For a couple years now, maxwelljoslyn.com has been sorely in need of a facelift and some new functionality for user-friendliness. Over the last few weeks I've finally gotten around to that, and if you're reading this, you're on the new version of the site.
The rest of this post is a showcase comparing what the site looked like before and after mid-September 2026, for the sake of future visitors (including me).
A Better Homepage
The homepage is a better experience for new and returning readers alike. "Greatest Hits" comes first, is updated for 2026, and is slimmed down to make room for a photo gallery! After that, we segue cleanly into new posts.
For historical content, this book is strong, and it effectively forms a man-on-the-ground narrative from the battles of the Chosin Reservoir campaign of the Korean War. But considered purely on writing quality, it's only decent. For instance, the author has a strange and persistent love of comma-splicing clauses that are nowhere near full sentences. I can accept it as a stylistic quirk, but it makes for uneven reading.
You (and long-time readers) know that I've long been questing for the staggering potential we can unlock by committing to fully computer-based gameplay. But I've tended to overlook the immersive potential of full real-time visual feedback. I gestured at that in my master's thesis but didn't fully pursue that particular thread.
Your recent experiment with Keep on the Borderlands image generation, and some work I've done on interactive battlemaps, have got me thinking again about how to more thoroughly integrate visuals into computerized play. Thanks for stirring the pot further here. Maybe you were the only one in five decades until yesterday, but make space on the bandwagon for Joey and me!
I've imported my old blog, 21st Century D&D, into this website, tagging the posts with "21stcenturydnd".
I wrote that blog during the second half of undergrad, give or take. While doing QA on the import program, I reread all the posts to gauge how I've changed since 2016-2018.
I've improved as a programmer and game designer, and there are ideas in those posts that turned out to be dead ends, or which are chiefly of historical interest as signposts for how far I've come. Yet there's a reassuring and comforting continuity between what I was thinking then, and what I've accomplished since.
You can now upload a portrait for each of your characters. A character's portrait is displayed above the character sheet's table of contents. (#56)
Sage Knowledge
Version 0.6.0 brings multiple enhancements to sage knowledge support. First off, Zingor now supports multiple chosen sage fields/studies, since we have characters hitting levels where they get more! (#163)
Zingor now also supports sage study concentrations, the app's term for subareas to which certain sage studies' knowledge points may or must be assigned (#171). The rules for concentrations differ from study to study, and Zingor implements all of them:
On his blog, Alexis Smolensk takes down the argument that using AI ruins your writing, by detailing just how magically useful it is for assisting with your writing -- so long as you bother to use it intelligently.
Present-day D&D practice may not admit of a procedural manual, but ours might, no?
An initial chapter might explain the importance of having a place that you control as the game venue (generally your own house), explaining why playing in a public place is liable to have too many distractions, as well as giving advice for keeping the fridge stocked, ordering food ahead of time and all that jazz. Simple stuff, yes, but things that a noob might not think to do for an art form with a strong component of people management.
That last needs a whole chapter too: Paying attention to players' emotions. Stepping in to resolve conflicts that are getting out of hand w/ techniques like making everyone go for a walk to cool down tempers. Praising players for good planning, good cooperation, clever use of abilities.
First Hemingway I’ve read in a good long while. The stereotype is that he writes lots of short sentences, but I don’t think that’s true. He likes writes a lot of direct descriptive sentences, but also goes hog wild joining them together into the long run on that are expressive in the way poetry is: dense with imagery, occasionally wandering into philosophical speculation.
I was holding out hope that the ending would not be sad, but it was, and abruptly, viciously so.
