Great Owlbear and Wizard’s Staff at the weekend. Thanks to all the organisers. I ran Stonetop and Legends in the Mist, both PbTA “local heroes” bit quite different (play to find out vs metaplot). Thanks to everyone who “played to learn” with me as it’s the first time I have run either.

Many thanks to @asako-soh.bsky.social for putting on the much beloved annual Owlbear and Wizard's Staff #ttrpg event! Played in @icooper.bsky.social Legend in the Mist and @burnafterrunning.bsky.social TOR2e. Great games. I ran a fun session of Zweihander Reforged. Looking forward to next year.

optimist: the cup is half full pessimist: the cup is half empty ttrpg editor: here you refer to the cup as half full, but in the next chapter, you refer to it as half empty. for clarity, we should standardize on one of them in the rules text, even if players might use both descriptions at the tabl

IYKYK 🌮@nisslbody.blacksky.app · 2mo ago

Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty Epidemiologist: You guys didn't just both drink out of the same cup did you

The Dying Earth RPG Quickstart Rules are available now from @pelgranepress.bsky.social Get it FREE here: tinyurl.com/ytbzjtea #TTRPG based on the fantasy fiction of Grand Master Nebula Prize-winning writer Jack Vance.

Ancient Aliens & other pseudoarchaeology TV shows/podcasts are not harmless entertainment. The purpose is to separate Indigenous people from their cultural history to support white supremacy. We need our own art & entertainment to combat disinformation pseudoscience, which is why I wrote FALSE FLAG.

I’ve long been a subscriber to the @theguardian.com but its descent from decent journalism into sensationalism of late has me reconsidering that. I have a subscription to the excellent @bylinetimes.bsky.social and if the Guardian doesn’t mend its ways it’s time to say goodbye.

As developers shift left from coding to architecture, understanding how apps interoperate has never been more important. At NDC Oslo, I will be running my Practical Messaging Workshop, where you will learn the skills needed to design event-driven architectures at scale. ndcoslo.com/workshops/pr...

Practical Messaging | NDC Oslo 2026

In this tutorial, we will look at distributed systems, and how we integrate them. We will understand why we would prefer to integrate via messaging, the fundamentals and key concepts of messaging and…

ndcoslo.com

WTF? We would rather desecrate a Bronze Age burial site than a movie filming location. I have no words for how dumb we have become…

Nic Wilkinson@nicwilkinson.bsky.social · 2mo ago

This makes me so angry - and I'm a person who marks anniversaries of fictional events And look at the tat and rubbish left on the beach - despite it being an ecologically sensitive site. As if we needed yet another reason to loathe the badly written books, the creator and the fuckwit fans.

Going to call it. The makers of “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” understood the assignment. Glorious cheese.

I feel that if you put your bag on the seat next to you on a train working the morning commute - it says an enormous amount about you as a person, with no other signal. Entitled, selfish, “I’ve got mine Jack.” Just that, all we need to know about you, whatever you tell yourself

It's no secret that I think JSX is the dominent form of web app markup today. But I've always wanted the framework and language smarts of C# when I've been doing web things - I'm putting together a new library called JsxCore, a JSX + TypeScript View Engine for ASP.NET Core.

Of course Agon by John Harper is the other obvious answer, a game about heroes travelling from island to island, trying to get home. As a Glorantha fan I always have to say, Glorantha does mythic Bronze Age too.

Natalie P (is not a vampire) 🦇@sashette.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Seen a few people come out of The Odyssey, inspired to run a campaign but throwing up all sorts of old sword & sandals overly crunchy hacks together as ideas. The answer is right here, and I hear some pretty great people have written for it.

I went to see The Odyssey with my wife last night. Overall, a very good movie. The xenia theme is a strong one, and it hits the key beats of the story well for three hours (cyclops, circe, calypso, scylla and charibdis, communing with the dead, and homecoming)

The wind here is making it 5 degrees cooler, and much less humid, so the heat is pleasant today and you can sleep at night. But oh how it howls, the moaning of angry lost souls.

@cultistofsooty.bsky.social , @draugmith.bsky.social I caved. Like a souffle.

Excellent day out at the Joy of Six show in Sheffield today running our Midgard Heroic Battles Glorantha game. The Battle of Grizzly Peak was hard-fought with the Lunars emerging victorious by a whisker in Turn 5. #miniatures #wargaming #spreadthelard #nerdlings #midgardheroicbattles

There is a tendency in modern shows to end a season prior to the big moment that the whole season has been building up to. House of the Dragon S2 is the last, but Walking Dead S4, and others all adopt this approach.

I saw Supergirl in the cinema last night. Look, I’ll be honest, I am a DC fan, but primarily the cinema had, sweet, sweet air conditioning. But… it’s a good, fun supers movie. Supergirl is flawed enough to be relatable, her backstory is woven through flashbacks that provide pathos not exposition.

The annual Warhammer Conference will be held in Frankfurt & online this September; it’s a fascinating academic event. I presented last year on some horror roots of 40K and have now submitted my proposal for 2026. There’s still time if you want to submit a paper too! warhammer-conference.com

Apropos of nothing, recommendations for good VPNs, usable from phones, to avoid overbearing governments?

I now find myself in the position of agreeing with Restore Britain on a policy, over social media. That is what it has come to: a Labor policy so ill-thought-out that I end up agreeing with the far right. So my kids can watch Netflix and HBO with me, but not YouTube. FFS Labour you numpties.

Labour deciding to act without reading the evidence (Starmer already reached a conclusion) is typical of the poor thinking from this government. Abstinence does not work. Education works. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

UK to ban under-16s from ‘high risk’ social media apps

Measures to include restrictions on ‘safe’ social media apps, with some fearing banning some platforms and not others will lead to legal challenges

theguardian.com

It looks like Labour can’t be bothered to even read the evidence on mobile phones. Starmer thinks a “moral panic” will make him popular so he’s invoking Mary Whitehouse. Education not abstinence. It’s not hard. Time to give my kids VPNs

When it gets hot in the UK, Brits have to figure out what from their wardrobe - generally built around its rainy - will work. Enter “holiday clothes” where Brits pull out the clothes we normally wear on our Mediterranean holiday and deploy them as we go about our daily lives. Often…interesting

Labour seems to be resorting to the worst of its Blairite "nanny state" tendencies over mobile phones. Populist vote-grabbing. Abstinence programs never work. "Just Say No," as a policy on mobile phones, will fail. Education, education, education! Teach kids how to be safe. At school.

Another Brighter release! As of 10.5.0, we now support exporting AsyncAPI from Brighter-enabled applications that describe your endpoints. Those familiar with exporting OpenAPI for ASP.NET endpoints will know how this works, but this is for messaging, not HTTP. www.nuget.org/packages/Par...

Paramore.Brighter 10.5.0

The Command Dispatcher pattern is an addition to the Command design pattern that decouples the dispatcher for a service from its execution. A Command Dispatcher component maps commands to handlers. A…

nuget.org

If you want to attend my Practical Messaging Workshop (ndcoslo.com/workshops/pr... ) at NDC Oslo (SEP 14-15) then the Early Bird Registration closes on Friday, MAY 22. ndcoslo.com/tickets?mc_c...

Practical Messaging | NDC Oslo 2026

In this tutorial, we will look at distributed systems, and how we integrate them. We will understand why we would prefer to integrate via messaging, the fundamentals and key concepts of messaging and…

ndcoslo.com

Brighter Release Notes 10.4.1 & 10.4.2 10.4.1 and 10.4.2 are both bug fixes and performance improvements. Thanks to all our contributors for keeping the flow of fixes coming. www.nuget.org/packages/Par...

Paramore.Brighter 10.4.2

The Command Dispatcher pattern is an addition to the Command design pattern that decouples the dispatcher for a service from its execution. A Command Dispatcher component maps commands to handlers. A…

nuget.org

I will be teaching my two-day course, Practical Messaging, at NDC Oslo this year. I suspect it will be the only public presentation this year. It's two days.

Practical Messaging | NDC Oslo 2026

In this tutorial, we will look at distributed systems, and how we integrate them. We will understand why we would prefer to integrate via messaging, the fundamentals and key concepts of messaging and…

ndcoslo.com