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  The approximate distribution of native speakers of the 8 branches of the Indo-European language family (within Europe and Asia). Dark Blue = Indo-Iranian Brown = Italic Red = Germanic Green = Balto-Slavic Yellow = Hellenic Light blue = Albanoid Purple = Armenian Orange = Celtic https://linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/pre-greek/ #rpg #ttrpg #worldbuilding #history

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  I am so tired of upper management dealing out work for me to do based on "they typed something into an AI chat" and this is what is said to do. I started looking for another job by just browsing indeed and I have to say, I do not know how companies make it. The job descriptions are so... "we want everything and you got to smile while you break your back" kind of descriptions.

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  In my homebrew game, I have been adding in fighter special abilities, pretty much like 3e feats. It is not easy designing spells, feats, powers, etc.. One issue I always encounter is any power that just gives the player the ability to do damage is always going to trump other powers. Same thing happens in D&D. Players will pick Magic Missile, Fireball, Lightning Bolt, Delayed Blast Fireball above other choices. In 3.5e, fighters will pick Cleave and Power Attack. Same thing for defens...

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  It is pretty clear to me from the last couple of months of work that where I work is just trying to replace people with AI. I mean, they never come right out and say, "We are automating your job away" It is always couched as, "We have to be more efficient". To get clicks, we need our website to be ready for AI crawlers, so we can suckle at the teat of the new AI links that AI services provided people. The other factor is is provides an excuse for executives t...

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  I have often wondered if 9-11 was like the JFK assassination in the shared moment of confusion, doubt, trying to make sense of things in the United States. Where I worked, everyone just kept doing their job but there was a zombie like quality to everyone's movements. Like people were just lost in thought, but still going through motions. This even manifested in the drive home through rush hour traffic. Usually, it was madness, with people jockeying to get just 2 car lengths ahead. Man,...

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  Grumpy old man time. I spent today thinking about what the heck happened to disposable razors. I swear that many years ago I could re-use the same disposable razor at least 8 times. Now I am lucky if I can use a disposable razor 2 times. So I went and dug up what I use to use Schick Exacta 2(Image 1). Guess what. Shick discontinued that in 2009. The latest razor I use is Schick Xtreme 2 (Image 2) I have a hunch that the company is deliberately making the product worse in regards to how long...

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  My job is very depressing lately. I am increasingly be tasked to make our websites more for AI crawlers instead of for people. I say that, but from another perspective I could just blame the people at large. More and more people are using AI. The people at large are still using Google and Google is making more and more AI summaries of things so people never leave Google. It feels like the privacy and tracking problem of the 00s. People will trade ephemeral things that they can not see or under...

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  Recent discussion reminded me of a blog post I wrote in 2013 about how there is a connection of sorts between Alternity and FASERIP. Sadly, the wayback machine seems to have lost my images. https://web.archive.org/web/20170101063703/https://www.kirith.com/random-wizard/articles/faserip-alternity.html But I have backups! FASERIP is a roll high on 1d100 with a chart to have degrees of success. (Image 2) If you flip FASERIP to a roll low on 1d100 and plot the dgrees of success, you get (Image 3...

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  Good article on the problem of scrapers and bots and llm crawlers. https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1080822/990a8a5e2d379085/

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  I think one of the greatest flaws of human beings is that we trade ephemeral (but important) things for convenience. It is like selfishness is built into our brains and it is hard to overcome (but not impossible). I also have a hunch that companies (especially tech companies) use that to their advantage. But what do I know?

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  javascript bugs me more than it should. I guess it is because I have to write in javascript from time to time. Today I am particularly annoyed with how to make hashes. In perl %hash In python {} In lua {} In Ruby {} BUT in javascript it is new Map() which they only introduced in 2015. Before that, people used objects which are instantiated with {} , but the objects have a bunch of other junk attached to them which makes it harder to reliably use in all circumstances. So, if you just want a...

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  //javascript is cursed someVar = new Map(); someVar.name = "Bob"; someVar.age = 24; console.log(JSON.stringify(someVar)); //OUTPUT IS... /* {"name":"Bob","age":24} */ console.log(someVar.get("name")); //OUTPUT IS... /* undefined */ someVar.set("name", "Maxwell"); someVar.set("age", 64); console.log(JSON.stringify(someVar)); //OUTPUT IS... /* {&amp...

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  I had a meeting with executives yesterday about sitemaps for websites. I am not usually invited to executive meetings. I am just a lowly manager. The executive's use of AI is really concerning, and annoying. They run everything through AI. Its like they think it is some kind of oracle from the gods.

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  I have done programming in large, boring, enterprise shops for a long time. The code is always a mess. One thing that has been on my mind lately (while looking through javascript code) is that someone should make a language? enforce a framework? that embeds a database as a first class citizen. So many problems in code bases come from attaching objects to other objects over time. There is no source of truth. Data is stale over there. Nobody sat down and thought about how to normalize all the da...

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  I like functional programming, even though I am not very good at it (based on some of the cool code I have seen from others). But sometimes I will see a functional programmer write something like orders .filter(valid) .map(enrich) .groupBy(customer) .map(calculateTotals) And I think, I would have done that in SQL SELECT customer_id, SUM(total) FROM orders WHERE valid = true GROUP BY customer_id; Many years ago, I use to have to maintain a large ColdFusion application. ColdFusion is...

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  Updated my little toy dungeon map generator. This code started 20+ years ago and I still open it up and tweak it every now and then. It now punches through walls to already existing rooms a little bit more frequently. The displayed dungeon is pure text, you can copy and paste it into a document. https://random-wizard.neocities.org/random-gygax-dungeon/

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  Wizards of the Coast has written to its employees to warn that unionizing could mean staff "end up with more, the same or less than [they] have now," and suggested that "your voice is strongest when it is heard directly." "when it is heard directly" Yeeeeeah, riiiiight. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/wizards-of-the-coast-writes-to-staff-to-explain-how-union-representation-works-as-studio-prepares-to-vote-to-unionize #dnd #rpg #ttrpg #wotc

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  I wrote this strange little program to try and figure out just how many magic items would a character have at various levels in Moldvay/Cook B/X Dungeons & Dragons. The concept is, You are a level 1 fighter. You pick what level you want to be. It generates rooms from the stock tables. It generates monsters from the monster tables. It generates treasure from the treasure tables. You defeat all monsters. You find all treasure. The simulation stops when you reach (or go above) the desire...

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  I had to write javascript in the late 90s, 00s. It was truly a horrible experience having to write code for Internet Explorer. Particularly when the world decided every company should use IE 6. javascript did not even have a trim whitespace function. browsers did not even have a nice console to go look at what was going wrong. You had to go install Venkmen to get some debugging capabilities. https://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/venkman/ Or the Microsoft Script Debugger https://en.wikip...

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  Comic by Martin Rosner https://bsky.app/profile/hotpaper.bsky.social

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  Sometimes I torture my brain by reading the set of Dragonlance modules again. There is something about them I really do not like. It feels like everything is scripted, which ultimately, it is, that is what a writer does I guess. Maybe I should take the leap into the pit of doom, and go and read the novels. #dnd #rpg #ttrpg

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  So I was reading through DL1 Dragons of Despair again, and I think I can articulate why I dislike it right at the beginning. In a well run campaign or story, the world is casually consistent and events happen independent of the the PCs (if they are not doing things). The module starts off with the back story of, "no cleric has been seen in 300 years". But for some reason, the PCs have been searching for a cleric for the past 5 years. And just as they meet, they encounter Toed...

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  I have been complaining about Dragonlace the last couple of posts, but let me say something good about the concept. It is hard to make up an entire mythos of a fantasy world. It is hard to make up a bazillion names of places and characters. Just making up constellations of the world of Krynn is top notch world building. Tracy Hickman did a good job synthesizing a lot of different things to make a new world. Although, some of the names are not great in my opinion, enough of them are. Also, I re...

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  So going back to another thing I do not like about the Dragonlance modules, are all the clones of things from Lord of the Rings. Now, granted, D&D ripped off things from Lord of the Rings, but Dragonlance reaches what I feel is excessive. Companions of the Lance = Fellowship of the Ring Cataclysm = Fall of Númenor Knights of Solamnia = Dúnedain Dragon Orbs = Palantir Note also, the plot of the Dragon Orbs is it draws you in (sometimes) and some elf king is driven helpless by evil throu...

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  Every now and then, I bust out my outline of the journey of the Heroes of the Lance, and think about what I would do if I were running the adventure path. My ideas change. When the heroes split, and some go west and others go east, I think the west path is more cohrent to the overall story, but the eastern adventures are more interesting. #dnd #rpg #ttrpg #dragonlance

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  If you ever want to read a book that copies Tolkien (way more than even Dragonlance), I present to you "The Iron Tower" by Dennis McKiernan. I read it long ago. I did not actually hate the book, but I can not say I liked it either. I went and looked it up again on wikipedia, and here are some reviewer's quotes. "Yet another abject Tolkien imitation. ... Derivative and dreadful." -- Kirkus "So many of the little cultural details that brough...

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  I met Tracy Hickman once, when I was a kid. It was at GenCon. Not sure what year it was. Maybe it was 1985? I signed up for a talk he was giving. It was so long ago, I can not remember a whole lot about it. Except, I remember he went into designing adventures. And he said something like. Consider if you tell the players there is strange writing on the dungeon wall. You should not put that in the adventure if you are just trying to convey mystery. The writing should actually mean something, even...

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  Side note. Anyone know of a high resolution scan or picture of Keith Parkinson's cover of DL4 Dragons of Desolation (Image 2)? I have seen claims that he hid the Doctor Who's tardis in the image. (Image 1) And maybe K9 the robot dog too. #dnd #rpg #ttrpg #dragonlance

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  I am jumping ahead to DL-7 Dragons of Light because I have read all the Dragonlance modules before, and I remember this is the one that really exemplifies what I do not like about the modules. The party of adventurers decide to take a boat to Sancrist. I think it is because there are rumours of another Dragon Orb there. (That, I have no issue with). BUT, they are attacked by a dragon and shipwrecked before they get there! No matter what, they get shipwrecked and survive. The whole point of th...

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  Once again, ScottyG, long ago, pointed out something interesting about T1-4 ToEE. The dungeon beneath the moathouse has rooms shaped like letters, E, L, M, N, T, A, I, and V. With those letters you can spell ELEMENTAL EVIL. #dnd #rpg #ttrpg #osr #gygax #toee