In 2023, I got back to writing articles on an eclectic range of miscellaneous “out of my lane” topics, getting the Tomas’s Miscellany stack back off the ground. The first hot topic of the year was Dungeons & Dragons.
In January, Wizards of the Coast announced that they were getting rid of the Open Game License and replacing it with a highly predatory copytheft license. The community was outraged. I wrote up a short history of D&D and open gaming. Having covered the most recent mistakes of Wizards of the Coast with D&D, I revisited my older work analyzing some of the game design blunders they made when they first bought the property.
Then I brought in comparisons between rugby, boxing, and different editions of D&D in “Safer but more violent?” in which I argued that rules that made character death less likely steered players into making more violent choices in games like D&D. Finally, I weighed in on the great gaming style debate in “Great stories come from simulation.”
Partly inspired by some of what I’d gone through in publishing my book, I wrote about the history of book returns in an article that tied together elements from changes in the United States Post Office to the Thor Power Tools case. Another writing-related article followed by exploring what romance writers get wrong about male sexuality using Bridgerton as an example.
Having brought up the topic of romance, I explained why dating apps suck, and what happened to one of the most functional dating websites in the internet’s earlier history: OKCupid.
In March, I started a series of articles tangentially related to military hardware. I argued that the South Dakota class battleship wasn’t actually an improvement on the earlier North Carolina class, and also asked what exactly a battlecruiser was in a “no-code” machine learning exercise. Then I asked if stealth fighters were an expensive mistake, and applied Elo ratings to 20th century jet fighters.
In the wake of the rise of ChatGPT, concern over academic integrity surged as teachers at colleges and universities tried to prepare ahead of the fall semester. I pointed out that “[c]heaters prospered before AI made it easy,” as the growth of the internet and large-scale movement away from proctored assessments had fueled a cheating pandemic long before ChatGPT.
I followed this up with an article about my fellow social scientists cheating (or at least fooling themselves) in an article titled “Annoying, Boring, Correct: The ABCs of good social science.” Both articles are worth a re-read if you’re following the Claudine Gay stories right now.
I also wrote one article on dancing, talking about why it’s hard for contra dancers to circle right, a niche topic if there is one, but one close to my heart.