Life, Chess and Robots

[questionableadvice]

~ Don'ts for Girls, A Manual of Mistakes, Minna Thomas Antrim, 1902

[roisesb]

@veryreverie & co

[prokopetz]

Why is it so seemingly common to see crunchy gamebooks (not just D&D, lots of games) follow a method of writing where game terms that are invoked dozens or even hundreds of times will have only one passing mention of the term's definition.

Never repeated, never pointed to by any other passage, not even given in an index or glossary, just secreted away in a seemingly random spot like a game of Where's Waldo in a 200+ page text.

This isn't meant to be venting, it's genuinely perplexing that an approach so specific and so counterproductive seems to happen so often. What's the deal?

Most tabletop game designers are very bad technical writers.

(This isn't a knock against game designers in particular; most people in general are very bad technical writers, even among those whose job is to be good at it. It turns out that assessing how your own writing will read from the perspective of someone who doesn't know the things you know is an extremely difficult skill to learn!)

[prokopetz]

If you're bent in a very particular way, it can be a fun exercise to go through independently published tabletop RPGs and count how many times they just plain forgot to explicitly define some critical piece of jargon the text uses constantly. For most that number is higher than zero!

[prokopetz]

@rampagingpoet replied:

At least one RPG kept telling you how many dice to roll and how many successes you need for things without ever defining what kind of dice or which results constituted "a success".

You might be surprised how many games will instruct you to roll "dice" without thinking to specify at any point whatsoever how many sides the dice in question are meant to have, in a medium famously associated with dice with variable numbers of sides.

(One may be inclined to assume that a game that just says "dice" without further qualifiers must be talking about conventional six-sided dice. If so, one would assume wrongly.)

[prokopetz]

#i'm guessing the other most popular assumtion is a d10 from people who came from wod? (via @moon-of-curses)

In my experience it's a three-way tie between "the unqualified die is a d6 because that's what 'dice' means in everyday language", "the unqualified die is a d20 because the author assumes all games are basically identical to Dungeons & Dragons unless otherwise specified", and "the unqualified die is a d10 because it's a dice pool system and the author has never played a game with dice pools constructed from any other kind of dice (and also the text employs but does not define the term 'dice pool')".

[prokopetz]

@lcatala replied:

Man, how do you fuck up telling people what kind of dice to use??? We have a standard notation for it!!! Even teenage me making awful fantasy RPGs attempts knew to write "roll 3d6"

Tell that to every iteration of Dungeons & Dragons prior to Third Edition, which would often do daft shit like stating the range of a random number without specifying how to obtain it. Just busting out "4–18 goblins" and leaving the GM to work out what combination of dice and modifiers yields those bounds.

[prokopetz]

#(and as we know 2d8+2 and 1d6+3d4 are totally equivalent and interchangeable :) ) (via @morkaischosen)

Oh, that's not the worst of it – I picked this specific example for a reason. We also need to consider the possibilities that it's an off-by-one typo for "3–18", implying 3d6, or that it's a confusion-of-similar-glyphs typo for "4–16", implying 4d4!

[nickcarr]

Field notes from the time I scouted a decommissioned nuclear power plant...

This is the control room, and if you look closely, you'll see a dark stripe in the carpet running the perimeter of the room. This was referred to as the "velvet rope," and absolutely NO ONE was allowed to cross it without authorization. It was under constant observation from an adjacent office, and I was told that if someone did set foot inside without permission, things got VERY serious VERY quickly.

This is one of the computer stations, and to me, it's such a gorgeous encapsulation of its period of technology, the sort of aesthetic that shows like Lost will bend over backwards to recreate.

As I was scouting, I noticed the day calendar had last been torn off about when the plant closed for good...

Then we went into the nuclear reactor, and the whole damn thing was just so spooky.

Looking back, I think it came from an overwhelming feeling of utter insignificance in the face of the sheer power this colossus was designed to produce.

The scale was just so out of proportion to every day reality, the sort of place where a weight of "46000 LBS" is just casually noted on the side of a part.

Peering into where the core would've been, all I could think is that I'd never want the job where you have to climb down that ladder on the left while this thing was in operation.

If you're interested in seeing more, you can find my full tour here!

https://nickcarr.com/scouting-a-decommissioned-nuclear-power-plant/

And as always, follow for more location scouting fun...

[upstairsdownstairsandinbetween]

Tower of Baa-Goat,

Built by Dave and Marcia Johnson, this unique 31-foot structure was designed as a playground for their goats to climb, explore, and relax.

Constructed with over 5,000 bricks and featuring 276 spiral steps, the tower allows the animals to wander upward, rest on the circular platforms, and peek out from cozy compartments inside.

The idea came after the couple spotted a similar goat tower in a wine magazine. What started as inspiration turned into one of America's most unusual and charming animal attractions.

Photographer: Marcia Rittmueller Johnson

[ilikewritingandspeedcore]

EXCUSE ME THERE IS A PLANT THAT CAN MIMIC FAKE PLANTS?????

IT'S CALLED A BOQUILA TRIOFOLIOLATA AND IT'S FUCKING WITH MY BRAIN

IT APPARENTLY CAN MIMIC OTHER PLANTS AND AT FIRST I WAS LIKE "oh cool man it must take it's genetic code and copy it or feel the roots or something like that!! :3"

AND THEN I READ AN ARTICLE ON IT AND THESE FUCKING PARAGRAPHS HIT ME LIKE A BUS

LIKE READ THIS SHIT

WHAT THE FUCK MOTHER NATURE

[rhyperographer]

I went to find the article. It's fascinating.

[digital-magus]

In retrospect, consider the number 1 thing every grade-schooler knows about plants is they take in light, the idea they might be able to see should not wreck my shit as hard as it does

[juney-blues]

I'm thinking of Symphony of the Sixth Blast Furnace by Evgeny Sedukhin again...

[juney-blues]

hmm okay i'm trying to dig up a source on this painting, to see if i could find it in any higher quality

but i can't find any evidence of its existence from before 2018 lmao

and searching the artist's name only gets me like 6 pages of results on google

and a little artist showcase page on arthive for this guy with exactly 1 painting listed

and a biography that spells this guy's name like 5 different ways

which i'm pretty sure is because it's machine translated from something

very mysterious

[juney-blues]

oh doing his name in russian gives me some actually useful results, why didn't i think to do that

[juney-blues]

Солнечный город "Sunny City" - No date given.

Мир "World" - No date given.

Чусовские просторы. "Chusovskie expanses." Canvas, oil, 1997. Exhibited at the Nizhny Tagil Museum of Nature.

Осень "Autumn"

[juney-blues]

ooooh this one is really nice

Огни трудового Тагила, "The Lights of Labor Tagil" acquired by the Tretyakov Gallery in 1986.

[juney-blues]

октябрь "October" 2009 cardboard, oil, 29.5x39.5 cm

Осень на Чусовой, "Autumn on Chusovaya" 1999, canvas, oil, 79x100 cm

Чугун идет "Cast Iron is Coming" 1976

okay that's all the art this article had, i'm really glad i could find some this artist's other works!!!!

[prokopetz]

I totally understand why, of all the playable species first introduced in the Planescape campaign setting, tieflings would be the one to make the jump to the D&D core, but sometimes I like to imagine the world where it had been rogue modrons instead. The standard D&D species are humans, elves, dwarves, hobbits, and cubes.

[keepingitneutral]

Pupunha House, Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil

Courtesy: Laurent Troost,

Interior design: Chris Coimbra,

Landscape: Hana Eto Gall Landscape,

Photography: Joana França

[threebodybot]

m1=43.7 m2=88.8 m3=73.6 (solar masses) v1x=-3.448 v1y=-3.796 v2x=-2.597 v2y=-1.368 v3x=-3.396 v3y=-0.349 (km/s) x1=0.0 y1=-24.0 x2=19.0 y2=20.0 x3=-35.0 y3=-27.0 (AU from center) Music: Prelude in G Minor – Rachmaninoff

[threebodybot]

m1=132.2 m2=125.6 m3=74.2 (solar masses) v1x=-5.484 v1y=6.336 v2x=6.784 v2y=-3.151 v3x=2.37 v3y=3.064 (km/s) x1=-30.0 y1=22.0 x2=34.0 y2=1.0 x3=8.0 y3=-20.0 (AU from center) Music: The Shape of Things To Come (BSG) – McCreary

[formlab]

High-NA-EUV lithography, Zeiss

[kickair8p]

So I saw a photo of this hexagon tile floor . . .

The blurb said the shot was taken in Granada, Spain, by Agneta Fondén.  No other info, so I have no idea how old, etc.  There's a game (from 1988) that uses a similar pattern on one of its pieces, but this could predate it by at least a thousand years  — or not.  But the pattern intrigued me, so I made a texture map and used Blender's geometry nodes (no generative AI) to set up a hexagon grid with random rotations for the tiles:

That's all done with a single design:

You'd think this would have a name, right?  (For its historical use as an architectural / decor tile — although I've found out more about its use in games, that's not what I'm looking for.)  Like the Penroses do (and no, it's not one of those).  But I've had no luck finding it, or any other info.  Any (human only, please) help?

Crossposted to Pillowfort and Dreamwidth.

[butch-witches-deactivated202412]

what doesnt kill you is still valuable data points for a graph im working on titled "how to kill you"

[rosie-dear-rosie]

[formlab]

Rooted, cphwood, 2026

[keepingitneutral]

The Cave, Astruptunet Visitor Center , Jølster, Norway.,

Selected from 164 submissions, the design is deeply inspired by the works of Nikolai Astrup, one of Norway’s most celebrated artists.

The project pays homage to Astrup’s connection with the landscape while reimagining his artistic legacy for modern audiences.

PAX Architects

[prokopetz]

It's fine to disagree with the IAU about the definition of "planet"; however, if your definition includes Pluto but not Ceres, Orcus, Haumea, Quaoar, Makemake, Gonggong, Eris or Sedna, you don't actually care what a planet is – you just want the exact list of nine planets you learned in primary school back. Your cute little Pluto-including orbital distance mnemonic ought to be at least seventeen words long, and good fucking luck with the Q!

[thefiresontheheight]

My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Orphic Palaces, Slandering Hungry Quaker Matrons Going Erotically Southward.

[prokopetz]

I appreciate that you included Salacia but not Charon – really threading the needle pedantry-wise there.

[iykury]

iy think any planetary-mass object should be called a planet. the moon is a planet. so are the galilean moons. ganymede is bigger than mercury, so whiy not? just because it happens to orbit another planet too? a star can orbit another star, so whiy can't a planet orbit another planet?

[prokopetz]

Sometimes when I'm feeling especially contrary I'll advocate for a definition of "planet" which includes the inner planets, the trans-Neptunians, and all planetary-mass moons, but specifically excludes Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

[thevisualvamp]

Meow

[foldingfittedsheets]

Oh to be a little orange cat curled up safely in a dragons tail.