Scatmania

When I was a kid of about 10, one of my favourite books was Usborne's Spy's Guidebook. (I also liked its sister the Detective's Handbook, but the Spy's Guidebook always seemed a smidge cooler to me).



So I was pleased when our eldest, now 7, took an interest in the book too. This morning,

https://danq.me/2021/04/09/spys-guidebook/

Twine 2 is a popular tool for making hypertext interactive fiction, but there's something about physical printed "choose your own adventure"-style gamebooks that isn't quite replicated when you're playing on the Web. Maybe it's the experience of keeping your finger in a page break to facilitate a

https://danq.me/2021/04/05/twinebook/

Following the success of our last game of Dialect the previous month and once again in a one-week hiatus of our usual Friday Dungeons & Dragons game, I hosted a second remote game of this strange "soft" RPG with linguistics and improv drama elements.
Thieves' Cant
Our backdrop to this story

https://danq.me/2021/03/09/dialect-thieves-cant/

Hi, ONS! I know we haven't really spoken since you ghosted me in 2011, but I just wanted to clear something up for you -

This is not a mistake:



Back in 2011 you thought it was a mistake, and this prevented my partner, her husband and I from filling out the digital version of the census.

https://danq.me/2021/03/02/poly-and-the-census-2021/

tl;dr?
I recreated a 16-year old interactive ad. Experience it here. Get the source code here. Or keep reading for the full story.


What?
Back in 2005 I reblogged a Flash-based interactive advert I'd discovered via del.icio,us. And if that sentence wasn't early-naughties enough for you,

https://danq.me/2021/02/02/axe-feather-2021/

Earlier this month, I made my first attempt at cooking pizza in an outdoor wood-fired oven. I've been making pizza for years: how hard can it be?



It turned out: pretty hard. The oven was way hotter than I'd appreciated and I burned a few crusts. My dough was too wet to slide nicely off my

https://danq.me/2021/01/25/pizza-oven-2/

This week our usual Dungeons & Dragons group took a week off while our DM recovered from a long and tiring week. As a "filler", I offered to facilitate a game of Dialect: A Game About Language and How It Dies, from Thorny Games, who I discovered through a Metafilter post about their latest

https://danq.me/2021/01/16/dialect-the-outpost/

It's that time of year again when I comparison-shop for car insurance, and every time I come across a new set of reasons to hate the developers at Confused.com. How do you confuse me? Let me count the ways.
No means yes
I was planning to enumerate my concerns to them directly, via their contact

https://danq.me/2021/01/15/confused/

On account of the pandemic, I'd expected my fortieth birthday to be a somewhat more-muted affair than I'd hoped. I had a banner, I got trolled by bagels, and I received as a gift a pizza oven with which I immediately set fire to several pieces of cookware, but I hadn't expected to be able to do

https://danq.me/2021/01/10/murder-40/

Clearly those closest to me know me well, because for my birthday today I received a beautiful (portable: it packs into a bag!) wood-fired pizza oven, which I immediately assembled, test-fired, cleaned, and prepped with the intention of feeding everybody some homemade pizza using some of Robin's

https://danq.me/2021/01/08/pizza-oven/