What I did on leave: Coding

I recently spent several months on paternity leave, and took the opportunity to do a coding project that I’d been wanting to write for a while. This was both a chance to use some free-ish time to take care of this project, as well as a way to keep my coding skills up while on […]

Tea Party 2016

Most years my parents, my wife, and I throw a tea party some time around New Year’s, where we bake tons of sweet and savory things and invite lots and lots of friends around. I try and document the spread each year, and here’s this year’s, including a few new items.

Day Out in London

I thought I’d show a collection from Instagram here, of a day out in London, in order to record them in a more permanent and ordered fashion. I’ve been experimenting with the Darkroom app for iOS now that VSCO got an iffy UI, and enjoying it. It’s got a better UI than Snapseed and seems […]

Shadowrun: Dragonfall DC Thoughts

As a follow-on to my thoughts on Shadowrun, here are some thoughts on the next official campaign/engine in the list, Dragonfall. I played the Director’s Cut version, for reference. Here’s my ending character: As you can see, this time I played a human, rather than an elf, so I missed out a little on some […]

Holiday Gaming Thoughts

Steam Link & Steam Controller I picked these two up for Christmas, and so far I’m very happy. The Link might work well over wireless for you, but it didn’t for me. The issue wasn’t just lag, but also the stream just dropping completely; it was essentially unplayable. I’ve since pulled some Cat 5e from […]

I have one of the best jobs in academia. Here’s why I’m walking away. – Vox

After spending four years working in higher education, trying to effect piecemeal improvements, I’m convinced that the picture is more dire than most people realize: There’s no one single problem to fix or villain to defeat, no buzzword-y panacea that will get things back to normal. As the spouse of a graduate student in the […]

Shadowrun Thoughts

I’ve been trying to finish some of my Steam backlog so I can feel less bad about picking up items off my wishlist. This was clearly prescient, as the Steam Halloween sale started today and I picked up two new games. The first Shadowrun was one of the games I wanted to finish, and last […]

Ridiculous Ascension Ending

Setting the honor pool to the maximum of 120 can lead to some ridiculous results, especially with the smaller expansions. In this case, the culprit was 3 multi-unite effects working together that let me acquire everything left in the deck, and then defeat everything in the deck multiple times over. The last turn, where this […]

Competitive Hearthstone: Too Much RNG, Finally? – YouTube

Many people have questioned the role of randomness (commonly called RNG) in Hearthstone. NoxiousGLHF, in the video above, feels that we’re getting dangerously close to having too many random cards that are viable competitively. He makes a distinction between cards like Mindgames, which are tons of fun but uncompetitive, cards like Flamecannon, which has controllable […]

Tech nerds are smart. But they can’t seem to get their heads around politics. – Vox

Real talk about nerds and politics. Yes, it’s messy, but it’s what we have to deal with to effect change. And it’s a shame, because if tech nerds want to change the world — as they say with numbing frequency that they do — they need to figure out politics, the same way they’re figuring […]