So I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to include people who are not ‘like me’ in a tabletop roleplaying game I’m running. It’s a game set in the nearish future in Southern California, during Gundam’s One Year War (just before the events of the Mobile Suit Gundam anime). And in setting something in California, one of the first commitments I made to myself was that it would not efface the presence of Latinx, Native, Black, or Asian people who live there today and make the place their home, and better.

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So… because I posted so little here last year, when I was looking at the site again after publishing my last post, and I saw that I had written a “What I did over the holidays” post last year. I didn’t do much this year, but I figure, hey, why not.

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Wow… it has been a really long time since I’ve posted anything on here. Last one was… *checks notes*, a post about making OSS PRs (which helped me get a new job, so that’s alright I guess).

For the last… I dunno, 10 months, I’ve been working on a couple of hacks of Blades in the Dark. One is about kids doing cool kid stuff, like in Hook or The Goonies and ET. The other… is kind of a game where you make Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam. So basically giant robots and political space opera and bad actors all around. (It’s called Against the Titans of War and is on this site)

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I’ve recently made my first big PR to an open source project, Speakerline. The maintainer is aces, and the whole process has been enoyable and instructive. It’s the instructive I’d mostly like to talk about though ;)

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My larger chunks of time off tend to be the time when I also get a lot of self-admin and personal projects moved forward. This year was no exception.

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I’m running Staticman for comments on this blog. If you’re using the main/public instance of the app, this requires you to add Staticman as a collaborator to your site repo, which I decided I’d rather not do… so I’ve run up my own instance of the application, and this is a quick look at how I did it.

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Despite the fact that I’m not really a front-end dev, getting threading to look decent was not the hardest part of this.

I’ve been wanting to set up Staticman on this site for a while. I took a swing at it a year or so ago, but either because I was less experienced with working with webapps and I was insisting on running up my own instance, or because it’s in Node and I’m a Ruby dev primarily, or because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, I couldn’t get it to work. I ended up adding Disqus to the site, but since they just got bought and I have no idea who the new owners are, I’ve finally gotten around to setting up Staticman. There is an excellent post on Made Mistakes about this that I’ve cribbed a lot from, but there were a couple of gotchas I ran into that took me a while to solve.

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Turns out Disqus just got bought, and considering I know bothing about Zeta Global (sounds sinister though), and since I was already kind of on edge about Disqus’ privacy stuff, I’m killing the comments on this site.

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About 3 years ago I took my first stab at creating this website. It was part of my work in General Assembly’s Front-end development course, which was one of my intros to development (the other being Harvard’s free intro comp-sci course, CS50, which I can’t recommend enough). The thing that I really wanted to have on here was search for posts, without any backend functionality. This meant JavaScipt, and man was it friggin’ ugly.

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I’ve been listening to Friends at the Table a lot recently. It’s an actual play podcast run by a team of amazing people where they play different tabletop games. They have a focus on “critical world-building, smart characterization, and fun interaction between good friends” (to quote their strapline) and they do all three really, really well. I’ve just finished the first two ‘seasons’ of their show, and I’m super excited to pick up with the rest.

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