vincentursus | Reading

http://www.sjgames.com/ill/a/2025-09-01

Having worked here for nearly two decades and touching nearly every product line, it took awhile for me to finally narrow it down to three choices.

The Stars Are Right. I'm going in publication order here, if anyone is curious. This is one of the first products I worked on after I started. I did the layout and logo design, but I don't feel too vain choosing it as its art, drawn and colored by cartoonist Goomi, really draws me to it. My favorite little touch is the tiny cultists. Chef's kiss!

The Fantasy Trip Companion. What's not to love about an octopus necromancer and its army of undead minions? This cephalopod found at least one thing worth loving about humans: Their bones make great soldiers.

Munchkin: Shadowrun. It doesn't hurt that as a 90s kid, I have strong Shadowrun nostalgia. But I also really like Lar deSouza's art, and Alex Fernandez did a great job with the bright neon coloring.

– Ben Williams

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

http://www.sjgames.com/ill/a/2025-09-01

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Per the dw_news post regarding the MS/TN blocks, we are doing a small code push shortly in order to get the code live. As per usual, please let us know if you see anything wonky.

There is some code cleanup we've been doing that is going out with this push but I don't think there is any new/reworked functionality, so it should be pretty invisible if all goes well.

nine_star_hegemony_feed

https://www.wuxiaworld.com/novel/nine-star-hegemon/nshba-chapter-6295

nine_star_hegemony_feed

https://www.wuxiaworld.com/novel/nine-star-hegemon/nshba-chapter-6294

nine_star_hegemony_feed

https://www.wuxiaworld.com/novel/nine-star-hegemon/nshba-chapter-6293

denise posting in

dw_news

A reminder to everyone that starting tomorrow, we are being forced to block access to any IP address that geolocates to the state of Mississippi for legal reasons while we and Netchoice continue fighting the law in court. People whose IP addresses geolocate to Mississippi will only be able to access a page that explains the issue and lets them know that we'll be back to offer them service as soon as the legal risk to us is less existential.

The block page will include the apology but I'll repeat it here: we don't do geolocation ourselves, so we're limited to the geolocation ability of our network provider. Our anti-spam geolocation blocks have shown us that their geolocation database has a number of mistakes in it. If one of your friends who doesn't live in Mississippi gets the block message, there is nothing we can do on our end to adjust the block, because we don't control it. The only way to fix a mistaken block is to change your IP address to one that doesn't register as being in Mississippi, either by disconnecting your internet connection and reconnecting it (if you don't have a static IP address) or using a VPN.

In related news, the judge in our challenge to Tennessee's social media age verification, parental consent, and parental surveillance law (which we are also part of the fight against!) ruled last month that we had not met the threshold for a temporary injunction preventing the state from enforcing the law while the court case proceeds.

The Tennesee law is less onerous than the Mississippi law and the fines for violating it are slightly less ruinous (slightly), but it's still a risk to us. While the fight goes on, we've decided to prevent any new account signups from anyone under 18 in Tennessee to protect ourselves against risk. We do not need to block access from the whole state: this only applies to new account creation.

Because we don't do any geolocation on our users and our network provider's geolocation services only apply to blocking access to the site entirely, the way we're implementing this is a new mandatory question on the account creation form asking if you live in Tennessee. If you do, you'll be unable to register an account if you're under 18, not just the under 13 restriction mandated by COPPA. Like the restrictions on the state of Mississippi, we absolutely hate having to do this, we're sorry, and we hope we'll be able to undo it as soon as possible.

Finally, I'd like to thank every one of you who's commented with a message of support for this fight or who's bought paid time to help keep us running. The fact we're entirely user-supported and you all genuinely understand why this fight is so important for everyone is a huge part of why we can continue to do this work. I've also sent a lot of your comments to the lawyers who are fighting the actual battles in court, and they find your wholehearted support just as encouraging and motivating as I do. Thank you all once again for being the best users any social media site could ever hope for. You make me proud and even more determined to yell at state attorneys general on your behalf.

darths_and_droids_feed

https://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/2668.html

Episode 2668: Factory of Dreams

Traps need some sort of bait. If the heroes can ignore the obvious or suspected danger, why wouldn't they? You need to give them something juicy to make rushing into the jaws of death worthwhile. Even if it's nothing more than a mystery or facade.

That provides another level of trickery. They might expect some reward, but often the lure can be fake. As long as the heroes believe there's bait there, they may take it anyway.

aurilee writes:

Commentary by memnarch (who has not seen the movie)

A typo on a dagger? Yeah, that's nonsense. Who would bother printing text straight onto a dagger? I think Hux could have the right idea that it's a mishearing though: Factoid Bait, Fanciful Spate, Fragmented Slate... plenty of things that could fit an inattentive carver. Really, the weird part is bothering to carve a dagger with an invitation or whatever it is in the first place.

Hmm. So if Kylo is commanding a factory with a gate to be built as bait, then it's definitely going to be a trap. How much is this First Order construction going to stick out like a sore thumb? Given the atmosphere of the place so far, I bet quite a bit. And then Poe is going to be the one that drags the rest of the party into the place in spite of that obviousness. Aaaaand somehow things will work out okay. Or okay enough for the sequel episodes lately; there's only so much work that "okay" can handle.

Or maybe Factory Gate will end up being the name of a bar somewhere. Wouldn't that be a surprise twist for everyone in the game?

Transcript

https://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/2668.html

irregular_comic_rss3_feed

https://www.irregularwebcomic.net/2874.html

Wow, the Wikipedia article on Feynman diagrams is insanely technical. Most people don't need to know that Feynman diagrams are "graphical representations of a perturbative contribution to the transition amplitude or correlation function of a quantum mechanical or statistical field theory".

In simpler terms, Feynman diagrams are basically just diagrams showing how a particle interaction works, in a nice graphical, easy-to-understand way. Isn't that a nicer description?

Pretty much everything I want to say about Feynman diagrams is actually in the comic. You don't need scary-looking equations to explain scientific concepts. (Though sometimes the equations do make neat summaries.)

I remember vividly learning about these in my university quantum physics courses, and being utterly blown away by the fact that one simple interaction (electron-positron annihilation) and another simple interaction that looks at first glance to be completely unrelated (photon scattering off an electron) look exactly the same if you swap around time and space and think of antiparticles as normal particles moving backwards in time. It's not just the case for this interaction either - there are plenty of other interactions involving all sorts of other particles that work just as well when rotated this way.

This is not necessarily to say that antiparticles are normal particles moving backwards through time. It's not really clear what that would actually mean in practical terms. But if you think of them that way, quantum physics still works, and becomes considerably simpler in the process. So it's a powerful way of thinking about it than can help you solve real world problems.

In many ways, this is actually one of the less weird aspects of quantum mechanics.

2025-08-31 Rerun commentary: I just checked the current Wikipedia article on Feynman diagrams and the language quoted above is still there in the introductory paragraphs. I half-expected that maybe in the intervening years since this comic was first published someone might have simplified the language to explain it better to people who haven't studied advanced physics, but no.

https://www.irregularwebcomic.net/2874.html

daily_illuminator_feed

http://www.sjgames.com/ill/a/2025-08-31

A funny thing happened as we've been working on the next batch of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. I'm obfuscating this anecdote slightly to not give anything away, but the core is true.

Because creating these books relies on careful attention to the original print editions, we do a lot of checks to ensure the text is as accurate as we can make it.

One element we have to do manually is a formatting check, where we confirm that the bold, italics, and capitalization is retained from the previous printings.

This is done with two people: one person carefully skims the original book, and the other double-checks the current version of our document based on what the first person finds. Most of the time, I'm in the "read the old book" role, and Nikki – Production Artist extraordinaire – is seated in front of InDesign, verifying or fixing as needed.

The way this normally goes is I'll say something like, "[section] 217, end of the section: You pick up the Book of Hidden Spells. 'Book of Hidden Spells' is italicized." Nikki will make an affirmative noise indicating that it's correctly formatted in the file and I'll go on.

When it comes to italicized text that isn't a title, I'll use my voice to inflect the emphasis: "About the middle of the section: 'You try to find the path.' The 'try' is italicized." I use my "lecture/teacher/actor" cadence to really highlight what's formatted, so we reduce the back and forth as to what text, exactly, needs something special done to it.

That's all background for this anecdote.

So, I get to one part in the book we're working on, and I say something like: "187, about one-third from the top: 'It's clear that you are in trouble.' Just the 'are' is italicized."

Nikki pauses. "Just the 'are'?"

I nod. "Is that a problem?"

"It's just . . . weird."

There's a moment's silence between us as I figure out how to progress, when Nikki chirps: "Oh! I get it! The word 'are' is italicized!"

"Yes?" I ask, confused.

"Sorry," Nikki continues. "The way you emphasized it and then said just the 'are,' I thought you meant the letter 'R' in the word 'are.'"

This wasn't as farfetched as it seemed, since sometimes the text does use partial emphasis in words, such as how the original text might emphasize "something" or "undead." We have to be careful to make sure only the correct bits receive special treatment.

The confusion cleared, and we correctly formatted the word "are." Then we continued with making sure the remaining sections of that book received our letter-by-letter attention, pausing only to jot down a note as a reminder to share this anecdote with you all . . .

. . . which I have now done.

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: Why Is The Darkness Blinking?

They're trapped between the realm of the living and the dead . . . and they're not too pleased about it. The Book of Unlife adds 44 unliving monsters to your The Fantasy Trip campaigns, along with a complete adventure setting. Live like there's too many tomorrows thanks to Warehouse 23!

http://www.sjgames.com/ill/a/2025-08-31

nine_star_hegemony_feed

https://www.wuxiaworld.com/novel/nine-star-hegemon/nshba-chapter-6292

nine_star_hegemony_feed

https://www.wuxiaworld.com/novel/nine-star-hegemon/nshba-chapter-6291

nine_star_hegemony_feed

https://www.wuxiaworld.com/novel/nine-star-hegemon/nshba-chapter-6290

ffutures

It turns out that the current version of OpenOffice is still compatible with my Macbook Pro, and unllike Free Office has a spreadsheet. Seems to work well so far, and hopefully will be more compatible with LibreOffice.

camwyn

Today, on ‘Americans will measure in ANYTHING other than the metric system (even the honorary Canadians)’:

( It happened in the shower, it’s tmi-chix worthy )

of all the nameless but notable figures in the Gospel out there, I never expected to find myself identifying with the woman with the issue of blood. Yeesh.

Current Mood: annoyed

irregular_comic_rss3_feed

https://www.irregularwebcomic.net/2873.html

Given her already established background, it's tough work making my version of Jane Goodall even more badass, but I humbly think I might have pulled off another tiny increment.

2025-08-30 Rerun commentary: During the Cold War, Jane worked behind the scenes, helping to establish and run peacekeeping forces in various flashpoints around the world, as well as providing assistance to rebel forces fighting against the forces of darkness. Oh, and there was some stuff about chimpanzees too.

https://www.irregularwebcomic.net/2873.html

daily_illuminator_feed

http://www.sjgames.com/ill/a/2025-08-30

I am not generally a sports fan, but there are some things that are so visceral that they speak to your deep subconscious in an irresistible way. A race is probably one of the most basic sports-related things that we have, and I was surprised a few years ago when I saw content about inanimate objects racing and it hooked me.

Marble racing was the first of this kind of thing that I found, and Jelle's Marble Runs is one of the best examples of it.They do a variety of creative tracks, but the narrative of the teams and play-by-play commentary makes it almost feel like the racers have some sort of true independence.

More recently I discovered my favorite implementation of the concept. The Diecast Racing League videos from 3Dbotmaker use toy cars instead of marbles and custom racetracks. The added sound effects and characterization can pull you in even deeper, and I've watched hours and hours of small cars doing some sweet jumps.

The most recent video in this theme that has come across my feed is from Corridor Crew. If you haven't seen their videos before, they're a team of digital effects artists who critique movies and make their own digital effects videos. They decided to make a CG marble run using a physics engine that breaks the rules of reality. It's a great video, and you can watch it here.

– Will Schoonover

Warehouse 23 News: The Autodueling Continues . . .

. . . with the Car Wars Pocket Box Bundle 2! Visit Midville and Black Lake to see its sights and colorful citizens, or take your chances in the Armadillo Autoduel Arena! Will you find glory or defeat? Find out by picking up this Pocket Box from Warehouse 23 today!

http://www.sjgames.com/ill/a/2025-08-30