Things that have interested me lately

[undyingking]

And maybe they will you, too? Let's see:

• Victorian Blood Book - extraordinary decoupage project, made in 1854. You really have to view the slideshow to get the full majesty and oddity of it all. Not many people's idea of a wedding present for one's daughter.
• Your Paintings - this BBC site has gathered together all 200-and-odd thousand oil paintings

Comments

[rotwang]

You'll be unsurprised, I'm sure, to know that I have been enjoying the histories too and stocking up on some of the modules :)

[undyingking]

*feigns surprise, badly*

[bateleur]

Republished (A)D&D modules

Apparently quite popular, since I've yet to manage to persuade the site to load!

Not much to say to a modern role-playing sensibility

Indeed not... but that said, I essentially never buy modern roleplaying products, since they're no use to me. They're all about stories, which is great.... but making up stories is the bit I want to be doing myself when I'm GMing. By contrast, the old D&D modules actually did all the work I don't want to do, so although the stories were less interesting (in fact let's face it, a lot of modules were just skirmish wargames) I did sometimes buy them.

Similarly with the old D&D rulebooks. I don't want my RPG rulebooks to be full of pages of background. What I need is weapon lists and spell lists and rules systems, because those are the parts that are hard to do for yourself.

[undyingking]

Hmm, it's loaded quickly each time for me. You might have been unlucky to hit a maintenace outage or sthg?

Mm, I went through about a 20-year period of not buying role-playing stuff, for that reason: why would you want to buy someone else's shelvefuls of story, when you could write it yourself?
But in the last few years I've started getting stuff again: 'indie' prepless games that are essentially toolkits for constructing one's own story on the fly during the course of the session. This has been quite useful for the limited way that I actually manage to squeeze role-playing into my life these days.

[lnr]

Cute idea with the Austen word list. Though I'm not sure *technical* authenticity is necessarily better than going for what feels right. The word list is pretty fascinating though.

[undyingking]

it is! -- and her notes about words that have changed meaning significantly are v interesting too.
I'm intrigued by the way so many people (today, and presumably also in the past) complain so bitterly about words changing meaning and/or usage, as though it poses some sort of existential threat.

[triskellian]

Oh, boo. I got briefly excited about the MOOC completion rates link, but it only covers "xMOOCs" (the big semi-standardised cross-university platforms), which are quite a different beast from the original "cMOOCs" (c for "connectivist"). Not surprising, cos it's much easier to measure things on the xMOOCs, and interesting anyway, so thanks!

(I was part of the team which ran one of the first UK MOOCs, and one of the things I'm currently supposed to be doing is writing an article about it...)

[undyingking]

Ooh, great, I shall ask you lots about this next time we see each other :-)