Recently began playing Dungeons and Dragons 5e with some local friends who have never played any kind of TTRPG game before. As the Dungeon Master, I'm working with a pretty barebones set of "gear" to get the game rolling:

• PDFs and https://5e.tools/ -- DND is not an especially rules-heavy game; buying a large number of expensive rulebooks does not feel especially necessary. Having PDFs and that site at hand can make quick rules lookup easy, and, more importantly, costs $0
• Laminated 1" square A4 paper -- I got a few of these made for about $2. It's easy to draw maps over them with a dry erase marker and wipe them up when done. A $30-$50 Chessex battlemap would be nice at some point, maybe, but this is cheap, extremely portable, more than enough, and easily replaced. I don't tape them together, so it's easy to trasnport them.
• Character tokens -- bottle caps, toys, lighters, erasers, coins, chess pieces... any little thing can work to represent characters. I encourage players to bring their own. For monsters, I have a ziplock bag with various kinds of colored aquarium rocks. Cheap and plentiful!
• Homebrew DM screen -- also laminated, and taped together. A bonus of a DM screen is that character sheets and other papers, such as the grid paper, can be tucked inside for easy transport. I didn't laminate it for writing purposes but rather to keep the pages in good shape.
• Tablet -- as the DM I use this for reading through adventures. Easy to transport and easily hides behind the screen.
• Notebook -- I keep monster tables, track initiative, track XP and keep other little notes here. I've tried loose-tracking game notes before and they have a habit of getting lost. In battles, I keep the initiative table on the left side where I also track monster HP and use the right side for monster stat blocks, maps, and misc notes. Works very well.
• Dice sets -- one per player. Ideally every player would bring their own dice but they don't break the bank and it's satisfying to keep a big bag o' dice. Players get to choose their set on a first come, first serve basis. (No need for dice towers because those are no fun.)

Excluding the tablet, which I already owned, all in all it was about $20 for everything. The dice were the most expensive bit. Now that I have a base operating set, any part (except the tablet lol) can be easily replaced if lost or damaged. If the game price were divided up among the players, they would have only had to chip in a few bucks to start playing.

It would be nice to play on 3D maps with little painted metal figures on a big gaming table. But this is already enough to get everyone comfortably playing! You can get into tabletop RPGs without breaking the bank.

I would like to try moving on to DND 1e or some OSR game later (OSRIC? OSE Advanced?) once the players get the hang of 5e. Mechanically, 5e characters feel a bit "samey" ... not as bad as 4e was though. I appreciate that 5e is a bit lighter on rules than 3.5e but a bit more "crunchiness" would still improve the game. My biggest criticism of DND 5e is that it takes a long time for people to set up their characters, but I hope it can motivate them to strive to keep their players alive.

One day I got a targeted ad in my phone notifications from Shopee -- Indonesian Amazon, more or less. It was for a 1080p smart projector for $20. Never did I think a projector was something I needed before, as I have a 43" TV with a Slackware media PC at an appropriate distance away from my couch. But then... the cheap refurb media PC gave up the ghost. And I thought back to a friend in my old artist community housing that had a projector that worked amazingly well.

My wife's asthma has been acting up bad lately as she has a case of pneumonia, which also means we're spending a lot more time in our bedroom, where the air purifier lives. On an impulse I told wife we were getting a projector. It was only $20 so what did we have to lose?

As much as I'd love to link to or name the specific model I purchased, an image of the model is as close as I can come -- it's a generic Chinese unbranded smart projector.

It came in the mail shortly after I ordered it with a power cord and HDMI cable. There are slots in the back for AUX audio and USB as well. I set it up on a dresser and pointed it at a wall. Then I registered a throwaway Google account on it and grabbed Jellyfin from the play store, and connected it to my regular workhouse computer via the process discussed here.

I'm generally adverse to "smart TVs" but if they can run Jellyfish or Kodi, have Google Play store, or have HDMI/USB it checks the boxes for me.

Huge success! We can watch high resolution videos at a width of ~140cm in our bedroom, in bed. As long as it's dark and we use an external speaker -- there's no complaints about this setup. If it were a $100 projector I'd have been hesitant to purchase it and I would have never considered any projector much more than that. But for now, the $20 projector is working very well. The colors pop. The software is enough to get the job done. If and when it dies, I'll drop an update.

This is the album that everyone that's anyone is talking about. I'm someone so that means I'm talking about it, too.

Where to begin? This album is a bit... unconventional. With all the slurring and broken, repeated fragments, the vibe I pick up off this is something of a drunk musician friend, 2 or 3 drinks too many, half-consciously trying to put out some songs.

And I don't mean that in a negative way! There is a lot of raw emotion coming out here, even if the stanzas can be pretty out-there and fractured. Anxiety, dread, guilt, blame, and nostalgia all come out here.

Another way I'd look at the lyrics: this is something of a stealth punk album satirizing pop music. It's punk in that the attitude has anti-establishment trends and there's a rudeness that pokes through, and tracks like Cobra that sound lyrically poppy really aren't. The backing is not what we'd call punk but this is an albm that's hard to put into boxes.

The first time I listened to this album, I didn't like it. I really didn't like the first track. But I gave it the attention it deserved until something clicked, and now I think it's a pretty good album. Getting Killed is worth experiencing. Give it a listen!

I recently had a friend end up in the hospital, and he was able to bring a phone with him. He didn't have XMPP on his phone and I didn't want to install Discord.

The solution? Email!

I have plenty of old email addresses from friends. We've left Facebook and we've changed numbers but our email addresses are here to stay. The only kind of person who is unable to keep an email address is so mentally unwell, they probably aren't worth conversing with anyway.

Outside of work or school, I don't think anyone uses email. It's a damn shame. Not everyone has Telegram/Xmpp/Discord/Instagram, and not everyone wants to share their phone number (for Whatsapp/Signal). But I think virtually everyone has at least one email address. Making a new email address takes minutes and after it gets added to your phone or desktop it's as easy to use it as any other account.

Emails can be as long or short as you want, much like a blog post. And, generally speaking, there is no expectation to answer an email immediately.

One way to categorize the modern internet channels is by speed, where

• "fast" web - discord, tiktok, livestreaming
• "moderate" web - xmpp, irc, fediverse, reddit
• "slow" web - discussion forums, RSS, wikis, email

Probably the most controversial categorization would be calling fediverse a moderate-speed channel despite the fact that posts are often coming in at the rate of 30 an hour or more. But the tendency of the network is to post and contribute mindfully. The typical fediverse post will be shorter than a typical blog post, but will be more meaningful than a chat blurb on Discord or shitpost on 4chan. In the same way, emails generally are more pleasant and meaningful to engage with than fediverse discourse.

This is an open invitation for people to email me. Fediverse and Gikopoi may be faster ways to get ahold of me, but maybe you'd enjoy getting back into writing email. I always enjoy receiving and sending emails. You can find my email address on the contact page.

Related discussion: It's good to send emails to friends, Pohon BBS, 2024-01-12.

I've long been a fan of board games. They're a great way to stay entertained and develop mental skills while socializing with friends. The name "mental sports" is kind of a tacky name, but it's kind of a good one, too. Lately, I have been revisiting a classic, Mahjong, and exploring a new-to-me game series, the Gipf project. The purchase of a special games table has been tremendous in reviving my social board game interest. When not in use, it conveniently lives under my couch, but is easily transported.

Dimensions: 86cm x 86cm, 72cm tall - 34" x 34" -- perfect for Mahjong and card games, but also quite suitable for tournament size chess boards (51cm/20"), luxury Backgammon sets (53cm/21"), or "universal" GIPF boards (46cm/18").

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The season has concluded. I review the shows discussed in my previous blog post after the split.

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Got a "free" tablet when buying my wife's new phone. Galaxy Tab A9, 8.7" display, 128GB storage, 4GB memory. I had never intended to buy a tablet and a few days into owning it, I don't feel I need it.

It's decent for watching media from my media PC in bed via jellyfin & reading manga and PDFs. But that's it.

A few others on Gikopoi have tablets collecting dust. I think I'll send my tablet out to one of my stores to serve as a POS. I do not recommend buying a tablet unless you read a lot of PDFs or comics or need it for running a business.

I have largely been adverse to oaking my experiments until now for the simple reason that the "white lightning" I made is pretty good on its own with mixers. Another reason is that oak is harder to source in the tropics -- not even as sticks, let alone barrels. But I've finally dipped my toes into the water of oaking, a/k/a aging spirits.

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Reading philosophy is an activity that can benefit all people. I enjoy this pasttime so much that I spent many years in university developing my skill in it. Along the way, I learned a few things, not just about the world and the mind, but also how to learn.

Reading philosophy is important, not because it gives us values and truths to accept, but because it exposes us to the process of developing understanding. Difficult works that develop our abstract reasoning help us to understand complex issues that arise in the course of daily life - and can also help us explain our reasoning to others when facing complex issues.

It is unfortunately necessary to be somewhat well-read in philosophy to keep up in more formal philosophical discourse. What follows is my attempt to collect noteworthy classical, modern, and contempotary works on a number of topics, with special focuses on the nature of mind, reality, the limits of knowledge, & moral teachings in a roughly chronological order. When reading philosophy like this, you can follow chains of thought through the centuries. After reading the texts I suggest, you should be able to begin participating in more serious philosophical discussion - not to mention developing more nuanced positions - and it shouldn't be hard to find people or resources to help understand the texts along the way.

After my list of suggested texts, more general notes on actually reading philosopy follow.

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Are you overwhelmed about the state of your media directories -- particularly your music and videos? I was for a long time, too. But we are in the 2020s and going through the effort of manually organizing personal media collections should be a thing of the past.

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