There is no crime where torture is an acceptable punishment.

There is no crime where sexual assault is an acceptable punishment.

There is no crime where slavery is an acceptable punishment.

genuinely the funniest thing ive seen on reddit

In terms of conflict resolution gimmicks in tabletop RPGs, dice are always a classic, but I've also seen playing cards, tarot cards, party spinners, dominoes in both their matching-game and tip-them-to-make-other-dominoes-fall-over modes, coloured beads, coin flips, chess boards, dance-offs, stop-watches, Jenga towers, guessing games, public speaking, fire, knives, candy, baked goods, and in one notable case, a dildo covered in edible glitter which players compete to thwap with those little rubber sticky-hand things. I've played games which employ these devices in ways which emphasise random chance, games which employ them in ways which emphasise player skill, and a game whose method of resolving psychic powers was once criticised for affording unfair advantage to characters whose players are actually psychic. Though there's inevitably a sense of trepidation when pushing the boundaries of one's medium, I promise you, whatever goofy conflict resolution method you've come up with for your indie RPG probably isn't even the weirdest one to be published this week, let alone overall. The usual crowd is going to sniff and harrumph at anything that isn't "roll a single twenty-sided die plus modifiers versus a flat target number" anyway, so fuck 'em – do it for you.

What was the game who was "criticised for affording unfair advantage to characters whose players are actually psychic"? It sounds like an interesting mechanic

The first edition of Conspiracy X resolves the use of psychic powers using Zener cards, either by having the player attempt to predict which card(s) will be drawn from the deck next, or by having the GM draw one or more cards and mentally focus on their faces while the player attempts to determine their values by reading the GM's mind.

(In practice, of course, this is statistically equivalent to rolling a pool of ten-sided dice and counting successes on 9s and 10s, unless psychic powers are real, a matter on which the game's text takes no position.)

Do these dark academia mfers ever actually study shit or is this just larping for oxford

Well, now you've done it. You started thinking deeply about what the social and political infrastructures of your imagined world would have to look like for that weird porn scenario you came up with to make sense, thereby establishing a very specific set of mental associations, and now reading about residential zoning laws gives you a boner.

I also ship both the brothers with a fucking therapist

this is a callout post about the people in the Fiber Hell Discord

Their crimes; made me start watching Supernatural in the year of 2024

Me every single episode; what the FUCK

Ah, that explains the new side story.

This is how they got me.

I mentioned it would be fun to do like, a vacation fic, and the evil fuckers all went :)))))) Do you know what would be funny??? Do you know where it would be really funny to set a vacation?? There's a couple of Sad Boys who could use some adoptive parents and some shitty parents who could use some strangling!

Now I'm sitting here on season 4 like WHAT in the FUCK is GOING ON

Me; DEAN DIED???

Discord; okay which time

Me; .....WTF DO YOU MEAN WHICH TIME

Ooh boy...how far are you now?

The weird angel dude who gives me news on Tumblr just showed up

LMFAO if two angels can't find one fuckin witch Cas is going to shit his celestial britches the first time he meets Sys and the Lady

Are you planning on watching the whole thing, or do you have a stopping point in mind?

SOMEONE UPLOADED MY FAVORITE CELTIC ALBUM EVER AND I’M ACTUALLY CRYING.  We listened to this hundreds of times in the car when i was a kid, so the only copy I had was an extremely beat-up cassette tape that Dad copied and re-formatted dozens of times so it could be playable and now this- the sound quality is amazing I’m so glad this exists, bless you Barry Cranbell for figuring out Youtube.

Some More Irish Music Genres

So there’s about half a dozen posts floating around about how WEIRD Irish music is, but I thought I’d add my own, based pretty much on my Pandora list this evening:

MORE, BECAUSE IRISH (and scottish) MUSIC IS BATSHIT INSANE:

Hey now, you’re an all star

listen to what I orchestrated

SoundCloud

THIS IS FUKING AMAZING WHY CANT I SPREAD THIS EVERYWHERE I WANNA SHOW IT TO EVERYONE. LITERAL GOOSEBUMPS

composer IN progress????

NO, YOU ARE READY FOR THE WORLD. IN FACT, THE WORLD IS NOT READY FOR YOU

Have fun

The fun thing about the knights and knaves puzzle is that no matter what goofy variant you come up with, not only has it already been considered, some maniac has worked out the optimal solution. What if there's a third guard who lies or tells the truth at random? It's been done. What if the guards will only answer yes/no questions, and also for some reason they understand your language but refuse to speak it, and you don't know which of the two words they may respond with means "yes" and which means "no"? Literal thesis papers have been written on that one. Logicians are absolute freaks for these guys.

#in the beginning #smullyan created the model-organism of “knights and knaves” #and the DMs seeking puzzles and the mathematicians seeking problems rejoiced for a week (via @lorxus-is-a-fox)

As a slight nitpick, while Raymond Smullyan popularised the name "knights and knaves", a variant of the basic two-guards formulation is known as early as 1931 (i.e., when Smullyan was twelve years old), so he probably didn't originate it.

(The author of the 1931 variant, Nelson Goodman, claimed to have heard it from someone else, but as far as I'm aware he never gave details. My thoroughly unscientific opinion is that it probably isn't much more than a century old, if only because had the puzzle been floating around in mathematical pedagogy before 1865, Lewis Carroll absolutely would have made Alice deal with it.)

Given how incredibly clean Smullyan's "there are two guards" setup is and just how complicated Goodman's 1931 variant already is, my lukewarm history-of-math take is that there's likely some obscure, undocumented, and now-lost "outsider-art" tradition of relatively mathematically sophisticated logic puzzles/riddles, of which the "fork in the road" setup is one of the easier riddles in the prehistoric genre, and Goodman's 1931 puzzle is either a crowning example of the lost genre or Goodman's minor innovation on top of

Which is to say - it seems totally plausible to me that the fork-in-the-road riddle could have existed before the 19th century somewhere extremely rural and isolated (in India, which has a long history of logic and logical puzzles? in the Baltics or the Slav world, which have long traditions of riddle-games? in West Africa, with strong links to the Muslim world's mathematical history and a longstanding practice of oral recordkeeping and storytelling?) and just plain never made its way to Lewis Carroll in time.

I saw the suggestion put forth somewhere that The lady or the tiger (Stockton, 1882) served as an early inspiration for the knights and knave puzzle.

Stockton's version contains the choice, but not the clues nessecary to solve it other than by blind luck. This was frustrating enough that later generations of storytellers added the logic puzzle just to add some meaning to a story that is otherwise thoroughly annoying.

Hmmm. I remember when I was researching the history of humour, and zeroed in on the particular "question and answer" style joke, I ended up concluding that, (in current form), it specifically originated in British riddle tradition. Question and answer jokes, in the broader definition, most definitely go back way further and not specifically to the British, almost to the beginning of the written word, ("So he opened the other one"), but interpersonal jokes which require the politeness phrase of "I don't know", and where it is considered polite to make an actual guess, but somewhere between clever and rude to correctly guess the expected answer, have been shaped in some very specific ways by riddle culture. (And Q&A jokes have had a large impact on english one-liner style jokes) And British riddle tradition itself used to be a lot more trivia than lateral-thinking based, so the transition to, like, almost *entirely* lateral-thinking based was an interesting period, which happens vaguely around the year 1800, and by 1850 the riddle tradition could be considered as being pretty close to modern. (In about the 1840's is when we start to see apparently sincerely-proposed riddles, entailing discussion around the room before the reveal of the lack of actual answer and of the punchline, and thus the impacts on Q&A style jokes. ("What did Joshua do around Jericho?" "He marched around several times and then had a big blowout")) And if I had realized how young the Knights & Knaves riddle was, I definitely would've paid more attention as I was going through, because I've definitely seen *variants* of that idea in jokes and in riddles from around the 1800, but I'm hard pressed to find any examples again quickly, and see how closely they actually match up. "knickerbockers" magazine comes to mind as a source I'm associating with the half-remembered riddles/jokes.

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This is the most magical thing I've ever seen

My family has started calling my cat "the beast" which is very funny considering she's a 19yo arthritic old lady who needs help up and down the stairs. Not to mention she doesn't really meow any more, just sits and stares at you, and im the only one who can reliably guess what she wants, so my parents are constantly messaging me "The beast awakens... I know not what she desires 😥😥" i feel like the chosen prophet of an eldritch god

Nay, verily... I have noted the position of the stars, and determined rather that The Beast Hungers... for her nightly plate of wet food

@calamitytrios @shitposting-hobbits-to-gallifrey The people have spoken

Behold, The Beast

General reminder to the pagans out there:

Making a supreme goddess figure part of your spirituality? Great! Worshiping a mother goddess? Wonderful! If that brings joy and meaning into your life, excellent!

"Once upon a time long ago, people all worshiped a great goddess until THE PATRIARCHY conspired to overthrow her and replace her with a CRUEL PATRIARCHAL GOD" - that's pseudohistory and conspiracism; there's literally no evidence for it whatsoever, and it can and does drag people down the new age to alt right pipeline.

my one skill is expertly manipulating the shape of the eggs I’m cooking so that they fit perfectly onto my toast every time

Bow down to your king

I can’t stop outdoing myself

Remember that post? The one that said “what if we all have super powers but they’re so mundane we don’t realize?” That post? This is proof that post was right

Very Silly Concept: a show called "Accessibility Nightmares" but it's structured exactly like Kitchen Nightmares. An accessibility specialist goes to different establishments and helps them make their businesses more accessible.

The accessibility specialist asks why the door at the top of the small set of stairs has a wheelchair symbol on it. The owner replies that's the accessible bathroom. The camera zooms in on the specialist as they process this information.

A customer with a service dog comes in to a restaurant. The hostess tells them they don't allow dogs. The accessibly specialist looks over at the hostess like

And there are web accessibility episodes too. The accessibility specialist stares at the white text on the light pink background of the home page like

The specialist asks why not a single product picture has alt text, and the business owner says "Well I mean, it's makeup, why would a blind person be shopping for makeup?" The specialist just

The specialist asks the web designer how a screen reader user is supposed to complete the captcha portion of the password reset process when there is no audio alternative. The designer admits they don't know.

When you left this tag three days ago, I thought "that's so sweet, but no. No way this concept is even close to that popular."

[ID: Four pictures of Gordon Ramsay in various states of confusion. /end ID]

This is it. This is my job. This is what I do for a living. I make those faces and then I tell my uncaring monitor exactly what is wrong with this website and what the site owner needs to do to fix it with all the fucks I can’t put in official work documents sprinkled liberally throughout.

And now I will be picturing Gordon Ramsey when I do it.