Reading

Four hours in an art gallery

I am in Vilnius, Lithuania at the moment.

The Founding General Meeting for the new pan-European bi+ organisation, Bi+ Equal, finished before lunch today, after two and a half days talking about the journey to get here - the Dutch / French organisations that have done most of the work started about 18 months ago - and sorting out the details. There were other things you could do, but this was a much more 'work' conference than any BiCon.

I'll have more to say about it later, but partly so I can tell people who are still here and not going to the ILGA Europe conference that's happening somewhere else in the city, I want to post about what I did this afternoon.

The main modern art gallery's English name is the Contemporary Art Centre. Their current show is called 'Bells and Cannons: Contemporary Art in the Face of Militarisation'. There's an online review complaining that there's not much to see, and that's true: it's not a large gallery compared to say Tate Modern etc.

But it is extremely good. ( Involves talking about violence etc )

Current Mood: overwhelmed

Entry tags:

🪫⚰️ Playthrough/Review: Now What Do I Do?

Playthrough/Review: Now what do I do?

( Game Description )

Pet death is a real possibility in this game, and it’s probably inevitable. I don’t feel positive about that.
This is a game that demands that you create the whole story, everything. You find an object related to your death. Quick, quick, think of something. And eventually, you need to tie all of these together and make a story of who killed you and how.

This will be either draining or boring or unsatisfying, or all of them. I rolled one room and bailed.

Creating mysteries for TTRPGs is a Hard Problem, and most solutions either involve ‘the GM knows but isn’t telling you’ or ‘the GM sets up a matrix of plausible events, whatever you work hard for turns out to be the solution.’

This ‘game’ has no such resolution mechanic, so you need to bring *that* to the table as well.
Combined with the harm-to-pets and some dissonances in the random tables (your character can be from the Colonial era, but the game can take place in the modern day: How the fuck am I supposed to get revenge on my murderer by scaring them to death? They’re dead anyway.) I just don’t feel like spending hours and hours licking this into shape.

I’d love to try out the ‘track’ mechanic at some point but maybe not in this game.

Entry tags:

advogato,
fedora

Where are we on X Chat security?

AWS had an outage today and Signal was unavailable for some users for a while. This has confused some people, including Elon Musk, who are concerned that having a dependency on AWS means that Signal could somehow be compromised by anyone with sufficient influence over AWS (it can't). Which means we're back to the richest man in the world recommending his own "X Chat", saying The messages are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange “AWS dependencies” such that I can’t read your messages even if someone put a gun to my head.

Elon is either uninformed about his own product, lying, or both.

As I wrote back in June, X Chat genuinely end-to-end encrypted, but ownership of the keys is complicated. The encryption key is stored using the Juicebox protocol, sharded between multiple backends. Two of these are asserted to be HSM backed - a discussion of the commissioning ceremony was recently posted here. I have not watched the almost 7 hours of video to verify that this was performed correctly, and I also haven't been able to verify that the public keys included in the post were the keys generated during the ceremony, although that may be down to me just not finding the appropriate point in the video (sorry, Twitter's video hosting doesn't appear to have any skip feature and would frequently just sit spinning if I tried to seek to far and I should probably just download them and figure it out but I'm not doing that now). With enough effort it would probably also have been possible to fake the entire thing - I have no reason to believe that this has happened, but it's not externally verifiable.

But let's assume these published public keys are legitimately the ones used in the HSM Juicebox realms[1] and that everything was done correctly. Does that prevent Elon from obtaining your key and decrypting your messages? No.

On startup, the X Chat client makes an API call called GetPublicKeysResult, and the public keys of the realms are returned. Right now when I make that call I get the public keys listed above, so there's at least some indication that I'm going to be communicating with actual HSMs. But what if that API call returned different keys? Could Elon stick a proxy in front of the HSMs and grab a cleartext portion of the key shards? Yes, he absolutely could, and then he'd be able to decrypt your messages.

(I will accept that there is a plausible argument that Elon is telling the truth in that even if you held a gun to his head he's not smart enough to be able to do this himself, but that'd be true even if there were no security whatsoever, so it still says nothing about the security of his product)

The solution to this is remote attestation - a process where the device you're speaking to proves its identity to you. In theory the endpoint could attest that it's an HSM running this specific code, and we could look at the Juicebox repo and verify that it's that code and hasn't been tampered with, and then we'd know that our communication channel was secure. Elon hasn't done that, despite it being table stakes for this sort of thing (Signal uses remote attestation to verify the enclave code used for private contact discovery, for instance, which ensures that the client will refuse to hand over any data until it's verified the identity and state of the enclave). There's no excuse whatsoever to build a new end-to-end encrypted messenger which relies on a network service for security without providing a trustworthy mechanism to verify you're speaking to the real service.

We know how to do this properly. We have done for years. Launching without it is unforgivable.

[1] There are three Juicebox realms overall, one of which doesn't appear to use HSMs, but you need at least two in order to obtain the key so at least part of the key will always be held in HSMs

AWS outage

DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

Entry tags:

🧊⛏️ First Impressions> Rangers of the Midden Vale

First Impressions: Rangers of the Midden Vale

( Game Description )

This was not created to be played solo, but there’s this solo play (endorsed by the creator) and I got it from a solo bundle, so I’m counting it as a solo game, but it looks like a good game to play with a group as well.

The solo play uses a lot of additional solo resources, so I'd have to see how well this plays with just the book rather than a lot of supplementary materials.

( Tables and mechanics )

So definitely something I'll keep around, study more, and will probably try as a solo game at some point.
I'm definitely keeping this around as a book of random tables; the enemies might or might not transfer to other settings, but the locations are definitely useful, and the list of potential enemy traits is short and to the point.

Current Mood: content

Entry tags:

🎩⛩️💎 Tools and Sundries: Colorful Characters

Playthrough/Review: Colorful Characters (Character Creation Tool)

( Game Description )

This isn’t a game in itself, though it is gamified a little, but the prompting and the ‘feels-like-a-game’ part helped me to come up with things about two characters that I was struggling with (I created a character and a general setting/situation for Combat Apothecary that I did not get to play; in that game they would have been solo, this system needs at least 3 players.).

Character Creation is not my thing. It’s not how I write. Constructs made consciously don’t come to life for me; whether that’s in books or in DnD.

The format forced me to empty my brain of any other thoughts and distractions, and to just go through one step after the next. And yes, there’s a name on the list, and an origin, but I can _tell a story_ for that, and I don’t have to worry about things like hair colour and height, which I really don’t care about at all. This is more about the *Character* than their mechanical description.

I have taken the first of these characters back into the system I’m trying to use right now (Tiny Dungeon) and was able to come up with mechanics that work for that character. Some of the traits were a little surprising, but they fit with what the character had to say about themselves and what others said about the character. This one is treefolk, so they are proficient in Heavy Melee weapons and have mastered Clubs, they know no fear (and get advantage on save tests), they’re good at wilderness survival, but they also have an eidetic memory.

I’ll create the other two tomorrow (well, one I had mostly created, the other suggests a lot of stuff due to her heritage), but knowing what they look like from the inside, I can now find better traits.

Once upon a time, Windows looked good

No, honest, it did.

Windows 2 was kinda ugly.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win203

Windows 3/3.1/3.11 were fine.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win30

Muted, boring, but you could look at it all day. And we did.

95 improved it.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win95osr2

Tasteful greys, spot colour.

NT 4 improved that a bit more.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/winnt40

Categorised Start menu, for instance. But nearly identical.

95/NT4 were visibly inspired by NeXTstep, IMHO the most beautiful GUI ever written.

Then it all started to go a bit wrong. The first pebbles bouncing down the mountainside presaging a vast avalanche.

Windows 98.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win98

IE4 built in so Microsoft didn't get broken up my the US DOJ. Explorer rendered local content via HTML. Ugly extra toolbars. Some floating, some embedded in the task bar. Ugly gradients and blends in window title bars.

Cheap and plastic and tacky.

But that is around the time that media and gaming PCs went mainstream, home internet use (often over dialup) went mainstream, and the alternatives died out (Amiga, ST & GEM, Arm & RISC OS) or very nearly died (classic MacOS, NeXT merger, Rhapsody).

So it's what many saw first and loved and remembered.

Result, people write entire new OSes designed in affectionate homage:

https://serenityos.org/

Look at the toolbars. Look at the textures in the title bars. This isn't Win9x, this is specifically Win98.

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%201-x/i...

Specifically:

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%201-x/h...

<- textured title bars

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%201-x/t...

<- gradients in title bars

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%201-x/m...

<- Windows-style colour schemes

KDE started out as a reproduction of Windows 98/98SE by a team who didn't realise that what they were looking at was WordPerfect 5.x instead of WordPerfect 4.x -- as the late great Guy Kewney put it:

"WordPerfect 4.2 was a bicycle. A great bicycle. Everyone agreed it was a great bicycle, just about the best. So what Wordperfect did was, they put together a committee, looked at the market, and said: 'what we'll do is, we'll put 11 more wheels on it'."

Win98 is Win95 festooned with pointless needless Internet widgetry because the DOJ was about to split MS into separate apps and OS companies, because MS drove Netscape into bankruptcy by bundling IE free of charge with Windows.

Strip all that junk off and what's left underneath is a better UI. But the German kids writing their "Kool Desktop Environment" didn't realise.

After that came WinME and Windows 2000, which turned down the bling a bit as the lawsuit was over, but it was only a blip.

Then came XP with its "Fischer-Price" themes.

Then Vista with gratuitous transparency everywhere because GDI.EXE had been ripped out and replaced with a compositor and that's no fun if you don't use some 3D features like see-through stuff.

Then 7 toned that down a bit and everyone love it.

Then the universally detested Win8, and then that was toned down and the Start menu put back for Win10, which is roughly what UKUI and Deepin copied in China, or Wubuntu in the West.

Then Win11, as copied by AnduinOS and a few others, which for this long-term Windows user is the worst release ever. I can't even have a vertical taskbar any more. It's abhorrent.

(Content repurposed from here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45626910

Inspired by this:

https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/the-ides-we-had-30-years-ago-and )

Current Mood: not nerdy enough

Entry tags:

🎪🧊First Impressions: Crux

Playthrough/Review: Crux

( Game Description )

I may play this again, if I ever feel like preparing a little mountain-climbing lore, or if I simply have a larger table to spread out the cards and several hours during which I don’t mind being frustrated.

I like this game. I like that there’s three strategies you can use (or roll your own), I’m finding some of the rules _slightly_ unclear, but I just made a ruling and moved on.
My lack of ability to build a narrative was frustrating, and I underestimated how much time I’d need.
‘One attempt takes roughly 15-30 minutes’ which may be true, but to play a round you’ll have to set aside 2-3h, unless you’re blessed with the space to leave the card mountain untouched (cat owners need not apply). And since it’s easier to keep everything in your head, 2-3h does not sound unreasonable.

At this point you need to ask yourself whether this is worth three hours of your time, and we’re back with the climbing experience: if you’re the sort of person who can build an appropriate narrative in your head just by pulling a card that’s ‘trivial’ or ‘hard’, you’ll probably have a great time when you’re stuck indoors.
If you’re not a climber and your inner monologue is ‘big rock, must get up’ you’re missing a major part of the fun.

I don’t know whether I’ll pick this up again. I don’t mind roguelikes, so I can’t tell how frustrating this will be to play, but without a fun narrative, you have only half a game.

Current Mood: cranky

Entry tags:

🥾🧩 Playthrough/Review: Tic-Tac-Tombs

Playthrough/Review: Tic-Tac-Tomb

( Game Description )

I’m in the mood for some solo dungeon delving. I’m looking for a simple mechanic where I roll for what kind of challenge or treasure I can find, roll to overcome the trap/monster, loot a little, and move to the next room.

This mechanism sounded like fun, but the tables you're rolling on don't work for me at all. The room description and challenge are based on multiple rolls on multiple tables, though I haven’t worked out what the ‘Being’ table is FOR; it doesn’t get mentioned. You can ‘sacrifice an item’ as part of your gameplay, but you’re not actually given items unless you roll a double, which I didn’t.

This feels half-baked.

This game is also the reason I stated in my last post that journalling games are not the ones with the highest mental load. So far, the highest mental load for me has come from Oracles/Spark Tables, where you get a couple of words and have to find out what they mean in your game.

Description of the Room: It is an endemic trap cache, where one can unlock gauze.
Challenge: Choose dull Alchemy.

I don’t even. I am not feeling intelligent enough to make a story out of that. (

caper_est pointed out that 'dull alchemy' probably means turning gold into lead, so there is that.) I don’t want to start there. Give me a smoky Guard Room with a Sarcophagus in which a portcullis suddenly drops. ‘None Survived’ says an inscription and, for want of a better table, 1d6 = 5 Skeletons to fight.
This may end up deadly, but at least I know where I stand. Or where I got squashed.

Current Mood: accomplished

Entry tags:

20x24,
rpg

My Transformation into a Meticulous Person

( Depth year, 20x24 project, 8 of Pentacles )

I haven't finished the font project because I needed to think about what the final form of my font collection should look like, but I have processed all fonts I acquired prior to mid-June 2025.

( Taming the Fonts, once and for all )

The lessons from this are twofold. One, working out a process that works for you will make life indefinitely easier. I haven't yet worked out processes for everything in my life, but I am working out more processes, and even when they're incomplete or insufficient, they're steps in the right direction.

I am also encouraged to look FOR processes instead of feeling overwhelmed.

But the other lesson is that while some of this probably *is* a character trait – something that will come easier to some people than others – it totally can be learnt.

Even in your fifties.

(Ugh, that sounds old.)

( Lessons Learnt )

It's a bit of a revelation for me that earlier charity bundles created a lot of cognitive load (all those games and I have no idea what they are, and I'll have to at least make an effort to sort them, and they take up so much space, and I spent all this money and never play them [ok, with charity bundles that guilt is very much reduced], but they were a moderately high cognitive load and I mostly dealt with them by ignoring them. (I downloaded the solo bundle, I haven't downloaded several others).

Compared to the last bundle: I checked it out, found a few things I was interested in, it's for a good cause. I have downloaded everything and presorted it (video games, multiplayer games, solo games (though there may be some movement when I find out I was wrong from a brief glance), 3rd party games, supplements. I will back up everything, and delete the things that I'm not interested in right away.

And something miraculous happened. I'm looking forward to eventually playing these games, even if I will probably dump half of them unplayed (for there are many many lots, and many games I *want* to play), but they're not taking up that uncomfortable mental space of 'this is too much I can't cope, argh'. Instead, I can look at this bundle, go 'I feel in control', back it up, and remove them from my hard drive for now; I'm currently working my way through the Solo Bundle, and when I have a bit more brain and hard drive space, I shall download and process another bundle.

Step by step, I'm reducing technical debt, and it feels GOOD.

Current Mood: busy

Entry tags:

Solo Knight: Dear Diary (Journalling Games)

When I started soloing, I thought that I would not like journalling games much.

I thought this would be the type of game with the highest mental load; I was mostly wrong.

What you need as a player is to shed all inhibitions. The game says you’re a vampire in 1950s Glasgow? You’re a vampire in 1950s Glasgow. The game says you’re a frog in human disguise? You're now a frog. And so on.

The amount of handholding journalling games do varies; but most of them will guide you towards a certain story shape, and give you prompts enough to – at least for me – spark ideas. The dice or cards do the rest.

So far, the journalling games I’ve tried have told me what kind of story I’m telling, and while instructions to ‘keep writing until you’ve reached an end’ can sound weird to non-writers, they make sense in the moment.

Right now, I don’t have a major writing project I am working on, and everything is new and shiny, so I am playing a fair few of these – they’re low-hanging fruit. (As is this journal entry; it’s possible I’ll change my verdict on journalling games.)

Recommended if you don’t want to wrestle mechanics, if you’re looking for a single session (so far, all of mine have been <2h), and if you’re willing to delve into a story and ham it up and write with wild abandon on the first thing that comes to mind.

Current Mood: gloomy

Entry tags:

⚰️🚂 Playthrough/Review: You are Roadkill

Playthrough/Review: You are Roadkill

( Game Description )

This actually was one of the first games I played, chosen at random. On the positive side, you don’t need to know anything about solo roleplay to play this.

On the negative side, this is depressing as fuck.

This taught me something about solo gameplay; I don’t want to play it again.

Yeah, 'bout that

Hhumm.. Well I'm still around though not sure why. The ups and downs of life are mostly the latter and, quite frankly, I'm not sure the few of the former are worth it; it's all so much pointlessness. I keep going but my heart isn't in it...

Current Mood: amused

Entry tags:

🪅 Playthrough/Review: With Iron Teeth

Playthrough/Review:
With Iron Teeth

( Game Description )

This is a very short game of chance. I did write out the narrative, but very briefly; there are no prompts for individual cards, just for the suits.

This is a quick game – I think it took me half an hour all in all, including reading the rules and finding a miniature that looked a little vampiry – and it was fun, quick, and brainless.

This looks like it could fill the niche of short video games - you have twenty minutes before you need to do something else, you don’t want to brain, you don’t want to sink into anything meaningful, and there’s a little tension and a little strategy.

This is Indie gaming at its best. It doesn’t have to be epic, it doesn’t have to be polished, it just has to be fun.

Current Mood: croaky

Entry tags:

📓🎩🪉 Playthrough/Review: The Disguised Frog

Playthrough/Review: The Disguised Frog

( Game Description )

That was unexpected. Wrote just under 1300 words, guided by the Tarot cards I pulled and the vague suggestions provided. My brain went down some very unexpected – but ultimately very hopeful – tracks.

There is, of course, a pattern to journalling games: I write out the beginning of a story, not its muddle or end (there’s always a muddle in the middle where you have to stop throwing new content into a story).

I have always struggled with writing exercises and find these games (as long as they provide enough substance and enough inspiration) extremely inspiring. Combined with the archetypes and meanings of the tarot, which I happen to know quite well by now, this was a blast.

The resulting story was weird and wonderful and I don’t know whether I shall ever write more of it and take it further, but this is the fourth game of this kind that gave me a meaningful experience.

I have not marked this as retired because I intend to play it again. Not any time soon, but this one will stay on my hard drive.

Short RPGs like this are a great way of unsticking creativity. I spend around two hours writing and rolling dice and pulling cards, there’s a definite end point, and the stakes are very low - you can’t really do this wrong.

Current Mood: baffled

Entry tags:

📟 First Impressions: The Joyride Everlasting

First and Last impressions The Joyride Everlasting

( Game Description )

This is an experience I have had with indie games, video edition, (or writers, self-published) before: sometimes a creator comes up with something half-baked that makes perfect sense to them, and it works for them because they hold the other half in their heads.
Third parties will feel baffled, because this is paper thin and in shreds.

So maybe someone with an anime/superhero/mecha background can make something out of this; I cannot.

Current Mood: bored

Entry tags:

🪫 Playthrough/Review: Combat Apothecary

Playthrough/Review: Combat Apothecary

( Game Description )

Well. My first DNF, but after spending about 2h and not getting to the first combat while getting more and more frustrated I decided that I had too many unplayed games on my hard drive to invest any more time into an unplayable game.

( Wot I learnt, afterwards, from other people )

It's a game where you have to bring everything yourself: the character, the setting, the gameplay, the enemies… everything. You get a small matrix of 'Environ' (18 items) with entries like 'Fort, Acropolis, Kiln' and as many 'Essence' entries. ('scorch, corrupt, undead') which includes both 'ashen' and 'cinders'.

Even if the information were presented much better (there is *so much* talk of 'lore' which from context is the same as 'essence' because there's nothing else), I'd still hesitate to call it a game.

If I have to do all of the creation myself, I'd want a much more robust system with much clearer instructions.

I did roll a basic combat just to try out the system, but other than being very very confusing indeed, I also dislike how close to the edge the character lives all the time.

In my playthrough, I was supposed to fight an undead creature, which I decided should be a zombie.
My superpower is bleed.
So basically I either bend the narrative until it cries uncle, or I can't use my class feature.

So while I like the general idea and some mechanics like not knowing when you'll meet the boss – definitely a mechanic I want to try out again – I hated the combat system and the general confusion. This is more mental load than making up a game system on the fly.