Month: May 2020

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

motheatenscarf:

So in Goblin Squad D&D yesterday, our Barbarian had just… the stupidest, DUMBEST, most terrifying, absolutely godlike thing happen to him.

This is a story of numbers, but it’s still beautiful.

We were fighting a dragon.

The dragon is hopping around while the Barbarian is just racing around trying to catch up to her

Dragon finally decides, no, really, fuck specifically THAT ranger and goes hog fucking wild on me (I LIVED!) but holds still long enough for the Barbarian to finally rage and LEAP ONTO HER BACK and go STAB

Dragon sees this and goes, “Oh. Sick.” 

and just goes VERT

Pro: I am not tanking anymore

Con: She instantly moves FOUR HUNDRED FEET STRAIGHT UP INTO THE AIR…. with our  raging Barbarian holding on for dear gottdamn life

One round later, she’s another 160 feet up, still getting stabbed by a Barbarian who has somehow held on, now getting attacked by ballistae and we’re all starting to get CONCERNED

Because if they take that dragon down, that is 560 feet our Barbarian is also falling out of the sky, and he is not attuned to the ONLY THING WE HAVE that can save his fucking life from that height

I’m sitting there doing math, trying to determine if 560′ is enough to kill him outright, silently being very grateful we still have exactly ONE diamond to rez his ass

and the dragon just goes VERT again, ANOTHER four hundred feet in the air

The Barbarian, now finally free from any potential collateral, cackles, as he is at long last, unshackled by the restraints of his conscience.

He has a tattoo, you see, which allows him to cast Fireball once per day

centered on himself

with a save which he autofails

But he is a tiefling.

And this fucker still has 160 hit points by the time it’s done exploding. But the explosion sends him backward as he fails the Athletics check to continue holding on and he begins to fall.

He falls for 3 fucking rounds and we can only watch our friend fall to his certain death.

The DM… has to roll ninety six d6s

let that number sink in for you

NINETY. SIX. D6s. They normally roll with real dice, you can hear the clickety clack through the discord, but  they had to get out a fucking app for this because they do not OWN ninety. fucking. six. d6s.

It comes out to 402 fucking bludgeoning damage he takes on impact as he leaves a Barbarian shaped crater in the center of the forum, 10 feet wide, 5 feet deep, a cloud of dust and broken brick shooting out as he lands.

And do you know what happens next?

Do you know what the fuck we see as the dust settles?

We hear a cough, and a see a thumbs up come out of the crater. 1 hit point left.

402 damage. Raging as he landed, halved to 201. He had 160HP left, it only brought him down to -41, not enough to kill him outright (you have to get equal to negative your max HP), AND HE’S LEVEL 12, which means he has access to Relentless Rage: the first time you’d drop below 0 HP, if it doesn’t outright kill you, you have to roll a Con save of 10 or higher to instead drop to 1 HP. He rolled an 11.

He fell almost a THOUSAND feet from the air off the back of a fucking dragon, took NINETY SIX D6 FALL DAMAGE, AND LIVED.

His arena name lived up to the hubris of this fucking swan dive. All hail ALTANIN, THE UN-FUCKING-BREAKABLE

Tags:

#D&D #storytime #death tw? #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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argumate:

While mask wearing has become far more common, it is far from universally accepted. Instead, whether to wear a mask or not has become a new front in America’s bitterly partisan culture wars.

In broad terms, wearing a mask has become associated with the progressive side of politics. Not wearing one has become a symbol of conservative defiance.

Americans are compelled to do this for every possible thing huh

 

eightyonekilograms:

It used to be that paragraphs like the above would make me wish for a deadly plague to kill everyone, but now we know that even a deadly plague is not enough. There is no escape from this hell.

 

brin-bellway:

I don’t know, from where I’m standing these days (at a Canadian customer-facing “““essential””” job where maybe 10% of customers are masked), [convincing 50% of the population to wear masks in exchange for giving up on the other 50%] vs [what we have now] seems like a genuinely difficult choice.

(especially if you can convince a half that’s disproportionately young and therefore disproportionately likely to be asymptomatic carriers…)

Though I find it a bit confusing that the people known for actually giving a shit about purity and contamination are the people *against* masks. I mean, I suppose there’s a distrust-of-hostile-authorities thing at play here, but that seriously outweighs the filth?

@rustingbridges​​ replied:

are masks not mandatory in your region? my area is mixed politically but last time I was at the grocery store I saw one person not wearing a mask (out of maybe 50-100 people)                            

God, I fucking wish.

*Overall* I think Canada has been handling this better than America (though it’s certainly no South Korea or anything), and overall the Ontario conservative government has been fairly competent (certainly relative to American conservatives), but they are not pushing masks anywhere *near* hard enough.

My last five-hour shift, I was literally the *only* person wearing a mask. I saw a co-worker (the one who made fun of me the first couple times I showed up masked, and you *bet* your ass I isolated a clip of that for when I’m no longer dependent on this place for food money and can afford to rat them all out to corporate [link]) *carrying* a surgical mask on her way out of the store, but she didn’t wear one on duty. Not one customer was masked.

A couple shifts previously a pair of (non-masked) people walked in, looked at the menu for a minute or two, and walked back out, and the franchise owner insinuated that they’d left because I’d scared them off with my mask-wearing. (Though it’s a good sign that he’s stuck to insinuations: it suggests that he doesn’t think he can get away with overtly telling me not to wear it, that he *believes* I’m in the right, even if he doesn’t like it.) (Also, the customers–actual customers, who actually bought stuff, they’re not your customers by right just because they walked into your store dude–immediately before *and* after that pair *were* masked.)

A shift or two before that a (non-masked, age maybe fifties or sixties) customer tried to *commiserate* with me over “having” to wear a mask and gloves at work: I told her that while the *gloves* were mandatory (they always have been), “masks are not mandatory, but they didn’t *stop* me”, and she made some backtracking noises about “whatever makes you feel safer”. (You know what would make me feel safer? If *you* were wearing a mask. Surgical masks have saved my bacon–including against pathogens–too many times for me to ever believe the claims that they’re *useless* for the wearer, but I’ll absolutely believe the claims that it’s far *more* effective to convince your *interlocutor* to wear one. Also I’ve since had to switch to cloth masks for work, rationing my few remaining surgical masks for the fortnightly Errand Days where I’m probably coming into contact with more people.)

The last three or so fortnights I’ve finally started seeing other grocery shoppers with masks. Uptake is somewhat higher there, probably because even non-assholes need groceries, but I’d guess it’s only maybe 30%.

—

Maybe New York has had the seriousness of this beaten into them more by having so many cases? I was gonna say “official stats are that about one out of every thousand people in my regional municipality† has had COVID-19 (though tests are rationed enough that who knows what the real stats are)”, but apparently even with our growth being more linear than exponential it’s up to 1/550 now. Although it’s majority nursing-home residents and staff, so I suppose if you don’t have contact with nursing homes you should re-weight your probabilities accordingly. (OTOH, how *much* of it being majority nursing-home people is that nursing-home people are high priority in the test triaging?)

—

†Like a county, but with more of the government operating at county-level rather than town-level.

Tags:

#I’ve been thinking about this so much that it’s hard to keep track of #which of these things I’ve said publicly and which I’ve said privately and which I haven’t said at all #I hope I’ve included the correct amount of context‚ let me know if I haven’t #replies #rustingbridges #our home and cherished land #home of the brave #politics cw #illness tw #covid19 #in which Brin has a job #discourse cw? #rants

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

argumate:

While mask wearing has become far more common, it is far from universally accepted. Instead, whether to wear a mask or not has become a new front in America’s bitterly partisan culture wars.

In broad terms, wearing a mask has become associated with the progressive side of politics. Not wearing one has become a symbol of conservative defiance.

Americans are compelled to do this for every possible thing huh

 

eightyonekilograms:

It used to be that paragraphs like the above would make me wish for a deadly plague to kill everyone, but now we know that even a deadly plague is not enough. There is no escape from this hell.

I don’t know, from where I’m standing these days (at a Canadian customer-facing “““essential””” job where maybe 10% of customers are masked), [convincing 50% of the population to wear masks in exchange for giving up on the other 50%] vs [what we have now] seems like a genuinely difficult choice.

(especially if you can convince a half that’s disproportionately young and therefore disproportionately likely to be asymptomatic carriers…)

Though I find it a bit confusing that the people known for actually giving a shit about purity and contamination are the people *against* masks. I mean, I suppose there’s a distrust-of-hostile-authorities thing at play here, but that seriously outweighs the filth?

Tags:

#I used to enjoy my work! #it wasn’t a Career (and I didn’t intend for it to be) #but it was easy and it helped people #now it’s dangerous and composed entirely of assholes #(it’s still rare for people to be rude to me in the *ordinary* sense) #(but under the circumstances just showing up is an asshole move) #reply via reblog #home of the brave #politics cw #discourse cw? #illness tw #covid19 #in which Brin has a job

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Why we at $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

{{Title link: https://saagarjha.com/blog/2020/05/10/why-we-at-famous-company-switched-to-hyped-technology/ }}

eightyonekilograms:

The whole thing is gold, but if I had to pick just one line it would be

as we seek to grow further it’s clear that a complete rewrite of our application is something which will somehow prevent us from losing two billion dollars a year on customer acquisition

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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tototavros:

being adjacent to cancel-heavy (or at least, cancel-anxious) groups for a few years has unfortunately infected me with an ability to write shitty thinkpiece theses, the two today so far have been “male/female designations of cables are transphobic” and “my sharona is pedophilic”

 

rendakuenthusiast:

I had the same thought re: cables some years ago but without the assumption that transphobia is bad or that people shouldn’t resist trans activists who try to make them stop referring to cables that way.

 

alexanderrm:

In the same vein of thought where wanting to know a stranger’s assigned gender at birth as soon as you meet them is equivalent to wanting to know what’s in their underwear or their private medical history, maybe there’s a hot take to be had that we should call them “penis” and “vagina” cables, which takes no longer to say, and is what we actually mean when we say “male/female” cables.

 

tototavros:

That would work, except no way in hell am I going to ask “Hey, anyone got any usb-vagina-wall-outlet-penis or micro-usb-penis-wall-outlet-penis cords?” in the office slack

 

rustingbridges:

I wouldn’t say that in the office, but on the other hand my girlfriend will absolutely live to regret your post

 

brin-bellway:

Huh. @tototavros, you *would* be willing to call them “male” and “female” in the office slack? I wouldn’t be comfortable with that myself: to me “male” and “female” feels like the barest fig leaf over the obvious genitalia references, still very crude overall.

(And indeed, “WTF, why are you referring to them so crudely” was my very first thought the first time I heard someone refer to them that way in my mid to late teens. I was boggled that she was not calling them “prongs” and “outlets” (sometimes “plugs” and “sockets”, though “plug” can be ambiguous as it is also an umbrella term) as I considered to be the norm, and even more boggled when I worked out that *most* subcultures in my meta-cultural neighbourhood consider comparing plugs to genitals to be the *standard* way of referring to them.)

 

shieldfoss:

According to google, the correct terminology ( in Danish ) translates into “male connector” in English (and I’ve been using male/female connector when writing in English since forever)

So

I mean

Yeah I’d absolutely use the correct technical terminology in places where I wouldn’t use “penis” and “vagina” terminology, even though it’s clearly just a figleaf for the exact same meaning.

2ac1cb8339202706457181b26f2d4331dd37cc3b

(see also)

—

…you seem upset that my dialect has different terminology for this, and that it is non-obvious to an outsider that male/female dialects (or languages) allow their terms in *every* context including contexts famously scrupulous about not discussing sexuality?

(From my perspective, it would not have surprised me in the least if male/female dialects had some painfully circumlocutious politically-correct euphemism *specifically* for use in offices: indeed, it seemed the most likely outcome. Since my native dialect is already so politically correct, I’d figured I could afford to wait until I actually *got* an office job to confirm this: I could just ask somebody for a double-outletted adapter and they’d teach me the local euphemisms then.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #language #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #gender #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #discourse cw #scrupulosity cw? #nsfw text

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~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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tototavros:

being adjacent to cancel-heavy (or at least, cancel-anxious) groups for a few years has unfortunately infected me with an ability to write shitty thinkpiece theses, the two today so far have been “male/female designations of cables are transphobic” and “my sharona is pedophilic”

 

rendakuenthusiast:

I had the same thought re: cables some years ago but without the assumption that transphobia is bad or that people shouldn’t resist trans activists who try to make them stop referring to cables that way.

 

alexanderrm:

In the same vein of thought where wanting to know a stranger’s assigned gender at birth as soon as you meet them is equivalent to wanting to know what’s in their underwear or their private medical history, maybe there’s a hot take to be had that we should call them “penis” and “vagina” cables, which takes no longer to say, and is what we actually mean when we say “male/female” cables.

 

tototavros:

That would work, except no way in hell am I going to ask “Hey, anyone got any usb-vagina-wall-outlet-penis or micro-usb-penis-wall-outlet-penis cords?” in the office slack

 

rustingbridges:

I wouldn’t say that in the office, but on the other hand my girlfriend will absolutely live to regret your post

 

brin-bellway:

Huh. @tototavros, you *would* be willing to call them “male” and “female” in the office slack? I wouldn’t be comfortable with that myself: to me “male” and “female” feels like the barest fig leaf over the obvious genitalia references, still very crude overall.

(And indeed, “WTF, why are you referring to them so crudely” was my very first thought the first time I heard someone refer to them that way in my mid to late teens. I was boggled that she was not calling them “prongs” and “outlets” (sometimes “plugs” and “sockets”, though “plug” can be ambiguous as it is also an umbrella term) as I considered to be the norm, and even more boggled when I worked out that *most* subcultures in my meta-cultural neighbourhood consider comparing plugs to genitals to be the *standard* way of referring to them.)

 

tototavros:

Yes, mostly because I don’t know how to refer to them otherwise

(gf has informed me that male = connector, female = port works but i think that’d be too confusing)

#plug and socket are even more ambiguous imo

(see also)

—

TBH, it was pretty unnerving to learn that the prong/outlet dichotomy is not a widespread norm. Like, what *else* do I think is just how things are, until someday somebody who isn’t culturally SJ has no idea what I’m talking about and I fall face-first into an inferential crevasse?

@eightyonekilograms, I’m intellectually aware now that a great many dialects consider this terminology unremarkable (though I’d thought offices might be unusually strict, at least enough to make it uncomfortable on the part of the *speaker* even if none of the listeners actually cared), and while I generally don’t use it myself I try not to let my “this is strange and distasteful” reaction show. (I don’t think I even said anything about it to the *first* person, and she was likely too distracted to see the look on my face.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #language #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #gender #nsfw text #scrupulosity cw?

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

tototavros:

being adjacent to cancel-heavy (or at least, cancel-anxious) groups for a few years has unfortunately infected me with an ability to write shitty thinkpiece theses, the two today so far have been “male/female designations of cables are transphobic” and “my sharona is pedophilic”

 

rendakuenthusiast:

I had the same thought re: cables some years ago but without the assumption that transphobia is bad or that people shouldn’t resist trans activists who try to make them stop referring to cables that way.

 

alexanderrm:

In the same vein of thought where wanting to know a stranger’s assigned gender at birth as soon as you meet them is equivalent to wanting to know what’s in their underwear or their private medical history, maybe there’s a hot take to be had that we should call them “penis” and “vagina” cables, which takes no longer to say, and is what we actually mean when we say “male/female” cables.

 

tototavros:

That would work, except no way in hell am I going to ask “Hey, anyone got any usb-vagina-wall-outlet-penis or micro-usb-penis-wall-outlet-penis cords?” in the office slack

 

rustingbridges:

I wouldn’t say that in the office, but on the other hand my girlfriend will absolutely live to regret your post

Huh. @tototavros, you *would* be willing to call them “male” and “female” in the office slack? I wouldn’t be comfortable with that myself: to me “male” and “female” feels like the barest fig leaf over the obvious genitalia references, still very crude overall.

(And indeed, “WTF, why are you referring to them so crudely” was my very first thought the first time I heard someone refer to them that way in my mid to late teens. I was boggled that she was not calling them “prongs” and “outlets” (sometimes “plugs” and “sockets”, though “plug” can be ambiguous as it is also an umbrella term) as I considered to be the norm, and even more boggled when I worked out that *most* subcultures in my meta-cultural neighbourhood consider comparing plugs to genitals to be the *standard* way of referring to them.)

Tags:

#nsfw text #language #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #reply via reblog #gender #discourse cw?

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

rustingbridges:

ok but @official-kircheis @candleprism @voxette-vk @invertedporcupine and anyone else who ranked bread so lowly – what kind of bread are you eating?

actually I’m curious about this in a general sense. what kind of bread do people really eat

I didn’t actually reblog that meme thread but my preference ranking is [potatoes, pasta, bread, rice], so:

The example of bread I had in mind when ranking them was Loblaws white baguettes. Although, the kind of bread I actually had most recently was Farm Boy garlic bread, which is much better than plain white (even Furlani garlic bread is better than plain white). Not enough to get it a higher ranking, though.

Don’t get me wrong, all four of these starches are very good, it’s just that potatoes and pasta are even better.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #food #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #I might go have some mashed potatoes right now #I hear there’s some leftovers in the fridge