Author Archives: Luke Maciak

Spoiler Warning: this review contains some mild, setting related spoilers. No major plot events are revealed. The gods are dead… – those are the opening words of The Banner Saga. This is a hell of a way to open up … Continue reading →

Roughly a month or so ago, something weird happened to this website. It was one of those weird and a bit scary glitches that make you question your own sanity because they come out of nowhere and they have seemingly … Continue reading →

3D printing has been around for quite a while now. It has always been something I considered kinda cool, but mostly inconvenient to use. You either had to build your own printer from scratch, or send your 3D model to … Continue reading →

You might have noticed my post output has been consistently dropping lately. This is partly due to the fact that over the last few years this blog morphed into a collection of essays and long-form reviews rather than a daily … Continue reading →

Saga made by the creative duo of Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples is one of the hottest selling comic book series on Comixology. There is a reason for that. It is a damn good comic book. Few months ago … Continue reading →

My favorite part of the original DOS version of Prince of Persia was the sword fighting. I didn’t much care for the super hard platforming and the only reason I ever put up with it, was that there was a … Continue reading →

I really don’t like the single sex race trope in fantasy. Which is not to say I’m against exploring non-binary gender dynamics though fiction. Far from it, I think it is a grand idea, and can be incredibly interesting if … Continue reading →

What I’m about to propose here is a bit unconventional, but it really works for me. I’ve been doing a lot of front and back end web stuff lately and as a result every machine I own or work with … Continue reading →

Did you know that you can add /.json to any Reddit URL to get a machine readable JSON document you can screw around with? You can test it yourself. For example, go to /r/vim/.json. It works for pretty much any … Continue reading →

Public encryption is great. It is a mature technology an an industry standard. The problem is, no one is actually using it. Or rather, whenever it is used, it is abstracted away, and hidden behind layers of misdirection. Why? Because … Continue reading →

Spoiler Warning: this review contains massive, weapons-grade spoilers. Days of Future Past works as an X-Men movie but as far as super-hero films go, we have seen much better. In fact, we have already seen a much better mutant related … Continue reading →

Life in a digital world gives us illusion of certain kind of permanence. Each netizen puts out certain amount of content out into the greater web, be it via social media interactions, blogging or code commits on github. We all … Continue reading →

There was a very interesting discussion happening last week between Chad Whitacre (founder of Gittip) and Shanley Kane (CEO and founder of Model View Culture) which ironically has been chronicled on Medium and in the Gittip bug tracker. I say … Continue reading →

I own a smart watch, and I’m not ashamed of it. I proudly tell people that my Pebble was probably one of my best purchasing decisions as of late. Or at the very least better than sniping Citadel/Marauder Warhammer miniatures … Continue reading →

I’ve been working on little side projects lately, keeping myself busy and also getting back into Warhammer Fantasy Battles (spoiler: probably best game ever) so I kinda neglected writing a super long post for this week. I have noticed that … Continue reading →

Back in 2009 I got a brilliant idea into my head: I was going to build a site on top of Joomla. Why? I still don’t exactly understand my own thought process that lead me to that decision. I think … Continue reading →

I have noticed that my comics category is almost entirely devoid of content. It’s not like I don’t read comic books either. I guess I’m just a bit more picky about what I read. If I had this blog back … Continue reading →

Let’s talk about Heartbleed for a second, shall we? Perhaps not about the bug itself, but rather about it’s real world ramifications. What does a small implementation mistake mean for an average citizen of the web? Well, probably the most … Continue reading →

The Warcraft franchise is a vast, ever growing, almost sentient thing. It includes a number of extremely popular strategic games, the worlds biggest MMO, spawned world’s first MOBA, inspired series of licensed novels, toy lines, an obscure and unpopular tabletop … Continue reading →

Marvel seems to have figured out the superhero movie formula. Ever since The Hulk (which was was a bit of s stinker) every single-hero movie has been a gradual improvement over the previous one. I think part of the success … Continue reading →

A few months ago I wrote about my desire to get a Chromebook. Well, I finally broke down and got one. At first I wasn’t really sure if it was worth the expense but now that I had it for … Continue reading →

Most fantasy settings tend to be built of a standardized template. You have your humans, elves and dwarfs in the good guys corner, and then your orcs, goblins and undead in the bad guy corner. These “classic” races are almost … Continue reading →

There is a religious movement within the Vim community which emphasizes purity of the environment and rejects superfluous plugins and advises adherents to meticulously prune their .vimrc to keep it nearly empty and thus clean from impurities. I personally do … Continue reading →

If you have been following my blog for a while, you might remember my 2008 post about silly D&D monsters. It was more or less just an elaborate link-blog to the Head Injury Theather post on the same subject. The … Continue reading →

Let’s talk about embedding code snippets in your LaTex documents. All of us here are programmers (except for those who aren’t) so this is a natural thing we might want to do. Despite being built by programmers for programmers, LaTex … Continue reading →