Neil Smith | Lightnews

Dr Neil Smith

@neilnjae.bsky.social

260 followers 890 following 68 posts

Story gamer, juggler, academic.

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Economics 19%

Sociology 17%

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Dr Neil Smith @neilnjae.bsky.social · Mar 31

Just had our first belated session of the Blades 68 Playtest. We've got a muckraking journalist and a groovy cabbie embroiled in the Profumo affair. #BitD #FitD #rpg #ttrpg @evilhat.bsky.social

Reposted by Neil Smith

Rise Up Comus - 🔜PaxU @riseupcomus.bsky.social · Mar 19

RPGs are a form of art that is welcoming to people of every skill level. "But my map is bad!" "But my dungeon is kinda boring." WRONG. We're not talking about putting out albums, we're talking about singing around a campfire with a friend who has a guitar. Fun is the focus, not production quality.

Reposted by Neil Smith

Savage Spiel @savagespiel.bsky.social · Mar 18

My write-up of Concrete Cow 25. savagespiel.blogspot.com/2025/03/conc...

Concrete Cow 25

I arrived in Wolverton at more or less the time I intended, paid my entry, and headed straight for the bring and buy, followed by Leisure Ga...

savagespiel.blogspot.com

Reposted by Neil Smith

Hannah Rutherford (she/her) @lomadiah.bsky.social · Feb 3

📣 LOOKING FOR CREATORS! 📣

I’m working with a UK charity that offers safe spaces & support to victims of domestic abuse.

We’re running a fundraiser in Women’s History Month (March), and would to have more creators involved - if that’s you, gimme a shout here or in my DMs!

(Plz signal boost 🙏💚)

Reposted by Neil Smith

Naomi Kritzer @naomikritzer.bsky.social · Jan 27

The "first they came..." poem gets quoted and quoted and quoted and quoted and you know what, we do in fact know who they're coming for first, right now, and that is trans people, and the answer needs to be "absolutely the fuck not, you motherfuckers," full stop.

Reposted by Neil Smith

Dr Duncan Robertson @duncanrobertson.bsky.social · Jan 27

If anyone from the USA or elsewhere wants to see how British humour is used to great effect, firstly, ignore the video.

And then read the (thousands of) comments.

Some great work here. Well done all.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgvE...

New Tesla Model Y: What have they done?

YouTube video by carwow

www.youtube.com

Reposted by Neil Smith

Make a Scene! Scenario Festival @makeascenemn.bsky.social · Jan 24

The Transformative Role-playing Game Design textbook is now available for free download! Featuring authors from Uppsala University, Dragons' Nest, Avalon Larp Studio, Chaos League, and more!
https://buff.ly/3CiHFdR

Reposted by Neil Smith

Jon at Handiwork Games @handiworkgames.bsky.social · Jan 17

a|state second edition is the story of how you fight back. How you organise to drive back the forces of the all-powerful Trusts, the organised criminals, the peddlers of religion, and find a better way for your corner of The City. Dickens meets Ballard in a flooded back alley. #astaterpg

Art from a|state second edition by Paul Bourne. A trio of metal buildings reminiscent of the Thames sea forts loom out of a golden mist from the waters of a huge canal.

Art from a|state second edition by Paul Bourne. We look through a horizontal forest of gantries, popes and gables cutting through the golden evening smog. Tiny figures are crossing a footbridge between vast buildings.

Art from a|state second edition by Paul Bourne. We see into the guts of The City, pipes and gantry and wires cladding huge buildings reaching upward out of sight.

A back alley in The City, a gloomy, ill lit slum of cobbled together technologies and architectures from varied eras.

Reposted by Neil Smith

Jon at Handiwork Games @handiworkgames.bsky.social · Jan 17

Want to help create the new editions of Cold City and Hot War?

You can now sign up to playtest, and be notified of the campaign launch here: www.kickstarter.com/projects/jon...

#coldcity #hotwar

A giant sphere made of spiked metal straps hovers in the ruins of what could be Berlin. Overlaid are the Cold City and Hot War logos.

Cold City is described by its tag line as "a game of hidden agendas, trust and monster hunting".

Hot War is described as "a game of friends, enemies, secrets & consequences in the aftermath."

Reposted by Neil Smith

🍁 Levi Kornelsen @levikornelsen.bsky.social · Jan 14

🧵 : This is a thread of sites and people who cover indie tabletop games, with links and bluesky handles to follow!

Share it, add to it, use it, follow everyone on it, turn it into an article on your site!

Dr Neil Smith @neilnjae.bsky.social · Jan 12

I like how people have so very different approaches to solving these problems. I considered brute-force, but thought that the space of possibilities would be too large to make that feasible.

Dr Neil Smith @neilnjae.bsky.social · Jan 12

Another attempt solving #AdventOfCode 2024 day 24 in #Haskell . This verison solves it prgramatically, growing the structure I expect to see and comparing it to what I've actually got.

Full writeup on my blog: work.njae.me.uk/2025/01/10/a... and code on Codeberg: codeberg.org/NeilNjae/adv...

Advent of Code 2024 day 24 revisited

Another attempt at the puzzle, this time actually writing code that solves it!

work.njae.me.uk

Reposted by Neil Smith

Jon at Handiwork Games @handiworkgames.bsky.social · Jan 10

Just packing up some of these, and took some photos.
The Three Coins is a role-playing game from within the setting of a|state, The City. It is a banned, imaginative game about escaping The City, played in alleys and wynds using a handful of coins. The book The Three Coins catalogues this pursuit.

Four Coins from a|state with a verdigris finish sitting on some distressed wood near some bits of machinery.

The book The Three Coins sitting on a rough wood surface.

Reposted by Neil Smith

Malcolm Craig @malcolmcraig.bsky.social · Jan 7

1) This is a thread about non-annihilatory apocalypses and how they fit into my research on RPGs, the Cold War, and nuclear fear in the 1970s/80.

Of course, we start with The Price of Freedom (Greg Costikyan, West End Games, 1986). Those of us of 'a certain age' will vividly recall the controversy!

Advert for the 1986 RPG The Price of Freedom. The image shows a crew of fist-pumping American patriots bursting through a US flag superimposed with the hammer and sickle and a picture of Lenin. Freedom is being most vigorously defended!

Reposted by Neil Smith

Tanya Floaker @floaker.bsky.social · Jan 1

Fellow tabletop gamers, what are your goals for 2025? Here are mine!

- Get to EIG every month
- Complete fulfillment of Lo! Thy Dread Empire
- Mum Chums for #ZineQuest
- Kick-ass freelance project I'm hype for
- Try be more organised and positive person
- Talk more about what I'm working on

Brian_Cooksey.gif @vaklam.bsky.social · Dec 31

Fellow #TTRPG gamers, what are your goals for 2025? Here are mine!

-Run at least one short campaign for multiple people.
-Play with some new people.
-Reach out to a few specific people that I'd really like to play with.
-Record new episodes of @iepodcast.bsky.social with @gamefiend.bsky.social

Daniel Kwan @danielhkwan.itch.io · Dec 31

Fellow tabletop gamers, what are your goals for 2025? Here are mine!

- Finish and crowdfund the Wandering Blades #ttrpg
- Paint a 2,000 point Custodes army
- Get a regular home OSR group going
- Booth at a con
- Produce new and interesting episodes of @aznsrepresent.bsky.social

Dr Neil Smith @neilnjae.bsky.social · Jan 4

Freemarket is great. I played a few sessions on it online a while ago. If love to give it another go.

Dr Neil Smith @neilnjae.bsky.social · Jan 4

Another post on optimising #Haskell solutions to #AdventOfCode puzzles. These show how a couple of simple and obvious changes lead to things going faster by almost two orders of magnitude.
work.njae.me.uk/2025/01/03/o...

#Optimisation #Optimization

Optimising Haskell: quick wins

Two quick examples of optimising.

work.njae.me.uk

Dr Neil Smith @neilnjae.bsky.social · Jan 4

Very nice! It's not a huge difference in speed between our boxes.

You went all-out for speed, with mutability and bit-twiddling. I'm afraid that's too much detail for my little brain to handle. I'll accept my slow solution, and raise a glass in admiration to yours.

Dr Neil Smith @neilnjae.bsky.social · Jan 3

I've just written about how I optimised a #Haskell program solving an #AdventOfCode puzzle. It's about how I used the profiler to find the parts that needed attention, and reduced the runtime ×15 with a couple of small changes.

work.njae.me.uk/2025/01/02/o...

#optimisation
#optimization

Optimising Haskell: joy of profiling

Using the profiler to find what to optimise.

work.njae.me.uk

Reposted by Neil Smith

Dr. Emily Friedman @friede.bsky.social · Jan 3

If you’re familiar with playing TTRPGs in front of an in-person audience (as player or audience) BEFORE 2009, I’d love to hear
about your memories.

You can comment or email Ecfriedman at auburn dot edu

This is for Polygon (& probably book), so please let me know how’d you’d like to be cited.

Reposted by Neil Smith

Khampheng @pennylescroche.transtapir.games · Jan 3

5 TTRPGs I want to try in 2025:

🦗Cloud Empress
🧪 Substratum Protocol
🐉 Dragonbane
🍲 Stewpot
🌆 Metro: Otherscape

Mo: Wildflower Edition 🪻🌸🪷🌺🌷 @moplaysgames.bsky.social · Jan 3

5 TTRPGs I want to try in 2025:

⚡ Tezca Sentai
🌃 Urban Shadows 2E (because it's FINALLY available)
🗝️ Home
💌 Exquisite Crime
📱Alice is Missing: Silent Falls Expansion

Mike 🔜 PAXU @mikerunderwood.bsky.social · Jan 3

5 TTRPGs I want to try in 2025:

🔺 Triangle Agency
🏰 Castles in the Air
🏘️ Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast
🚗 The Last Caravan
🌇 Urban Shadows 2E

(There are dozens more where this came from)

Reposted by Neil Smith

Shannon Appelcline 🌮 @shannonappelcline.bsky.social · Jan 1

What was the year like in roleplaying? What classics returned? What did Wizards of the Coast do this time? It's all in my yearly report on the roleplaying industry.

www.designers-and-dragons.com/2025/01/01/2...

2024: The Year in Roleplaying – Designers & Dragons

www.designers-and-dragons.com

Dr Neil Smith @neilnjae.bsky.social · Jan 1

My review of #AdventOfCode 2024 now up on my blog. An overview of the #Haskell features I used (very few), the packages I used (not many) and the overall performance of my solutions (generally pretty good, with a few not so good).

work.njae.me.uk/2025/01/01/a...

Advent of Code 2024 review

A look back over the 2024 event.

work.njae.me.uk

Reposted by Neil Smith

Shraddha Agrawal @shraddhaag.dev · Jan 1

I just finished publishing all 25 blogs explaining my solution for solving each day of #AdventOfCode!

Huge shoutout to @mattboyle.bsky.social for giving me this opportunity to publish them on ByteSizeGo, what a fun and active community to be a part of 😁

Posting all links in the thread below 👇

Reposted by Neil Smith

Alex Ries @alexries.com · Dec 30

Birrin flying boats: It was a long road to the final painting, the aircraft lifting off in front of one of the great Southern floating cities.

#scifiart

Dr Neil Smith @neilnjae.bsky.social · Dec 29

And that puts me as another member of the "500 star" club with #AdventOfCode work.njae.me.uk/tag/advent-o...

I found the first year's challenges a few days after they went live, and I've done the rest each year as they appeared. It's been fun so far. Long may it continue!

List of the previous ten Advent of Code events, showing 50 stars gained on each.

Dr Neil Smith @neilnjae.bsky.social · Dec 29

My solution to #AdventOfCode day 25 in #Haskell : work.njae.me.uk/2024/12/29/a... , code at codeberg.org/NeilNjae/adv...

A quick and gentle finish to the challenges.

Advent of Code 2024 day 25

A gentle end to the challenge.

work.njae.me.uk

Dr Neil Smith @neilnjae.bsky.social · Dec 29

My solution to #AdventOfCode day 24 in #Haskell : work.njae.me.uk/2024/12/29/a... , code at codeberg.org/NeilNjae/adv...

Laborious and fiddly reverse engineering. Not fun at all.

Advent of Code 2024 day 24

Horrible, finicky, detailed reverse engineering. Not my cup of tea.

work.njae.me.uk

Dr Neil Smith @neilnjae.bsky.social · Dec 28

Don't forget to sign up for the Forged in the Dark season of games on the Raspy Raven server. We're closing the sign-up on 31 December.

Sign up: bit.ly/4fqM8s9

More blurb on the games: docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Join The Raspy Raven discord, link in sign-up form.

Reposted by Neil Smith

BiohazardJeff @biohazardjeff.bsky.social · Dec 25

It’s only the PoD set, but it’s pretty great to finally hold actual books after all the years of work. Free Poseidon!

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