The Tao of Gaming

(Posting early so you have some reading during the Christmas break! Enjoy!)

On BGG I posted a geeklist with more thoughts on cheating.

If you read HPMOR you will probably like this — HPMOR is a Disney Movie about a Serial Killer (lots of spoilers).

David Byrne’s Tiny Desk Concert.

RPG Designer Monte Cook has a substack.

A furloughed IRS Lawyer opened a hot dog stand and called it Shyster’s — “The Only Honest Ripoff in DC“. (Photo and blurb).

Richard Ayoade interviewing Tim Burton on Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. (For the Criterion Channel).

Via Marginal Revolution: We are repaganizing (in a Christian Magazine …. discusses Christianity, Abortion, Infanticide, Peter Singer, Medically Assisted Suicide and Paganism)

The Zvi’s thoughts on AI during the Winter Solstice — We will win.

Was there a second starting point of life that formed 1 cm long beings and died out on Earth 2B years ago? As always, Betteridge’s law looms large, but …. Possibly.

“Imagine that you’re much smarter than me, and I also party all the time and abuse drugs while you live a completely sober lifestyle. If I end up more economically successful than you are, you need to look inward and ask what you’re doing wrong. That is the situation of East Asia relative to the US and Europe.” Human Capital, Not Industrial Policy.

The Dave Berry 2025 Holiday Gift Guide

A 4th Chinese Poem constructed in a 29×29 grid of characters (similar to a magic square) palindromic poem that produces 4,000 sub poems (that rhyme and are coherent) depending on how the subsections are combined & read. Written (Embroidered, actually) by a 21 year old to woo back her husband, who had left her for a concubine. (“At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) – “heart.” Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui’s original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.”) A nice introduction (Twitter) . Wikipedia Page.

A runaway supermassive black hole found moving at 2.2 million mph near the Cosmic Owl.

Feral Historian discusses The Doomed City, a soviet SF novel (published after Perestroika) and uses footage from Dark City¹ because they share themes. In fact, after seeing the video, Dark City seems to clearly rip off The Doomed City’s “Experiment” and motifs, but Wikipedia does not show a link.

Video Game Trailer that I watched on a whim, and was delighted to find it giving off “Iron Giant” vibes. Coven of the Chicken Foot.

Birds — Not real, but conscious?

An LLM/AI was put in charge of the vending machine … “Profits collapsed, but morale soared.” “Leave it to business journalists to successfully stage a boardroom coup against an AI chief executive.”

Sumo — Aonishiki’s Elite Technique accounts for his astonishing rise. (Japan Times)

1. The very first DVD I bought, because it really is quite good, and Roger Ebert did a commentary track and that says something. ↩︎