Some brief notes about how I'm using my guitar pedalboard for DI recording

What The Rulebook Didn’t Include: Gumshoe

Hexagonal grids

Burning Wheel: help and FoRKs with beginner’s luck

My 2020 in tabletop RPGs and goals for 2021

Wizard’s tower floorplan

Shaun Hayworth on advancing situation in Burning Wheel

A Gumshoe Drives hack

A rule variant for Gumshoe to make drives more significant.

Zombie World first impressions

Sundry thoughts on the Zombie World RPG after a single play session.

An Indie Games Reading Club Reading List

Paul Beakley’s The Indie Games Reading Club is a staggering resource for role-playing gamers filled with useful content. But where to start? Consider this a possible path into the archives.

Burning Wheel conflict action cards

Gaming ambitions for 2020

Gumshoe: an overlooked feature of spends

Trail of Cthulhu with pushes

An overview of character mechanics that need to be resolved when adapting Trail of Cthulhu to use Pushes from the Yellow King RPG.

Gumshoe: encoding genre with abilities

Gumshoe: adjudicating interpersonal skills

Gumshoe: antagonist spends

A look at the math and narrative ramifications of spending antagonist pool points in the Gumshoe RPG systems.

Gumshoe: What is competence?

Gumshoe: the investigative to general ability exchange rate

Gumshoe: the kernel of the game

This is the first post in a series looking at the Gumshoe role-playing game system.

The Gutter Prayer

Reading queue

Trilemma Adventures Compendium kickstarter

Fate Accelerated Edition index card character sheet

Trail of Cthulhu: Shanghai Bullets

Actual play notes for Shanghai Bullets.

`b`, a bug tracker extension for Mercurial

How to use variable fonts in the real world

Gumshoe’s sense trouble ability

Burning Wheel GM Apprenticeship

Yellow King: Starting with a Classic

The Yellow King Role-Playing Game

A review of sorts of The Yellow King Roleplaying Game. If you have never played a tabletop role-playing game but been curious, check this game out.

Cleaning a stomp box footswitch

Mercurial and Git

Routing around Git with the hg-git bridge.

Three albums from 2018

`necessary-evil` maintainer change

JSON Feed types and utils for node.js

A dark mode less mixin

A small less mixin to abstract dealing with dark mode in stylesheets.

A generic function to forward events

Making a Boss FS-6 substitute

Notes from making a DIY remote footswitch for a Boss pedal.

Choosing properties for property-based testing

Fall of Delta Green Lethality rules

macOS typography shortcuts on Windows

macOS has nice keyboard shortcuts for a number of common typographic characters that are a pain to type on Windows. Here’s a method to simulate it.

Obscura

Villainous motivations in Cthulhu games

Field lenses in TypeScript

“Just…” thinking

Trail or Call of Cthulhu?

With two great marquee Cthulhu role-playing games available, how do you decide which is right choice for your game?

When to use varargs

Observations on implement functions with variadic arguments.

The Dying of St Margaret’s, again

ORM objects and system layering

String tension and pick thickness

A small observation about the interaction of picks and strings on guitar.

Don’t use `obsolete` attributes for internal code

Leveraging `Pick` to simplify testing

Using some of the advanced types in TypeScript to deal with large interfaces outside of your control.

A minimal TypeScript dependency injector

A barebones dependency injection function that takes advantage of TypeScripts’s mapped types, and Promises.

Classes for structure, plain objects for data

An Idiom from Clojure applied to TypeScript.

Projects in need of homes

Crafting Interpreters

A ten second song

A speaker cabinet project

Notes and photos from building a speaker cab for electric guitar.

Accessing Local Storage from a Web Worker

A quick how-to to work around the limitations on accessing LocalStorage from within a Web Worker instance.

ANN: Manticore 0.5-beta1 released

Manticore 0.5-beta1 has been released, with an overhauled codebase, and a number of small UI improvements.

Structured messaging followup

Short version: prefer interface extension over type aliases for structured message types.

Structured messages with TypeScript

Exploring how to use newer features of the TypeScript type system to work with structured messages in the browser.

Black boxes for guitar

In which I confess to giving up the tube amp snobbery.

Calibrating expectations

Directors Handbook: Opposition Forces

More of the Dracula Dossier Director’s Handbook: Edom, Dracula, and others.

Directors Handbook: The 1894 Network

Continuing to read through the Dracula Dossier Director’s Handbook. This time the 1894 network and their descendants.

Directors Handbook: Eyes Only Briefing and Opening the Dossier

Initial thoughts on the first two sections of the Director’s Handbook for The Dracula Dossier.

The Dracula Dossier

First thoughts, and a reading order, for The Dracula Dossier for Night‘s Black Agents

ANN: Manticore 0.4 released

Manticore 0.4 has been released, with the ability to select specific monsters instead of using the filters.

Adventure game implementations

A rabbit hole about classic adventure game implementations.

Enterprise

On features of enterprise software.

.powerpoint

Introducing Manticore

Announcing Manticore, an web app for generating encounters for the 13th Age roleplaying game.

13th Age character creation

My weekly gaming group has begun playing 13th Age. This article contains some thoughts on the game’s character creation process.

Mouse Guard RPG 2nd edition coming

The Mouse Guard RPG is getting reprinted with a revised edition of the rules.

Clojure/West 2014 talks for web developers

Clojure/West is full of great talks. Here are three that web developers in Clojure should watch.

13th Age‘s most practical innovation

An initial reflection on ideas introduced in 13^th Age.

Garage Band amp sims

A grab bag of thoughts on using Garage Band for recording guitar direct.

Triggering CSS transitions on new elements

A work around to ensure that CSS transitions trigger for newly added DOM elements.

The Mouse Guard RPG scenario structure

Luke Crane and David Petersen’s Mouse Guard RPG introduces the concept of separate GM and player turns. This article takes a look at the ramifications of these turns in play.

The smallest visible increments

A TypeScript & alt JS grab bag

Various and sundry observations about altJS languages, with a focus on TypeScript.

Modeling union types using only functions

The lambda calculus is the basis for functional programming. Church's encodings in the untyped lambda calculus show an interesting pattern that parallels union types in languages like Haskell. Here I try to show how these discriminated union types can be implemented using only javascript functions.

ANN: Color.js 1.0

color.js, my color management library for JavaScript, has hit 1.0.

A clarification

duck-wrapping types

Duck-wrapping

If it doesn't quack like a duck, wrap it in a duck. Or don't.

In which parables are quoted

I steal from Phil Hagelberg's IRC comments again.

Wisdom from The Mountain Witch

Collected resources for Timothy Kleinert's wonderful small press RPG The Mountain Witch.

Static types are great, but I don't use them in practise

In which I foolishly chip into a long standing nerd debate.

Summer reading

Brief comments on books read over the summer break.

Project templates

Leveraging Leiningen templates for great starting out experiences.

The right abstraction

In which Phil Hagelberg comments on abstraction.

The Clojure web stack and the CRUD stack

Why it is my opinion that Clojure is better off with out a CRUD web framework.

ANN: necessary-evil 2.0.0

Necessary-Evil, the Clojure XML-RPC library has reached version 2.

Reconsidering the relevance of design patterns

Design patterns fell out of favour in the last five or so years. I think there is still some value in them.

Fuzz

Fuzz is the classic broken up guitar sound. To my ears it can't be beaten.

Reversible and composable routes?

Unanswered about defining routes in web applications

Silver screen Cthulhu

An assortment of thoughts about Shadows Over Filmland for the Trail of Cthulhu RPG.

Templates are functions

An article that looks at templates in web development in the context of pure functions and functional programming.

Night's Black Agents: Vampires

A worked example of an alien vampire type for the spy-thriller role-playing game Night's Black Agents by Kenneth Hite.

Night's Black Agents

A review of vampire spy-thriller role-playing game Night's Black Agents by Kenneth Hite.

Prometheus

Some (spoiler filled) thoughts on Ridley Scott's film Prometheus.

Another redesign

The Dying of St Margaret’s

A review of Graham Walmsley’s first purist scenario for Trail of Cthulhu.

Knife sharpening

A professional knows when to sharpen their tools.

Configuration middleware

This article looks at how Ring middleware and dynamic binding presents a powerful tool for controlling configuration in Clojure web apps.

Fiction (read recently)

Bullet point summaries of various fiction I have read recently.

ANN: An improved Clojure brush for Syntax Highlighter

Introducing a new Clojure brush for the Syntax Highlighter javascript library.

Simple L‑system generation

A simple but functional implementation of L-Systems in Clojure.

The Apocalypse Machine

A detailed review of The Apocalypse Machine, Graham Walmsley's post apocalypse setting toolkit for Trail of Cthulhu.

Ready‑made customization

Comprehensions continued

Trevor Burnham's reply to my critique of Coffeescripts comprehensions.

CoffeeScript comprehensions are broken

An examination of List Comprehensions in several languages, how Coffeescript's ‘comprehension’ semantics differ from the common case, and limitations that arise.

The Book of the Smoke

A review of Pelgrane Press's companion to the campaign frame The Bookhounds of London for players and keepers.

Prefix < and >

Bookhounds of London

A review of Bookhounds of London, a campaign frame for Trail of Cthulhu by Kenneth Hite.

A brief overview of the Clojure web stack

Ring is the foundation of web programming in Clojure. It has a broad ecosystem of libraries that fullfil many different roles in the web stack. This article introduces the fundamental concepts of Ring as well as four major libraries, and explains common idioms to help you get started quickly.

Parsers generating parsers

Following my introduction to fnparse, this article looks at how more common functional programming tools can be leveraged to make parsers that output new parsers.

Start parsing in Clojure: fnparse

Parser combinators are a powerful way of expressing complex parsers as first class operations in a language with first class functions. This tutorial introduces one such library, fnparse, for Clojure.

Error monads revisited

An error monad in Clojure

ANN: Necessary-Evil

Necessary-Evil is an XML RPC library for Clojure.

SVG maps with Cairo and Mapnik

Using open source technology and data to render maps.

Impedance mismatch with CouchDB

Some observations, both positive and negative, from using CouchDB to build this site.

Turn Coat

The Strain

The Curse of Chalion

Hellboy: Masks and Monsters

Mutant City Blues

Spook Country

Shadows over Filmland

A Colour out of Space

Brief notes of H.P. Lovecraft's classic sci-fi horror tale.

The Dance in the Blood

The Amazing Screw-on Head and Other Curious Objects

Du jour

Chronicles of the Black Company

Short notes on Glen Cooks early Black Company stories.

Intermission

Stack

A stack of books.

Monads: redux

Thoughts on the appropriateness of monads in Clojure.

Ghosts in the machine

Following on from looking at state monads in the context of Clojure, this article looks at variations that add different forms of state-m of non-determinism.

Welcome to the machine

A close look at how the state monad is implemented and used in Clojure.

A couple of lists

Further comparisons between Python and Clojure.

On iteration

How Python's view of iteration lead me to Clojure.

Functions of functions

iPod rejects

Some factorial refactorings

Unmythic

Some problems I have with a lot of fantasy fiction.

The Haunting: Terms

In my recap of The Haunting I mentioned some terms that were new to people outside small press gaming circles at the time. This post explains some of them.