Neither Gods Nor Genies

In Game Masters Aren't Gods... They're Genies, Neal Litherland argues that the job of a GM (and it's telling that he calls it a job) is "to create challenges ... decide what treasure the players find, what allies they make, and ... do all these things in service to the players." He sees the game as being akin to a book that the players will want to keep reading. In a related discussion on Discord he made it even plainer, casting the GM in the role of a performer and other players as the audience.

There are a couple of big assumptions at play here and I disagree with both of them.

"Employment services providers" are literally incompetent

We all know that the points reporting and compliance testing is bullshit but you'd think that, at the very least, they'd be able to do basic things like write a resume, right? They certainly seem to think they can, because it's one thing they all insist on doing - even if your current resume was written by your last "provider". Every single one of them thinks they know what a resume should look like and no two of them agree, which alone tells you all you need to know about their supposed expertise in the area. But it's worse than that. It's not just that they all assume their own opinions are universal, it's that they are actually terrible at writing resumes. Let me give you an example.

FAQ for TTRPG GMs

Q: Is it OK to kill off a player character by GM fiat?

Utopia: Why doesn't Tony quit?

It's a question I find myself asking while watching the latest season. What possible reason could he have for sticking around, despite the fact that it must be extremely clear to him that he cannot achieve any of his goals. Unless he actually does achieve some things, but we don't see it?

Routine Inspection

Hi Property Manager, 

On behalf of every tenant who has to put up with this bullshit, I'll be conducting an inspection at your house on 16/04/2023 between 8:00PM - 4:00AM. I realise that window may not be convenient for you, but none of you have ever bothered to ask me what time I'd prefer you to visit so I won't either. I'll take approximately 15 minutes (or however long I feel like); however, as I'm very busy with important matters, I cannot confirm the exact time of inspection. It'll be a fun little surprise for you. But don't try to take a shower or go to the shops or anything because I could arrive at any time.

Unnecessary Confusion

The MyGov and Centrelink websites are really bad. They're confusing and inconvenient. For example, you know how on every website ever, you've always been able to enter your username, press Tab, then enter your password and hit Enter rather than clicking on each text field and then the login button? On the MyGov site, you have to click on the username field first. It's not automatically selected. Then after entering your username, you have to hit Tab three times to get to the password field. One press takes you to the "forgot username" link. There can be no good reason for this. They just set the tab stops in the incorrect order and don't care to fix it. But that's not the main thing I want to talk about today.

Simple trick for getting a free house

All you have to do is take out a home loan and buy a house then, instead of living in the house, you get someone else to live there and pay off the loan for you. When they're done paying, you somehow still get to keep the house even though they paid for it and they get nothing.

Weirdly, this is practically impossible to do if you don't already own a house, and just gets easier the more houses you already have.

And even though you obviously just stole a house, you don't have to go to prison. No one will even suggest it. Everyone will just act like that's a completely normal thing to do.

How to subscribe to a YouTube channel's RSS feed.

YouTube frequently makes changes that make it harder to keep up with your subscribed channels, but RSS still works. The instructions for using it are wrong though, and have been wrong for an extremely long time. They're also hard to find. So here's how to do it.

1. Get an RSS client (eg. Thunderbird. The following instructions will assume you're using Thunderbird but should be basically applicable to any feed reader).
2. Create one or more folders under "Feeds" to categorise your subscriptions. Or don't.
3. Right-click a folder (or "Feeds") and click "subscribe".
4. Under "Feed URL" paste "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=" (without the quotation marks).
5. Open your web browser and find a channel you want to subscribe to.
6. If the URL contains the name of the channel (eg. https://www.youtube.com/user/Wallsy) then:
1. Open one of that channel's videos and then click the channel name under the video to return to the channel page. This time the URL should be different.
7. If the URL contains a string of gibberish (eg. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJpPXZwyo0fgu3h94R3P5pA), copy that gibberish.
8. Switch back to Thunderbird and paste the gibberish from the channel URL at the end eg. https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCJpPXZwyo0fgu3h94R3P5pA
9. Click "Add". Links to the latest videos from that channel should now be retrieved. You can set it to check for more videos automatically or just whenever you click the "Get Messages" button.

Improved Genesys Combat

The Original System

If you're already familiar with how combat works in the Genesys core rules, feel free to skip this section. This is an explanation for those who aren't familiar with it.

Why I Love Vivaldi

The web browser, that is. Well, one of the reasons. I actually like a lot of things about it and dislike some others but overall it's the best option available. I might write more about it some other time but I just felt like writing about this particular feature today. What feature? The options you get when you right-click on a hyperlink.

Lessons from Lone Wolf: Choice and Consequence

I've been running a group playthrough (or let's play) of the Lone Wolf gamebook series on the Something Awful forums, and I've gone over the books in some depth in order to provide extra information and to attempt to make some bits work a little better (eg. not letting us get into stupid dead-man-walking states). In doing this I've come away with a few lessons that anyone thinking about writing a gamebook should follow. Here are some of them, in no particular order.

Internet trouble

My internet started slowing down and dropping out the other day. I knew what the problem was - the cable from the junction box to my flat is a completely shoddy bit of work and just lying unprotected on the ground. It's been an issue before and even been completely broken (or perhaps cut) at one time. It should have been a simple matter of having a TPG guy come out, test the cable, and fix it. But tech support never makes it that easy.

Amazon reviews are bullshit

OK, not really. But their system for moderating them certainly is, and that does raise a few issues relating to their accuracy and usefulness. But to get into this properly I'll need to go back to an email I got a few months ago. As happens from time to time, someone asked me to review a shitty book.

Intellectual property vs. physical property

The theory of copyright is sound enough to seem obvious and unassailable in the modern world: if one creates something, then one should be able to control and profit by its distribution. It applies as well to something we create with our minds as something we create with our hands. If I build something I can sell it, give it away, or keep it for myself. If I write something I should have the same options. If it were that simple, there would be little room for criticism.

But there's a strange difference in how the law treats physical and intellectual property. If I build a desk and sell it to you, you can use it as a desk, you can use it as a basis for constructing something else, you can chop it up and use it as firewood. It's your desk now. But if I write an article and you buy a copy from me, I get to tell you what you can do with it. You can't sell your copy to anyone else, for example. You can't chop it up and make something new out of the pieces. In fact, if I want, I can take it back and not let you have it any more. Even though you paid for it, it's still mine.

Phones are annoying

Someone has apparently accidentally set their phone to forward their calls to my number, so I've been getting phone calls all day. This would be annoying enough, but the people who've been calling are a pack of wankers.

Letters to Yourself

Robert Dessaix's 'Letters to an Unknown Friend' was the keynote address at Essaying: The Calibre Prizes, a symposium held at the National Library of Australia. This is my review of a transcript of it, written for my Writing Creative Non-Fiction class back in May.

An astounding coincidence

I've done some research, and amazingly, it turns out that the period of time when I was a child was objectively the best time to be a child. Those who grew up either before or after me missed out on all of the best things. Here are just a few examples.

Microsoft HAL

There's a point when installing Windows 8 (and again when upgrading to 8.1) where your screen fades to black, and then after a few seconds the word "Hi" appears in the middle of the screen. And I just don't understand what they were thinking when they decided to do that. It's the creepiest software installation ever.

Comics Kingdom

An open letter to King Features Syndicate

Just read your "One Year of Comics Kingdom" email and I'm stunned at the audacity of your claims. You've "enhanced the look and feel of the newsletter"? Are you serious? They look like garbage now. Supposedly this was to make them look better on mobiles, but I don't read my emails on my phone, so to me it's a clear downgrade.

The biggest crock though is where you claim that the Comics Kingdom website is "quick-loading" and "responsive". I've got to wonder if you've even seen the site. It's slow, inconvenient and just generally awful. I cannot understand how anyone could claim that Comic Kingdom is in any way an improvement over DailyINK. From my perspective it's worse in every way.

And as for its mobile-friendliness, the site takes so long to load on my PC I wouldn't even consider trying it out on a mobile, especially if I were using 3G rather than wifi. Having archives access has become mostly pointless (even as you've expanded the availability) as it takes so long to load each strip that reading through old ones is more of a chore than a pleasure.

And this is not a new problem, nor can you claim ignorance of it as I've complained about it on several occasions. Your site is arse and your constant claims that it is somehow improved over the old one are salt in the wound. You've had a year to get this working. Fix your damn site.

Lectures are shit

God I hate lectures.

Someone... talking.... really slowly... and with weird... pauses and EMPHASIS... and... while talking... really slowly... they repeat... that is, they REPEAT themselves... over and over... and say exactly what's written on the slide... even though you can read it on the slide... and they almost never... never seem to have planned (or rehearsed)... so they repeat... themselves... or explain something... out of context... or that isn't part of the... isn't supposed to be in the lecture... or they get out of sync with the slideshow... and repeat themselves when the right slide comes up... or they explain things... in the wrong ORDER.