Many bloggers write a “Books I Read Last Year” or “Recommended Movies” post at the end of the year. Frankly, I think most people do it because other people do it and because they’re really easy to write. It’s a total cop-out for generating content. In fact, it’s such a good cop-out that I’m going […]
Author: kevin
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Switching Up My Gaming
I play all of my video games on my 2012 MacBook Pro, but recently, it has been showing its age. The 100GB Windows partition is too small, so I actually didn’t have enough space to install new games. Over the past year, I saw a few games that my computer no longer met the minimum […]
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Meeting My Neighbors
For the past three years, I have hosted a holiday cookie exchange for my building. Our building has 12 units (mostly 2 bedrooms), so I had hoped that we could get at least half of them to participate. However, in the last three years, we have had three, four, and three units participate, including ourselves. […]
Julie and I have very different understandings of the 5 star rating system. Here’s what usually happens at a restaurant: (Kevin nosily scrapes the last bits of food from his plate using his finger as a backstop instead of his knife) Kevin: So how would you rate this restaurant? Julie: I liked it! Maybe four […]
Short Version of the Tip When a player takes an action that requires a roll: Ask the player to describe exactly how they are doing it Complete their description right up to the moment that decides success or failure Ask the player to roll Narrate the resolution (or have the player do it) It may […]
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Working from an iPad
Julie and I just got back from vacation in China. Amongst many other things, we saw baby pandas. On the trip, I wasn’t carrying my MacBook Air, but I did have my iPad and iPhone, and I learned a few things about trying to do work on my mobile devices.
In 1996, Deep Blue played competitive Chess against world champion Garry Kasparov. In 2011, Watson beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy. In 2016, AlphaGo played and beat Lee Sedol in Go. And in 2018, OpenAI Five played 2 games against professional Data 2 players, and the humans survived 2 very fun games. But in another year, I think […]
After my last stint writing and publishing a tabletop adventure, I was inspired to take a shot at writing a rule system. With a few playtests and a PDF from an online Word template, I now also call myself a game designer by sharing “College Contagion.”
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My Current Podcasts
Everyone is into podcasts these days. Here’s a common conversation I have had. A: “So, I was in the car listening to a podcast-” B: “Wait, you listen to podcasts? Me too!” A: “Really, what podcasts do you listen to?” As much as I enjoy them myself, I don’t think it is unique or surprising […]
Recently, I caught a podcast episode of The Splendid Table where “Nigella Lawson Defends the Honor of Home Cooking.” She recently wrote an article on Lenny Letter arguing that people shouldn’t say that they are “just a home cook.” The word “just” implies that home cooks are less than a chef where Lawson seems them as distinct […]