vivdunstan

The game will be played over several rounds using the Swiss-Elim format. Scenarios will use Mark III attacking for the preliminary round, followed by Mark V for round two. It will then alternate back to attacks by Mark III. Armor units will be used for bidding against other players in order to determine who is on which side.

Thank you to our friend Henry Cobb for donating a $25 gift certificate for Warehouse23.com to the winner.
 

Want to learn more and register to play? Click here to read additional details and fill out the registration form before sign-ups close on October 28!

Questions? Please visit the dedicated post on our forums.

– Michelle Richardson

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/2025-10-24

dotaturls_feed

Posted by Tony Finch

https://github.com/nik-rev/awesome-tiny-crates

https://dotat.at/:/5QGC3.html

2025‑10‑23 - Awesome tiny crates that make writing Rust more fun.

https://github.com/nik-rev/awesome-tiny-crates

redirect https://dotat.at/:/5QGC3

blurb https://dotat.at/:/5QGC3.html

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web.archive.org archive.today

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https://dotat.at/:/5QGC3.html

dotaturls_feed

Posted by Tony Finch

https://adam-p.ca/blog/2025/04/string-length/

https://dotat.at/:/A8TTA.html

2025‑10‑22 - The best – but not good – way to limit string length.

https://adam-p.ca/blog/2025/04/string-length/

redirect https://dotat.at/:/A8TTA

blurb https://dotat.at/:/A8TTA.html

atom entry https://dotat.at/:/A8TTA.atom

web.archive.org archive.today

https://adam-p.ca/blog/2025/04/string-length/

https://dotat.at/:/A8TTA.html

edenfalling

Actual words will appear sometime over the weekend. :)

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: new brighton, mn

lannamichaels

In my reading of Game Of Thrones fic, I developed an urge for fic where Elia Martell Targaryen (why some married women are only referred to by their maiden names and some are always only referred to by their married names, I do not know) and her kids don't die. It would be interesting to see what it would change!, I thought. Surely it doesn't need to change a huge amount necessarily, but it would great to see it!

And so I went looking and found a bunch and it turns out.

It turns out that when you want fic where legitimate claimants to a throne survive, you get a ton of fic about Targaryen restoration. You get so many fics that are love letters to the Targaryens.

I don't care about Targaryen restoration! I don't like the Targaryens and see no reason why I should! (Except for Aemon, the Targaryen maester who is still alive at the Wall, I allow that he's really intruiging.)

Also I will admit the first time I saw the pairing of Jon Snow/Rhaenys Targaryen, I had a full blown "why? why the fuck?"

But yeah I get it, if Jon Snow is her long lost half-brother, then it's true Targaryen heritage to ship them. I don't see it, I don't even like the ship, and it's interesting how I have no problem whatsoever with Jon Snow/Sansa Stark, who were raised as half-siblings, but my reaction to Jon/Rhaenys is "I'm completely uninterested in reading this". Also I'm not really into Jon/Daenerys.

Maybe it's the whole enforced-incest of the Targaryens? IDK.

But also.

Reading the fic.

Okay so I am never going to read the books, I have long since been warned off from all the grimdark rape, and I am never going to watch the show, ditto.

I did not realize how small the amount of time the Targaryens have actually been ruling in Westeros. They only showed up like 300 years ago???? In a setting where people are like "my family has been ruling in this one spot for 10,000 years" or whatever, the Targaryens are new kids on the block who showed up with dragons, conquered everyone, had several (!) really bad rulers, constantly married each other (in violation of the local religion, and no one else was allowed to copy their behavior because they're special), seemed to do very little marrying out to the locals because who needs to shore up support, dealt with civil war/rebellion, lost their dragons, had a really fucking awful last king, and then, surprise, they were overthrown.

And you want those folks back? You are nostalgic for the wonderful days of the people who showed up five minutes ago and were generally terrible?

Also blowing my mind was, okay, I had been told over and over again that Baratheons all look a certain way since time immemorial and so that's why obviously if you look into it, Cersei's kids can't be Robert's.

But the Baratheons were founded as a new house by a Targaryen bastard. The looks of the Baratheons are the opposite of the Targaryens. Also this is also only like 300 years ago, and Westeros seems to enjoy a society where there are several pathways to ensure that only one or two of your sons are allowed to have children (maesters, the wall, endless wars).

So all this is kind of amusing from a "reading fic without knowing canon" perspective, the slow unfolding of, oh my god, what is going on in this canon. But also the mismatch of people who have actually read/watch this canon and what they want to write (Targaryen restoration, Targaryen incest) vs. me who has not done that, and what I want to read.

But actually what I want to write is a fic where Jon Snow actually is Ned Stark's bastard. Ah, yes, I see here that "Ned Stark is very honorable". Uh-huh. Well, he had an affair with a woman who is a sex worker/laundress/woman who was interested before his marriage and then, because he is so honorable, he took the child in and raised him, rather than leaving Jon Snow to live in poverty.

This explains nothing about why Ned Stark wouldn't tell Jon Snow about this mother but I'm sure we can come up with something (the mother was already married? who cares).

But I'm not writing this, entirely because I have no idea of a plot to go along with this. Oh and also I'm not reading/watching this, but I wrote an MDZS drabble without reading the book/finishing the show.

redbird

I went to my doctor today, for an annual physical and so she could write the next Ritalin prescription.

So: I had a fasting blood test last month, and the glucose number was high enough that she is ordering a re-test and an A1C test, which means another morning trip to Somerville on an empty stomach. My "bad" cholesterol is high, but not high enough for her to be prescribing statins right now. My "good" cholesterol is also high, but apparently that's less protective in older patients, and I'm approaching that age.

I also asked her to look at my calves, because I frequently have swelling by the end of the day, especially in the left calf. She said it sounded like a vascular issue, then measured the circumference of both my calves. The left calf is noticeably bigger, which supports the idea that there's some kind of vascular issue.

What I'm supposed to do for that is try to reduce my sodium intake, and try wearing compression socks for at least a little while each day. Reducing sodium intake means I'll be looking at ingredient labels for quantities--right now, I'm mostly checking to make sure that various things don't contain any of the various things that we know that one of the three of us needs to avoid.

Carmen also did a breast exam (no longer part of the standard physical exam, but she asked if I still wanted one, and I said yes), and looked at my back for any suspicious moles or freckles. Also, before the appointment they asked if I was OK having them check height and weight, and I said yes, then asked the assistant how tall I now am. Five feet two inches, confirming what I think is what the neurologist's office said, which is an inch or so less than when I was 30.

( grumbling about paperwork and MyChart )

yuletidemods posting in

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thisbluespirit

I've left it a while since I did a crosspost for

rainbowfic, which was because I was doing a very long sequence divided up into five parts and wasn't sure what to do about it now it's complete - it's something like 28k altogether (this is what has been absorbing my whole writing time for four months, when I've had any). Anyway, I've decided I might as well crosspost all the parts at once and move on. People certainly aren't obliged to read any of it, let alone all of it.

Name: Calla Island
Word Count: 5053
Rating: PG
Summary: Viyony visits Calla Island, the ancestral seat of the Allin family.

Name: Dazzled
Word Count: 5364
Rating: PG
Summary: Viyony explores a sacred cave and gets considerably more than she bargained for.

Name: Assignations
Word Count: 8293
Rating: Teen
Warnings: Death, blood, injury.
Summary: Viyony arranges an assignation with Leion, but she's not the only one with plans for midnight.

Name: Storms
Word Count: 5326
Rating: PG
Warnings: Threat of drowning, sea-sickness.
Summary: Viyony's determined to get Leion off the island.

Name: Harbour
Word Count: 5079
Rating: Teen
Summary: Leion takes Viyony home.

sholio

... as one does ...

( Spoilers for 5x12-5x16 )

thewayne

The shape of things to come?

SiriusXM radio service pushed out an update that expected the infotainment system to be at version x.5. Or whatever. If it wasn't, it rolled back. And therein's the rub. Sirius was unable to revert to its former state, so it tried to download its newest image. Which wasn't compatible with the current state of the infotainment system. Reboot the infotainment system, rinse, repeat.

For some Audi owners, this went on for MONTHS.

I would be seriously pissed if this were to happen to me! Now, my Subaru is 10 years old, and I replaced the radio with a newer Kenwood to get some additional functionality out of Apple's Car Play, and I'm glad I did it. But if I had a newer car with a touchscreen, and it got borked like this? WOW. Very unhappy camper!

The problem was that there are people with car that, for whatever reason, were not running the latest version of their car's infotainment OS. Maybe they had a bad antenna, who knows. Then this APP update comes along and blows everything up. Once again, bad programming that was unable to fail safe and properly revert back to its previous state. I don't know anything about how these infotainment systems are programmed, but you'd think the first thing you'd do when pushing an update would be to read what version is out there - which you can presume is working properly - and write that version identifier off to a safe memory space that won't be overwritten. If your update fails, reload THAT saved version! Then figure out what happened.

*sigh*

https://www.thedrive.com/news/a-siriusxm-update-sent-some-audi-screens-into-a-forced-reboot-loop-for-months

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/10/23/003245/a-siriusxm-update-sent-some-audi-screens-into-a-forced-reboot-loop-for-months

madrobins

Between the ages of 10 and 14 I learned to weave. On a full four-pedal floor loom. My weaving teacher lived down the road from our weekend house/barn, and in the summer every Wednesday morning I would amble down for my lessons. Hazel Warren was an Eisenhower-era =Lady= (she would have fit right in with the Helen Hokinson cartoons that appeared in the New Yorker) with enormous skill, and considerable patience (we actually warped the loom together. The math alone should have killed me).

When we moved up to Massachusetts full time, my mother decided she was going to weave fabric for curtains for the living room. This would have required (educated guess) 200 yards of 30" fabric): Mom managed just shy of 2 yards, and the warp stayed on the loom for decades, until I cut it off, disassembled the loom, and shipped it out west when I sold the barn.

I have decided that someone should get the good of it, so yesterday I unearthed the various component bits, and today I brought them down to the garage and unwrapped them (we will not speak of the volume of geriatric bubble wrap, brown paper, and styrofoam peanuts that are now bundled into garbage bags).
In the process of decanting the loom I found a paper-wrapped box, at a guess 40" x 5" x 5". In my father's scrawl was the word LOOM? In fact, when I opened it, it turned out to be a "Bliss" Adjustable Rug Frame, left over from my mother's brief phase of rug hooking. As near as I can tell, it's in the manufacturer's box and everything. If anyone wants it, contact me. Otherwise I suspect it will be donated to SCRAP (thank you, Ellen Klages, for the suggestion).

As for the loom itself? It is in approximately 30 pieces, like a massive 3-D jigsaw puzzle. Alas, that I did not document the taking apart of the thing when I did it. This is going to be interesting.

I am unspeakably sweaty and grimy. Crawling around in the attic is messy work. Who knew?

oursin

(Yogi Tea Bag tags, bringing the woowoo by random bollox generation long before AI started getting in on the act.)

Anyway, are we at all surprised by Millions exploited by ‘menopause gold rush’ amid lack of reliable information.

(Query: how far is lack of reliable information due to its being overwhelmed by menopause quackery, murmurs historian of medicine.)

Millions of women are being exploited by a “menopause gold rush” as companies, celebrities and influencers take advantage of a “dearth” of reliable information on the issue, experts have said. Healthcare companies and content creators saw menopause as a “lucrative market” and were trying to profit from gaps in public knowledge, women’s health academics at University College London (UCL) said. Researchers called for the rollout of a national education programme after finding a significant number of women do not feel well-informed about menopause.

You know what? I think part of this can be put on to the decline in the good old trad women's magazines, which had a) health columns written by pseudonymised health professionals b) agony aunts prepared to Do The Research and having a stack of helpful leaflets written in conjunction with qualified experts.

Brought to you by someone who was devouring her mother's magazines pretty much from the time she became literate and therefore encountered the concept of menopause decades before it became of personal relevance.

And what still gets very little play is what Stella Duffy points out in this piece:

while everyone in my research talked about physiological and emotional difficulties in the transition, once they were out the other side – even while dealing with workplace discrimination and the caring demands of their loved ones – all of them also described postmenopause as time of thriving and growing. We’re not done yet.

Margaret Mead mentioned this, but I'm not sure the 70s feminist discourse around 'croning' did a lot of favours to the idea of what happened after the pause.

dewline

Yesterday, if memory serves, I added Public Health to my profile's list of interests. I consider that choice on my part long overdue.

Current Mood: busy

leecetheartist posting in

drawesome

Title: No.23 Undersea

Artist:

leecetheartist

Rating: G

Content Notes: And what is starting to be in the grand tradition of using an Inkvent Calendar during one of these challenges Diamine has presented me with the standard ink "Fireside Snug" which I think is about as far as you can get from an Undersea prompt.

However this thing just started drawing itself with the dip pen, and when you think about the colour of some of the kelp you get around here it all falls into place, so, my friends, let me present to you the Giant Kelpy Seadragon. This large and cryptically adapted dragon is no relation to the Leafy Seadragon being much bigger and no relation to the pipefish at all. They can be found anywhere there are large stands of kelp, particularly favouring the larger species like Giant Kelp.

Their cryptic colouration and fronds lets them ambush their prey, usually fish. There is no evidence that the resident Giant Kelpy Seadragon took Prime Minister Harold Holt although residents say that the creature was 'unusually agitated at the time' for reasons unknown.

Calls to destroy the beast were shouted down by locals and conservationists, and Finnigan, as the beast was affectionately known, was a popular attraction for many years before starting a migration to the Sargasso Sea in 1973 where the species is believed to spawn. What happened to Finnigan after this is unknown.

Current Mood: mellow
Current Location: Atlantis
Current Music: Cow Town

dotaturls_feed

Posted by Tony Finch

https://aartaka.me/advanc-ed.html

https://dotat.at/:/IPPZT.html

2025‑10‑22 - Advanced self-aware ed(1).

https://aartaka.me/advanc-ed.html

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oursin

Happy birthday,

chalcedony_cat,

diony and

em_h!

daily_illuminator_feed

http://www.sjgames.com/ill/a/2025-10-23

Here's something you gamers can use for a variety of purposes . . . just don't do anything nefarious!

Let's say you have a social gathering coming up that you can be reasonably assured about the possible outcome – for example, you're setting up a few Munchkin games for Halloween. Create for yourself a relatively disposable social-media account for the event (such as on Bluesky), with, sayyyyyy, MyHalloweenGaming. Then, when you realize that handle's already been taken, try MyHalloweenGaming2025, MyFullLegalNameHalloweenGaming2025, and MyHalloweenDFSVJKLDFSJKLDFSJKDFSJKLJKL2025try6.

Finally have that account? Great! Let's say you're inviting Chris, Pat, and Drew, and you're pretty sure you'll play three games. Next, you post 64 short social-media messages before the game starts that reveal the outcomes; be sure not to tell anyone about these!

– I'll win all three games of Munchkin on October 31!

– Chris will win all three games of Munchkin on October 31!

– Pat will win all three games of Munchkin on October 31!

– Drew will win all three games of Munchkin on October 31!

– I will win the first and second games of Munchkin on October 31, and Chris will win the third!

. . . and so on.

With three games and four participants, that's 64 possible outcomes (4 x 4 x 4), assuming one winner.

You play the games, and hopefully have lots of fun! At this point, you also know who won.

Excuse yourself to the restroom, and then delete the 63 posts that didn't turn out correct.

When you return to the table, "remind" folks about the social-media account you made (that you're informing them about for the first time). Tell them you made a prediction a while back, and send them the link.

Ta-da! You're a prognosticator!

This is the con-artist gist of it, though there are plenty of variations you can do. For example, I'm pretty sure you could do this on your real Facebook account if you just set your "guess" posts to Private, and then make the correct one more-public after the game.

This can also be a nifty technique in RPGs to showcase a super-smart character's "precognitive" abilities or the like.

Anyway, it's an amusing gag you can do; don't use it for evil . . . just a little fun "trick-or-treat" for friends!

– 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/2025-10-23

$radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)$

radiantfracture

Kate Beaton had a sore throat after hitting two major festivals before dropping into Munro's Books, but she was every bit as fierce and funny as you would expect, and more.

So glad I dragged my sorry carcass out of the house for this.

Surreally, I missed about 15 minutes of the Q&A because I felt a coughing fit coming on and went to have it out in the street. But it was still great. (Leftover hyper-reactive cough reflex, not continuing illness.)

§rf§

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dotaturls_feed - Tetrapod lamp.
oursin - (no subject)
daily_illuminator_feed - October 24, 2025: Are YOU The Best Ogre/GEV Player?
dotaturls_feed - Awesome tiny crates that make writing Rust more fun.
dotaturls_feed - The best – but not good – way to limit string length.
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lannamichaels - When you want an AU but everyone else who wants that AU wants it for different reasons
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sholio - Still thinking about Babylon 5
thewayne - Some Audi infotainment systems were bricked for MONTHS by a SiriusXM update!
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oursin - 'Your deep inner self is your brightest light'
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leecetheartist in drawesome - Drawtober 2025 Prompt 23. Undersea
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The best – but not good – way to limit string length.

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When you want an AU but everyone else who wants that AU wants it for different reasons

physical exam

Last Day to Sign Up for 2025

Starfall Stories 50

Still thinking about Babylon 5

Some Audi infotainment systems were bricked for MONTHS by a SiriusXM update!

Today's Adventures in Family Archaeology

'Your deep inner self is your brightest light'

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Drawtober 2025 Prompt 23. Undersea

Advanced self-aware ed(1).

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