have …

For years now I have had a boilerplate rejection notice for review requests from Elsevier journals. (See the Cost of Knowledge pledge for why.) I include it here, feel free to remix and reuse: As a publicly funded scholar, I prioritize reviewing for open access and not-for-profit initiatives. I cannot in good conscience devote my efforts to corporate behemoths like Elsevier, whose profit margins have exceeded those of Big Tech …

I mentioned in a previous post that doing exact UNORM or SNORM conversions to float in hardware was not particularly expensive, but didn’t go into detail how. Let’s rectify that! (If you haven’t read that post yet, please start there if you need an explanation of what the UNORM and SNORM formats are, as well as the basic idea.) Previously, I explained how for n ≥ 1, using the specific …

My mom died last month. Going through some of the personal items she left for me, I found this book. The Jews of America was the textbook that virtually all of my sisters and I used in religious school, or Sunday School as it was called in Reform synagogues of the time, as we made our way toward our bar and bat mitzvahs. It’s how we learned about Jewish history …