Dungeons & Dragons played an outsize role in popularizing fantasy literature, ideas, and themes, as well as inspiring many of its devotees to create their own. Roleplaying, as a formal activity, owes nearly its entire existence to the phenomenal success of D&D. Even more remarkable is the extent to which the computer and video game industry, which is bigger and more profitable than the music and movie industries combined, owes a huge debt to the example set by D&D....

Another day, another unexpected problem. Launching a .NET 8 app from a docker container, I got this error: Failed to create CoreCLR, HRESULT: 0x80070008. I was puzzled as the same container ran smoothly in our test environment but not in production. I ruled out resource problems (memory or disk full, maybe?) but then compared the Docker Engine versions we run in test and production. Both were old (20. xx when 25 is available), but interestingly, the production version was older....

Today, something unexpected happened while I was working on one of our Linux machines. I issued the crontab -e command to add a cron job to my user’s crontab file, modified and saved it, only to the following error: crontab: installing new crontab crontab: crontabs/<user>: rename: Operation not permitted crontab: edits left in /tmp/crontab.hgmsOH/crontab Puzzled, I checked whether my user permissions were all right, if the disk was full, and several other things....

Powerful and cautionary story. I wondered for many years, how all of this could have happened. How people like my grandpa turned into monsters and people around him watched or turned into monsters with him. The last years made this very clear. More here.

I think I like his take on the topic.

If you are one of the few following me on Substack, I have news: I’m leaving Substack and moving to a different platform. I actually left a couple of weeks ago; my latest posts are not on Substack and you can find them on my website (the source of all my content), or you can subscribe to the new newsletter or the RSS feed like hackers do. If you’re an old-time Substack subscriber, you already know because I transferred all the active subscriptions to the new platform....

Today’s fun was implementing OAuth2’s RFC 7636’s PKCE (Proof Key for Code Exchange) in C#. It’s relatively straightforward, but I decided to share my implementation should it be helpful to someone else out there. PKCE is an extension to the Authorization Code flow to prevent CSRF and authorization code injection attacks. [..] It was originally designed to protect the authorization code flow in mobile apps, but its ability to prevent authorization code injection makes it useful for every type of OAuth client, even web apps that use client authentication (source)....

The structure [of most Miyazaki’s works] is not bound by the western-culture Aristotelean three act setup, conflict, pay-off, and resolution… its about showing you the sweet and sour of life. The loss and the love and the beauty all at the same time. – Guillermo del Toro For more context, see: Move review: The Boy and the Heron.

NTS Radio is a family of like-minded and passionate individuals, dedicated to supporting exciting music and culture through online radio and events. NTS uncovers the best of the musical past, celebrates the present and cultivates the future of the underground music scene, and prides itself on being open-minded and experimental. (source) I’m certainly a latecomer, but NTS Radio is the bomb. I have not opened Spotify (whose algorithm I find dull and repetitive) in the last week, not even once....

Last night, I was preparing dinner while waiting for Serena to return home when I received an unexpected call from her: she was in her parked car, petrified as the car’s headlights had illuminated a person lying on the floor of our building’s entrance, right in front of the elevator1. I told her to stay in the car and rushed down the stairs. When I got to the ground floor, no one was there; I checked the basement, and it was empty, too....