I’ve always been a fan of A.J. Jacobs’ fun life experiments. As I do with every book I read, I took copious notes as I read his book My Life as an Experiment. Typically, I would go through my notes and pull out twelve gems that I found most useful to share on this blog. This time around, I decided to hand my notes over to Gemini AI to help me find those gems.
Generating Fantasy Names by Rolling Dice
You don’t need to be particularly creative, use artificial intelligence, or any fancy software to come up with good names. I’ve devised a system where you can come up with decent names simply by rolling dice and combining results from a set of tables.
A Simple Rules Change for Faster Dungeons & Dragons Sessions
In DnD, combat tends to take up most of the game time, and my players hate that. To make it more fun for my players, I came up with a few simple rules changes to drastically shorten combat encounters by reducing the number of dice rolls required to bring combat to its conclusion.
Last Year’s Top Baseball Prospects
I recently went through the baseball prospect selection process I developed and streamlined it. I’m waiting until USA Today picks their Minor League Player of the Year award before selecting my top 2025 prospects. In the meantime, here are the current reigning top nine baseball prospects from 2024.
Why Do You Collect What You Collect?
Why do you collect what you collect? Is it sustainable for a lifetime? Does your collection enhance your life? These are questions to ask about anything you collect. If you don’t have a good answer for any one of these questions, then you’re not collecting, you’re hoarding.
The All-Topps Era Baseball Mega All-Star Team
I’ve put together a massive spreadsheet of baseball players with some basic statistical analysis. The spreadsheet has four sheets, over 3,500 players, and stats from 1876 through 2024. With it, I quickly put together an all-star team of the greatest players since 1952.