My Shed of Marvelous Discoveries 17 Sept. 24

I know I've seen people do this before, but I'm inspired by SweetFish who used to do this on cohost. This is a collection of the fascinating and wonderful things I've come across lately, with more or less commentary as the case may be.

Aurahack wrote [an all too familiar piece about numbers on web sites] and how cohost changed that for the better, before it succumbed to capital's lack of interest. I agree with everything she wrote; I remember constantly refreshing my Livejournal page to see if anyone had commented. Hell, I did that with my email, in 1999 when absolutely no one in high school was interested in emailing me.

I knew some of the history of the Grimm brothers' collection of fairy tales, but I came across this article which goes into excellent detail, with enough supposition to help contextualize the facts.

On Heat Death, there's an excellent essay about Tolkien's orcs, how many people have oversimplified Tolkien's work and then criticize him based on the oversimplification, and how to dig in to what's really there. I don't agree absolutely, totally, 100% with every single jot and tittle, but overall this is great.

Ben Frosh wrote about the ATB battle system in Final Fantasy and now a change in the way it tracks animations messed it up in 6, as well as their contribution to a ROM hack that fixes it.

P. James Stuart wrote a long piece about Thief, TTRPGS, and the lessons one might learn from the former to run the latter.