rijnhardt

$160 billion. Three companies. Sixty days.

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 09:29:35 +0200

“We don’t know where we’re going, but we’re making good time.” — Yogi Berra

That is more money being injected by three companies than every venture capitalist in America invested in every startup in 2023, combined.

Kenya has 56 million people living and working very hard towards earning a living in its economy. Just about the entirety of Kenya’s economic output, roughly $119 billion a year, exchanged hands within an afternoon in a single transaction.

When the numbers stop behaving

Eleven months ago, OpenAI was valued at $300 billion. Today, a mere 330 days later, that number is $730 billion. This means that SoftBank, NVIDIA, and Amazon are willing to defend the claim that OpenAI generated more than $17,000 in value per second for 28,512,000 seconds, nonstop.

When I posted about Anthropic in January, the number was $17,361 per second. OpenAI and Anthropic are now running neck-and-neck in a race that did not exist three years ago.

Compute trumps cash in the bank

A significant portion of the round that OpenAI just finished is in services, not cash. OpenAI has promised to build its stateful computing engine on Amazon’s infrastructure while keeping the stateless one on Azure, which has recently traded its exclusivity on compute in exchange for first dibs on their intellectual property should OpenAI be all bark and no bite.

The cash injection they will receive is significantly lower than the quoted $110 billion figure, and nobody is saying by how much.

A different type of war machine

The top three funded companies in this race — OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI — raised $160 billion in the past sixty days. The entire African continent spends a third of that on its defence, roughly $50-$55 billion, each fiscal year.

These three companies raised the equivalent of the defence budget of 54 countries in 60 days.

The bottom line is that we are either watching the most important race of capital expansion in human history, or the most expensive living-room play ever staged. Where the kids wrote the script, the parents bought the tickets, and nobody knows if the curtain goes up on act two.

I said it in January, and I will say it again: I do not know which one it is. But we are going to find out.

Sheet Music x Git: Goldberg Variations

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 07:08:53 +0200

Sheet Music x Git: What if theme and variation were shown as a version diff? I present the first couple of bars for the Goldberg Variations as a visual/audio-driven git diff.

Prototyped with Claude using the Opus 4.6 model and the Lilypond notation files for the music from the Mutopia Project.

The Dungeon Masters: The Accidental Creation of a Billion‑Dollar Industry

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 05:00:00 +0200

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“helping to create what would become one of America’s most enduring subcultures”

On a bitter February evening in early 1973, snow drifted against the windows of a split-level house on Centre Street in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Inside, an early-thirties former insurance underwriter named Gary Gygax hunched over his basement table, moving tiny lead figurines across a hand-drawn map. The basement smelled of paint thinner and cigarette smoke. Its wood‑panelled walls were lined with shelves of military history books and boxes of miniature medieval knights. The room felt both cluttered and full of possibility.

Gygax, a compact man with wire-rimmed glasses and a carefully maintained goatee, had been preoccupied for months with a problem that would have seemed absurd to many of his daytime colleagues at the Fireman’s Fund and in other office jobs: how to make his tabletop war games feel more like the fantasy novels he loved reading. That night, as his children slept upstairs and his wife Donna worked late at her job, Gygax was on the verge of helping to create what would become one of America’s most enduring subcultures.

Within a couple of years, he and his unlikely collaborator, Dave Arneson, an avid Minneapolis wargamer with a flair for theatrical game‑mastering, published the original boxed set of “Dungeons & Dragons”, three slim booklets totalling just over a hundred pages. The game they developed in basements and hobby shops helped launch a tabletop role‑playing industry now worth billions globally, influencing everything from video games to Hollywood blockbusters. And offering a creative sanctuary for millions of players seeking something that mainstream culture couldn’t always provide: the idea that ordinary people could become heroes in stories of their making.

But on that February night, Gygax was simply a middle-aged man trying to fix what he saw as a fundamental flaw in military miniature gaming. Traditional war games, with their strict historical scenarios and fixed outcomes, left little space for personal creativity or storytelling surprises. Players commanded armies, not characters. Victory was based on numbers, not myth. Gygax had been experimenting for years with ways to add more personality to his games, drawing inspiration from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” and from a wide range of pulp and fantasy authors, whom he later cited as formative influences.

What Gygax could not have foreseen was that this simple change—shifting focus from armies to individuals and from historical simulation to creative teamwork—would become one of the most unexpected ideas in modern American culture. In a society shaped by corporate routines and media, Dungeons & Dragons offered something novel: entertainment that required active participation, group storytelling, and the courage to experiment with new identities. It was participatory fiction long before the internet popularised such concepts, a kind of improvisational theatre in the form of a board game.

To understand how this worked, picture a typical D&D session in Gygax’s basement. The Dungeon Master sets the scene: “You find yourselves at the entrance to a gloomy cavern, rumoured to contain both treasure and a hungry ogre”. Each player describes what their character does. One might sneak ahead to scout, another draws a sword, and a third prepares a magic spell. The Dungeon Master narrates what happens based on their actions and the roll of the dice. Maybe the scout finds a hidden trap, the ogre wakes up, and a frantic battle begins. Success or failure depends not just on rules but on the group’s choices, imagination, and teamwork. The story unfolds in unpredictable ways, transforming players from spectators into heroes of their shared adventure.

Tabletop role-playing games grew out of a mix of military wargaming, fantasy fiction, and traditional American Midwestern hobby culture. Its development reflects genuine ingenuity, emerging from hobbyists rather than large corporations. It is the story of a complex partnership between two very different individuals, characterised by innovative ideas and legal disputes. Despite moral panics, business disagreements, and technological progress, their creations have not only endured but also prospered, and are now widely considered more visible and influential in popular culture than at any time since their 1980s heyday.

Roughly fifty years after those early snowy nights in Lake Geneva, tabletop role-playing games are enjoying a renewed surge of popularity, played by everyone from Hollywood celebrities to corporate team‑building consultants. Understanding how we arrived here, how an insurance salesman’s basement experiment became a cultural phenomenon, reveals something important about our shared capacity to reinvent ourselves. The power of collaborating to imagine, and the enduring human need for stories that allow us to be more than just passive consumers of someone else’s dreams.

Overview: The Dungeon Masters

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 23:28:06 +0200

In the winter of 1973, an insurance salesman in a Wisconsin basement began tinkering with toy soldiers and tables of combat odds. Within a few years, his experiments—shaped by a quiet collaborator in Minnesota—would become Dungeons & Dragons, a game that slipped out of hobby shops and into the bloodstream of global culture.

This series follows that journey from basements to boardrooms, from tin soldiers to Twitch streams. It traces how D&D emerged from Victorian war games and Midwestern hobby clubs; how a fragile partnership collapsed into lawsuits; how moral panics, corporate feuds, and finally Wizards of the Coast reshaped the game; and how today’s players—more diverse and visible than ever—have claimed it as their own.

Taken together, these posts ask a simple question with complicated answers: what happens when a strange little game about pretending to be someone else becomes one of the most powerful storytelling engines on earth?

#	Chapter	Description
1	The Dungeon Masters	The story begins in Gary Gygax’s Lake Geneva basement, where a small rules experiment quietly rewires what games—and stories—can be.
2	The War Room	Behind the closed doors of a musty Midwestern basement, a Cultural Revolution takes shape long before anyone realises it.
3	Tin Soldiers and Napoleon	Before D&D, there were tin soldiers, sand tables, and H.G. Wells, laying the groundwork for games as laboratories of imagination.
4	The Collaboration	D&D’s origin story is also a contested biography of two men who would spend decades fighting over who really created it.
5	From Chainmail to Character Sheets	The leap from faceless units to named characters doesn’t just tweak game mechanics—it transforms how players relate to stories and to themselves.
6	The Moral Panic	As D&D spreads, it collides with American fears about childhood, religion, and control, becoming the target of a full‑blown moral panic.
7	Corporate Dragons	Behind the dragons and dungeons, boardroom battles and bad bets nearly kill the company that birthed D&D—until Wizards of the Coast steps in.
8	The Digital Revolution	As computers, consoles, and the internet rise, D&D’s DNA spreads into digital worlds—and then flows back again to reshape the tabletop.
9	The Inheritors	Today’s players and designers—more diverse and networked than ever—take D&D’s tools and push them toward new identities, politics, and communities.
10	In Closing	D&D’s true legacy isn’t monsters nor mechanics, rather a new kind of community and a new way of imagining who we can be together.