Originally shared by Tom McGrenery

Here’s your next dungeon crawl. A cross section of the Titanic.

I think I’ve just had a breakthrough on Tartary Mechawrestling that takes it away from being battletech lite and in a boardgamey direction.

I won’t be ready to playtest it for a couple of months but would you guys be interested in feb/march?

TIL:

historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison. They conclude that Edison’s version was able to outstrip the others because of a combination of three factors: an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve (by use of the Sprengel pump) and a high resistance that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable.

My man Humphry Davy heads the list, but this is beginning to sound like one of those cases where it was actually the Dutch Arabs Chinese in 2000 BC.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

anti radiation deer blood baths is now added to my list of phrases you can radically reinterpret with stress or punctuation.

[anti-radiation] deer [blood-baths]

anti [radiation deer] blood baths

[anti-radiation-deer] [blood-baths]

anti [radiation deer blood] baths

in a huge hurry today, but sometimes the research gut-punches you.

22 Dec 1794: ship Zorg sets sail from Netherlands, bound for Java.

4 days later lands in Plymouth. Stays for 4 months, no explanation why.

11 Apr. 1795 sets sail from Plymouth, bound for Java.

3 days later wrecked off Boulogne, 158 drowned.

G+ has just spontaneously deleted my post twice, just before I could hit send.

I guess it’s a sign. Time to get on with work.

I’ve been in favour of a radical rethinking of the economy for years, but I’m not reposting this for political reasons. Instead, it’s to share something that writing a gaming book has made me realize about the history of shipping. It’s super simple but I never really confronted it before.

Raising a spar/sail or an anchor is the one task that requires most strength on a pre-industrial ship. It can define the crew requirements for a sailing ship, in fact – you need n crew to pull that rope. Add a winch and you can cut the number in half, or a third.

So why don’t all ancient ships have winches? Had they not invented them?

Of course they had, winches have been around as long as anyone can remember.

But if the ships were sometimes sailed and sometimes rowed, then they needed oarsmen. So many that a winch was unnecessary – you just get all the oarsmen to pull the rope. A winch just takes up space.

The Dutch East India Company had trouble manning the ships returning to Europe full of pepper and tea in the 18th century. A 1200 ton East Indiaman needed 70 crew, and it was hard to scrape them together once malaria, accidents, desertion and war had taken their toll. But they went out to Asia with 200 men aboard, sent to man a whole fleet of ships circulating around Japan, China and what’s now Indonesia, gathering goods, fighting colonial battles, relieving merchant factories, maintaining an empire. So returning 70 men home at the end of their contracts seemed easy to Head Office, in The Hague.

But in 1780 they were forced by war to switch to simpler pinks that only needed 30 crew for 1000 tons. 30 men? How? Because pinks had evolved more efficient rigs, traded speed and battle-readiness for cost-shaving sail plans. They were automated, in simple ways. They were shaped by a harsher economic climate and reflected specialized needs.

And after the East India Company collapsed, ships based on pinks became the norm, and there were just fewer mariners per ton of cargo.

And as a side-effect, cargo ships were no longer easily convertible to war service. Or piracy.

Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger

This article is chock-full of not only good data, but good analysis of how automation has been changing the labor market for decades – and how, if you haven’t already noticed, this isn’t getting any better.

https://medium.com/basic-income/the-real-story-of-automation-beginning-with-one-simple-chart-8b95f9bad71b//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

so… rectilinear forms, repetitive columnar structures, atria and courtyards…

this is what an anthropological approach to architectural history is all about, really.

Note also how “Ancient Greece” means the Acropolis/Temenos/temple quarter. Not where the Ancient Greeks lived.

Originally shared by Linux Inside

The old motherboard looks like ancient Greece.

So in general although this Willett rye is delicious I think it’s inferior to Rittenhouse for making cocktails, because it has a really concentrated rye flavour that doesn’t play nice with others.

But. In a Boulevardier in particular it’s ridiculously good. And you can mix it pretty close to 1:1:1 rather than the 2 whisky: 1 Campari: 1 Italian vermouth that Doug Ford suggests.

Damn, this is good. Like, if I had a Negroni I’d be wishing I had a Willett’s Boulevardier.

for Cindern Block

A spirograph program that makes Islamic geometric patterns.

A puzzle game based on intuitive mathematics.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/415170/Engare/

I love it.

Via Isaac Kuo with thanks.

Originally shared by Jennifer Ouellette

Engare review: The geometry of Islamic art becomes a treasure of a game https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/10/engare-review-spirographs-math-and-islamic-art-blend-for-quite-the-game/

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/10/engare-review-spirographs-math-and-islamic-art-blend-for-quite-the-game///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Originally shared by null

NotJose Bacio​

letting you know in case you can make it…

events/cea2p9hnruefc688qgvo69s5b7c?authkey=COio_uLVo9P3_wE//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Jack and the Beanstalk is a coded retelling of the Norse Myth cycle. The beanstalk is Yggdrasil.

In the rare first editions Jack has a brother, Luke, whose pet dog threatens to eat the neighbourhood kids and also the moon.

It’s written in this coded form to keep it secret from adults who, having handled money, are no longer trustworthy.

I don’t want to defend Zak. I don’t intend to, I’ve seen him do things that I feel are badly wrong. I tend not to call him on it because I know that I don’t know the whole picture.

It sounds like I’m a few months behind where you’ve got to with him, and that might be the whole reason for me not simply agreeing with you.

I have felt intimidated by Zak’s way of interacting, his demands to control speech, his ability (now reduced) to throw people out of the club. You could argue that he intimidated me into removing my supporting +1 for Patrick, although I feel like it was my own (conflicted and difficult) decision, based on my still not being sure what was happening on the reddit thing.

On the other hand, he’s one of very few people who can be relied upon to provide useful, honest feedback on my work. There’s a side to that disdain for feelings that’s valuable. It’s just not for everyday discourse.

The bullying is not valuable. I really, really wish he would listen to Patrick and change his behaviour, but I have little hope.

Honestly I don’t really ever want to take sides for or against anyone – I think this whole language of “supporting” or “standing by” people online is kinda silly, like sending hopes and prayers. I’ve kind of made a mental note to say “OK, this is bullying. Let’s try to find out if there’s a way to have this discussion where nobody gets hurt” next time I see it… but I think I’m probably 3 years too late with that approach. I don’t let him bully on my threads… and he doesn’t, but he still bullies on other people’s and it’s a problem.

So I’m not defending Zak. But. Here are some things I have in the back of my mind, when I’m weighing whether to wade into it with him:

1. lots of people hate him and have lied about him. I guess he has a siege mentality and an us or them perspective and I’ve watched that develop since 2008. It keeps getting worse. I would like to do an intervention before he hurts himself physically but again, I’m probably years too late.

2. it sounds like his girlfriend is dying slowly and that will inevitably bankrupt both of them before the end. I have no idea how he manages to do anything under those circumstances.

3. his whole persona, from porn to appearance to gaming to political advocacy has always been “fuck you I’m here and alive” plus “fuck you I care about these people and will fight for them” and while the “fuck you” aspect has served him well in getting attention (for his own work, for the advocacy, for being at the center of things) it seems like it’s also his curse. The mask that becomes the face. It should not surprise us that he is who he is. But I kinda think we all just got used to him, so his basic abrasiveness keeps sneaking up on us.

He’s talked himself into an untenable position regarding online discussion. I would still like to try to bring him back from that, because he has so much to offer that it’s a tragedy to let him go. I’m pretty sure that cannot be done by mirroring his own behaviour. And meanwhile people get hurt.

Anyway, that’s why I’m reluctant to take sides, even while I’m not willing to defend him.

One for Reynaldo Madriñan

On the one hand, god it’s frustrating not to be able to just see the figures clearly.

On the other, I guess this is their revenue model.

Grrr just give me everything free for my momentary distraction!

http://scandia.store/product/shinto-kami-poster//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

l’m not completely certain about all of these, but many are outside my period.

One thing I’m always conscious of is the reach of any particular tradition. These mostly seem Anglo-American and post 1850 to me.

Originally shared by Peter Kisner

https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/lucybellwood/the-art-of-the-sailor-tattoo-guide/

Originally shared by Host For the End

A pair of Ocean Liners converted to auxiliary cruisers fought a pitched battle in 1914.

Read that again.

Basically the Germans put some artillery and machine guns on an Ocean liner. The British did the same thing. Cap Trafalgar was actually disguised as the Carmania at the time the battle occurred.

An auxiliary cruiser would be a wonderful vessel for CoC characters venturing to the south pole, to visit the mountains of madness. And the implications for space vessels pressed into service as warships seems obvious.

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/desperate-fight-death-rms-carmania-vs-sms-cap-trafalgar-1914.html//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Unpopular ideas club: STR should be a skill.

After all, fighters get a bigger die than MUs for HP, which is supposed to reflect their training, right?

I’m not going to offer a theory to explain why it’s treated as an innate talent in DnD.

So I finally finished Black Sails. And although I could gripe about its soap-operaness, the one-bound-Jack-was-free boss fight… it won me over in the moment with its sheer cheek.

– SPOILERS BELOW –

no, really.

Also discussion, so if you’re up for that, it’s not just a summary.

OK?

OK.

The cheek consisting of Rackham’s voiceover speech telling us “the story is more important than the truth,” while the pictures tell us that the stories we knew before (from Johnson, from Stevenson, from history books) are all secretly wrong.

Fine. They successfully sneaked out from under the tragic promise of the premise – that we were going to see the final downfall of the Great Pyrates into the squabbling over a dead man’s chest that animates Treasure Island (which itself can be seen as a diversion from RL Stevenson’s own island-hopping white man’s tropic hetertopic flight from England). Well done. Most piratical. And it’s nice that Mary Read finally shows up in the closing minute, for those of us who were wondering why she was absent.

But.

There’s a bigger tragedy lurking in the margins. And like the Mary Read bit, they don’t beat us over the head with it. It’s the tragedy Madi and Julius saw coming, and it comes out of the exact calculus of what it takes to make comfort for each of the different characters and the social classes the represent. And the conclusion – the happy ending that the camera lingers on – is happy only for the individuals. Flint’s incipient class war is nipped in the bud and Flint himself doesn’t get another word in while it happens; he’s explicitly bought off by directorly sentimentalism. Madi tells Silver how he betrayed her, but even she stops short of spelling it right out:

the pirates have the option of retiring, through a sufficient stratagem. With money and powerful friends they can make a space for themselves in the Empire – even continue to tweak its nose a little, within strictly set bounds. And they will die eventually in their beds and the Empire will smooth them over and Nassau will by degrees become a colonial town like any other and maybe that means that a little yearning voice will be left over, singing counterpoint to the great imperial march of the 19th century, but we all know about the inevitability of this. The bigger pirate project of 1776 will go the same way, yielding another empire with different serial numbers but no fundamental restructuring of the engine of power.

But the maroons – the blacks – have nowhere to go, no victory, no accommodation . Nor will they, for centuries. They can stay on their island as long as obscurity lends them security – what, 10 years? But the pirates got their comfort and abandoned the project of making a place free of slaves. I bet Nassau still runs slave plantations, in fact, just outside that tavern the show offers us as synecdoche of the new order.

And eventually Madi comes round. She meets Silver on his lonely headland. Aww. Why? Maybe because it’s happened, the Empire has come, and she needs a white husband to keep her off the sales block. We don’t find out, the story’s the thing.

The story – the book we see Mrs. Hudson reading to children, that depicts the pirates as cannibals driven by a thirst for violence and ruin, each reassuringly put to a lawful end – is an elegy for an age that, in fact, still hasn’t finished. Rackham’s (and Max’s) protection racket tells us that – piracy is only officially gone from Nassau – and maybe the point of the whole show is that you can’t really trust any story you’re offered – certainly not this one, that has Long John Silver in it. But in the end the show continues to write the black people out of the narrative. Their more desperate nightmare is the one Silver can’t face.

Originally shared by Joseph H. Vilas

Heartwarming. Breathtaking. Better than It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Inspiring, and a hero for our times.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/cornell-pumpkin-prank-20th-anniversary-mystery//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Thinks: I wonder if Dinosaur Comics is still going?

Could this be the last ever Dinosaur Comics and I just stumbled onto it today???

Probably not.

http://www.qwantz.com//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

So I finally went to the Mutter Museum of medical oddities in Philadelphia. And it was about as fascinating and unsettling as I was expecting – pickled punks, preserved dissections, so many different kinds of conjoined twins. But the thing that sticks with me is the wall of skulls, because it was absolutely a random hireling/NPC generator a la Chris Kutalik – optimally each skull had place of collection, name, biographical remarks and diagnostic remarks, often tied to the cause of death.

My favourite:

Geysa Fekete de Galantha, Magyar

Calvinist, Hussar, deserter, guerrilla.

I could totally play that guy.

http://muttermuseum.org//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Originally shared by Rhys Taylor

Hmmm… looks like I’ll be sticking with Robot Wars, in which the competitors may be much smaller but the violence is real and the teams rarely trash-talk each other and the producers never make that a focus of the show. Yer doin’ it all wrong, ‘murica and Japan.

http://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-41673074/giant-robots-clash-in-us-japan-battle//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

A few pages into my first Neal Stephenson (Quicksilver) I’m alternately delighted and irritated. Nice turns of phrase – “a voice that carries on the air forever like the smell of smoke” interrupted by clumsy “well, young Ben Franklin, as you know the history of alchemy really got going 90 years ago when…” type exposition.

Opinions? Embarrassing anecdotes? Favourites?

Play report:

a lot of planning, scouting. Chris P.’s mercenary woulda totally died if I’d had the Arduin tables ready to hand. As it turns out, he’ll be out of action for a couple of weeks.

Birds hate other birds. They also fear crocodiles, but if they’re assured the crocs are on their side, they’ll take out their death urges on other birds first.

Jason Kielbasa has discovered the Dick Move. I confidently expect that this will kill the whole campaign.

this is distressingly similar exactly the campaign I always run:

Bad cosmic weather, or too many beasts have attached themselves to the sails and weighed it down. The further you go without stopping to scrape of these horrifying barnacles the more dangerous the trip will be, eventually scraping your metaphysical hull against the tip of a sphere, causing reality to crash right in to you.

Keeping the ship running becomes a driving factor. Making the ship nicer, or getting a better ship, or hijacking and staffing a horizon fort.

http://whatwouldconando.blogspot.com/2017/10/campaign-ship.html//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

“Listen up, my good friend! I do not want to hide from you that we are still at terrible risk. Grab your gold and valuables and all your important papers and come back on deck. You never know what might happen. If those three emergency sails that we just brought up get broken then we’re lost… but come on up! And bring that bottle of Schiedam gin with you.”

Translated words of a sea-captain headed to the East Indies, reported in A. Voogd, De scheepvaart op Indie en de Rotterdamsche Lloyd (Rotterdam 1924)

An article about restaurant menus as guides to imaginary worlds (that overlap our own worlds via tourism).

James Aulds Tiki reference!

Me: steamship reference!

Just about any DM: these are the weirdest artifacts. Imagine trying to reconstruct a world via the information on restaurant menus. It’s not quite a potion recipe book, not quite a travel guide, not quite reliable as a guide to the Kitchen Levels.

article title: “Restaurant Menus and The Geographical Imagination:

Recreating The Exotic In America, a Glimpse Into 1940’s and 1950’s Menus”

At same page:

“Mediating Exploration: Missionaries and the Imagining of Indigenous Cultures”

“Taking Home the Pyramids: Andrew D. White, a Tourist in 19th-Century Egypt”

http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/Architourism/exhibition/Restaurant%20Menus%20and%20the%20Geographical%20Imagination/index.html//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

In 2049 women’s breasts will be uniformly perky but boring.

Robot boyfriends will be so common that there will be no need to advertise them or mention them in any way.

Also, what if you’d told Harrison Ford in 1977 that he would be reprising all his most famous characters in 30-40 years, mostly for them to get kicked around by vaguely Russian, vaguely sexy martial artist chicks?

In the future people will be as shallow as robots, which is to say as shallow as this film thinks you are today.

NOTE: THE COMMENT THREAD BELOW CONTAINS SPOILERS. READ ON AT YOUR OWN RISK.

that 7 bw photos thing

next Tuesday!!!

Originally shared by Jason Blalock

Well, okay. Gonna be watching this.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/12/16464150/megabots-giant-robot-duel-live-stream-watch-twitch//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Oh oh oh. These are pleasing developments.

Stan Spencer

https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/1/14471312/dune-movie-adaptation-director-denis-villeneuve//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Best thing so far in The Atrocity Archives is that when they get into the archive and look at it, the jocular gallows-humoury writing style gets gut-punched and can only barely keep narrating.

It’s very elegant. He doesn’t tell you it’s a gut punch. He just lets it be, and communicates the change in mood through the narrator’s voice.

Commemorative medal for the Battle of Jutland, 1916

….note the German eagle savaging the British bulldog. Jutland was absolutely a nasty surprise for the invincible British navy. Still, it more or less ended German naval ambitions for the war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jutland

One for Scrap Princess – the British National Maritime Museum’s collection of Punch and Judy puppets, featuring Death, the Devil and the Crocodile.

http://images.rmg.co.uk/?service=set&action=show_content_page&language=en&set=176&ref=news&utm_source=Royal+Museums+Greenwich+Picture+Library+Newsletter&utm_campaign=00e4e5b144-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_06_08&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_951cfb5066-00e4e5b144-37651429//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

OK people I totally failed to organize anything for this week. So: next Tuesday evening, who can make it to the beach of dead bodies to plan a heist against Chinese crocodile torturers? Or whatever?

events/c17pkl9is3c68ts0nhm4flt0g9c?authkey=CKPf36CY74mGGQ//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Originally shared by Jay Exonauts

Jolly good cutaway maps of London!

http://londonist.com/london/transport/london-cutaways

http://londonist.com/london/transport/london-cutaways//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Why are the library search functions so broken on Apple’s iPhone Music app?

I have music on my phone – multiple albums by a single artist. The phone only finds half of it if you search for the artist’s name. If you search by song it finds the song, but there’s a whole album it can’t see if you search by album or artist.

Looking for a new MP3 player for my iPhone that isn’t broken. All it has to do is:

1. be searchable

2. find the music I have downloaded on my phone

3. not try to sell me a subscription service to stream other music that isn’t on my phone

4. not lie to me about what’s available. Yes I may own a song, but if it’s not on the phone right now, I don’t want it to come up in the lists and then I click on it only to be told I can download it thereby using cellular data and hard drive space.

that’s all. Anyone?

I’m not completely in love with Charlie Stross’s The Atrocity Archives – it feels a bit too much like the nerd-bait it appears to be on the surface, and 2004 is a surprisingly long time ago in internet years. And there’s a lot of ISO 9000 gags that remind me of James Raggi’s general complaint about cyberpunk – that it’s too much like looking out of the window. But then this:

“but if I do that… we’ll never find out if the last thought to pass through the mind of the captain of the Thresher was “it’s squamous and rugose!” or simply “it’s squamous!”

and the bugger’s completely won me over. Even though I can see the shiny hook under that fly.