Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 12hYesterday, out of the three (non-Ikea) beds I tried to assemble, I have one complete. The problem comes down to tolerances: the nuts for these rail bolts are recessed a little too far, so there's not enough space between the bolt head and the side of the access hole for the clip to fit. 100
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 28/07/2026Hey look, somehow someone made three whole films out of The Hobbit. I bet we could get one film out of La Belle Dame sans Merci. The closest full length treatment was a 1921 film of the same name written by Irène Hillel-Erlanger and directed by Germaine Dulac. 020
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 28/07/2026Every time I visit a new site these days and see the overly bubbly rounded corners, I know exactly where the design came from (hint: AI). It's worse than ugly, it's boring. Even Bluesky isn't this bad. 100
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 28/07/2026Caveats before I continue: I can't avoid the US-centric aspects, but having read news from elsewhere, I can see the same sorts of discussions cropping up. I am sympathetic to the "local businesses" argument if for no other reason than it's depressing to visit "home" and see dead main streets. 100
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 27/07/2026Some years ago, I tried my hand at adapting @bradkerr.net 's adventure Demon Driven to the Maw to play as a Vaesen mystery, and I spent *way* too much time with late 1800s railroad timetables just so I could properly estimate travel from London to Aberdeen. Also history and folklore... 141
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 27/07/2026The photography research includes having dug through digitized books looking for suitably time-consistent images of, among other things, Petzval lenses, which I then edited to make look like cyanotypes. This is one example. 110
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 26/07/2026Well, here we go again. The daytime temperatures will be bad enough, but those nighttime temperatures will be brutal. Will do my best with just fans. 000
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 16/07/2026I'm convinced there are the bones of a publishable article in this, if I knew a venue. I think I would like to expand on both the labor economics and the consent landscapes around open movements. dhintro2025.commons.gc.cuny.edu/reflections-... 010
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 15/07/2026Just this week I discovered there's (finally) an in-development Dolmenwood system module for Foundry VTT. Several times in the past couple of years I picked up the idea of making one myself, but even though I *do* program, I hadn't learned enough about Foundry development to make a go of it. 110
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 01/07/2026New annoyance unlocked. Audio exposure limit warnings are apparently required here (no way to turn them off), and iOS happily warns me twice a day that I've exceeded my 7 day exposure limit. But the readings are wrong. I have my over-ear headphone wired in AUX->USB-C, and the volume at 20-25% max. 100
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 25/05/2026Here come the mushrooms! Spotted this array walking through my neighborhood. 010
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 16/05/2026A 10 year old guitar? Probably worth less than what you paid for it. A 40 year old guitar? Might go the other way around! I'm (sadly) selling my Ovation Celebrity, the first guitar I bought with my own money. I spent $125 on it at a pawn shop in Borger, TX, 30 years ago this month. 100
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 15/05/2026A rare glimpse of the definitely not saintly dog behind this account. Last night I presented the project my partner and I have been working on for the last 4 months at @thegraduatecenter.bsky.social. I'm really proud of what we've made. 010
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 27/04/2026Another round of cleaning out my desk at work. In theory I can read this. I did write it, but Russian is hard to make and maintain progress learning. 000
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 20/04/2026What do you know? The output file still needed to be filtered, but I was able to find another 1,600ish emails to cull. I set the threshold at > 100, but I can also try filtering by domain. 000
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 20/04/2026The first target was the obvious mailing list and stale notifications clutter, while deferring some decisions about what to keep otherwise. By Saturday night I had whittled it down some. 100
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 20/04/2026Once in a while I get a truly wild idea that I can't let go of. Over the weekend, the latest wild idea was to do something about this deplorable situation. This is an account I've had open since 2008. Which is to say it's old enough to graduate high school if it were a person. 100
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 02/04/2026I made this the other day, thinking I was being cheeky. Reality has other ideas, I guess. 111
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 09/03/2026It was worth spending a few minutes to distill these. Going through this process helps clarify my thinking. This is a summary of the current magic rituals I think I want in my game, as well as some touchpoints for the kind of gross magic I'm considering. 020
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 09/03/2026Thought I'd be clever and search for Holzlöffel Wien in an attempt to find places that sell decent wooden spoons. This is the kind of thing that occupies my time while I'm waiting to put my move in motion. Anyway, enjoy some 14th-15th century wooden spoons from an archaeological site. Link in alt. 000
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 08/03/2026Hmm.. I could definitely make use of the Speak with Dead list for my (languishing back burner) game's Dead-spræc wyrdweg. An unpublished version is below. 110
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 08/02/2026Lol well that’s what I get for moving letters around and not paying attention to where they are. It was still going to net me only 12 points, and think that’s the best I could have done. 000
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 05/02/2026Huh, now this is interesting. I hadn't really considered how symbol manipulation like language expands the field of object manipulation. But it makes sense. From L.S. Vygotsky's book Mind in Society: 000
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 23/01/2026Ew, gross. Like, I know we're a Microsoft shop now, but come on. Still, something tells me this innovation fund and training will not increase our capacity to *pay* for AI services. Oh, and as I've said before, using these products directly undermines the UN's climate goals. 100
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 20/01/2026In case you think I'm kidding... Big Ed's Hamburgers in OKC has a family burger that's a bunch of meat and cheese on a 12" bun, sliced up pizza style. www.restaurantji.com/ok/oklahoma-... 110
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 06/01/2026The updated map. There are things I would do differently if I made another one, but that's something I'll save for another module. 021
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 22/12/2025In other news I'm gonna use some of the Christmas break to update Dead I Am the Rat, my Mausritter adventure, based on my playthrough in October. I'd love to make more art for it, but that probably exceeds my available time. If I did, though, I thought up this nice little Mouscopalian church. 030
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 22/12/2025Not a tree as a person, but similar vibes. Original: bsky.app/profile/aaro... 020
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 16/12/2025I am disappointed to see that someone has unsealed the forbidden puzzle. They have forgotten the last time we unsealed it. 020
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 13/12/2025David Arora offers this explanation. It's an idiomatic redundancy to indicate lots of little people where a simple plural doesn't do the job. That's fascinating to me. I can't think right off of a similar construction in English that has this effect. PDF here: i.warosu.org/data/sci/img... 4312
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 29/11/2025In very corporate TTRPG news, I found out Burger King commissioned a game in Italy called Burger King's Quest, based on the fantasy setting it created in the 70s as a response to McD's Playland. Compare with the Wendy's game Feast of Legends. burgerking.fandom.com/wiki/Burger_... 000
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 26/11/2025Alright, here's my contribution to weird occult deer art. I had intended to develop this into a linocut, but as usual, I got distracted. 010
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 26/11/2025Okay, just for fun, here's an overpowered Mausritter weapon. Hopefully it has enough ridiculous drawbacks. 010
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 08/11/2025And this is literal theft. All of these works are in the public domain. 100
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 08/11/2025This bullshit keeps popping up in history just about everywhere you look. > Walter Scott never complied with Seward’s wish to see it published. 110
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 03/11/2025— Michael Holquist, writing in the prologue (1984) to Bakhtin’s work, Rabelais and His World. Apropos of absolutely nothing. 000
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 30/10/2025You know what? I missed this shit. We really took for granted physical copies of The Onion back in the day. @theonion.com thanks to you I can look forward to my mail. 000
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 12/10/2025Enclosure of the commons is the main fear, especially if legal fictions can (re)define what the commons are in the first place, or make choices about who can place things into or remove them from the commons. There's productive scholarship in this around Indigenous archives, for instance. 020
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 10/10/2025"Now that everyone has their Consciousness Transference Device in place, we're all going to drink this artificially flavored vaguely fruity beverage and take a nap. When we wake up, we'll all be uploaded to the Cloud." 010
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 05/10/2025Morning activity: scanning through this book by @bvlsingler.bsky.social which I found while looking for scholarly sources tracing the origin of the "count the fingers count the knuckles" means of determining if something is fey. I'd love to know if there are earlier instances of this! 122
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 04/10/2025As I'm reading and annotating for my MA in Digital Humanities classes, I'm really appreciating Obsidian's features. Here I have a Base, where I can see how many authors I'm missing from the stuff I'm annotating. The Web Clipper gets some info, but of course not always accurately. 100
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 28/09/2025Obsidian + Obsidian Web Clipper + the Note Annotations plugin = 😚👌 020
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 22/09/2025This is my first deck, The William Blake Tarot of the Creative Imagination. I love this deck, but so far I haven't been able to make it work for what I want to do. That doesn't mean I have abandoned either the deck or the tarot mechanics I am examining. 110
Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 22/09/2025Just bought my second deck, the classic on easy mode so I don't have to flip through a book. Bought it to go with HMtW and also to do a class presentation about a playable object. My first deck was a gift from @hewhocutsdown.bsky.social (one tradition holds that your first deck should be a gift) 220