The Leewit @ghost_bird@witches.town

(Monsterhearts 2 is very good, by the way. Special mention for explaining the design decisions behind the rules so it's easy to understand how to use them. And lots of good advice on safe play in an emotionally-charged game, of course.)

Kind of want to run Monsterhearts 2 but (i) it's heavy stuff for players recruited from my rather trad RPG club, and (ii) anything set in high school is going to be an emotional minefield for me even if I'm careful to keep it distant from my own experience. But still...

I've only ever heard "turd burglar" as a slur, albeit a "comedy" one, so I wasn't expecting to find it as a character name in Disgaea 5. Has there been a language shift?

I didn't expect a film that's mostly Charlize Theron beating up policemen to leave me dissatisfied and a little cross but that seems to be how I came out of Atomic Blonde.

"We're getting too involved, too deep into the game, so deep that we can't stop playing even when it's over... Which means that the next time we play each other, it'll feel like the continuation of the same game. No matter what game we're playing, we'll see it as a chance to get even for the last game, for the game we played before and couldn't stop playing."
"I call this state of mind 'tournamentality'".
- Bernard De Koven, "The Well-Played Game"

(Apparently my unconscious talent for invisibility includes the ability to look furiously busy whenever I'm in front of a computer? Not that I'm complaining, mind you.)

Co-worker: "Sorry to bother you - I know you're busy."

Me (hastily closing tabs on witches.town, Captain Awkward, Adventures_in_the_Northern_Wilderness.pdf, and the Traveller RPG wiki): "No, it's OK. I've got a couple of minutes."

So I'm reading Bernard De Koven's "The Well-Played Game" and it's a good book with a lot of useful insights for community-building and moderation.
But there's something about it that makes me think "this was written by a well-meaning male academic in the 1970s", and I think if I could identify what that is then I'd have a better handle on its shortcomings. (And the shortcomings of Christopher Alexander, who has even better insights with some of the same flavour.)

(Not subtooting anyone on here but, seriously, never read blog posts or comments about Omelas.)

Like most right-thinking people, I love LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"... but it doesn't half attract Bad Takes.
Hint: Omelas is where we live, more or less, and the thing you'd definitely do if you lived there? It's what you're doing right now as you live your life, not your so-brave/noble/principled/rational [delete as appropriate] words.

Fun with machine learning: making self-driving cars read stop signs as speed limit signs.
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2017/08/today-in-cv-dazzle-news-making-self-driving-cars-read-stop-signs-as-speed-limit-signs/

Update: greed > social anxiety (this time)

https://witches.town/media/FOwTaXleGy7gCtJUEFA

I want a potato naan from the fresh naan shop down the road but that means going outside and interacting with people.

Audience question: "Why _do_ non-binary people have such good hair?"
(Answers: focus on presentation, need to be visibly queer all the time, Queer Code London have a list of good places to get your hair done.)
#NineWorlds

(Update: it's good, but not easy to live toot. So, er, that's all for now.)

Last panel of the convention (for me): "Shitting on Social Norms in Tech: Organizing Events No One Else Will", which has the air of something that will either be very good or else not.

#NineWorlds

"The original title of this panel was going to be 'Everything Wrong with Sherlock in Six Hours or Less'... but we didn't think that would be enough time."
#NineWorlds