Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Starting School of Rock
January 19, 2026
music school

Back in November, I walked into School of Rock in Downingtown and asked about learning to play keyboard. The next day, I came back to watch a rehearsal for a show in production. By the end of that night, I’d agreed to play keyboard on a couple of songs I barely knew. A month later, I had my first live rock band performance under my belt.

This is how School of Rock works, and it’s one of the weirdest experiences I’ve had in a while. I take lessons just before my performance rehearsals, seeing a teacher on nights when the band meets. In the past when I’ve tried music lessons, there was always a hard sell—the teacher would push expensive recurring packages. This time, my teacher literally looked at me after the lesson like “why are you still here?” But it wasn’t because he didn’t want to teach. The whole school seems oriented around people wanting to be there because they want to make music. Get your lesson, get to rehearsal, go make music.

The Different Gear
November 09, 2025
stress work life

I’ve seen this pattern before. Work tightens - end-of-year reviews, auditors wanting receipts on every decision, the odd mathematics of pursuing a promotion while doing the current job and creating space for whoever inherits it. Half-hour blocks stacked into a grid where each one demands a different mental model.

And when that ends, I don’t rest. I add more.

The Games I Actually Play
October 11, 2025
games RPG

I bought Nimble — a streamlined version of Dungeons & Dragons — after a friend recommended it. He seemed surprised I actually did.

I like D&D. But what I like about it isn’t the game itself. I like that it’s possible to play D&D. It’s the lingua franca of tabletop role-playing — the one game that everyone at least recognizes, even if they don’t play. It’s the reason I can tell my mom, “I’m playing D&D on Friday night,” instead of trying to explain Viking Death Squad or Ironsworn. She doesn’t need context. It’s shorthand for “I’m with friends doing something creative like roleplaying.”

ActivityPub on Sn
August 24, 2025
Sn code

I’ve spent the morning trying to get my ActivityPub implementation off the ground, and I fee like I’m making headway. You can currently follow my account at the blog (@owen@asymptomatic.net), and it seems to record that information for future publishing. The testing suggests that when I publish this post, it’ll push it out to anyone that is following that account, but given that the Mastodon instance that my personal account runs from and my iOS client report different things (Mona thinks that my follow request is “pending”, and I’m pretty sure I’ve set things up for there to be no review of follow requests), I’m wondering what exactly will happen.

Configuration of a system such as this is non-trivial and a bit inscrutable. I’ve tried to narrow options down to the bare minimum necessary, as combined with the other options that are needed for the blog itself, so that it doesn’t take a lot of config to get the system going.

Two Experimental RPG Sessions That Reinvented My Table
August 22, 2025
RPG DMing DnD

Forty-plus years of rolling dice teaches you a few things. Chief among them: the game’s scaffolding—your basic five-room dungeon, your tavern-to-adventure pipeline—works because it’s reliable. But reliability can calcify into routine, and routine can drain the magic from even the most magical of games.

After running my homebrew Port Haven campaign for three years with the same core group, I found myself wrestling with two familiar DM problems: how to give individual characters meaningful spotlight time without boring the other players, and how to elegantly convey complex plot information that had become tangled over years of play. Rather than reach for conventional solutions, I decided to experiment with the fundamental structure of how we play.