The ongoing conversation
Work, technology, games, books, and the things that catch my attention.
Open letter to the Internet: The incredible success of the potato salad Kickstarter is simply a modern example of performance art. Like the million dollar home page or the eBay-nanza of religious-icon toast before it, it won’t kill its medium (crowdfunding, web advertising, online auctions). No doom to say here, move along. —jhunterj
This is the email I sent to the FCC commissioners at the end of April. I’ll rework it a bit to send to my senators and representatives. Feel free to use it as a basis for your own communications, and see this letter as well. Dear FCC Commissioners: As a paying consumer of Internet service, I am […]
Yesterday was the 52nd day of 2014 by the calendar I use. Since there are about 52 weeks in a year, that means if the year were a week, we just got through Monday. 2014 is 1/7 gone, and it seems like it just got here. Coming up in about three weeks is Pi Day, […]
I’d like to make a quick pass of today’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip: First, I think it’s funny. I get the joke, and it’s a good one. SMBC is a great comic, and one that I read regularly through my RSS reader. That’s my disclaimer, since I’m about to pick nits, but they do […]
This is another self-challenge: the lycanthrope template in Pathfinder allows it to be applied to any humanoid creature within one size category of the base animal. So how big to Pathfinder animals get? There are a couple of Colossals—the great white whale from Bestiary 2, the blue whale from the Skull & Shackles Adventure Path […]
If you’re a native English speaker, you probably learned in elementary school that there are five or six vowels: a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y. The letters that aren’t vowels are consonants. It’s a nice enough rule of thumb, and serves many purposes well. But it’s not quite accurate. First, there is a […]
Another Twitter pun meme went on in October, and seems to have enjoyed a recent resurgence. The idea is to take a well-known film title and add a word to it, yielding a (presumably) unwatchable movie. #AddaWordRuinaMovie has even spawned an account @ruinmoviee, which I guess is a pattern now for popular meme hashtags. But back […]
As I was knocking around some character ideas and checking out the Prestige Class options, I noticed that the Paths of Prestige‘s Storm Kindler had the unusual prerequisite “Must worship a god of storms.” (This is unusual in that it’s not codeable in PCGen, for example.) While checking to see which game deities fit the […]
Some quick rules of thumb for those of you with a website and a website admin (someone you contact when you need something changed or updated on the site), based on my attempts to do some things with those websites: Is it your domain name, or the website admin’s? This is the realm of the […]
Thanks to hanging out with some puzzling people on Facebook, and growing up playing word games in general, I noticed oddities of letter arrangements while I’m writing. Like say I was figuring out how to make the past tense of “video”, then wrote “videoed”, then noticed the “EOE” sequence is pretty unusual in English. Maybe […]