It's A Binary World 2.0

Author: Eric Mesa

  • A Couple Recent Interesting Podcast Episodes

    First off, I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy listening to the science fiction short story podcast Escape Pod. Today I listened to episode 949, A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls. Large Language Models (LLMs), what we have colloquially called AI for the past few years, have been a giant source of wonder and consternation…

  • Humblewood Session 01

    Humblewood Session 01

    Last weekend I decided to try the Humblewood D&D campaign setting with the kids. For the past year (give or take) we’ve had a lot of fun playing DnD Adventure Club campaigns. Our one major foray in to regular D&D, Dragons of Stormreck Isle, was a failure. I think there were a few reasons for…

  • This Weekend’s D&D Moments

    This Weekend’s D&D Moments

    This weekend we finished The Wild Trilogy from DnD Adventure Club. The first challenge involved sneaking around an Owlbear. The kids asked about their options and I noted that in addition to sneaking, they could try and distract it. Sam’s dwarf, Grumpy McGrumbles, has a cooking hobby, so he took hits pots and pans and…

  • The Algorithm

    I sometimes forget that most of social media is governed by an attention span algorithm instead of a reverse chronological algorithm. There are at least a couple times, however, when I’m reminded of that fact:

  • Humble Bundle finally has a GOG bundle!

    After all these years, there’s finally a Humble Bundle that redeems keys to GOG! I don’t have anything against Steam, per se, but I always hated the lack of diversity of locations to redeem your keys. I’m hoping this eventually means that games sold on Humble Bundle through their store (ie not part of a…

  • Bite-Sized TTRPG Adventures

    I’ve written a lot about DnD Adventure Club, including my last two posts. Today while I was looking at the Pathfinder Humble Bundle, I went to the Pathfinder website to see if they had a page listing differences (since Pathfinder started as a fork of D&D 3.5). I found this page – Adventure Paths. It…

  • A little more on this weekend’s D&D game

    Scarlett was inspired by my previous post and made an animatic-style drawing of some of her favorite moments from the campaign. The top panel is the party questioning the guards. (The ninja-looking character is Sasha, the character that Scarlett plays) The next panel is Grumpy using intimidation to question a gnoll. The middle panel is…

  • Highlight of my day

    Highlight of my day

    I was DMing the first third of a DnD Adventure Club campaign for my kids today. My son likes to mostly play as Grumpy Mcgrumbles, a dwarven fighter. The kids were attacked by a group of Gnolls. Normally, most of the time, the kids play pretty straightforwardly although they are starting to get more creative.…

  • Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park 2023

    Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park 2023

    Almost exactly a year ago my wife and I took our second trip to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. We’d last visited 12 years earlier in October, and so had missed the opportunity to see puffins. I’d meant to make a series travelogue posts about my trip, but I got busy with programming, work,…

  • Review: Sins of Empire

    Sins of Empire by Brian McClellan My rating: 4 of 5 stars If you put a godstone on the mantle in act one…. Just to get my one issue out of the way – this trilogy is really just one giant book broken in 3. This book doesn’t really have a resolution at the end.…

  • Review: Fugitive Telemetry

    Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells My rating: 4 of 5 stars Murderbot continues to be awesome. As with most mysteries, there isn’t too much to say that won’t end up being a spoiler. Muderbot continues to grow as a character while also not losing that which makes Murderbot such a delight to read. It’s similar…

  • Review: Middlegame

    Middlegame by Seanan McGuire My rating: 5 of 5 stars I stayed up way too late last night reading. Today I took advantage of the fact that it was raining all day long to sit on the couch with a few cups of tea to finish the book. As I finished I recognized that this…

  • Review: Prime Deceptions

    Prime Deceptions by Valerie Valdes My rating: 4 of 5 stars Our favorite Cuban spaceship captain is back and I enjoyed it even more than the first book. Now that Eva is her new self and knows there isn’t any more lying to her crew, they can move on to more fun adventures. This book…

  • Review: The Black Tides of Heaven

    The Black Tides of Heaven by Neon Yang My rating: 5 of 5 stars I would probably more accurately rate this book as 4.5, but I decided to round up. Yang does a perfect job in this novella creating just enough history for the world that we feel as though it’s gone on forever. It’s…

  • Review: Save Yourself, Mammal!: A Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Collection

    Save Yourself, Mammal!: A Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Collection by Zach Weinersmith My rating: 3 of 5 stars I’m not going to waste time looking it up, but I believe this was SMBC’s first collection. So Weinersmith (or whoever didn’t the formatting) hadn’t figured out the formatting. In order to save space, the comics are…