just hallucinated only the bottom right panel and started giggling and decided i wanted to find the real thing to laugh about it again. and i couodnt so i had to go into my boyfriends dms and ask them if "do you have truckparts"
gonna be so real i did not realize the bottom was about purchasing and shipping automobile parts. I thought they were straight up intending to kill and dismantle the UPS truck like some auto mechanic apex predator.
Shortcuts to determine if an integer is divisible by:
This is a given.
If the last digit is divisible by 2 (a.k.a. even), then so is the whole number.
If the sum of the digits is divisible by 3, then so is the whole number. The recursivity of this means that if the sum has multiple digits, you can add them up again until you get a single digit and see if it's 3, 6, or 9.
Like the rule for 2, but check if the last two digits are divisible by 4.
If it ends in 5 or 0.
If the rules for both 2 and 3 apply.
No shortcut. Alas.
Like the rules for 2 and 4, but check if the last three digits are divisible by 8. (Yes, this pattern keeps going for 16, 32, etc.)
Like the rule for 3, but the sum of the digits (or the sum of the sum of the digits, etc.) must be 9.
#THIS POST IS WRONG 7 DOES HAVE A RULE FOR HOW TO TELL IF THE NUMBER IS DIVISIBLE#it's just. not a short cut#you're better off dividing it and seeing if you get a whole number than doing the method
Okay, so, basically, you remove the least important digit of the number (which is the first digit from the right), you double it, and then subtract it from the remaining number. If the number you get is still large, you do it again.
When you get more objective about the way nature is & away from weird anthropomorphic carnivore slander it is a little funny when the baby sea turtles hatch and every other animal in like a ten mile radius goes "oh fuck yum one million mini sliders"
[ID: a screenshot of the original post's tags that read, "#real turtleheads know this is a play on sliders (turtle emoji) which are a type of terrestrial turtle. but it's also tiny hamburgers #which seems apt. #this has been another episode of Joke Explainer" /end ID]
Keeping these actually. Necessary footnote for this post
Watching a jaguar casually walk up to an adult sea turtle headed back to the water after laying her eggs and eat it like why am I in my sea turtle violence era and why are they like this. Adult sea turtles aren't especially easy to eat in the water they'll swim around with shark bites taken out of them like they're just chillin. And then on land they just kinda
Also today I learned that since the jaguar scares off other smaller predators it's actually good for the sea turtle population if there are jaguars there. Cause less babies get eaten by Everything Else. I'm gonna be honest I didn't even consider that a jaguar could be on the beach
GAY BRITISH JOHNNY CASH: [realizing this bit is too many degrees of separation from the original and opting for a bait and switch punchline] I shot a man in reno just to watch him die
you have to be careful reading too many things that are good/smart/well-written bc then you encounter something that isnt and you get confused like ? why didnt they just make this good ? were they stupid
Once you've learned the spot the historical signposts, it's interesting how many "generically medieval" fantasy settings manage to miss the actual medieval period on both ends. They've got the Roman Empire rubbing shoulders with the German Renaissance, skipping directly from the year 500 to the year 1500 with nothing in between!
(The one consistent exception is, of course, the obligatory Vikings-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off culture, who legitimately are medieval, but nobody they interact with is, so you've effectively got Vikings with time-travelling boats raiding both Roman-occupied England and Renaissance Italy.)
"Oh, they skip the actual middle ages because it's too Christian" listen. If fantasy authors are willing to hold their noses and elide the explicitly Christian dimensions of both the latter Roman Empire and the fucking Reformation, they can deal with Christianity in the middle ages just fine.
Firstly, one thing I'd want to quickly go over as reference is what it actually means to say that a "stock fantasy setting" is more rooted in the late middle ages/renaissance than in earlier periods. Generally, the traits of these settings that are characteristic of this time are:
Aesthetics generally. Like, castles in a "stock fantasy setting" are usually these big ornamented things covered in towers and turrets (consider, say, Neuschwanstein Castle, which was itself an early modern nostalgia piece rather than a genuine Renaissance fortress), while armor leans more towards full heavy plate (like these 16th-17th century pieces, for instance). These are all classically late styles.
Likewise, your classic fantasy merchant city -- you know, your Ankh-Morporks, your Lankhmars, that sort of thing, with tangled crime-filled alleys, probably a network of scummy canals, a huge bustling port, a guild of thieves, all of it ruled over by dynastic merchants in fine brocade and velvet and heavy jewels -- that's very heavily inspired by the merchant cities of the Italian Renaissance like Venice or Genoa, or North Sea merchant cities like Amsterdam around that time or a little later, or, frankly, even early modern London.
Also, generally, urbanization. Roman civilization was very urban. Renaissance-era European civilization was very urban also, especially in places like Italy, the North Sea, and other areas rich in commerce. In fantasy, too, the notion that cities are major centers of life and politics remains -- merchant cities bustling with commerce, capital cities with the king's fancy castle, fortified cities with huge bloody walls, these are all recurring archetypes. Crack open, say, a D&D setting sourcebook, and that assumption that major cities or city-states are major focuses of culture and economy while rural areas are clearly in their orbits is fairly evident, I think.
Also, in my experience, medieval fantasy monarchies tend to be fairly centralized affairs, with powerful monarchic kings, the royal seat in the capital or the king's castle as the bustling focus of governance, and a tendency for the edicts from the king's person and the intrigues of court to be the driving focuses of political life. Also, a lot of intrigues in a classically corrupt court. This tracks fairly well for the late period, historically, where European kings put a lot of effort into centralizing and strengthening their authority, some more successfully (the Iberian kingdoms at the end of the Reconquista), some less so (Charles I of England). Absolute monarchy was less of a factor in earlier medieval Europe, which operate chiefly under a network of looser, less centralized feudal ties.
By contrast, what would these things equivalents in the earlier Middle Ages be like?
Castle-wise, the really early periods were the time of the motte-and-bailey, aka wooden palisades on top of earthen mounds. Later, you'd tend to see squatter, more fortified constructions for defensive purposes (take the Krak des Chevaliers as an example). Even well into the later middle ages, though, a typical rural keep or castle was often a fortified house or manor more than what we'd picture as a castle today.
Armor was usually dominated by chainmail, scale armor, and non-face-covering helmets (a knight of the Carolongian Empire, for example, might have worn something like a scale or mail shirt and a helm with earguards or a noseguard, but certainly not the "classic" knightly set of plate you usually see in fiction). In terms of helmet styles, for instance, compare this 11th-century nasal helm or these illustrations of 12th-century styles with later forms such as the classic "bucket helm" that was popular during and after the Crusades period. Helmets with more articulated shapes and visors came later. What's called a close or closed helm, for instance, like these ones, was mostly a 16th-17th century style, although antecedent forms were already common in the 15th. Even the barbute with its distinctive T- or Y-shaped visor slit was a distinctly Renaissance Italian thing.
(Like, as a practical example in terms of helmets, this reminded me of a passage in the first Dunk & Egg story where Duncan buys a great helm/bucket helmet, and it's described as coming across as a goofy-looking and antiquated choice when other knights all use visored and often very ornate close helmets. And this makes sense! Westeros is very explicitly based on England during the Wars of the Roses period, in the 15th century, by which point medieval armor and helmet styles had gone out of use and most armored troops wore jointed plate armor and visored helms.)
Religiously, monasteries were often the center of religious life and, for rural communities, often more important than distant bishopric seats. They were also centers of, among other things, record-keeping, writing, and brewing.
Cities. The middle ages proper were a very rural time -- cities existed, and exerted political and economic influence, but took a significant dip in both size and importance for a time. For a good few centuries the center of life for most people was the manorial system, where you had a local knight or lordling living in a fortified house or a small keep and providing protection to a town or two around this in exchange for material support. Self-sustaining religious communities like monasteries were also important. All of these, for a long time, would have basically self-supporting.
(Well, alright, that's also an oversimplification. In rural France-England-Germany, that'd be about right, sure. In northern Italy and in Flanders-Saxony, though, you start to see... not urbanization as such, but, let's say, townization early on in the system of the medieval communes, where farming and trading towns left isolated by the collapse of Roman-era state systems formed confederations for mutual defense. So the main form of urban culture in this timeframe isn't really centralized around a single big city but more along the lines of fifty towns who formed a loose alliance because they're afraid of bandits and robber knights.)
Government. Centralized states and nations weren't... really things for a long time. Feudal governance was based much more strictly on the notion of personal debts and obligation between rulers and those who administered portions of land for them. A feudal noble had obligations towards his king, but he also had a tremendous amount of freedom in running his own affairs and could have gone for the majority of his life without every showing up in the vicinity of his lord's castle -- the idea of, like, the royal court as the focus and center of political life wouldn't really crystallize for some time, and this degree of independence meant that negotiation and re-negotiation (read:testing how much you could ignore the king or going into outright revolt) were very common.
Also, the notion of national identity -- of saying "I am French, I am English, I am Italian" -- also didn't really exist (I'd recommend Liah Greenfield's Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity for a discussion of how this mode of thinking about group-and-land identity formed in the 16th-17th centuries). Before then, concepts of identity were either strictly local ("I am from this village"), based on loyalty systems ("I am from a village defended by Knight Whatshisname, who gives his tithe to Lord Whatshisface, who gives his tithe to King Whatshisproblem"), or based on religion ("I am Christian", "I am Jewish", "I am Muslim").
So, broadly, there weren't really "countries" the way that we think of them today, with clearly delineated cultures and borders and directed from a central capital. The most granular political units were the rural manorial keep and the free town, which gave their fealty to a larger lord or a grouping of peers, and the span and size of a kingdom or an empire was determined in large part by how many of these tiny units or groupings of tiny units you could claim tithe-right and allegiance from. And that's feudalism!
Event-wise, the Big Things in the medieval period proper were the Crusades, a series of primarily religion-motivated wars (or, well, religion-land-and-luchre-motivated wars, granted) and the Black Death. It really cannot be overemphasized how the terror of being struck by this mysterious dying dominated medieval thought for large spans of time.
One book I read recently which I'd recommend for a having a good look at how medieval people thought and lived might be Michael Flynn's Eifelheim... with the caveat that it's also a science fiction novel about first contact with aliens, but the medieval side of things is really well-researched and -written.
This is an autobiographical piece. Names have been changed for anonymity, but it's otherwise left be.
---
The class's first suspicion of Kevin was that he had, somehow, cheated his way up to this course. He just seemed perpetually confused, and strangely antagonistic of the professor. The weirdest example of this was when he asked what an ion was (in a third year EE class?), and was informed that it referred to any positively or negatively charged particle. It would have been strange enough to ask, but his reply of "Either? That doesn't sound right" sealed him in as a well known character in the class of 19 people.
The real tipping point in our perception of him during a lecture where the professor mentioned practical uses for a neutron beam, and Kevin asked if a beam could be made out of some other neutral material. When asked "Like what?", he replied "An atom with all of its electrons removed." When we pointed out that the protons would make that abomination extremely positively charged, he just replied with "So what if we removed those too?" and then was baffled when we informed him that would just be neutrons.
That's high school level chemistry. Not knowing it was so incredibly strange that I felt like something was off, so I asked him if he'd like to grab lunch. He accepted, we chatted, and I finally began to get a sense of his origin story.
See, Kevin wasn't a junior/senior electrical engineer like the rest of us. Kevin was, in fact, three notable things: A business major, a sophomore, and a hardcore Catholic. All three of those are essential to understanding his scenario.
What had begun all of this was actually a conflict with Kevin and his roommate. Kevin frequently had his fundamental belief in Absolute Good, Absolute Bad, and Absolute Anything pushed back on by his roommate, who was in STEM. Said roommate kept invoking quantum mechanics as his proof against Absolute Knowledge. Kevin was tired of having something that he didn't understand thrown at his convictions, so he decided to take a quantum course to settle things once and for all.
Despite not having any of the pre-reqs.
He'd actually tried to take quantum for physicists first, but the school's physics department wouldn't let him. It's actually pretty strictly regulated, because it is a mandatory class for physics majors. However, because quantum is not mandatory for electrical engineers, there aren't really any built in requirements for the class. It's just assumed that nobody would actually try to take it until their third year because doing so would the be the mental equivalent to slamming your nuts in the car door. Just, pure suffering for no good reason.
Apparently, the counselors had tried to talk him out of it, but if Kevin was one thing, it was stubborn. He'd actually had to sign some papers basically saying "I was warned that this is incredibly stupid, but I refused to listen" in order to take the class.
He was actually pretty nice, if currently unaware of how bad he'd just fucked up. I paid for the lunch, wished him the best, and reported back to the class discord. We'd all been curious about this guy's story, but now that I had the truth, I could share it with the world.
Feelings were mixed. Some people thought he was going to drop out any minute now. Others thought that he wouldn't, be also that convincing him to drop now, while he still could, was the only ethical thing. Others figured that a policy of non-interference was best: The counselors couldn't dissuade him, and if we tried to do the same, he'd probably just think it was STEM elitism trying to guard its little clubhouse. He'd figure out how hard things were, or he'd fail. Either way, it would help him learn more about the world.
We wound up taking the approach of non-interference. If nothing else, understanding his origins gave us more patience when he asked bizarre questions. He wasn't trying to waste our time, he was just trying to cram three years of pre-reqs into a one semester course. He did get a little bit combative sometimes, and we could tell that he was really wracking his brain to try and find some sort of contradiction or error that he could use to bring the whole thing down, but he never could.
First test came by, and he bombed it. Completely unprepared. He'd taken Calc I, but he didn't know how to do integrals yet (that was Calc II). Worse, he was far past the drop date. I imagine most people in his shoes would've stopped struggling. They'd realize they were fucked and just let themselves fail, at least salvaging their other classes grades in the process. Why waste resources on an unwinnable battle?
Kevin never asked questions like that. If he was stupid enough to try it, he was stupid enough to finish it. God bless him.
He invited me to lunch after the test and said that the class was more fascinating than he'd ever imagined, but he didn't know if he'd be able to pass it. He asked if I could help, and I said...maybe. I brought the request to the discord, and from the eight people there I got three volunteers who admired this dork's tenacity. He was in over his head, miles beneath the surface, but his fighting spirit was fucking glorious. If he was willing to go down swinging, we were willing to bust our asses trying to get him caught up.
Some of the stuff was just extra homework we gave to the guy. We told him he needed to learn integrals, stat. We sent him some copies of basic software that can be used to teach the basics of linear circuit equations, and he practiced that game like it was HALO. Just, hours sunk into it. Absolutely godlike.
He was still scrabbling for air at just the surface level of the class, but he'd gone from abysmal failure to lingering on the boundary between life and death. Other people in the class started to learn about Kevin's origin story, and our little circle of four volunteer tutors grew to six. Every day, he had someone trying to help him either catch up in some way, or finish that week's homework. He'd gone from being seen as a nuisance that wasted class time to the underdog mascot.
He was getting twelve hours of personal tutoring a week, on top of three hours of classes, on top of six hours of office hours, on top of the coursework. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that this kid was doing 40 hours a week just trying to pass this one single class.
Second test comes around and he gets a 60. He's ecstatic. We're ecstatic. Kid's too young to take out drinking so we just order a pizza and cheer like he just won gold at the Olympics.
After that second test, things hit another tipping point. With so much catch-up under his belt, he was able to focus a lot more on the actual material for the class. A borderline cinematic moment happened when I was trying to get ahead on the homework so that I could put more hours in on my senior project. Nobody else had finished it yet because it wasn't due for another week, so the specifics of the problem I was working on were still a mystery. I went to the professor's office hours and get some pointers, but he wasn't willing to give good hints when the HW wasn't due for another week or so. He said I still had time to think about it, which was true, but I wanted to be able to think about other things. Kevin had watched the whole conversation, waiting for his turn to ask the professor more simple questions, but when I left I got a text from him telling me to hop on zoom.
Kevin had finished it earlier, because Kevin started all of his homework the moment it was assigned. He needed to, in order to make sure that he could get it done on time. He'd finished it the day before, and was able to walk me through it.
From student, to teacher. I'm not exaggerating when I say that he probably saved me eight hours on that assignment. I could've kissed him.
A month or two later, we took the final. As soon as we were done, we six asked Kevin how he did. He was nervous, there was so much new material for him in this class that his retention hadn't been great. Us six were also a little stressed: We were going to pass the class, but the final was hard.
We waited for the results.
And waited.
And waited.
Finally, the scores were posted as a table, curve included. From our class of 19 people, 4 withdrew within the deadline, 4 failed, 1 got a C, 8 got B's, and 2 got A's. We could see that the curve for a C was set at 59.2% overall.
We called Kevin. He was crying. End score, 59.2%. Teacher curved the C exactly to his score.
It was a week into winter break so we couldn't gather the forces around for a party like last time, but we were all losing our shit. Kevin was losing his shit. He couldn't believe how stupid he was to try this course, he couldn't believe that six people busted their ass just to make sure he didn't die, and he couldn't believe that the professor basically just passed him out of sheer effort alone.
He said it was the stupidest thing he'd ever done, and while I doubt that, it was outrageously stupid. And yet, I've never been so invested in a fellow student before. I'm prouder of Kevin's C than I am of my own B. I was walking on sunshine for weeks after that. In theory, my senior project was building a functioning washing machine, but in practice, in my heart, it was helping Kevin pass Intro to Quantum for Electrical Engineers.
(And as an epilogue: No, he did not renounce Catholicism and become an atheist like his roommate had hoped. He did walk out changed. I think that being that wrong about something, and realizing it, was a pivotal moment for him. It's hard to be dogmatic once you realize that a lifetime of being wrong feels exactly like a lifetime of being right, right up until the last two seconds of it.)
For those who thought that this was Nintendo baiting people into posting videos for them to take down, (as I initially did, admittedly), it’s actually people posting pictures of YouTube takedown notices. Nintendo didn’t bait anyone...They walked into a metaphorical garden rake.
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
amandla
theartofmadeline
gummygunk
yousharknotpass
tangentwithtanner
