I'm writing this article well before the year 2020.ev starts, mostly due to the fact that Twitter's search function is possibly the worst I've ever seen and this is probably my last chance to find the post in question to refer back to.

Late in November of 2019.ev a meme was going around birbsite, "Please quote this tweet with a thing that everyone in your field knows and nobody in your industry talks about because it would lead to general chaos."  Due to the fact that I was really busy at work at the time I didn't have …

When I was younger and had more time on my hands I used to LARP a couple of times a month with House of the Unknown at CMU.  We never really did anything terribly elaborate - I was one of the few who dressed up because my character was sufficiently different from me, but a lot of folks just wore whatever they happened to have handywhich suited.  I also used to go to anime conventions and cosplay a bit, though I never really put the kind of effort into any of my costumes that most folks do.  I certainly never did …

A couple of years ago, I don't remember exactly when or how, I stumbled across an unusual podcast called Tales From the Afternow from Rant Media. I suppose that it's more accurate to call it an audio drama rather than an audiobook because it's not talk radio as we usually think of it, nor is it a performance of a novel. The world described in these stories is a bleak one set on a post-nuclear war, post hyper-corporatization Earth in which licenses are required to read or write, languages and information are considered dangerous weapons, and even Time itself is …