Failing Better
You may have read recently about the problem with Socks. The basic story goes like this: The BBC ran an online poll to choose the name of the new Blue Peter cat. The name Socks was winning until the end, when there was a sudden burst of support for Cookie. A decision was made to …
Continue reading “Why the name of a cat can be the most important thing in the world”
I didn’t know her.
There’s a lot of talk in the scribosphere at the moment about posting under your own name, and whether you should or not. (Some thoughts from Danny, Jason, and Phill.) I post here under my real name. That’s because I want people to know who I am. In its own small way, this blog is …
I recently read these three tweets by Helen Lewis, and it helped clarify for me the difference between those against self-ID and the rest of us. The second tweet is the key one here, because it assumes that those in favour of self-ID believe the act of saying a thing causes it to be true, …
Is the name of an impromptu talk I gave at this year’s GameCamp. If you’re at all interested in games and their creation, you should make sure to come along to the next one. As it seemed to go down quite well, I thought I’d write it up here in case anyone else finds it …
Continue reading “Hacking D&D 5e for a more cinematic experience”
I recently finished a spec for The Big Bang Theory. I know that writing specs for currently-airing shows is considered a bit passé these days but I a) needed a spec of a particular US comedy to put into the Nickelodeon Writing Program, and this was my favourite of the ones on offer and b) …
Some years ago, I had a minor entanglement with Alex Dally McFarlane and the notable hatemonger known as Requires Hate (also known as Winterfox, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, and too many other aliases to mention here), where they bullied a friend of mine off of Twitter and very nearly out of fandom altogether for the crime of Not Being …
I was dating someone a while back. Doesn’t matter who. It ended. Shortly afterwards I started receiving emails from sockpuppet accounts on an online dating site which we both frequented. It was easy enough to tell who they were from, because after a few how-are-you your-profile-looks-interesting getting-to-know-you exchanges, they would make the same claim as the person whom …
Dropped into my FLGS yesterday to try and play some 5th edition D&D, and it was a bit unclear exactly how the organised play system was supposed to work. So when I got home I armed myself with a glass of whisky and dropped down the rabbithole. If you want to give the new edition of D&D a …
You might not know about the bill that’s going before Parliament next week to force telecoms companies and ISPs to retain data so that the security services can look through it at a later date. This is because it’s being rushed through as emergency legislation. The leaders of all three parties are claiming that there’s …