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I’ve done National Novel Writing Month for the past few years, which results in a lot of writing but not much that’s usable. I’m totally fine with that, since writing is a muscle that you have to build up over time, and this coming November I plan to take the challenge again. In the hopes ...

There are a lot of things that I really like about 5th edition, and one of those things is advantage and disadvantage. In D&D, the primary conflict resolution mechanic is the rolling of a twenty-sided die. Roll the d20, and see if you hit some target number. Modifiers to that roll (and to the target ...

So the new edition of D&D came out today, or at least the Basic Rules, which is more than enough to begin actually playing. When you get hit for enough damage to knock you down to 0 hp, you need to make death saving throws. If you roll a 20, you are back to 1hp If you ...

That this subject needs a part two is surely proof something – either self-doubt or my inability to stay engaged with something for very long. Here are the other things sitting in my various Google Docs folders: The Time Detectives I love time travel. It’s one of my favorite fictional concepts. The elevator pitch is that in ...

I like to write, but I have a problem with starting new projects and not finishing them. It’s not that I lose interest, it’s more that I write and write until my head gets all turned around and I have no idea whether what I’ve just written is any good. Sometimes I’ll know just how ...

I am still working on the remaining analysis of Duluth municipal elections – hold your horses! – but I thought that as a breather I would talk about something that comes up a lot when people are talking about switching over to instant-runoff voting. Normally I would use the term ranked-choice voting, which it the ...

Last time I looked at single-winner elections, this time I will be looking at the multi-seat elections. Note that what’s actually being proposed is more properly called “single transferable vote”, but I’ll be calling it ranked-choice voting in order to maintain consistency. The multi-winner version does rely on ranking choices, so it’s not a total ...

There is a fairly good chance that the City Council of Duluth will be putting ranked-choice voting (AKA instant-runoff voting) up for referendum sometime in the next five years. I sat in at one of the City Council meetings last week and listened to a task force Mayor Ness had formed talk about whether ...

The vast majority of Supreme Court decisions are actually about pretty boring stuff. There’s case set to be heard in a couple of days, Taniguchi v. Kan Pacific which will determine whether the payment for translation services extends to the payments for translating text documents. The case is over a matter of slightly more than ...

So I recently started reading Supreme Court opinions. This initially started when I was busy proving someone wrong on the internet, but I was quite surprised to find that they’re (mostly) very human-readable. I suppose I just assumed that SCOTUS opinions were going to be arcane and incomprehensible, and so I had never read one. ...