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: Plain old conceit

  • Healers in the Crimea: a factual account

    I am presenting a Special Lecture on Global Crime and Public Health this semester, which is really the culmination of my work on international drug cartels, prohibition and harm reduction. In preparation for the lecture on harm reduction, at the end of the lecture on sex work and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) I thought I…

  • Foundling

    Found on the street in front of my house, an alley cat with two broken legs. The leg in this picture has a compound fracture, the bone completely severed and moved around inside. He spat and hissed a lot, but once I got him by the scruff he gave in. I think he was injured…

  • Statistical Proof Paul the Octopus is the spawn of cthulhu

    I’m not the first person to have considered the possibility that Paul the Octopus is the spawn of Cthulhu, based on his “remarkable” predictive powers. However, being unconvinced, I presented the possibility that he is not a normal octopus to my students last week, as an example of a basic non-parametric test (the runs test).…

  • TV and the demise of European soccer

    So, that festival of the boot is on again, and although since I moved to Europe my interest in soccer has waned considerably[1], I still watch the World Cup quite avidly. Of the 6 European soccer giants – Spain, Italy, Germany, England, France and Holland – only 4 made it to the round of 16,…

  • How I DM

    Greg at Synapse RPG makes the claim that “we dont really have a good grasp of what goes on at other people’s tables and our community is not too great at sharing techniques or playstyles.” I don’t know if this is true or not, but it occurred to me that it would be fun anyway…

  • Congratulations, America!

    You’ve done it! 120 years after the introduction of the Bismarck system, a mere 60 years after the foundation of the National Health Service, 40 years after you put a man on the moon, and a mere 35 years since Australia introduced Medibank, you finally have a system of universal health coverage. Welcome to civilisation[1]!…

  • Fantasy role-playing, the ultimate expression of post-modernism

    I’m fairly confident that Noisms, Sir Grognard, and in fact any the people on my blogroll except (maybe) Wax Banks would be quick to describe themselves as “not really much of a post-modernist,” and probably even be quite quick to tell me exactly what they think of the idea. But if we go and check,…

  • Cyberpunk, post-modernism and orientalism 2: Race in Cyberpunk

    So I’m still struggling through the introduction of the PhD thesis I promised to read: understandable since the introduction is still going at page 50. In between my last post and this one I’ve had to wade through some sleep-inducing academic wank, but now I’ve got to the outline in the introduction of the importance…

  • Cyberpunk theory

    After the dispute over my opinions about the nihilistic elements of cyberpunk role-playing, I did a little more digging and found that this element of cyberpunk is not exactly considered unique. I also discovered that, rather unsurprisingly, cyberpunk is a rich field of theoretical endeavour. I discovered a cyberpunk course at the peer to peer…

  • Player-driven campaigns

    I’m not a fan of sandbox campaigns – I think plot and links between sessions make a campaign more fun, I don’t like wandering monsters and random encounters, and my experience of players’ attempts to navigate even small detail-rich worlds is that they flounder without a lot of guidance. However, at the end of my…