Various Work and Gaming Updates

Visited Swinburne University today to attend NVidia's CUDA and OpenACC course. The content was good, indeed downright excellent, if upside down (OpenACC should have come first), and it didn't have much in the way of instructor guidance. It made me realise how much this sort of teaching requires a strong combination of technical and andragogical knowledge and skills. In other work-related activities, I had a frustrating few days installing a few R packages (just brms, rslurm, dplyr). This doesn't sound like much, but the packages had dependencies which had dependencies, so it ended up being around 65 in total, order is critical, and it's not something that is prone to parallel installation. As a minor bit of news, I've been adding various academic presentations to Figshare and assigning them Digital Object Identifier, probably something I should have done years ago.

I've been a bit busy on the gaming front as I'm working on getting a new edition of RPG Review out (late, of course). On Wednesday I completed a 2000 word review of Star Wars Revised and Expanded Second Edition (they could have called it "third edition"), plus an campaign article which combines existing published material by ICE for Spacemaster, Rolemaster, and MERP, as well as adding in content by others. Last night we had a session of Good Society, the Jane Austen RPG. Whilst our group is making good use of the tropes etc, I am dissatisfied with the lack of development or dynamic in the game system. I suspect the designers will either have pick up their game tremendously and provide a great deal of background material. Finally, the RPG Review Cooperative has released another newsletter, which includes involvement in the one page dungeon contest, the 200 Word RPG Challenge, and involvement in Arcarnacon 2019. We've also had a substantial (30 book, many rare) donation to our library - thanks to Paul Smith.