several times a day

an assemblage of many small parts

[mellifexfarm]

behold my ugly

[cryptotheism]

Parading his big stupid unmoving chrome body around like a sainted reliquary

[cilantrhoes]

[darkditzy]

happy pride month everybody

[cinemamind]

バラゴン

[3liza]

i gotta be real with you guys im just sort of stunned tumblr has been running an open-front ZenDesk form for tumblr TOS reporting this whole time that doesnt require any kind of validation except a fucking email address. this one fact alone explains every single "why did so and so get banned for no reason" event of the past X years. however it is equally baffling that i didnt notice it before now. i would say it is baffling they implemented it in the first place but like i said, the management of their website is verifiably not well

[pangur-and-grim]

[ex-bus]

Is that a pangur and grim reference

[pangur-and-grim]

wait you might be on to something

[bubbloquacious]

Please recommend your fav youtube or other channels explaining cool maths, and books, it would help me so much. I got *extremely* smart kids but I am not gifted in maths myself so I hope to throw stuff at them and see what sticks. In the sense of, 6yo going to university to find calculus is too easy. At the moment fractiles, hilbert curves, and square stacking problems are interesting but in 2 weeks, who knows. Nothing is too tough :)

Hi! That sounds like a very exciting parenting challenge. I have a whole bunch of channels I follow, see if there's any here you'd enjoy :)

suckerpinch - Tom 7 is a certified Computer Science Guy, and on his YouTube channel he makes these lovely videos on his weird programming projects, supplemented with silly drawings.

Sheafification of g - This channel has rapidfire irreverent presentations of math subjects, usually about category theory and its applications to logic and functional programming. This is probably my favourite math channel on YouTube right now, and it's the most similar to my own style of writing posts.

Sebastian Lague - He's an indie game developer who in recent years has found his stride making extremely well-presented videos on his own small exploratory projects called "Coding Adventures", usually on one specific technique in gamedev or computer graphics.

3blue1brown - I think everyone knows this channel, but it nevers hurts to include. Beautifully animated videos on all sorts of math subjects.

Numberphile - Very well known. Relatively short videos of mathematicians as they explain math subjects, oftentimes number theory, by writing with black markers on big sheets of brown paper. I don't watch all their videos but many of them are very interesting.

The Gray Cuber - Short animated videos on a variety of math subjects, usually either group theory or funny things you can do with numbers. In the past year or so he's really leaned into a very silly presentational style which does make me chuckle, and he has a knack for finding interesting ideas to really play around with.

Joseph Newton - Very lovely explainers on what I think are really interesting math subjects. Plus I like his voice.

optozorax - In my opinion one of the most exciting programming/math/physics projects currently on YouTube. They're investigating ways of modelling portals (like from the video game Portal), and how to make sense of what happens when they move or accelerate, or when they affect gravity, or pass through one another. Really really cool original work, including interactive web demos.

Mathemaniac - Animated explainers on math and physics, aiming to leverage visuals to create new intuition. I'm especially excited about his current series on differential forms.

Zundamon's Theorem - Two text-to-speech characters talk about math subjects in a sort of Socratic dialogue. Usually the subjects are interesting ways of looking at or generalizing familiar concepts from school mathematics.

Michael Penn - Presentations on lots of different math subjects, though oftentime he's running through either a long calculation or a proof of a single statement. Usually number theory or calculus, and always just him in front of a chalkboard talking to the camera. And that's a good place to stop.

webgoatguy - Cute short videos, working through solving elementary (meaning 'not a lot of theory necessary') problems while scribbling in a drawing program.

jacobneu - Animated explainers in a nice style, about topics related to homotopy type theory.

2swap - Animated explainers! These ones have some really stunning visualizations that help solve the presented problems. Also they're really into Connect 4 so there's a bunch of videos on that.

PolyaMath - Guess what, it's more animated explainers. Mostly about solving certain interesting puzzles, often about geometry.

[prokopetz]

Did you play AD&D? I can't remember how old you are, so hopefully that's not too offensive. If so, was a typical game really as hostile as people say it was?

That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".

A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!

In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.

The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.

A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.

In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).

It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.

Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?

The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!

These kids purchased the repackaged survival modules along with all their other D&D books; having no frame of reference, they assumed that these represented what a "standard" D&D adventure was supposed to look like – and since they weren't experienced players with whole binders full of pre-generated backup characters at their fingertips, the result was a lot of seemingly unfair total party kills, and a lot of kids concluding that the previous generation's GMs must have been objectively insane.

[stephenleasheppard]

There is an additional amusing point of order here, which is the answer to the following two questions. I once had a discussion with someone in Gary Gygax's gaming group, who was involved in early TSR work a bit. Allow me to paraphrase my questions and his answers.

Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?

"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"

Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?

"No, why would it?"

[sabotflask]

One of my favorite anecdotes about early D&D, from Blog of Holding:

"It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.

"Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?

“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.

"Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.

"The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.

"Gary and his players couldn’t believe that the tournament players had been so incautious. But, to be fair, none of those tournament groups had played in Gary Gygax’s game. They had learned the rules of D&D, but they had no experience of the milieu in which the book was written. Of those nine groups that had learned D&D from a book, only one played sufficiently like Gary’s group to survive thirty seconds in his dungeon."

[contemptible-scoundrel]

ADVENTURE IS CALLING...

DO YOU PICK UP THA PHONE

[orteil42]

given the current climate this pride especially i feel i must mention that i love my trans friends, i stand with trans people in the fight against transphobic legislation and those who would enforce it, and this blog is not a good place for you to be if you do not vibe with that

[3liza]

why is pjackk back unbanned?

Post by @3liza · 1 image

💬 1  🔁 0  ❤️ 60 · reference post about the "phantom report bug" · this post is not rebloggable because i need to be able to update it and ed

^^^ i spent all night and yesterday compiling information about a "phantom report bug", where people are getting emails from tumblr support about TOS reports they did not file. pjackk was banned off one of these phantom reports, i told tumblr support about it, and now he's unbanned. i think @garaks-padded-bra was also banned erroneously off a phantom report, so hopefully that will get reversed soon as well

PLEASE CHECK YOUR EMAIL FOR PHANTOM REPORT EMAILS. if you spot any, even if theyre old, tell me about them so i can add them to the list (linked above), and report them to tumblr support. POLITELY. tumblr support wants to fix this.

[goodgirl-inc]

[venhediss]

[magicfriend1000000000000000]

[comment-tube]

[angryopossum]

[creekfiend]

I'm so glad that that truncated fucking ran-into-a-wall-at-speed tadpole-ass looking squirrel only lives in high altitude forests in Borneo bc this means I am extremely unlikely to encounter one in my day to day life. thank god

[tuftedpygmysquirrel]

Hello.

[creekfiend]

DID YOU MAKE THIS BLOG SIMPLY TO TORMENT ME

[tuftedpygmysquirrel]

I can go upside down.

[creekfiend]

WHERE IS THE REST OF YOU