Adam Vartanian

My first five RPGs: - AD&D - Abantey - Vampire: The Masquerade - Palladium - GURPS (Probably, we played a little bit of a lot of stuff around the same period of time.)

I do think this is important. The military is not supposed to be able to refuse what the President wants. That would be *very bad*. The problem here is that the US elected an idiot to the Presidency, the military going along with his stupid decisions is the correct outcome of that.

I have truly passed into middle age; I haven’t heard of a single one of these. But then, I don’t really watch video on the Internet, so I suppose that’s to be expected.

I actually looked at the American Community Survey data on this, uh, 15 years ago, looking at income in a person’s 40s, broken out by degree. Every college degree increased earnings on average, and most of them increased earnings by a significant amount. flooey.org/iscollegewor...

Happy Fourth of July, New York City

I was trying to think, and I suppose it has to be Rickey Henderson, who I saw play a number of times for the A’s. I wasn’t at the game where he broke the stolen base record, but I had a newspaper article about it on my wall for years.

I took a class with a group of Scottish improvisational bakers. We did a lot of "tart, and…"

One was an upholsterer and the other was a civil engineer.

We recently got a pair of kittens, and I had forgotten just how much housework I could get done while procrastinating on cleaning the cat box.

I feel like one of my unusual qualities is I don’t remember stuff like this. Have I ever written a production-destroying bug? Almost certainly! Do I have any memory of doing so? Nope! I remember a couple big production outages by others, but that’s because they make good stories at parties.

Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in college: 1) History of American Film 2) Shakespeare 3) Game Theory 4) War & Diplomacy in Europe, 1815-1914 5) Ethics and Professionalism in Engineering

You read things like this and you can only hope that when the time comes, if it comes, when it is your community's turn to be tested, that you acquit yourselves half as well.

This is kind of amusing, but it’s a perfect 20 for me.

As we enter into holiday performance season, it’s worth remembering the elements you need for success.

Five concerts I’ve seen: Weird Al Skinny Puppy Leonard Cohen Silversun Pickups Imogen Heap

Today I learned that Brian Blessed voices the Tarzan yell in Disney's Tarzan.

OAKLAND WE DID IT!!!! 🏆

I should probably blog the details, but it turns out that checking if a user is a member of a group on GCP is incredibly convoluted. You'd think there would just be an API for this, but GCP and Google Workspace do not play well together at all.

I love the implication that before Pac-Man, enemy movements in video games were entirely controlled by humans.

TIL the term "portmanteau" for a word mashup was coined by Lewis Carroll.

Sometimes you sort of forget you live in one of the world's great cities, and then you go out to a show that happens to be right next to Tower Bridge

I found Godzilla's favorite restaurant in London

@ahl.bsky.social I don’t know if you intentionally didn’t insert the chime on the one reference to a past episode where Bryan said to, but it was hilarious either way.

This probably isn't news to anyone, but Ursula K. Le Guin is a tremendous author. The idea that she published A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness in consecutive years is mind blowing.

I will never get over how much Southern’s stations sound like someone made up fake English towns for fun. We’re on the train to Dorking, including stops at Sutton, Cheam, Leatherhead, Hackbridge, and Boxhill & Westhumble.

The town of Colma, CA is mainly composed of cemeteries for nearby San Francisco. It has about 1500 residents and 1.5 million dead. Its motto: “It’s great to be alive in Colma”

We’re in the US visiting family and I’m horrified to discover that it now feels weird to have the light switches inside the bathroom.

Today I managed an incredible feat: I played a 3-player game of Monopoly to its ultimate conclusion within 90 minutes.

I was today years old when I put together that Tom Lehrer’s The Elements is to the tune of The Major-General’s Song from Pirates of Penzance.

When writing documentation, I think people underestimate the value of a giant red arrow pointing at something. I use them constantly, they’re great.

Age yourself with the first computer you used. (I don’t know that it was exactly one of these, Packard-Bell made a number of different models. Definitely had a 3.5” floppy drive, though.)

Yesterday I learned that Holy Names University in Oakland — where I did a number of summer camps — closed down last year. Today I learned that one of the members of the House of Lords went there. It's a small world.

My last two interviews I’ve signed off with “Talk to you later!”

Our local cafe was having a special dish today and so we preordered it earlier in the week. When we went to pick it up, we realized that we hadn't ever given them a name when we ordered. We looked at their list and saw that our order had been recorded under "The American Family".