Author Archives: Pace Arko

Udra: My RPG Campaign History in Several Parts

See parts one, two, three. and four. 2011 to The Present: The Virtual Living Room There was a roughly two year period between Summer of 2009 and early 2011 where I wasn’t running my game. This was because two key … Continue reading

Posted in Games, Going Postal, Personal, Udra, Udra's History | 2 Comments

Historical Revisionism

“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four So what I discovered, in painstakingly cleaning and correcting nearly five hundred fifty pages of link spam and weird line breaks, is … Continue reading

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Recovering from a Spambot Attack

So, sometime towards the middle or end of March, my site got hit with a spamdexing attack. Nearly all my pages got littered with links to illegal boner pill sites. I suspect, and I really can’t prove this, the attack … Continue reading

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Bragging Rights?

I do have a smartphone, a clamshell, Blackberry 8230. It was my first mobile phone and I bought it somewhere towards the end of Obama’s first term, around 2010. I got it because it was cheap and I was afraid … Continue reading

Posted in Personal, Science and Engineering | 2 Comments

The Path to Tetra Vaal

So around 1997, over my company’s broadband connection, I downloaded some video files–which is what we did in those days before YouTube–from the Honda robotics site about a bipedal robot called P1. I can’t seem to find the video I … Continue reading

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Universal Basic Income

The Coming Problem So Humans Need Not Apply came out a little after my 51st birthday and I learned about it several days after that via io9. And yes, I find it’s logic sound: robots are going to eliminate most … Continue reading

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And Lost in All the Kerfuffle on Gravitational Waves–

We have news that physics might have found a four neutron atomic nucleus. This is surprising because accepted wisdom in the Standard Model says that small nuclear groupings of neutrons shouldn’t form at all. Regardless, without protons to stablize them, … Continue reading

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Gravitational Waves

After nearly a century of searching, gravitational waves have been discovered. Finally an important prediction made by general relativity in 1916 has been confirmed. This matters in at least five possible ways. It confirms the accuracy of general relativity which, … Continue reading

Posted in Science and Engineering | 2 Comments

Hold on, Let Me Get My Tinfoil Hat

As has been related in several places, I’m a skeptic. I think this is noteworthy considering the era and cultural context I grew up in: San Francisco in the 1960s and 70s. My mother has this wonderful hippie expression for … Continue reading

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"Now Fatigue"

January second is apparently “National Science Fiction Day” and to mark that moment, let me share a little personal history with you. My mother, now 73, was the one who first exposed me to science fiction through her large paperback … Continue reading

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