Archive for category Advice

Random Anime Suggestions

A friend was asking me for anime recommendations, lamenting having not seen anything good recently. At the moment I was not sure what to suggest, only saying I would put together a list. And since I have done so, I figure why not share it?

These are arranged in no particular order, nor are all of the new; it is simply based on things I have been watching lately.

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D&D: Observers

Multiple times I have been in a situation where people are interested in Dungeons and Dragons but unsure of whether they want to actually play. So instead they just want to watch a session. This is the situation I dealt with during last night’s weekly game, so I wanted to write down my thoughts about handling this from a DM’s perspective.

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Using ‘itemgetter’ for Sorting in Python

Here is a useful technique for sorting in Python I recently came across. And a reminder about something stupid you should not be doing, which I did.

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Practicing Foreign Languages

I like to spend some of my time online helping people learn the Japanese language. People are typically surprised that I can speak Japanese because of the overwhelmingly foreign aura that surrounds it. This is especially true of English-speakers; we can hear a language like French or Spanish and sense familarity, even hear some words we may recognize. In comparison, learning Japanese is like learning to speak with aliens from another star system. “Hey isn’t that the writing system that the Predator had on that bomb on his arm?”

Today I want to give you some brief advice about learning any language, not just Japanese. And in fact not even in my own words.

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D&D: Secrets

I don’t know why, but I am always really tired on Wednesdays and tend to sleep in longer than usual. Tuesday is the night I play Dungeons and Dragons, and for whatever reason that is exhausting, even though I spend almost the entire time sitting and possibly speak the least of anyone around the table. I guess it is just mentally taxing.

So the player characters in my group kind of shot themselves in the foot. The brother of one character got cheated at gambling and is in debt. The characters went to out-gamble/cheat that debt away and ended up owing a bunch of money themselves. All of this gambling revolved around a simple die-based game (big surprise) that is geared towards being fast.

At the very end I did something for the first time I have done with those players: made a roll in plain sight of everyone. Today I want to talk about this subject and keeping secrets from players in general.

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