iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Beautiful product though, and will play again despite any caveats from a first run.

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Also, in play, not clear if there is a maximum number of tags that you can invoke. If not, it may suffer from QW “augment hunting” problem that made us switch to “one only and narratively interesting”.

Slightly wary that Mist may make early QW mistake of assuming a scene must be concluded with a Detailed contest over leaning more heavily into Quick to keep the narrative moving unless played are invested in detailed. Balancing encounters will require a little more experience from me.

Legends in the Mist has some parallels to QuestWorlds I could use to grok it. Themes and tags are similar to Keywords and Breakouts. Simple, Quick and Detailed contests are akin to Assured, Contest and Sequence.

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Graham Spearing 🔜 Furnace Convention @firstage.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Great Owlbear and Wizard’s Staff at the weekend. Thanks to all the organisers. I ran Stonetop and Legends in the Mist, both PbTA “local heroes” bit quite different (play to find out vs metaplot). Thanks to everyone who “played to learn” with me as it’s the first time I have run either.

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Many thanks to @asako-soh.bsky.social for putting on the much beloved annual Owlbear and Wizard's Staff #ttrpg event! Played in @icooper.bsky.social Legend in the Mist and @burnafterrunning.bsky.social TOR2e. Great games. I ran a fun session of Zweihander Reforged. Looking forward to next year.

A group playing Zweihander at Owlbear and the Wizard's Staff event in Leamington Spa.

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jess @jessfrom.online · 22/08/2026

optimist: the cup is half full pessimist: the cup is half empty ttrpg editor: here you refer to the cup as half full, but in the next chapter, you refer to it as half empty. for clarity, we should standardize on one of them in the rules text, even if players might use both descriptions at the tabl

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DriveThruRPG @drivethrurpg.com · 21/08/2026

The Dying Earth RPG Quickstart Rules are available now from @pelgranepress.bsky.social Get it FREE here: tinyurl.com/ytbzjtea #TTRPG based on the fantasy fiction of Grand Master Nebula Prize-winning writer Jack Vance.

The Dying Earth RPG Quickstart Rules are available now at DriveThruRPG.com

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Rachel Grant/R.S. Grant @rachelgrant.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Ancient Aliens & other pseudoarchaeology TV shows/podcasts are not harmless entertainment. The purpose is to separate Indigenous people from their cultural history to support white supremacy. We need our own art & entertainment to combat disinformation pseudoscience, which is why I wrote FALSE FLAG.

An archaeologist risks everything to stop a disinformation podcaster from using his influence to incite violence
On NetGalley for a limited time.

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Ian Cooper @icooper.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

I do like the FT and used to have a subscription through Revolut. The kids grew into their own accounts and I downgraded my Revolut account and lost it. But your are right, it’s worth considering.

Ian Cooper @icooper.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

I’ve long been a subscriber to the @theguardian.com but its descent from decent journalism into sensationalism of late has me reconsidering that. I have a subscription to the excellent @bylinetimes.bsky.social and if the Guardian doesn’t mend its ways it’s time to say goodbye.

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It’s always been a problem that you can be perceived as a cost not a value add

Hands-on examples will help you cement your knowledge throughout the workshop. This course runs less frequently now, so don't miss your chance to catch it in Oslo.

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Day 1 focuses on how we connect applications via messaging, covering everything from streams vs. queues to message pumps, outbox and inbox, and API management. Day 2 takes that skill set and asks: how do we succeed at building a system that uses events to interoperate (instead of HTTP or gRPC)?

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Practical Messaging | NDC Oslo 2026

As developers shift left from coding to architecture, understanding how apps interoperate has never been more important. At NDC Oslo, I will be running my Practical Messaging Workshop, where you will learn the skills needed to design event-driven architectures at scale. ndcoslo.com/workshops/pr...

ndcoslo.com

In this tutorial, we will look at distributed systems, and how we integrate them. We will understand why we would prefer to integrate via messaging, the fundamentals and key concepts of messaging and…

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Ian Cooper @icooper.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

WTF? We would rather desecrate a Bronze Age burial site than a movie filming location. I have no words for how dumb we have become…

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Ian Cooper @icooper.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

I hear that they want to do a sequel based on this Trojan dude called Aeneas. They say it’s also an odyssey, but with a bigger budget, so this time we go to the underworld and have a much bigger battle with a cart of thousands at the end.

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Ian Cooper @icooper.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

A particular favourite is actually capturing the look of the heroes of Eternia laughing. Glorious.

static.klipy.com

He-Man Feeling Fabulous

Alt: He-Man Feeling Fabulous

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Ian Cooper @icooper.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Going to call it. The makers of “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” understood the assignment. Glorious cheese.

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Ian Cooper @icooper.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

I feel that if you put your bag on the seat next to you on a train working the morning commute - it says an enormous amount about you as a person, with no other signal. Entitled, selfish, “I’ve got mine Jack.” Just that, all we need to know about you, whatever you tell yourself

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David Whitney @davidwhitney.co.uk · 28/07/2026

It's no secret that I think JSX is the dominent form of web app markup today. But I've always wanted the framework and language smarts of C# when I've been doing web things - I'm putting together a new library called JsxCore, a JSX + TypeScript View Engine for ASP.NET Core.

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Ian Cooper @icooper.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Given how much cinema thrives on margins, you would think the intermission made sense.

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Ian Cooper @icooper.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Of course Agon by John Harper is the other obvious answer, a game about heroes travelling from island to island, trying to get home. As a Glorantha fan I always have to say, Glorantha does mythic Bronze Age too.

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By contrast, I loved Travis Scott as Phemius the bard. I'm a sucker for oral storytelling, and it was a great demonstration of how great storytellers hold a space. When he struck the table with his stick, it reminded me of watching a performance at the Crick-Crack Club.

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But I'm not sure how the imagery of Agamemnon, armored in black at the gates of Troy, was supposed to echo or inform the themes Nolan drew on elsewhere.

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It's churlish, perhaps, to point out bum notes. I'm still unsure what Nolan was trying to say with his Agamemnon as Batman schtick. Agamemnon's story is an important part of the myth, and the part about homecoming echoes Odysseus's own story.

Even at three hours, it is a large epic to compress into a single movie, but by keeping to his theme (the rights of host and obligations of guest, and the coming dark age being because people have abused it) he manages to weave an episodic story into a whole.

Matt Damon has the gravity these days to pull off the old, wily, hero, but the strongest performances for me are Robert Pattinson's Antinous, Anne Hathaway's Penelope, and John Leguizamo as Eumaeus) Though, as a book reader, I always thought Homecoming was the strongest part, so that may show.

I went to see The Odyssey with my wife last night. Overall, a very good movie. The xenia theme is a strong one, and it hits the key beats of the story well for three hours (cyclops, circe, calypso, scylla and charibdis, communing with the dead, and homecoming)

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So, I’d tend to “lean on the broker” for partitions and ordering over trying to rebuild that in the framework.

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Of late, we have become a little more supportive of queue features on streams and vice versa. Because some people are constrained. But the good news is that more brokers now support both queues and streams (or cloud providers have both) so it’s far more accessible.

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My attitude here a little bit is “lean on the broker”. In a sense that is Brighter’s origin story. NServiceBus and Mass Transit were brokers for MSMQ, whereas we wrapped RabbitMQ.

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I can ask my wife if you just need a recommendation. She used to be a solicitor and worked for Law4All once, so she dealt with housing issues a lot. She no longer practices but I can tell you who she recommends right now if that helps

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But Brighter has had strong support for stream processing since its inception due to its architecture of using a single threaded pumps guarantee that you scale out.

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I mean you can do this, but in essence Wolverine is building FIFO on top of a queue that doesn’t support it, and maybe the problem is that you picked that middleware in the first place?

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If you must do it in a queue, the simplest approach is to ensure that you don’t send deltas on a queue, but instead version stamp and apply “only if later.” I get that some folks use a queue of stream for everything, over thinking the problems through, but some of this is compensating a poor choice

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Ian Cooper @icooper.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

We don’t do it explicitly, but then we would say - use a stream, not a queue for that. Brighter’s single threaded pumps guarantee ordering, and naturally align to stream’s partition and group id strategy. You simply scale performers up to the number of partitions. We will keep the stream order.

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Very limited numbers outside of the big shops on major lines. AFAIK most other folks are freelancers or solo.

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Ian Cooper @icooper.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

The wind here is making it 5 degrees cooler, and much less humid, so the heat is pleasant today and you can sleep at night. But oh how it howls, the moaning of angry lost souls.

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Ian Cooper @icooper.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

If I could influence them to support you, I would

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Ian Cooper @icooper.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

Without folks like you, running the game, persuading folks to give it a try, and falling in love with it, we have nothing. Appreciate you. @chaosium.bsky.social

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mogsymakes @mogsymakes.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

Excellent day out at the Joy of Six show in Sheffield today running our Midgard Heroic Battles Glorantha game. The Battle of Grizzly Peak was hard-fought with the Lunars emerging victorious by a whisker in Turn 5. #miniatures #wargaming #spreadthelard #nerdlings #midgardheroicbattles

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House of the Dragon’s S3 opening was “who cares, who are these people, whatever” and it didn’t need to be. S2 wasted so much time in filler that it could easily have structured this as the finale.

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Sorry but show runners are getting this wrong and I don’t care about their shows any more when they do this.

Imagine if Knight of the Seven Kingdoms had ended before the Trial By Seven! And then we had to wait two years for it. That would have robbed the story of all momentum. But it didn’t. It gave us the Trial of Seven and then gave us the fallout and set up future seasons.

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I could, but I don’t necessarily have the time. And it’s a story telling failure IMO. Don’t build up all that momentum and then stall. Give me the payoff. It’s not a cliffhanger encouraging me to watch next time if it’s two years not a week. I just don’t care any more. GoT got this right.

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The E9 denouement left me wanting more. Modern cliffhangers with a two year wait time are just, meh!

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