Isolated BS: social engineering, spotted dick, and proper beaver representation

Hacking

The reality of most hacking: social engineering. Hackers vs Sneakers. The 90s as the best period for hacking in fiction, back when people understood even less how computers worked. A review of Hacking in media.

Free Software

Free as in speech, free as in beer, etc. Freedom-respecting social network alternatives and the dream of critical mass. Mastodon. How the USGS uses Twitter data to track earthquakes. The impossibility of competing with YouTube. Appreciating Free software and open source and collaboration.

Unicode things hooray

Ranting about a user experience failure with Instacart. Text encoding, Unicode, emoji, and non-Latin writing systems. Emoji standardization. Lesbian emoji activism and the new beaver emoji!

Tattoos

Stephen Wolfram and Arrival Heptapod logogram creation. Ravens. Figuring out how to spell “Bomberman” in Heptatpod.

RPGs

Dungeons and Dragons is fun! The positives and negatives of play-by-post. A review of our (Chris’) failure with Decipher RPG. A desire to try again! Liam Ginty.

Monster Care Squad: A Ghibli-inspired tabletop adventure of healing Monsters and solving local problems in the gentle world of Ald-Amura

Percent!

“Percent” is literally just latin for “per hundred” and Christopher was this many years old when he realized this! And then we learn about per mille and per myriad and have to promise not to start using them.

Spotted dick

A rewarding pun-tastic etymological romp. Also it was really tasty!

Attribution

“Six dice of various colours” used in episode image - by Diacritica CC-BY-SA-3.0

Decipher RPG Mirror illustration commissioned for Decipher Media by Amber Lee Jones

Monster Care Squad: A Ghibli-inspired tabletop adventure of healing Monsters and solving local problems in the gentle world of Ald-Amura: Kickstarter

Hackers: social engineering, Kevin Mitnick, and hacking before the internet w/ Brian Epstein: Decipher SciFi

Splatmoji - Quickly look up and input emoji and/or emoticons/kaomoji on your GNU/Linux desktop via pop-up menu.: GitHub.com

Decipher RPG - Mirror Pilot #1: Decipher SciFi

Decipher RPG - Mirror Pilot #2: Decipher SciFi

Decipher RPG - Mirror Pilot #3 (the finale!): Decipher SciFi

The hilarious, extremely convincing proposal to make a beaver emoji.: Slate

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