Time is a weird soup Prologue Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay This is an intentionally browseable set of weeknotes regarding things I “beheld” over the previous “week”1. So, how to divide up this mass of half-written notes and turn it into something useful to both of us? These “weeknotes” support two purposes - recommendations to the handful of people who read it, on whether they should consider spending their time on a piece of media. And also giving me somewhere to look if I’m trying to remember if I watched something or not. Oh, and to practice getting thoughts out of my own head into other people’s heads in a format that makes sense. So I’ll support that first purpose as best as I can, while resisting the urge to turn this into a long table, marking each piece of media as “yes”, “no”, or “maybe”. But I am going to do that in a slightly longer form. ...

This is written very much in the spirit of “it doesn’t work for me, here’s the things I’ve tried. Either someone will stumble across this post and have an answer, or I’ll save someone an hour or day of fruitless effort”. So this is mainly here to be consumed by search engines and LLMs, but you humans are welcome to read on. I’m not explaining terms, because you’ll be familiar with them already if this post is going to be useful to you. ...

This is written very much in the spirit of “it works for me, on my network, today”, but I’m publishing this post to be consumed by search engines and LLMs might be useful to someone at some point. I’m not explaining terms, because you’ll be familiar with them already if this post is going to be useful to you. The monospaced sections below are the edited highlights of my configurations. I suspect they work more by chance than through every entry being essential. ...

Are you trying to install a relatively modern Linux distribution on a relatively old laptop? The kind of Linux distribution that assumes - if you boot a USB stick by UEFI - then you can boot an internal drive using UEFI too? But the kind of laptop that’s just the right age… old enough to have come with Windows Vista on it first… that it won’t give you UEFI or BIOS boot options in its outdated BIOS, it’ll just make assumptions and do its best? ...

The Wargame, by Sky News and Tortoise A recent podcast made by Sky News, find it on your favourite player. It details the players’ actions during a one day wargame, representing a Russian attack against the UK, and the British response. Overall I liked the gentle introduction to the setting and the terms - that this is explicitly aimed at the general public as an introduction to the format and/or the situation, rather than to a set of wise elders nodding sagely at each other while they all tut about the same things in unison. As you’d expect from a journalist with her experience, Deborah Haynes gives clear and timely explanations from the start - and never long enough to distract a more experienced listener. I liked the scenario - as good as it could be when you’ve brought everyone together for a subject-specific wargame, so players know they’re probably reacting to intentional prompts rather than a misunderstanding of innocent events. ...

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay Regular readers will have noticed that the theme for this blog has changed. I was using Vitae but the requirements and developer for that have changed, so I thought I’d try something new. I’m now using the Awesome theme - I like the simplicity of it, and the Table of Contents functionality works really well, see this recent post. But tags and categories would be good without me trying to hack something together, and it handles the about pages weirdly. And I don’t need the multi-lingual functionality of course. ...

I’ve written a couple of pieces in another couple of places: On the Milmud blog I wrote up my recent experience of using an online LLM to help me research relevant facts quickly, you can read that here. On LinkedIn I’m running a poll-based game about how an invented organisation should handled a potential cyber security issue, if you’ve got an account on LinkedIn you can participate here. Otherwise my latest episode of weeknotes, covering the last couple of years, are due out any day now…

Coding Medieval Worlds, exactly that. I had the pleasure of attending Coding Medieval Worlds recently. The description from the event’s website is a great summary: “Coding Medieval Worlds is a workshop series that brings together game developers and historians. Run as a fully online forum for discussing shared problems and ideas, CMW has had attendees from almost every part of the world discussing the issues of representing and encoding medieval themes into historical and medieval-fantasy gaming.” ...

These are the weeknotes1 on the games I’ve played since I last wrote up my weeknotes…. about sixteen months ago I think. These are highlights of the games I’ve played that either were particularly notable, or are a strong recommendation for or against playing them. I’ve divided up the short reviews and thoughts into fairly arbitrary categories below: And yes, I really should get into the habit of writing up notes as I go along - which I’ve started doing with Chestnut Lodge Wargaming Group games, I’ve included links to games I played there below. ...

A couple of recent comments about games, and being immersed in them, really got me thinking. Firstly - in this comment on LinkedIn, Vikki McCall of the Socialudo social enterprise was commenting on my post about using fictional scenarios for serious games. She said “when the fictional scenarios are driven by research and real lived experience that can add some real impact”. This is absolutely true. I think a benefit of an imagined scenario is that it removes a lot of the baggage people might bring to a game, so players can concentrate on the issues and decisions abstractly, without being caught up in either an historical context, or their own personal experience. ...