I don’t really like running Dungeons & Dragons 5e. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I could learn to live with or subtly work around most of those reasons. There is one core mechanic in the game, however, that drives me up the wall like nothing else, and I basically never see it discussed anywhere—the long rest. This article is my attempt to make a case for why the long rest isn’t very good.

You know how sometimes you see a common phenomenon, and you think there should logically already exist word for that phenomenon, but no matter how hard you search, you can find no such word? That’s what this article is about. I want to create new terms for two existing phenomena that, in my limited understanding, are not well-explored1 in spite of how common they are. I’m going to call them the sunk cost discount and the trip cost scaling problem.

Since moving to Brussels1, I have been radicalised against the automobile. I came from the Dutch countryside, where cars are kind of necessary to get anywhere meaningful, but where other modes of transport do exist and are feasible. I spent six years cycling one hour to school and one hour back, and I spent a few more years doing a commute of 1h30 by two buses and a train to university.

I recently happened upon an article1 that argued against the four freedoms as defined by the Free Software Foundation. I don’t actually want to link to the article—its tone is rather rude and unsavoury, and I do not want to end up in a kerfuffle—but I’ll include an obfuscated link at the end of the article for the sake of integrity. The article—in spite of how much I disagree with its conclusions—inspired me to reflect on idealism and the inadequacy of things.

I have recently been working on a conversion document that adapts Dungeons & Dragons’ Eberron campaign setting to the Savage Worlds system. I’m not a game designer and I’m not a particularly prolific writer, so this was a bit of a challenge for me. One of the most challenging things to pull off was converting the races. Through writing the document, I think I developed a deeper understanding for the racism inherent to fantasy fiction.

I like to read GNU/Linux hobbyist forums from time to time. Partially to keep up with all the changes that are constantly happening within the lovely world of Free Software, but mostly because I’m just very excited about GNU/Linux. It is quite possibly the world’s biggest international collaborative effort, and that’s just mind-bogglingly cool—the idea that people from all over the world come together to make this amazing tool for everyone to freely use.

Spoilers Game of Thrones. I have been watching Game of Thrones with great interest the past few weeks. It has very strongly highlighted a struggle that has been gripping my mind for a while now: That between elitists and laypeople. And I find myself in a strange in-between. For those not in the know, the latest season of Game of Thrones is a bit controversial to say the least. If you skip past the internet vitriol, you’ll find a lot of people disliking the season for legitimate reasons: The battle tactics don’t make any sense, characters miraculously survive after the camera cuts away, time and distance stopped being an issue in a setting that used to take it slow, and there’s a weird, forced conflict that would go away entirely if these two characters that are already in love would simply marry.

We will meet at three o’ clock GMT, the first of May. [sic] This is a subject on which I am extremely pigheaded. Often, when I am planning an online meeting with people who live in other timezones, they wish to choose a time and date using the GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) timezone. And often, that causes misunderstandings. The cause behind the misunderstanding is normally daylight saving time (henceforth called summer time).