Paul M. Cray

I've always found Jimmy Stewart's voice oddly comforting. Strong grandpa vibes. Even though it sounded the same when he was young. #TCMParty

The thing about the super clubs is they’re from London, Milan, Manchester, Liverpool, Munich, these places are already exciting! Hell even the underdog teams people love like Brentford and AFC Wimbledon are in London

I also do kind of think it’s nice. Maybe this is gonna get banished from south wales but Wrexham really is the smallest least glamorous place with a football team foreigners have heard of and I kind of think it’s sweet

Coming soon: Tunnels & Trolls: A New Age A fantasy roleplaying game where ordinary characters become fated heroes, in a land shaped by mighty trolls.

I've been a lifelong fan of Tunnels & Trolls. We acquired it and are re-imagining it via a big Kickstarter. There is magic and monsters but someone needs to dig out the latrines and make bread.
Kickstarter Page - reb.to/FollowTunnels
Quickstart Rules - bit.ly/3OiURFa

What a time to be a live!

Human brain cells on a chip learned to play Doom in a week Neuron-powered computer chips can now be easily programmed to play a first-person shooter game, bringing biological computers a step closer to useful applications

2026, man

www.newscientist.com/article/2517...

hm! a large number of Protestants who voted Nixon they got the sweats over the thought of a Catholic POTUS! (1960 really should not have been so close, after recent recessions.) I don't know how that particular culture war would break out if Nixon has a Jewish VP but it's interesting to contemplate

Update 16: This Project Terminates Here. All Change, Please. · This Blighted Isle: TERMINUS Hello Friends,We've reached the end of the line for the project – its terminus, even.All rewards have been shipped out. Everything was posted weeks ago, so if you haven't received your reward yet then...

The final KS update for TERMINUS!

www.kickstarter.com/projects/pat...

Contents: the project is finished, thanks for the support, what's I'm doing next, and... TERMINUS has an ambient soundtrack!

To be quite honest, this makes me want to write a creepy TTRPG with a modern setting so I can create an ambient soundtrack for it.

Or, I need to finish writing up my ‘Cthulhu in Ancient Greece’ scenario and then write creepy music for aolos and lyre…

1899 art nouveau houses in the Brussels East Extension. The brick patterns on the right are a negative image of the patterns on the left.

"New technologies change warfare:

Cannons made medieval-style castles obsolete; anti-ship missiles did the same to battleships.

Cheap, expendable drones could be doing something similar to complex defensive weaponry."

I feel like the Graeber experience is:

(1) he’s talking generally: well this is interesting and makes sense

(2) he’s talking about something you know about: oh no

Very much this.

The Zhodani core expeditions are fascinating because, even though the Traveller-verse is *big* ("The Atlas of the Imperium" lists, I think, ~11k systems), the actual galaxy is *enormously* bigger (~100 million times) and this is one of the few canonical examples of that being taken into account

Sadly, much though I want this desperately, I can't justify it given by straitened economic circumstances. I will have to wait and hope it appears in Bundle of Holding bundle eventually

The best handling to date is the life's work of Ursula K. Le Guin

I feel like David Graeber really captured something about lefty academia because the concept of “bullshit job” is very resonant and has a lot of intuitive appeal but his exploration of it is totally hamstrung by the fact that he’s never left campus and is very vague on the mechanics of actual work

The Core Expeditions - Mongoose | Traveller | DriveThruRPG An Ancients device sparked the Core Expeditions, journeys that would take the Zhodani closer to the Galactic Core than any other known civilisation. Spanning thousands of years and costing trillions o...

Might be of interest to some in this bailiwick: www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/5...

All books are real books ffs

I’ve only recently noticed the ridiculous trend for people to competitively tickbox their reading, and my immediate response was WTAF?
I don’t really have anything further to say on the subject as it doesn’t deserve it.

There's definitely nothing wrong with a project like reading all the books on a list or all the books by a particular author or even reading only short books in November and December to get your total up for the year. Even if you only read cat mysteries, there must be some better cat mysteries!

I haven't read this, but for instance Reading Widely or Reading the Classics as projects you undertake as a reader don't strike me as very far away from more "gamified" approaches to reading in kind

Of course, sf books *are* real books and some people might only read industrially extruded literary product. But certainly the two don't necessarily go hand in hand. Furthermore, I have been told, reading fast makes you concentrate more, so you actually take in more

"On a deeper level, it also means that we give up the art of reading slowly." I'm a slow reader, but reading a lot of books, for me, reading a lot of books about different things. When I commuted to Salford, I could read 40 pages of a real book or 80 pages of a sf book during my journeys

What We Lose When We Gamify Reading At the dawn of 2026, I spent an irresponsible amount of time cataloguing what I did in 2025. There are so many ways to aggregate a personality these days: Letterboxd kept track of how many movies y…

This strikes me as wrong: "If we’re gamifying our reading, we stop reading widely: we pick different versions of a story that we are guaranteed to like, and with that we lose a sense of well-roundedness, a sense of discovery and surprise." lithub.com/what-we-lose...

New LEGO set for our times

(The friend's horrible bunkbed accident happened when the wood platform under her top bunk suddenly fell through. She instinctively grabbed the sides and ended up suspended by the nails that had run deep into several of her fingers and both legs. It was a horizontal accidental crucifixion 🤢)

I might be middle-aged, but I still want a tall bunkbed with useable space underneath for a reading nook or some such. Due to a friend's horrible top bunk accident, I'm scared of this scenario, but I still *want* it. I need this in an adult queen size. We have high ceilings.

Yes, an AI can assimilate every paper ever written on the subject, which a human can't