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Gaming newsletter

Occasional games related stories I notice across the internet, sign up for the newsletter version, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Pandemic’s creator is making a board game about climate change

from WIRED UK

When game developer Matt Leacock released his best-selling board game Pandemic, he didn't expect that twelve years later people would be using it to help them process an actual pandemic sweeping the world.

Indie RPGs show roleplaying can - and should - be far more than Dungeons & Dragons

from

Dungeons & Dragons is such a behemoth in the tabletop roleplaying game scene that it’s become a synecdoche for the hobby itself; to many, “D&D” and “tabletop RPG” are one and the same. The game is massively popular.

RuneScape saved her life. Fifteen years later, she’s still playing

from WIRED UK

When Allana turned fourteen, the limits of her world shrank to the four corners of her bed. A heart condition kept her between hospital and home. She could not attend school or make friends. She was lonely. She could not live like a normal fourteen-year-old.

The Best Tabletop RPGs Of 2020

from Game Informer

Many tabletop role-playing enthusiasts had to make big changes to their playstyles in 2020. Whether it meant suspending long-running games, moving to virtual play sessions, or playing more with those they lived with, it’s been a challenging time to get a fix of that dice-rolling goodness.

Worldbuilding: Fantasy Religion Design Example

from

Working through the Fantasy Religion Design Guide, our first step is to decide on the scope of religions on the world we are creating.

Worldbuilding: Fantasy Religion Design Guide

from

Depending on your campaign setting idea, in the early stages you may only need a bare minimum of details about your religion.

Ethics newsletter

Occasional ethics related stories I notice across the internet, sign up for the newsletter version, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation

from MIT Technology Review

Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, a director of AI at Facebook, was apologizing to his audience.

I asked an AI to tell me how beautiful I am

from MIT Technology Review

Qoves started as a studio that would airbrush images for modeling agencies; now it is a “facial aesthetics consultancy” that promises answers to the “age-old question of what makes a face attractive.

Why GPT-3 is the best and worst of AI right now

from MIT Technology Review

GPT-3 has captured the public’s imagination unlike any AI since DeepMind’s AlphaGo or IBM’s chess-playing DeepBlue.

Inside the ‘Wikipedia of Maps,’ Tensions Grow Over Corporate Influence

from Bloomberg

What do Lyft, Facebook, the International Red Cross, the U.N., the government of Nepal and Pokémon Go have in common? They all use the same source of geospatial data: OpenStreetMap, a free, open-source online mapping service akin to Google Maps or Apple Maps.

Auditors are testing hiring algorithms for bias, but there’s no easy fix

from MIT Technology Review

I’m at home playing a video game on my computer. My job is to pump up one balloon at a time and earn as much money as possible. Every time I click “Pump,” the balloon expands and I receive five virtual cents.

Want to make your company more diverse? Consider quitting

from WIRED UK

In 2021, organisations of all kinds will realise that they have to make racial justice a core part of their mission, not just an add-on.

Language newsletter

My curated recommended articles on linguistics, natural language processing and interactive fiction.

Newsletter coming soon, for now enjoy the posts below, updated regularly .

Full Page Reload

from IEEE

Why GPT-3 is the best and worst of AI right now

from MIT Technology Review

GPT-3 has captured the public’s imagination unlike any AI since DeepMind’s AlphaGo or IBM’s chess-playing DeepBlue.

from

Michael Moorcock's Three Day Novel

from

In his early days of writing, famed fantasy and Appendix N writer Michael Moorcock was a disciple of Lester Dent's Master Plot.

How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker

from The Guardian

The Guardian’s style guide was originally published in 1928 as a physical book, and is available to everyone on our website. Over time, it’s grown bigger and more complex, containing guidelines on important topics that we want to get right.

Building an Intelligent Voice Assistant from scratch

from Towards Data Science

In my article Home Automation with Alexa, we learned how to emulate IoT devices and control them remotely using a Voice Assistant device. There, we used an Echo-Dot that “wake-up” every time that the word Alexa is spotted. But, how a voice assistant works?