The ongoing conversation
Work, technology, games, books, and the things that catch my attention.
In awesome news, there’s a Kickstarter for the classic Avalon Hill squad leader card game Up Front. Go check it out! In and amongst many other additions and improvements, I believe the new version will include several of my own scenarios from my previous website as well as some weather rules, which may or may not reflect […]
I like credit unions, I really do. I’m a customer of both banks and credit unions, and my credit union handles more of my money than my bank does. But: My credit union, and perhaps many credit unions, have offered me an “opportunity” this holiday: I can skip my next loan payment, either December or […]
A Jawa costume at Star Wars Celebration IV, 2007. Photo by Scott Ruether / Star Wars (CC BY 2.0). Played some Jawa riddle games with the boys last month. I’ve already shared the results on Facebook, but another fried made a different “Utinni” joke this week, and that reminded me to share it here. If […]
This weekend I was over-scheduled, and I came out of it wondering how I had managed to avoid posting another entry for the whole weekend. But at least that wonderment lead to this reminder: Whether you’re managing your time, your money, or your calories, the basics come down to: Become conscious and intentional about your […]
So you have data you’re tracking every day. Maybe a lot of data. Maybe tracking it a lot of ways. You might even have graphs of the data over time, so that you can spot trends and anomalies. And then you find that you’ve got too many graphs… It’s time to let the data tell […]
I had two complementary meme images cross my Facebook wall this weekend: Reflecting the tone of this campaign (and the several leading up to it), they spend their energy talking about what they are not, attempting to counter the stereotypes that make modern political discourse so popular and useless. I hope you have friends from […]
Today’s pun-filled hashtag on Twitter is #DisneyLucasMergers. (Don’t know why? Tsk! Go read Disney to Buy Lucasfilm for $4.05 Billion; New ‘Star Wars’ Movie Set for 2015 first.) “Snow White and the Seven Droids” is the most popular one. I threw in some that I hope are less obvious: Finding Solo 20,000 Clones from the Sea Planet The Hutt […]
Once upon a time, I found myself in the wonderful position of writing a supplement for the GURPS WWII line. GURPS WWII: Frozen Hell covers the Finnish involvement in three wars within World War II: the Winter War of 1939–40, the Continuation War of 1941–44, and the Lapland War of 1944–45. There is precious little […]
I think Sundays might be good days for meme posts, kind of a day off. And the memes might be recycled, but the answers will be revisited from any of my earlier off-blog posts. This is a meme. Treat is as such. I’m otherwise dispensing with the instructions. If you really don’t know how to […]
I’m resurrecting some material from my previous web life. A version of this article was originally published on or before November 15, 2003. Iron Dragon, published by Mayfair Games, is my favorite entry in the Empire Builder series of crayon rail games. It lacks some of the educational value of most of the other […]