Andrew R Gross

 As you might notice, I don't blog much these days. I'm still active in many of the same creative endeavors and highly opinionated, but I'm just not spending that time on this website. If you're looking to stalk me online, consider doing so on Lemmy at  @andrewrgross - SLRPNK . Anyway, thanks for your interest. Have a great day.

The tabletop RPG I've been working on for over a year is done! We've released the core manual along with the starter campaign! Links to all of it are available on our website, https://fullyautomatedrpg.com . They can also be found below: The manual: Fully Automated! Solarpunk RPG Core Game Manual - Fully Automated! OG Dev Group | DriveThruRPG Fully Automated! Solarpunk TTRPG by Fully Automated RPG And the campaign modules: Fully Automated! Campaign 1: Regulation! - Fully Automated! OG Dev Group | DriveThruRPG Fully Automated! Campaign 1: Regulation by Fully Automated RPG

For the last six months, I have found myself sounding off every few weeks on Facebook about the ongoing atrocity that is the Israeli massacre of  the people of Gaza. I figured I should copy and paste it to this blog I don't use much just in case Facebook deletes it, or I eventually delete my account. It's good to have a record, you know? [Big sigh] It's one of those times again where I feel like I need to lay out recent events, mainly to organize my thoughts for the next time someone asks me why I'm wearing a Palestinian flag on my kippah. First, there's the blockbuster 972+ report on the targeting process for the bombing campaign. They built a chain of AI tools that rank everyone in Gaza in likelihood of being a Hamas fighter, then programmed another one to report when it believed that they arrived at their family home. And finally, they lowered the confidence thresholds so that basically any man over 15 in Gaza qualified, and set the collateral damage limit to ...

 My last blog post was June 28, sharing a beta version of my game. It's nearly six months later. Hundreds of hours have been spent on this, and sometimes I feel like that's a nuts thing to do. But it's gotten away from me at this point. It's too good not to finish, and so far along. I could release it as it is now, though it'd remain just a curiosity. To see it become what I really want means at least trying to promote it, and I can't promote it until it's DONE done. The manual still needs cleanup in places, and that will easily take many hours. I'm considering reformatting it all in a more professional software, though I'm far from certain it's worth the time. But what really needs prepped is the campaign modules. There's a lot of formatting and assets to play and test. For now, the goal is to resume trying to find new eyes for this. I don't know how available anyone will be during the holidays, but then again people have time off. Fully...

For a long time I've been working on a tabletop RPG, and this week I'm transitioning it to beta version. It's still in development, but it's at a stage where I'm ready to share it with a broader audience in order to collect feedback before releasing it fully. For anyone who just wants the link, here it is:  Fully Automated! Solarpunk RPG Manual as well as the Fully Automated! Story Modules . Exploring LA by Sean Bodley ( patreon.com/seanbodley ) It's funny to look back on the path that led here. It started around 2018 when I went looking for a scifi RPG after I got tired of running homebrew Dungeons and Dragons games. I couldn't really find what I was looking for, which was just a cyberpunk story with a sense of realism and humor. I settled for the RPG Corporation but immediately dispensed with most of the in-game lore. It all felt stuck in the 80's, technologically and culturally. To their credit, there's a ton of content, and it's not bad. It...

  Members of Congress voted this week to strip Representative Ilhan Omar of her foreign affairs committee assignment supposedly in response to statements she made several years ago which have been widely criticized as antisemitic. Now, I don't normally write much about antisemitism, because most of what I say both on and off the internet is about constructive, positive things. I discuss things I'd like to see more of. But in this case, I have such a thing to say about this ordeal. The central thing is this: I remember the statements that have been used to justify Omar's present public shaming because they were what motivated me to start wearing a kippah at thirty-three. In support and admiration for Ilhan Omar. This may sound crazy if you've read most news. They don't bother recounting what Omar said that earned her such vitriol, instead content to describe it the way I did above: "widely criticized as antisemitic".   This is a great phrase if you work in ...

The following is a reddit post that ran longer than intended, but I think captures something I've been thinking about a lot.  ~~~ I think it's important that more people start to recognize a pervasive miscommunication that conceals one of the fundamental drivers of political conflict right now. When a right-leaning person says that they support things like "law", "order", "law enforcement", or "the rule of law", they are not talking about a blind imposition of the official, written, government codes of law on all individuals regardless of circumstance. They are talking about natural law. They believe that there is a specific way that all things are simply supposed to be. Who holds power to decide natural law is determined itself by this natural law, and the power they hold is owed to them by virtue of the fact that they intuit this law. They are attuned to how things should simply be, and know how to impose that on those who...

 We got a new dog: Jimmy Parker! Also, Tony and I got COVID. Here is another useful link I want to save, since I still have use for it: Cal-SuWers Network Dashboard (Sigh.) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1myoRuz43_s8NmCXt8ImpYDW9GQUFCDzN/view?usp=sharing

 It's January 2022 now.  I also finally was able to get an appointment to get boosted.  I've started a new job and moved to a new city, and I'm excited to try new things... once the latest surge ends. Unfortunately, enough time as passed that the posts I'd made with links to useful COVID trackers are off the front page of my blog. And yet... their utility hasn't passed. Alameda County Dashboard https://covid-19.acgov.org/data.page?#geography San Francisco County Dashboards https://sf.gov/data/covid-19-cases-and-deaths https://sf.gov/data/covid-19-case-maps San Mateo County Dashboards https://www.smchealth.org/data-dashboard/county-data-dashboard https://www.smchealth.org/data-dashboard/cases-city 91-divoc http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/ IHME Projections https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america Deloitte https://datausa.io/coronavirus LA Times https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-coronavirus-cases-tracking-outbreak/los-angeles-coun...

The Eternals is a very good movie. It's beautiful to look at, exciting, and gets viewers invested in its characters. It makes no major mistakes. It's easy to rate a move when they fail at any of these things, but when there's nothing wrong, what's left to debate is whether a film is good or great. I'm inclined to call Eternals the later: it's boldly ambitious. One can debate whether it succeeded in those ambitions -- I thought it did -- but I think it is beyond dispute that everyone involved aspired to something monumental, which is something I will praise regardless of outcome. There is a sense of enormity to the film that brings to mind 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ultimately, though, every film's reception depends on what the viewer is looking for. This is a movie aimed at comic book nerds who also read books. It's not a kids film. There's nothing a kid couldn't enjoy, but the pacing and themes are clearly intended for adults. In one moment, we'...

 My latest project is a big one, that I've fantasized about since I was a kid. It's a helper and companion robot. Their name is Bellamy Crashbot (although I call them Crashy). More info is available on Hackaday . The appeal of a general purpose robot should be obvious. Who doesn't want a cool, scrappy robot friend to help with chores around the home or lab? But more specifically the goal of the project is -- like most of my projects -- to learn where the field is and try to contribute to it with my own entry. It's a tricky one in this case, since this project is so  big.   When in doubt, I start with the big picture: robots are becoming more ubiquitous, and I wanted to make one that moves around interacts with people. I think different people envision different things when they imagine what constitutes an android like those we see in science fiction, but my bar is frankly not that high. Humans will form emotional relationships with obviously inanimate things if you just...

 I've really enjoyed the positive reactions project builds get on LinkedIn, so I went ahead and finished up another one. Like the project itself, this write up was fast and straightforward.  Easy One-Day-Build Toddler Learning Tower [Instructables]

It's tough to find time to write blog posts with so much else going on, but I wrote a write-up of the Console Busy Box that I made last year, and I also helped Tony set up a Fiverr profile, so I figured I'd throw up a blog post just to show that I haven't forgotten how to type. Baby's First Mission Control Console [Hackster.io]  This is a console busy box. Click if you're curious and all questions will be answered. Additionally: I convinced Tony to make himself reachable on Fiverr as a new way to reach clients for his writing projects. I helped him set up his two "gigs" as Fiverr calls them, and made the art to communicate to potential clients what kind of zany fun Tony can provide: So far, interest has been good and the clients have been happy! I'm excited to see where this little experiment goes next.

Daylight Savings Time is unpopular. So why do we still do it? I'm not asking why we started  DST, which is stupid but doesn't matter. I'm asking this: what is preventing us from stopping this unpopular practice? I've met several people who thought that California had ended it by referendum with Prop 7 in 2018 . It's fitting that a measure about DST is misunderstood by many Californians. But the literal explanation is that DST is imposed by the federal government, and Prop 7 merely demonstrated Californian's preferences as the first step of asking our federal government to free us from daylight savings. This feels absurd though, doesn't it? The federal government? Why is congress in charge of what time Californians set their clocks to? The answer is that just as a dollar is just piece of paper that gains its worth from our collective agreement, their authority exists so long as we believe it does. We set our clocks forward because everyone else does, and if w...

 Covid Links These are sites I check often enough to make it worth my time to post them to my website because I don't sync my bookmarks. LA City Dashboard: https://corona-virus.la/data LA County Dashboard: http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/media/coronavirus/data/index.htm LA County Map: http://dashboard.publichealth.lacounty.gov/covid19_surveillance_dashboard/ LA Times Dashboard: https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-coronavirus-cases-tracking-outbreak/los-angeles-county/ NY Times Dashboard: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html IHME Model: https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america

We are all metaphorically going back in time to March, so let's act like it. Do you remember how the magnitude of the danger and disruption of COVID-19 dawned on you? If not, you're about to experience it again anew. I remember in the first month wondering whether I should cancel an in-person meeting of a dozen people, or if the attendees would think I was being overreactive. My Mom asked whether it would be silly to cancel a cross-country plane trip. And then I saw this article by Tomas Pueyo on March 10:  Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now . In the article, Pueyo warns readers of what came to pass: a wild-fire spread of death curtailed only by cutting off transmission rapidly. It was the first illustration I'd seen of what to expect, which was important because I had no frame of reference. All of this context is building to this: when experts like Fauci say that the worst is yet to come, this is what they mean. Look at the trajectory of cases , and extrapolate the deaths o...

 Here is how I'm voting in 2020: I've received my ballot in the mail and completed it, then I've dropped it off at a Ballot Drop Box. You can find it at:  https://www.lavote.net/home/voting-elections/voting-options/vote-by-mail/vbm-ballot-drop-off Then, I will sign up for SMS updates on my ballot to confirm receipt: www.lavote.net/av_inquiry My votes: Note: I'm not in city council district 4, so I can't vote for Nithya Raman, but if you are, DO. I strongly support her. I also strongly support Measure J. It's a vitally important reimagining of public safety that meets the demands of our time. Item Choice Difficulty Reasons City of Los Angeles District 10 Mark Ridley-Thomas Difficult Ridley-Thomas has been in charge for a long time while homelessness, housing shortages, and poor policing have worsened. Ridley-Thomas holds better positions than Yoo, and has been more forthright about them. Board of Trustees, Seat 1 Andra Hoffman Easy DSA-Endorsed Board of Trustees,...

During the last ... three months? Four? Tony and I have produced a few things I want to highlight here (mostly to make them easier to share online). First, I made a baby mobile and published the design process and full build plans online: Arduino Baby Mobile (Marvel Inspired) [Hackster.io] Second, I made figurines of two characters from The Umbrella Academy, a comic book and TV show that returns to Netflix on July 31, and I wrote up a guide on how to make your own: Custom Figurines: the Easiest Way to Model Your Favorite Characters [Instructables] I've entered it in a contest on Instructables and I'm excited to see how it does. Finally -- and best of all -- Tony has written an unlicensed prequel novel to The Umbrella Academy comic book and Netflix series: The Ties That Bind , by A.E. McGinn You can also read it on Wattpad if you prefer, or download it as an e-book: The Ties That Bind.azw3 The Ties That Bind.epub The Ties That Bind.mobi ...

There is a lot of data on COVID-19's movement and direction. Below is a catalog of data tools to help us find data and see comparisons that help us understand what has happened and might happen next. There's a lot of information, so I've ranked each group starting with the links I consider most useful first. If you'd like to volunteer to help provide supplies to Los Angeles, go to  https://blog.crashspace.org/covid/ to volunteer or donate. Los Angeles and California: LA County Dashboard [LA County] LA County’s map of cases by neighborhood district Data | COVID-19: Keeping Los Angeles Safe [City of LA] A collection of stats and relevant data for city residents to make smart risk assessments California coronavirus cases: Tracking the outbreak [LA Times] Cumulative and new cases by CA metro areas http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/media/coronavirus/locations.htm [LA County DPH] A table of case counts by neighborhood district US, nationally an...