As a longtime D&D player, I admittedly looked down on the Warhammer 40K RPG. Hand-painting a horde of space marine miniatures? DUMB, especially compared to theorycrafting a half-orc ranger I will never actually play. Grimdark, never-ending intergalactic war setting? How about something more grown-up, like the post-WWI, steampunk world of Eberron? I’m here to admit that Warhammer 40K is actually kind of sick. Specifically, the computer roleplaying game Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader. Read more

In the Comedy Central mockumentary, The Review, Andy Daly has a TV show that rates and reviews life events. The audience requests that Daly gives a review of eating 15 pancakes, running from the law, or getting divorced, and he carries them out regardless of cost to his personal life. This year, I got the chance to do an in-depth review of unemployment. I’m gonna arrange this review into the three main stages of unemployment: losing the job, looking for a job and having absolutely nothing to do. Read more

I chat with my friends on Discord basically all day long. I thought it would be fun to run some basic stats on our chats and put them together in some sort of fun graphics package vis-a-vis Spotify Wrapped. I soon found out that Discord does not directly expose a way for a server admin to download their own data. Lame, but I did notice that Discord bots are able to access chat logs programatically. Read more

The bus stop by my office has a huge debt counter that ominously ticks up and calculates the share of the national debt that each American ‘owes’. With the recent passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the national debt has come under substantial scrutiny. One of the emerging schools of thought around the national debt is Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton is the “MMT for babies” introduction that I’ve been looking for, and maybe it would answer a personal question: should I be scared of that bus stop ad? Read more

He lifted up the infant and, as all watched, whispered three times into his son’s ear the name he had chosen for him. It was the first time the name had ever been spoken as this child’s name, for Omoro’s people felt that each human being should be the first to know who he was. Roots tells the story of Kunta Kinte, the great-great-great-great-grandfather of author Alex Haley. There is a huge burden on Roots: over 12 million slaves were captured and shipped across the Atlantic, and Roots endures in the public conscience as the story of those untold millions. Read more

I’ll remember 2020 for so many things: Coronavirus, my first year of cat ownership, and games. Oh God, I played so many games in 2020: board games, video games, tabletop roleplaying games, you name it. The games on this list didn’t necessarily come out in 2020, nor are all of them actual standalone games, but these are the games that got me through 2020. Honorable Mention The Last of Us Part II (PS4) - An ambitious return of possibly my favorite PS4 franchise. Read more

The Challenge My fantasy football league had a fun way to determine our draft order: the person who most accurately guesses the amount of runs scored in all seventeen MLB games on Saturday, September 2nd gets to choose their draft position. The worse your guess, the worse your draft position. We had a wide variety of techniques from total guessing to some statistical modeling, and I thought this would be a good chance to think of each of these modeling practices. Read more