rants

I've held off on buying any tables for maybe three years now, playing TOTAN from time to time but mostly doing Visual Pinball. I do love the look of the TPA tables, but somehow I can't decide what to think about Farsight and so I don't know if I should actually buy a few season packs. Somehow...

A regrettable milestone was passed today - I've issued my first ban that wasn't just a random spammer. So I made it 75 days...I guess that's pretty good for a forum as large and as populated as this one. But since we're here, a bit of musing on what it's like to be a moderator now that I've done...

(Since it's been a while since the last one, a reminder that the [NP] in the post title means it's not about pinball. This is your chance to skip it if you're not interested.) In 1986, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt first published the essay On Bullsh*t, which is as far as I can tell the first...

About 2 months ago, I posted some observations on TPA and programming in general (if you missed them, these posts were On Pride and Programming, What Greed Won't Get You, and The Lust for Results), wherein I tried to explain some of what goes on in software development for the benefit of the...

Feeling better today...although that could be simply because I slept for 15 hours last night, after several sleepness nights of coughing and struggling to breathe. But we seem to have had an invasion of martyrs while I was incapacitated, of which the following is an example. Sorry, you're going...

Those readers paying attention to the forum know that controversy has re-erupted over FarSight's tuning process for the tables in TPA and its effects on the difficulty of the tables. I took a rather indifferent stance on the issue the first time it came up, since the tables were only moderately...