Back in the saddle, Once more in to the breach, Yabba dabba doo! Leeeeroy Jenkins!
Fancy new website with fancy new graphics and fancy new content
I’ve taken to the great blue nowhere once again with a spiffy new site and a spiffy new look. This is all in celebration of my new pursuit of a Masters in Data Science from the University of Pittsburg. A Masters that has a focus on AI. Que scary noises, thunder, lighting, the sound of the Cheeto’n’Chief wheezing!
This new blog will have a wider focus, not as wide as the blast area from that krak grenade you threw at the Hormagaunt who is now in mid-jump on an unstoppable arc to return-to-sender your expletive-laden explosive meant for the extreme Extremis that is extremely deadly at not so extreme range. It will also not be so narrow that the beloved nerds, geeks, and goobers who fill the internet would scroll right past this blathering blog, akin to a patch note for patch 1.0.4.2b that patches a problem nobody noticed nor knew needed patching. No, this blog ships a fuller release: Opinions, Technology, AI, Table Top Gaming, Foundry Macros, Software, and Sandwiches.
When it comes to opinions, they will be rare, they will be wrong, they will outrage, and they will hopefully entertain. Most of all, they will be mine. Shouted into the chaotic cacophony of the world wide web, in which my little website (in truth, my umpteenth attempt at one) wanders wistfully, if not woefully, unseen and unedited… well, the parts not cut off by national firewalls, that is.
So consider this your formal warning. If you came looking for balanced, peer-reviewed, both-sides takes? Well, you’ve come to the wrong place. The screenshot is the disclaimer. Zapp said it so I don’t have to.
What you’ll get instead are takes forged at 2 AM about things that matter deeply to roughly twelve people. Why a twenty-year-old game system still out-designs its successors. Why your favorite app got worse on purpose. Why the best UI ever shipped was a spreadsheet.
And here’s the thing about being wrong in public: it’s free QA. When I’m wrong, tell me. I’ll patch the opinion, note it in the changelog, and we both walk away smarter. That’s more than most software can promise.
Opinions: rare, wrong, mine. Now you know the warranty.
Destructor does not understand. Neither does your favorite chatbot, by the way. It just fails with better grammar.
That’s the energy for the tech side of this blog, and the scope is wide. AI, sure, everyone’s talking about it and most of them are wrong in interesting ways. But also the stuff under it, around it, and bolted onto it. The mouse that died a hero so a review could be written. The mechanical keyboard rabbit hole, which has no bottom. Robotics, where software finally gets consequences. Games, both the playing and the dissecting. Lamps that sabotage Bluetooth. (Real story. Coming eventually.)
I’ve spent decades across IT support, software, hardware, game development, and consulting, which mostly means I’ve broken a wider variety of things than most people. Every one of those breaks taught me something, and the scars are now content.
Expect three flavors here. Reviews of gear I actually bought, with my own money, after weeks of overthinking. Teardowns of why something works or why it never did. And troubleshooting war stories, fully documented, so your ultimately futile search lands on an terrible answer provided by me. You know, instead of a well thought out forum thread that could possibly save you money in the end.
But that’s ok. Why?
Because Destructor does not understand. That’s fine, and if Destructor doesn’t understand, do you?
This is the section I didn’t write for you. I wrote it for me. You’re just invited.
I’ve been running tabletop games for over twenty years. (Maybe been a player for two months?) Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, Exalted, Shadowrun, systems you’ve heard of, systems that died in the 90s and deserve exhumation. These days my tables live in Foundry VTT, which means my two oldest hobbies, game design and software, finally share a desk. The result is macros. Lots of macros. Macros that automate the boring math so the table can stay in the moment. Macros that do things the system never intended. At least one macro that exists purely to deliver a punchline at the right initiative count.
Expect three flavors of post here. Macro breakdowns, with the actual code and the actual mistakes. GM craft, twenty years of lessons learned the hard way at the table (mostly by my players, sorry about the gazebo). And system autopsies, where I crack open a ruleset to see what makes it tick, or why it never ticked at all.
If none of that means anything to you? Stick around anyway. Watching someone love a thing this much is its own show.
So here we are. The site is live, the graphics are fancy, the content is, well, you just read it. Judge accordingly.
I want to be honest about what shipping this actually looked like. There was no launch party. No countdown clock. No team standing around a laptop waiting for someone to press the button. There was me, a terminal window, an umpteenth-attempt website finally resolving where I told it to, and the profound silence of the internet not noticing.
And then there was the sandwich.
A Giant Club from Jersey Mike’s. Mike’s Way, because I’m not a barbarian: onions, lettuce, tomato, oregano, salt, and enough red wine vinegar to qualify as a marinade. Turkey, ham, bacon, provolone, mayo. A sandwich with the structural integrity of a load-bearing wall. Eaten alone, at my desk, in front of a website that nobody had visited yet.
That might sound sad. It wasn’t. It was the whole point.
Because here’s the thing about building something for the umpteenth time: you stop doing it for the launch. You do it for the build. The launch is just the excuse to eat a sandwich the size of a femur and call it a ceremony. Every previous version of this site taught me something before it died. This one gets to inherit all of it. Version 1.0 ships today, the roadmap for 1.1 is already scribbled on a sticky note, and the changelog will be honest even when I’m not proud of it.
So that’s the deal. I’m back on the web. The blog covers opinions, technology, AI, tabletop, macros, software, and yes, sandwiches. One category down already.
Welcome to the umpteenth attempt. I think this one sticks.
What’s your ship-day ritual? Mine’s a Giant, and it’s Mike’s Way.