Tag Archives: gaming

My Greatest D&D Moment

I’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons since 1980. That’s a bunch of years, dozens of characters, lots of GMs, and more adventures than I can recall. (I’ve also played other RPGs, including Twilight 2000, Vampire, Shadowrun, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Yes, there’s a TMNT game, and it’s beyond fun.)

Like any other seasoned gamer, I have war stories. I have war stories for days, and I was recently trying to decide which is my favorite. What was my greatest gaming moment ever (to date, anyway – I still play, and you never know, right)?

Here’s what I decided on. Read more

Kara is self-aware: technology is climbing out of the uncanny valley, but toward what?


The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of robotic and 3D computer animation, which holds that when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s human likeness.

This, from the folks at game developer Quantic Dream, is simply remarkable.

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Predicting the 21st Century: Nostraslammy’s ten-year review

Ten years ago, at the turn of the millennium, Nostraslammy took a stab at predicting the 21st Century, with a promise to check back every ten years to see how the prognostications were turning out. Odds are good I won’t be able to do a review every ten years until 2100, but I figure I’m probably good through 2030, at least, barring some unforeseen calamity. And if you’re Nostraslammy, what’s this “unforeseen” thing, anyway?

Let’s see how our 22 articles of foresight are holding up, one at a time.

1: Researchers will develop either a vaccine or a cure for AIDS by 2020. However, it will be expensive enough that the disease will plague the poor long after it has become a non-issue for the rich and middle classes (although this is one case where political leaders might fund free treatment programs). The end of AIDS will trigger a sexual revolution that will compare to or exceed that of the 1960s and 1970s (unless another deadly sexually-transmitted disease evolves, which is certainly a possibility). Read more