Coffee, Code, and Chronicles

The Escapist, in 2018, created Read an RPG Book in Public week . The event details follow: Read An RPG Book in Public Week is an event that happens three times a year, during the weeks surrounding March 4, July 27, and October 1 (starting on the Sunday on or before, and ending on the Saturday on or after). During these weeks, roleplaying enthusiasts are encouraged to take their favorite RPG rulebooks out with them and read them in public - on the bus, in the coffee shop, at lunch, at the park, or anywhere (as long as it isn't disruptive to work, school, church, or any other functions). I try to honor this event every year, so I thought: I know ICS, I can tell a machine to create an ICS calendar file for sharing. I asked Claude, specifically. It adds the calendar for the next 20 years, or 2046. Felt about right. God willing, I'll still be playing or running Warhammer with or for my grandchildren. Why these three weeks? March 4 was designated as GM's Day in 2008, and was coi...

A bit of a meta post.  The theme has been Table Top Roleplaying Games (TTRPGs) and their settings and the fiction that can be seeded by and created in and around it. TTRPGs come in a lot settings and systems today. None appeal to me more than the Old School Renaissance or Old School Revival—I prefer the former over the latter, but both are acceptable—games that lean into the medieval fantasy settings and systems building on the original Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) games of the 1970s and 1980s. OSR games build on the original “white box" D&D release (0e) and often include work that builds on the play style prominent in the 1970s: “Player Skill, not Character Abilities." This style breaks the fourth wall using the fact that you are playing a game. The dice provide friction and prevent the game from becoming just “playing pretend," and the situations are challenges presented by the Dungeon Master, a friend at the table, but not necessarily cheering you or your chara...

Much of the art for my A to Z challenge has been generated by "AI." This is commonly called Generative AI, or GenAI. How it works is well understood. Some great primers on AI art are below and I highly recommend taking a look at them. If for nothing else than to dispel the fear, uncertainty, and doubt generated by the hype cycle. As a professional software engineer with almost 40 years using computers—we had an Apple IIc in my high school—I can say this without being too dismissive. GenAI is a sophisticated random number machine with a lot of dials to "dial in" a result. Take many, no... all, of the images I've used in the A to Z challenge. I provide a "prompt" and the "machine" sort of reverse engineers key words and phrases to get to the result. I often have to refine, add, subtract, and "punch" the prompt for what I'm after, and I often have to settle. But I'm also artistically inclined, so what might look awesome to the ...

My wife and I are partner home brewers. While we are not distributed, we do a lot of bottle shares and we take our branding a little further than most home brewers. We have a home brewery on untappd, think "Facebook for Beer," We have labels printed for our bottles, stickers for laptops, and even custom bottle caps. Artistically inclined, we think we do a pretty good job. There's a nerd streak that runs through our brewery name,  Thirsty Stone Brewing . Both a pun and a homage to ourselves and our daughter. Then there is the logo modeled after Gallifreyan, the fictional language and writing system of the Time Lords, Doctor Who's birth race. Our beers always are a pun. All great and all usually the work of my wife.  Then there are "my beers": beers I make that my wife might not care for or drink a lot of, but I mostly share with my friends. There were the annual years of Night Gaunt (2015) — 2016 , 2017 , 2017 3.5e , 2019 — and Pale and Gaunt (2018) , an impe...