There are three ways I think about information in roleplaying games. Information can be landmark, or hidden, or it can be secret. This division can apply to locations on an overland maps, objects within dungeon rooms, and even to details about locations and objects that the players encounter. A…

Have you ever met someone who is exceptionally easy to talk to? Someone who – simply through good conversation – gets you to open up? Makes you feel smarter, more interesting or just understood? These are all common traits of "supercommunicators" — people who are consistently able to create…

He had beaten more than 19,000 applicants for a place at medical school, yet Khurram Sadiq was now bunking off his hospital shifts. The 19-year-old felt inexplicably anxious around strangers on the wards and was hiding from his own patients. During lectures he couldn’t focus on what he was being…

When the Virginia opossum feels threatened, she plays dead. Lying on the ground, curled up into something resembling the foetal position, with her eyes and mouth open and her tongue hanging out, she stops responding to the world. Her body temperature drops. Her breathing and heart rate are severely…

Some people can walk into a room and instantly put everyone at ease. Others seem to make teeth clench and eyes roll no matter what they do. A small body of psychology research supports the idea that the way a person tends to make others feel is a consistent and measurable part of his personality.…

Cultural Comment A look back at the screenwriting guide that helped shape the modern Hollywood blockbuster. March 9, 2023 Illustration by Nicholas Konrad; Source photographs from Alamy / Everett This year’s list of Best Picture nominees feels dispiritingly familiar. “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Avatar:…

Loading...In 1980, Mad Max gave the world a genre-defining vision of a decaying Australia that entranced audiences and spurred decades of imitators. But behind the roaring engines and manic performances, it was the real flaking paint and cracked roads of outer-suburban Melbourne on-screen.…

'Rogue One' was filmed in the UK, which meant [+][-] major marketing campaigns in London on its release (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images) Getty Images Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is one of the most pivotal movies ever made by Disney. Premiering in 2016, it was the media giant's first Star Wars…

Ever since rapper Gunna called the pandemic a “panoramic”, lockdown life hasn’t been the same. In the midst of all the memes and constant change however, one thing has prevailed – the lockdown uniform AKA the unassuming tracksuit AKA the outfit you wear every single day now. For those who could work…

Editor’s Note: This a guest post by John Corcoran. Have you ever met someone whose personal story just blew you away? My friend Tom is one of those guys. A West Point graduate, Tom spent a few years in a U.S. Army special forces unit where his job was to parachute deploy into warzones from…

In 2018, I paid a man a couple hundred dollars to repeatedly jam several needles into the skin of my right wrist. I felt as if I were being attacked by a microscopic cavalry of crabs. Into every jab went black ink, eventually forming the shape of double quotation marks. It was my first tattoo, and…

I’ve been a psychology professor since 2012. In the past six years, I’ve witnessed students of all ages procrastinate on papers, skip presentation days, miss assignments, and let due dates fly by. I’ve seen promising prospective grad students fail to get applications in on time; I’ve watched PhD…

Profiles For decades, Scott Frank earned up to three hundred thousand dollars a week rewriting other people’s screenplays—from “Saving Private Ryan” to “The Ring.” Finally, he decided to stop playing ventriloquist. December 25, 2023 Frank has been hired to touch up nearly sixty Hollywood scripts,…

Job qualification #1: a clean conscience Tomorrow afternoon I jump into a new gig I’m terribly excited about, showrunning the second season of one of my favorite TV shows. It hasn’t been announced in the trades or anything, so I’m not gonna name drop it here yet. Not super sure why. Maybe…

Star Trek: The Deep Space Nine episode that predicted a US crisis 9 January 2024 Christian KriticosFeatures correspondent Alamy In the 1990s the Star Trek series Deep Space Nine predicted a dystopian vision of 2024 homelessness that has parallels with reality. It's tempting to view fictional stories…

Space sickness What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he’s not coming back? "If you guys don't give me a chance to repair my instrument, I'm not going back." Eric Berger – Jan 22, 2024 6:00 am | 322 The STS-51-B mission begins with the liftoff of the Challenger from Pad 39A in April 1985.…

I recently attended a conference about AI in education, and what I saw scared me. Not the AI tools themselves, but the eagerness of some teachers to let them take over all stages of our work. I don’t even blame them. In an education system already forcing us to think and work like machines, the lure…

Picture two English classrooms. In the first, the teacher is teaching Macbeth to a group of eager students, and has planned the lesson meticulously, taking into account their individual learning differences, with the children sitting in three groups. All students have been tested to determine which…

On 26 February 2015, Cates Holderness, a BuzzFeed community manager, posted a picture of a dress, captioned: ‘There’s a lot of debate on Tumblr about this right now, and we need to settle it.’ The post was accompanied by a poll that racked up millions of votes in a matter of days. About two-thirds…

Static is a grind Study: Why a spritz of water before grinding coffee yields less waste, tastier espresso "It turns out you can’t cut corners if you want to achieve excellence.” Jennifer Ouellette – Dec 6, 2023 3:40 pm | 139 Grinding dry coffee into an espresso portafilter. Credit: University of…

Søren Freiesleben has lived in Odense his entire life. He likes the historic Danish city for its size. It’s not too big—just 200,000 people live there—and he never feels like he’s drowning in crowds. So far so normal. But there is something unusual about Odense: Its homes are heated by the social…

Most people need years to build a good wardrobe. Keri Langerman does it in a matter of hours. On a Friday night, Langerman, a costume designer based in New York City, got a call from her director about a project she’s working on. An actor was just cast for the leading male role and was scheduled to…

Streamliner At your service. Yellowjackets. Photo: SHOWTIME Aside from “Why’s everything so expensive?” the biggest complaint of the streaming era may be “Why’s everything so dark?” The budgets of television shows have skyrocketed in recent years, so why is it often such a struggle to watch them on…

Photo by Winston Chen on Unsplash Skye is passionate about the craft of needle felting. With a few overstuffed bags of wool roving, a pack of needles, and her callused hands, she’s constructed everything from hats and vests, to small decorative dolls, to an entire barnyard scene complete with pigs,…

Last year I fell in love with a toaster. It looks like most others. A brushed, stainless-steel housing. Four slots, to accommodate the whole family’s bread-provisioning needs. It is alluring but modest, perched atop the counter on proud haunches. But at a time when industry promises disruptive…

United States July 22, 2023, 6:00 AM The Athenian historian Thucydides once remarked that Sparta was so lacking in impressive temples or monuments that future generations who found the place deserted

The recent counter-protest in Melbourne against UK transphobe Posie Parker sent shockwaves through both international and local media after white supremacists were seen saluting on the steps of parlia

” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life. One of my friends, more so t

New Zealand wicketkeeper-batter Bernadine Bezuidenhout couldn't make it two minutes without throwing up. She was extremely weak, struggling to sleep and eat, had "hectic" water retention in her legs,

I t was the response I got on social media that made me think I’d stumbled on to something bigger than I initially thought. On Twitter a few years ago, I asked what I thought was a pretty simple quest

A typical screenwriter looks a lot like me: white, middle-class, and highly educated. I graduated from Cambridge, an elite institution. I’m a published author, having written a memoir at age 25, and I

John Seale was considering retirement a decade ago — then fellow Australian George Miller convinced the cinematographer to shoot “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Now, their partnership continues with the fantast

Illustration: by Jess Ebsworth This article was featured in One Great Story , New York ’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. If you call a slew of Hollywood’s most powe

Sami brings ingenious design, a D.I.Y. spirit and pure athletic ability to the job of key grip — pushing and pulling heavy camera rigs with exacting precision. With Robert Yeoman operating the camera, Sanjay Sami pushes nearly a half-ton of equipment down a track for “Asteroid City.”Credit...via…

My electric bike sings, emits a nearly imperceptible hum from its tiny motor. I love its song. A song of peace and magic. Has money ever bought as much delight as the delight of an electric bike? The

In one respect, the actors and writers of Hollywood uniting on the picket lines in a historic, industry-shaking strike is a tale as old as time: one of workers fighting bosses for better pay. Yet the reason this battle is shaping up to be so uniquely intractable and momentous — as you might have…