Game designer, forever DM, RPGphile, lover of musicals, painter of minis. Senior Creative Director on the Iron Man project at @MotiveStudio. Opinions my own.
This has quietly been a miracle month in medicine.
In the last 5 weeks we’ve got news on:
- retatrutide, the triple agonist GLP-1 from Lilly, basically melting fat and body-wide inflammation at record levels
- RevMed’s new pancreatic cancer drug showing unprecedented abilities to extend life
- small trial of a one-and-done PCSK9 gene editing therapy for slashing LDL cholesterol
- Mayo’s AI-assisted radiology showing vastly improved cancer detection
- this new therapy for metastatic solid tumors
This stuff is at varying levels of evidence. Retatrutide is ~100% on its way, other stuff needs more clinical trial data. But put it together and we’re maybe on the verge of majorly reducing the mortality of heart disease and cancer, the two leading causes of death in America.
I’m loving 007 First Light so far. I could never really get into the Hitman games, but I appreciate their design DNA here, and it absolutely nails the Bond fantasy.
Within one 24 hour period, Trump:
- got out of a $100 million IRS fine
- secured "immunity" from all future tax investigations for his family and friends
- created a $1.8 billion slush fund for lawbreaking supporters
- was reported for likely insider trading worth nearly $1 billion
All of the obvious things to say about this are true. It's bad. Nobody even tries to defend it. The closest thing to a defense you get is something about how "but Democrats suck" and "woke was also bad," which is not a defense, but rather a kind of moral blank check made out to the administration to give them the right to do anything.
But what I'm most curious about is whether this sort of lurid corruption creates a countermovement that successfully returns government to rule of law or whether it's establishing a norm of executive imperialism that every future administration will use to achieve its ends, which can always be justified by the moral blank check of "the other side is worse, so let us do whatever we want."
Continuing to slowly expand my collection of ye olde D&D editions.
Can I stop now or do I need the rest of BECMI? My heart says keep going but my wallet and shelf space say stop.
Tweet: "fuck this brownie is so good rn"
Ten immediate replies: "Well said. Brownies combine eggs, granulated sugar, and cocoa powder in a way that quietly elevates the culture. They're not just a snack, they're a vibe."
Finally got my physical cartridges for two *modern* C64 games, Griffinsoft’s Musketeer and Sherwood, and now playing them on my C64 Ultimate. Such a cool retro experience. :)
The Montreal Expos are exiting the baseball space. During Q2 and Q3 2026, we will transition to acquiring high-performance GPU assets. This is all part of our long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider.
What the Artemis II astronauts did over the last 10 days was a testament to their bravery. And the fact that they traveled farther from Earth than anyone ever has, re-entered our atmosphere at more than 24,000 mph, and splashed down safely was a testament to human ingenuity. Thanks to everyone at @NASA for making this mission possible, and for taking us along for the ride.
I hugely respect Wikipedia for spending the past two decades trying to prove my high school teachers who decried it as unreliable wrong. These days, I actually point students doing research towards Wikipedia as a valuable starting point, specifically for the endnotes.
The Hotlzman Shield in Dune is one of the perfect examples of adding a tiny thing to a setting to get a vibe you want out of it.
In Dune's case:
- Holtzman Shields stop fast moving objects.
- Lasguns (particle beam guns in Dune) can cause a nuclear explosion if they hit a shield, so they're not commonly used.
- Melee is the dominant form of combat, trying to strike slow to penetrate the shields.
- Projectile weapons exist but they're designed around boring through or disrupting shields, but a skilled combatant can deflect the slow moving projectiles.
- Heavy artillery can still kill shielded humans through sheer transfer of force or heat, which the shield can't block.
- Anti-vehicle weapons are built around these principles because the vehicle might be shielded.
Dune codified the idea of high tech sci-fi where you still have melee and the idea of "oh here's this piece of technobabble that let's me have what I want in my sci-fi setting." Gundam's Minovsky Particle and Mass Effect's Element Zero owe the Holtzman Shield their existence.