if we’re mutuals feel free to use me as a powerful summon during a tough battle
Apologies to those who have mentioned other subjects. Honorable mentions: paleontology, philosophy, and math
Poetry in iambic pentameter!
Extra honourable mention!
“why don’t you just…?” the answer is either money or anxiety
or the Bone Pharoh
Your sixth most recent emoji is how your guardian angel feels about you
horses are inherently funny because they come in so many sizes. like draft horses
this looks so fake. this horses skull is bigger than the dudes entire torso. this horses NECK is thicker than the dudes entire BODY.
and then at the opposite end of the spectrum you have shit like this shetland pony which ALSO looks fake
what the hell happened to this thing who bred this line of ponies to be so ridiculous
fun fact, while most mini horses and ponies look fat, like the shetland above, some are genuinely just scaled down versions of regular horses
you look at this and think “wow that’s a horse i bet I could ride that” but you’d be wrong because this is an american shetty and it’s the size of a large dog
also fun fact, this is the world’s smallest horse, thumbelina

and this is the largest horse ever, brooklyn supreme
I would fucking die for Brooklyn Supreme
ABOUT TO GET SICK FROM EXCITEMENT
JUST POSTING MY TAGS OUTRIGHT BECAUSE HOLY SHITTTTTTTT HOLY FUCK OH MY GOD
Autism uprising
I’ve been skimming John Francis Daley’s (director on D&D: Honor Among Thieves) twitter and I continue to be so completely blown away by the movie’s commitment to practical effects and/or minimized CGI where feasible. I mean holy shit look at all this
Practical effects mean that the creators were largely unionized.
A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where music education has been made mandatory.
“We are helping our students become more competitive in an increasingly sound-filled world.”
Educators, school systems, and the state are put in charge of this vital project. Studies are commissioned, committees are formed, and decisions are made— all without the advice or participation of a single working musician or composer.
Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious black dots and lines must constitute the “language of music.” It is imperative that students become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed, it would be ludicrous to expect a child to sing a song or play an instrument without having a thorough grounding in music notation and theory.
Playing and listening to music, let alone composing an original piece, are considered very advanced topics and are generally put off until college, and more often graduate school. As for the primary and secondary schools, their mission is to train students to use this language— to jiggle symbols around according to a fixed set of rules:
“Music class is where we take out our staff paper, our teacher puts some notes on the board, and we copy them or transpose them into a different key. We have to make sure to get the clefs and key signatures right, and our teacher is very picky about making sure we fill in our quarter-notes completely. One time we had a chromatic scale problem and I did it right, but the teacher gave me no credit because I had the stems pointing the wrong way.”
In their wisdom, educators soon realize that even very young children can be given this kind of musical instruction. In fact it is considered quite shameful if one’s third-grader hasn’t completely memorized his circle of fifth.
“I’ll have to get my son a music tutor. He simply won’t apply himself to his music homework. He says it’s boring. He just sits there staring out the window, humming tunes to himself and making up silly songs.”
In the higher grades the pressure is really on. After all, the students must be prepared for the standardized tests and college admissions exams. Students must take courses in Scales and Modes, Meter, Harmony, and Counterpoint.
“It’s a lot for them to learn, but later in college when they finally get to hear all this stuff, they’ll really appreciate all the work they did in high school.”
Of course, not many students actually go on to concentrate in music, so only a few will ever get to hear the sounds that the black dots represent. Nevertheless, it is important that every member of society be able to recognize a modulation or a fugal passage, regardless of the fact that they will never hear one.
“To tell you the truth, most students just aren’t very good at music. They are bored in class, their skills are terrible, and their homework is barely legible. Most of them couldn’t care less about how important music is in today’s world; they just want to take the minimum number of music courses and be done with it. I guess there are just music people and non-music people. I had this one kid, though, man was she sensational! Her sheets were impeccable— every note in the right place, perfect calligraphy, sharps, flats, just beautiful. She’s going to make one hell of a musician someday.”
Waking up in a cold sweat, the musician realizes, gratefully, that it was all just a crazy dream. “Of course!” he reassures himself, “No society would ever reduce such a beautiful and meaningful art form to something so mindless and trivial; no culture could be so cruel to its children as to deprive them of such a natural, satisfying means of human expression. How absurd!”
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, a painter has just awakened from a similar nightmare...
I was surprised to find myself in a regular school classroom— no easels, no tubes of paint.
“Oh we don’t actually apply paint until high school,” I was told by the students. “In seventh grade we mostly study colors and applicators.” They showed me a worksheet. On one side were swatches of color with blank spaces next to them. They were told to write in the names. “I like painting,” one of them remarked, “they tell me what to do and I do it. It’s easy!”
After class I spoke with the teacher. “So your students don’t actually do any painting?” I asked.
“Well, next year they take Pre-Paint-by-Numbers. That prepares them for the main Paint-by-Numbers sequence in high school. So they’ll get to use what they’ve learned here and apply it to real-life painting situations— dipping the brush into paint, wiping it off, stuff like that. Of course we track our students by ability. The really excellent painters— the ones who know their colors and brushes backwards and forwards— they get to the actual painting a little sooner, and some of them even take the Advanced Placement classes for college credit. But mostly we’re just trying to give these kids a good foundation in what painting is all about, so when they get out there in the real world and paint their kitchen they don’t make a total mess of it.”
“Um, these high school classes you mentioned...”
“You mean Paint-by-Numbers? We’re seeing much higher enrollments lately. I think it’s mostly coming from parents wanting to make sure their kid gets into a good college. Nothing looks better than Advanced Paint-by-Numbers on a high school transcript.”
“Why do colleges care if you can fill in numbered regions with the corresponding color?”
“Oh, well, you know, it shows clear-headed logical thinking. And of course if a student is planning to major in one of the visual sciences, like fashion or interior decorating, then it’s really a good idea to get your painting requirements out of the way in high school.”
“I see. And when do students get to paint freely, on a blank canvas?”
“You sound like one of my professors! They were always going on about expressing yourself and your feelings and things like that—really way-out-there abstract stuff. I’ve got a degree in Painting myself, but I’ve never really worked much with blank canvasses. I just use the Paint-by-Numbers kits supplied by the school board.”
Sadly, our present system of mathematics education is precisely this kind of nightmare. In fact, if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done— I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul- crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.
Everyone knows that something is wrong. The politicians say, “we need higher standards.” The schools say, “we need more money and equipment.” Educators say one thing, and teachers say another. They are all wrong.
The only people who understand what is going on are the ones most often blamed and least often heard: the students. They say, “math class is stupid and boring,” and they are right.
—Introduction to "A Mathematician's Lament" by mathematics educator Paul Lockhart. Full essay here:
>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.
>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.
>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.
>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.
>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.
>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.
>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.
>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!
>Lemmings problem now solved.
>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.
>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.
>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.
>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.
>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.
>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.
fastest reblog in the west
i love when flowers close in the evening like good night girl i love you sleep tight
#HELLO IT IS TIME FOR MY FAVORITE FACT#which is that sometimes when the flowers close there is a little bee inside#spending the night all cozy and safe in his little nook#specifically male squash bees do this in squash flowers#look at a field of squash or pumpkins at night and there are little guys snoozing in there#this knowledge brings me such joy that i must share it with the world (tags via @scribefindegil)
Im gonna eat the bees
in the evil world im seriousbeaste
guys what would your url be if you were in the evil world
Anyone got the i explode you 100000 explosions as a love language pls i need to explode someone
Making a shitty one-page RPG called Oh Shit It’s the Killer. The premise is simple: you’re a high schooler spending the weekend in the woods with your besties. The Killer is there also. He is trying to the Kill you
I say shitty not to demean the quality of my work but because it’s less an exercise in good game design and more an attempt to induce paranoid internal conflict that turns into murder (in game of course). It has like three mechanics and one of them actively encourages you to murder the other PCs
Great news!
It’s done
I put like three braincells into this, so if there’s anything about it that outright sucks, uh. Sorry not sorry, L + ratio + let’s use the 1-page restriction as an excuse for any unfun mechanics
“What if there was a game about being a genre-savvy slasher protagonist murdering their way to the role of Final Girl?”
“Sounds cool when exactly does the PvP start”
“character creation”
With 10 point font I can fit the last mechanic I want to include, Gear, adding another layer to the backstabbing and manipulating mess that is character creation.
honestly a solid one-page RPG, and it isn’t another Lasers and Feelings hack, so points for that as well! I like the gradually ratcheting up difficulty, it is reminiscent of Pandemic.
the only point that feels like it needs elaboration is “multiple people can win by teaming up to defeat the Killer”. is this the same is the Final Stand mechanic, a skill check for each player? and is there a limit to when it can be triggered? otherwise the winning strat is blatantly to team up and attack the Killer as soon as possible while their power is low. horror-movie narrative logic says premature attempts to attack the killer should fail, but reveal something important about the nature of the threat. I suppose the narrator’s job is to forestall such an attempt by inserting as many skill checks as possible and offering bad decisions.
Yeah attempts to attack the Killer only truly work during the Final Stand. Notably, that’s also when throwing your buddy to the killer is a wayyyy easier option than making those checks
I can’t promise that the system math, like, works. I didn’t test it at all. For a more drawn-out and difficult experience you could switch to 3d6 + bonuses, keeping the three highest, have the Killer’s power range from 4 to 18, the difficulty of killing an ally be 11 (or 12 if you want to discourage infighting a little more, and the number the Final Stand begins at be 18. That’ll usually result in longer games with probably only one winner.
@that-house I could not stop thinking about this all day
(edit: updated image - minor tweaks)
This fucking rules.












