Have you seen the movie E.T. or the Netflix series Stranger Things? Then you probably have some idea of what Role-Playing Games are. In this podcast I give a 20 minute introduction to RPGs in general and the Amar RPG in particular. Get into the fun and excitement of adventure and creating stories together with your friends. Link to transcribed video. Link to this post: https://isene.org/2018/09/Podcast-RPGs.html Read more!

This is my first podcast here at isene.org. I talk about the range of topics I may cover in my upcoming podcasts - anything from sex to astrophysics. Want me to cover something special? Want to challenge me? State your wish in the comment section below. It may come true :-) PS: As I mention in the podcast, I tried experimenting with Octopod as the podcast platform. But it was way more complex than simply... Read more!

Here are some neat updates for Game Masters of the Amar Role-Playing Game. A Game Master screen can be made using a generic screen like the Stratagem The Master’s Tome Customizable GM Screen. Just choose 4 of the 5 available panels, print out and insert them into the generic screen’s plastic sleeves. You’ll have a nice screen to hide all your Game Master secret from the players with all the important game tables right in... Read more!

It’s been a great adventure with memories for life. Of the 52 countries I have visited, the Japanese are the most polite, service minded and nicest people - with Tanzanians in a good second place. The Aussies are still the coolest. Tokyo is the nicest city I’ve been to. Sydney is still the most beautiful, New York the most spectacular, while Longyearbyen is my favorite. When I visited Tokyo for the first time, 1.5 years... Read more!

I got some of my art up in the newly built art gallery And some of my photo work in the photo gallery And then my music got a permanent home in the music gallery I currently explore photography. I will do more digital artwork and music when that grabs my interest again. Read more!

Today Niklas and I visited the Owl Café. It’s my second time visiting these fascinating birds. Niklas was there three weeks ago with Jonatan and Benjamin. We all love the cuties. Getting this close to them does give a nice perspective on how different life can be. If you ever visit Tokyo, make sure to drop by the Owl Café. Read more!

It’s been a real pleasure to move from Wordpress to Jekyll. Feeling like a kid again, learning this neat web platform. It lends itself beautifully to my interest in programming in general and coding in Ruby in particular. I’m tinkering, adding plugins, exploring some scripting to automate the workflow for writing and publishing. Yeah, it’s cool. But now that everything is rather perfect, I’m again facing the challenge of igniting myself for something new. Since... Read more!

Arriving in Tokyo mid-July and working here until September 1st. A fantastic city with really nice people. I’m loving it to bits. The focus is my work for Dualog and NYK, but in the weekends, I get to be a tourist. Visiting the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) was great. Seeing the old solar telescope in action was rather cool. Lots of old and new equipment. The 10-year old inside me was truly excited.... Read more!

The next OnePageBook is out - titled, “Make it Simple”. It’s about removing the unnecessary and distilling something down to what is really needed. Cutting the crap and leaving the essence. An event comes to mind; I was sitting in this meeting with a woman from a large corporation heading the work on their new IT strategy. I had been given a 67 page IT strategy draft. Full of fluff and riddled with inconsistencies, errors,... Read more!

There are nuggets of gold to be found from most people who teach and coach others. While most North American hyper & overly extroverted coaches can come across as rather cheesy, there is wisdom to be had from the likes of Tony Robbins and Joe Polish. Even Jordan Peterson has a couple of worthwhile words of advice. This list from Joe Polish puts a clear perspective of the qualities of successful entrepreneurs: Smart entrepreneurs are... Read more!

I am migrating my web presence over to Jekyll. I love programming, and Ruby is often my language of choice. Being able to tweak my tools is both fun and essential for productivity. And since Jekyll is written in Ruby, I can have a great deal more control, fun and efficiency when I publish my stuff. This is the very beginning of this migration. I will slowly move my static pages over here and then... Read more!

After 15 years in the making, finally Amar Tools is ‘feature complete’ and deserving the 1.0 release mark (and just recently jumped to v1.1). The swiss army knife tool set for the Amar Role-Playing game is freely available on Github. Although created for the Amar RPG, these tools are useful for any fantasy RPG. The online version is available here: http://www.isene.org/amar.html A shortened version of the feature list: Generate random encounters in various terrains (day or... Read more!