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: Nerd Culture

  • Problems with Presenting Graphics in Stata

    I’ve been burnt twice in the past two weeks by a strange graphics handling problem in Stata and Microsoft Office. In the spirit of presenting workarounds and warnings for obscure software problems that I stumble upon, I think I should report it here. The basic problem is simple and very nasty: charts produced in Stata…

  • The Return of Fighting Fantasy

    Apparently Ian Livingstone has written a new Fighting Fantasy! adventure, entitled Blood of the Zombies. How appropriate! I discovered this fact through an article in the Guardian, which includes a suggestion that it will be mostly snapped up by 38 year old nerds reliving their childhood. Well, wrong, Grauniad! I turn 39 in a week!…

  • Why Poor Kids Don’t Go to University

    In today’s Guardian there is a very simple and cute opinion piece that summarizes very nicely the reasons that poor children don’t go to uni. Coming from a poor background myself, I feel I have some insight into the social and cultural factors that bear down on children from poor families to stop them from…

  • Why Working with R Really Sucks

    Today, doing a little task in R, I had cause to look up the following “warning” that appeared after compiling a script: Warning message: In readLines(file) : incomplete final line found I couldn’t figure out what this warning meant, because the script ran fine, so I did a web search and I came across this…

  • The Edition Wars Hit the Big Time…

    … and immediately turn into a nerd vs. arsehole flamewar. At the Guardian there’s a relatively fluffy piece describing the D&D edition wars for non-gamers, in the context of the D&DNext announcement. It’s nice to see D&D getting a bit of mainstream attention, even if it is from the standpoint of an incomprehensible nerd conflict.…

  • Does Titanic Have the Most Cynical Ending in Cinema History?

    I watched Titanic in its 3D release about a week ago, on the strong urging of my partner. I missed it the first time around so it was all new to me, and I’d somehow managed to avoid learning anything about the story. It’s a great movie, very nicely paced and with an excellent combination…

  • The End of Scientific Computing with Windows?

    This week my work started the process of buying me a PowerMac – a 12 core, 24Gb RAM monster that will replace my 8 core, 16Gb RAM windows machine. I also received a new macbook, and my colleagues are also going to or planning to buy macs in their next round of upgrades. This means…

  • Should the Government Subsidize D&D?

    In most social democratic countries (that is, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, troll-infested Scandinavia and much of Europe), the government provides some state support to the arts and sport, either directly through grants and training or indirectly through subsidies for community participation and activity. Let’s consider a few examples of these from around…

  • Style and the Construction of Gaming Worlds

    I have always found it impossible to play magical cyberpunk outside of Shadowrun; I can’t imagine adapting the Shadowrun system to play, say, space opera or high fantasy. Similarly, I can’t imagine playing high fantasy with Traveller rules, or cyberpunk with D&D. Something about these classic games prevents them from being used outside of their…

  • Learning About Dating Through Big Bang Theory

    Big Bang Theory has some amusing and interesting insights into the world of nerds and physicists, and the way it depicts the social standing of nerds in America seems very familiar to an Australian viewer. But like most American shows, when it moves on to talking about relationships and gender relations, it’s a whole new…