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Daily Illuminator Archive for October 2025
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October 1, 2025:
Like many geeks and gamers, our household has always loved Halloween. Candy, get-togethers, candy, spooky stuff, candy . . . what's not to like? . . .
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October 2, 2025:
For nearly 40 years, architectural critic John Margolies photographed attractions and buildings along the roads of the United States. The Public Domain Review has a neat article about how his pictorial archive was donated to the Library of Congress, which put the material in the public domain (although individual artwork may still be copyrighted) . . .
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October 3, 2025:
Gamehole Con is coming up very soon: October 16-19 in Madison, Wisconsin. As usual, SJ Games will be there to run games and enjoy your company . . .
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October 4, 2025:
Whatever you may expect to read on a Wikipedia entry for a random fish – say, a black neon tetra – you quite probably aren't prepared for a subheading entitled "Credit Card Fraud."
The whole entry is worth reading (it's short!), but the summary is that a YouTube channel rigged motion-tracking software to let fish play video games by mapping their motion to inputs. The fish managed to crash a game of Pokémon Violet they were playing and open the Nintendo eShop, committing some financial hijinks in the process . . .
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October 5, 2025:
I discovered something fun recently: Kiwix, an offline reader for various appropriately licensed content you typically find online, such as Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Project Gutenberg, TED Talks, and more. It's all completely free (although they take donations) and seems to be limited primarily by the storage space of your device . . .
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October 6, 2025:
You can now buy the latest Car Wars book from Three Ravens, Convoy of Chaos, from Amazon. Intro by Wil Wheaton . . .
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October 7, 2025:
Thought experiment, and possibly a hook for folks playing a super-heroic game: A supervillain has gained the ability to immediately access all information said directly to pets. Not near them . . . to them: "Don't let me forget that the money's hidden in the coffee can in the cupboard, Mr . . .
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October 8, 2025:
I can't do better than the headline from Dexterto: "Florida woman wins Mortal Kombat tournament playing with newborn baby in arms." But the article is worth a read, especially for the adorable picture. Our household doesn't have quite the same story; we were eight months' pregnant when our kiddo attended Gen Con . . .
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October 9, 2025:
I've been a gamer for a long time. When I was growing up, the beverage of choice to indicate a hyperkinetic over-caffeinated state of being was any variety of mountainous sodas . . .
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October 10, 2025:
Here's a broad idea for a cinematic "impossible stuff happens"-type roleplaying campaign, based on a balancing trick some GMs use: When devising threats and adversaries (especially for a game with lots of options and power variability such as GURPS), a GM might run those threats in a quick mock-combat with copies of the heroes' current character sheets. During the actual scenario, if the heroes perform a fair bit differently than that sample encounter (especially if the duplicates did better), simply have some mastermind comment on it.
"Hmm . . .
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October 11, 2025:
Remember in happier times last year when the sun disappeared in defiance of all primal reason? Our household had snacks . . .
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October 12, 2025:
I notice sometimes game designers define a mechanic as "fragile" – and I often catch myself doing this as well. I sat down for a little bit today and thought through what exactly that means . . .
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October 13, 2025:
As readers of my daily movie-essay Patreon may have seen recently, I'm part of another book of movie analysis currently in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign: Subversive Sci-Fi Evolution. More importantly, I'll be alongside a bunch of other cool folks, who are offering their own reflections on films they find interesting . . .
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October 14, 2025:
I will be going to Gamehole Con in Madison, accompanied by Irene, this weekend. This is one of my favorite shows! . . .
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October 15, 2025:
Not to be a decade late to the acolade party, but the TV series Taskmaster is pretty amazing. For those of you who are unaware, the core premise of this British game show is that a Taskmaster (comedian Greg Davies) – usually in conjunction with show creator and Taskmaster "assistant" Alex Horne – assigns participants some sort of seemingly illogical or impossible challenge to perform . . .
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October 16, 2025:
We were at Costco this past weekend, and we realized that some Advent calendars were already on the shelves. Then I recently heard someone else noting that the cool Advent calendars were probably going to start showing up soon and then rapidly disappearing from Aldi's . . .
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October 17, 2025:
It's the most frightful time of the year! Halloween is coming in two short weeks, and we're having a super sale on dozens of haunted games and accessories on our online store . . .
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October 18, 2025:
Our mega-secret master database which I'm not supposed to talk about lists everything the company has ever done. I'm a data geek at heart – I mean, I'm many kinds of geek, of which "data" is one – so I decided on a whim to poke around and see what I could find . . .
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October 19, 2025:
We are thrilled to announce Munchkin Second Edition, coming soon to BackerKit!
Munchkin, the mega-hit card game of backstabbing your way to 10th Level, debuted nearly 25 years ago and took the gaming world by storm. Now, after all these years of kicking down doors and stealing treasures, we're bringing you the revised edition that Steve once said we would only create when pigs fly!
So what's new in Munchkin Second Edition? . . .
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October 20, 2025:
If you're looking for a different near-steampunk aesthetic, consider a computer keyboard that uses rotary-dial telephone technology. Treading similar ground to The Onion's revelation of the MacBook Wheel 16 years ago, Google Japan has created the Gboard, Dial Version . . .
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October 21, 2025:
Pledging is now open on Kickstarter for Choose Cthulhu Books 11-14!
Choose Cthulhu is a series of non-consecutive, solo adventure gamebooks set in the otherworldly realms of H.P. Lovecraft . . .
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October 22, 2025:
Gamehole Con in Madison was as much fun as it always is. I got to run two games of Melee and play in a third one! . . .
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October 23, 2025:
Here's something you gamers can use for a variety of purposes . . . just don't do anything nefarious! Let's say you have a social gathering coming up that you can be reasonably assured about the possible outcome – for example, you're setting up a few Munchkin games for Halloween . . .
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October 24, 2025:
Find out by joining the online match!
Tim Tow will host the Ogre Internet 2025-2026 Tournament.
The game will be played over several rounds using the Swiss-Elim format. Scenarios will use Mark III attacking for the preliminary round, followed by Mark V for round two . . .
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October 25, 2025:
For those of you who have not heard the word, Kickstarter United-OPEIU's 153 workers went on strike on September 26, 2025. Why? . . .
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October 26, 2025:
Are you nostalgic for the DVD era? Do you like LEGO? . . .
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October 27, 2025:
At LibertyCon this summer, I recorded a mini-interview with Roger Carden of Applied Game Mastery. Seriously mini . . . you do not have to budget a lot of your time to watch this! . . .
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October 28, 2025:
For those who love older tech, the BBC has an interesting article about the race against time to recover data off old, deteriorating floppy disks . . .
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October 29, 2025:
I've got a double feature for you today with two topics that are cool things happening in science. The first is an experiment that happened in space . . .
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October 30, 2025:
They make specialty jelly beans in lots of different flavors, right? At least as many as are on the sides of any die that's d20-sized or smaller? . . .
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October 31, 2025:
Here's a link to a Guardian article with some really disturbing preliminary work about the mental effects of using generative AI.
tl;dr It sure looks like ChatGPT makes you stupid . . .
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