The cliche of halflings in D&D is that they are jolly burglars and shoeless, gourmand hippies, following the vaguely Irish or Welsh culture given them by Tolkien. This is not so in Udra. In Udra, all the halflings came from the agogwe of Darth Lom. If their culture could be described in one sentence it [...]
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Pace Arko
[This happened on May 12, Sunday 2013, between 16 and 21 UTC. Players Mike, Ian, Ralph and Demo in attendance. It being Mother's Day, John and Toby are unable to attend. Pace is in Silverton, Oregon and all players are participating via Skype and Roll20.] After mapping most of the complex the Green Dog Sea [...]
Despite all my quixotic efforts to be the hippest thing on this planet, many things still surprise me. As early as 2003 (and 2005, twice.) I’d been wondering if there were software tools to do bookkeeping and physics for turn-based combat in pen and paper role-playing games. It turned out that there were, and I [...]
So, from various sources, today I learned about a team of molecular biologists at Stanford University who’ve constructed logic gates out of the DNA transcription machinery. There is a video summary with some animations as well. While reading about all these things, I was reminded very strongly of Ralph Merkle’s nanomechanical rod logic gates, which [...]
Well, this gets into my endless arguments about W3C standards, interoperability and freedom from any proprietary software. But basically I hate Adobe’s Flash utility. Yes, it’s widely supported but, it’s proprietary and, I’d rather not have the Internet held to the whims of any one company. So if I am going to have any interactive [...]
Okay, to preface, I’ve searched the Web for these words and I’ve found that in all cases, it was only me that was using them, or if they were used by someone else it wasn’t in any coherent way beyond spamming search engine results. So this is my notice to the anglophone world. I coined [...]
This is an idea I had for character in the game of City of Heroes, a game now sadly deceased. (These days I play Champions Online, based, at least partially on the venerable and wonderful Hero System table-top rules set. CO is a worthy enough effort but, still currently a pale shadow of Paragon City.) [...]
I’ve just noticed something that has been slowly happening over the last ten or twenty years. New technology and manufacturing techniques will soon make it possible to make millions of tiny machines, perhaps even microscopic robots, cheaply. For example, it has now become possible to make supercapacitors out of layers of graphene (As also described [...]
As an aging ex-physics major, knowing just barely enough to glimpse at possible answers but not enough to really know if I’m right–a little knowledge is a dangerous thing because it makes you presumptive that you’ve got all the facts when you don’t, I remember the first time I read about Alcubierre’s space warp. It [...]
So this is really a miscellaneous post about several things and just an excuse to keep my site from going stale. The animated image is just there so you won’t think this is a complete waste of your time. You have to click the image in order to see the animation. This wonderous animation was [...]