A Sense of Humour

One thing about roguelikes is that they tend to have a sense of humour.  NetHack, for example, is famous for all its tailor-made messages, from stupid causes of death to obscure stuff, like reading a scroll of amnesia while named MAUD.  If I ever get around to finishing my review of TOME, I have a few examples there that caught my eye.

But this year, I've been playing a lot of Crawl, and a couple of things caught my eye enough to want to share.  The first is a minor thing.  The 'p' command prays to your god, having a different effect depending on which god you are worshipping.  If you have not yet chosen any god, you instead get a short message about contemplating the meaning of life... unless you are undead:

The other thing that amused me happened when I found a unique weapon, the Singing Sword, which sometimes renames itself the Screaming Sword.  And which apparently thinks it is an angry halfling...

Someone on the design team has good taste!

Planck 2015 Summary

It's a week after Planck finished, and I'm almost over the jetlag of my return flight.  So as good a time as any to write my summary of the conference!

I wasn't too impressed.

There were a number of problems with the conference this year.  Some of these were organisational.  Some were topical.  Some were just unfortunate, such as it raining the days of the excursion and conference banquet.  But of the four Plancks I have been to, it ranks the lowest; and while I have had worse experiences at other conferences, those were for somewhat unrelated personal reasons.