Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

Category: Art

  • Heavy Metal’s Profound Influence in the Middle East

    How can they lose with inspiration like this?

  • Japanese Data Visualization Skills, with a Radioactive Example

    Japanese people in general seem to have excellent skills in data visualization, as well as quite advanced mathematical ability and a robust approach to science. Japanese appreciation of data visualization, particularly, seems to exceed anything similar in the West (at least, that I’m familiar with). In my favourite magazine, Tokyo Graffiti, for example, ordinary people…

  • Lies, Damned Lies and Statisticians 2: The Fugu Rule

    On Thursday night I had my farewell party, primarily filled with my partner’s co-workers, who have been good companions for the past year. Most of them know that I’m an inveterate liar, so I nevertheless considered announcing to them at the party that actually “the job in Tokyo was a lie and I’m not going,…

  • Lies, Damned Lies and Statisticians: The Drunken Whale

    In  a recent game report I mentioned that I have a singular talent for convincing people of the truth of outrageous lies, and gave the example there in a footnote of the time I convinced a friend that a hawk had carried off a baby at Matsue castle. This got me to thinking that I…

  • Post-it Monsters

    Revealed through a friend, the Don Kenn gallery of monsters drawn on post-it notes. They have an Edward Gorey-meets-Where the Wild Things Are feeling about them, along with a childhood nightmare atmosphere. I like them! Especially the floating baloony ones, and the child’s cthulhu imaginings.

  • Photos from the End Times…

    The Guardian today has a series of pictures from deserted buildings in Detroit, USA, where the economy (particularly, I suspect, the housing sector) has been slowly collapsing. These pictures are exactly how I imagine the world after a zombipocalypse. Who leaves a library deserted but full of books, except someone fleeing a zombie assault? I…

  • Brutalist Vignettes

    Somehow I stumbled on this gem of architecture criticism. I particularly like September 26th. But October 1st is also brilliant.

  • Current Viewing: The Descent Part 2

    I was a big fan of the movie The Descent, which pits a group of young women cavers against a colony of blind flesh-eating proto-humans in a dark and claustrophobic cave nightmare. This is the kind of movie that you really need to pause regularly, and it combines all of our worst fears – claustrophobia,…

  • Of Crown Princes and Lantern Princesses

    On the weekend just been, regular commenter and past player of mine, Paul, and his wife The Indomitable G came to my sleepy resort town at the tale end of a two week tour of Japan. We had heard tell of a minor festival of bamboo lanterns in distant Hita Town, so decided to visit.…

  • That Time of Year Again: The World Wildlife Photographer Prize

    I get my inspiration from a variety of places, and I find the natural world offers a variety of spectacles beyond compare, on every scale from the minute to the gigantic. So I look forward every year to the Veolia World Wildlife Photographer of the Year prize. This year’s have just been announced, and were…