jadeserpentcladinashenglories

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You could also think of it as a lookup table, which I think might be a more intuitive approach for some people.

Like, fundamentally, the problem is that you want to get a random result selecting between three things; those things could be actual numbers, but in a TTRPG context they could be what kind of fish is on a menu, or how badly a character was just injured, or whatever.

However, the output device you're assuming that people will use for randomization can produce six results, all of which are unique and equally probable. (The reasons to assume this are complicated and outside the scope of this particular conversation, but do exist.)

How do you easily get the former from the latter? Well, as established by the fact that this is a conversation to begin with, there are a few ways. But one of them is to treat the outputs as arbitrary symbols and then just map them as desired.

In the case of a d6, 1-3 are already mapped as desired by default. That leave you with 4-6, which also have an inherent ordering when not remapping them, so the obvious option if employing that approach is to simply remap them in that preexisting order, resulting in 4 being equivalent to a result of 1, 5 a result of 2, and 6 a result of 3.

(This is, incidentally, probably why I find that method more intuitive and easier to remember than the divide and round up approach despite not having a math background, and in fact having dyscalculia. That wants me to either actually do arithmetic - not hard arithmetic, even for me, but still - or remember three groups of remappings with a much more tenuous connection to the underlying ordinality rather a single group operating strictly according to it. Remembering that results displayed on the die which are already part of the group you want to compress into do not necessarily correspond to that result in actuality seems particularly likely to trip me up!)

Why do games so often model a d3 with "1d6, divide by 2 and round up" rather than the neater-feeling "1d6 mod 3"? [Not particularly about CAIN, but it's an example]

The modulo operator isn't particularly intuitive for folks without a math background. In practice, nobody's really doing the math at the table every time they roll a d3 – both the divide-and-round-up formula the mod-3 formula serve simply as mnemonics to help remember which faces to read as which values, and 1/2 = 1, 3/4 = 2, 5/6 = 3 is just plain easier for a lot of folks to remember than 1/4 = 1, 2/5 = 2, 3/6 = 3.

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

france is non-canonical

fact

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imagining an alternate timeline where shakespeare wrote a play about king arthur. we would be so unwell

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

It’s my birthday tomorrow and I’m pretty certain I’m going to have a migraine from stress (we had a gas leak in the basement. Yes again. It’s fine now. They fixed it.) so if people could go ahead and show me pictures of their pets, cool rocks or really just anything that makes you happy I’d love that 💖

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

Both Selfish; you each lose 2 points

You Selfish, prev Cooperative; You gain 2 points

You Cooperative, prev Selfish; You lose 1 point

Both Cooperative; You Each gain 1.5 points

(ps make sure to say what you voted)

Making this post long so you have to scroll to see prev's tags.

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

I also wouldn't be entirely surprised if someone were to try and make a Paizo -> Pazuzu joke and landed on "Paizuri" as a malapropism of the latter - it sounds fairly legitimate as a name for a demon prince, if you don't know what the term actually means!

Seeing one of my posts reblogged with a very incongruous set of tags can be a fun puzzle – like, how did this happen? Sometimes it's obviously a bot, particularly if the tag in question is a trending one. Sometimes it's clear from context that it's a real person creeping my archive who was trying to reblog the post immediately preceding or following and misclicked (i.e., the tags would have been topical for the post one spot further down). Sometimes it's less clear; just the other day somebody reblogged a post about dice math in tabletop roleplaying games and tagged it #paizuri, and when I checked it wasn't even a porn blog, which raises several questions.

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Have you considered the possibility that Mochi has learned how to rig rolls?

Given how much of feline play and social behaviour are imitative in character, I feel like it shouldn't come as a surprise to gamers that their cats want to roll the shiny math rocks, too. Like, you demonstrated that this is a form of play and let them watch you do it. They're participating!

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Tumblr stubbornly refusing to load made this very amusing to me. Just, like, yep. Those sure are low-visibility conditions!

Snow and fog

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

I’m paying to force seven thousand strangers to see a photo of my late husband having fun with his dog. Tumblr Blaze is totally worth it. XD

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

Hello,

I hope you’re doing well! My name is Jaber, and I’m reaching out to ask for your support in helping me evacuate my wife, Menna, and our 2-year-old son, Hashem, from Gaza. They are currently stuck in an extremely difficult situation due to the war, and I am desperate to find a way to save them and ensure their safety so we can be together again.

I also lost the small business I built with my brother due to the bombings, so I am trying to rebuild our lives from scratch. If you could take a moment to check out our campaign, perhaps share it or donate, it would mean the world to us. Our previous campaign was closed, and the funds were returned to you because of internet outages and not responding to the inquiry email 😔.

Thank you so much for your support 💖

(Verified campaign – please check the details at the end of the story).

I wasn't remotely expecting to get reached out to myself (this blog is tiny), but... Here we are. Can't help directly, unfortunately, but I can at least get it in front of the few people following me?

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

I just accidentally made un-tea?????

I made green tea, but I forgot there was an old bag of chai in the kettle, so I mixed chai water with decaf green tea, then I mixed in like a half table spoon or something of that honey from the dollar store that they aren't legally allowed to call honey because there's too much corn syrup in it and some almond milk and a single drop of coffee creamer because we ran out and???? It tastes like??? Nothing????

It has LESS flavor than my tap water! HOW do you EVEN-

I think I made a flavor that's only perceptible to shrimp, that's the only explanation

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

UK ADULTS IT IS TIME AGAIN TO SHOUT AT YOUR MP.

It is about that Wes Streeting plans to make the ban on puberty blockers for specifically trans children and not cis children undergoing precocious puberty permanent.

Advice on what to put in your letter, with sources, is available here:

You can and should personalise it as much as possible, but there's nothing wrong with C&Ping most of the text from the doc and adding a couple of sentences on your own experience/views.

Mine, below the cut:

I am writing to you to ask you to oppose the permanent ban on puberty blockers, for the following reasons:

The ban was implemented by the previous and current Secretary of State for Health and Social Care in an apparent response to the Cass Review, which itself did not directly call for such a ban;

The review however marked all observational studies as poor and itself only conducted a systematic review, which under the GRADE II methodology is classed as very poor, as has been noted by a Yale study on the metholody of the review;

According to NHS figures, a typical waiting time for a child to be seen by a gender specialist is 6 years. If they turn 18 before being seen, they then progress to adult services, where they face another 6+ year long waiting list (this information was obtained via a freedom of information request to the NHS https://docs.google.com/document/d/1neOdLdAPHD6wTikLi9s7Y1AFxrOR9FZQjoMvxKIyJGk/edit?tab=t.0).

The inability to access timely treatment, even for serious cases, leads many to obtain puberty blockers via private healthcare, an avenue of access that has now been removed by the ban.

The ban therefore currently leaves transgender children with no medical treatment options for gender dysphoria within the UK, forcing those who can afford it, to take their children overseas for treatment, and leaving those who can’t with no medical pathway.

As a transgender adult, I am well aware of the acute, often suicidal distress suffered by transgender children undergoing a puberty which does not align with their experience of their own gender. It is not inconceivable that blocking transgender children from accessing this healthcare will increase suicide rates in this group.

A preprint paper by Goldsmiths lecturer Dr Natacha Kennedy (Kennedy, 2024) examines the effects of the ban, using a survey for the parents of young transgender people after the ban was implemented. The parents responding to the survey commented that the ruling seemed to have emboldened transphobes, particularly transphobic politicians and media, by making transphobia more respectable:

“She feels as though the government and media hates her. It’s disgusting that our country is doing this to children.”

As part of this, there has been an increase in delegitimizing language, such as referring to transgender children as ‘gender questioning’:

“It seems since the ban following the Cass Review that it has given politicians, the government, the press and public endorsement to try to further reduce trans youths’ rights and even the word ‘trans’ or ‘transgender’ is being removed from the narrative and there seems to be an erasure of using the word ‘trans’ for youth and it has been replaced with Gender Questioning Children. My child is not gender questioning, they are transgender and have been out for over 9 years and living as themselves. They know who they are and it hurts terribly when people doubt that or don’t accept it.”

The results of the survey show the lack of treatment options has already had a horrifying effect on children and young people’s mental health. Parents noted:

“I have a child who has been suicidal, self-harming and has been unable to leave the house.”

“My child was suicidal and has self-harmed many times as a way to express her emotional distress at the change in her access to gender affirming care.”

“Distraught. Devastated. Distressed. She had already been through the experience of having her healthcare access stopped after the Bell judgement - she had been due to start blockers that week and they were instantly stopped. This deeply affected her trust in adults responsible for her care, and had a knock on effect on relationships with teachers, club leaders, the GP etc.”

The paper also shows that parents and families have been severely impacted by the ban. They feel powerless to protect their children and abandoned to deal with the impacts alone:

“I am so worried about puberty. I think about it at least once a day. I am deeply concerned that if she struggles then we are helpless.”

“It has caused direct damage to my mental health by causing panic and confusion. I was left to support a child whose mental health changed for the worst overnight (literally). There was no support for her or parents. There was no warning. I felt confused and desperate and also totally unseen.”

“Watching my child suffer and struggle needlessly due to the decisions made by people who this has zero impact on is single-handedly the hardest thing I've ever had to do as a mother.”

One parent noted that their daughter was now frightened of being outed at school and potentially stabbed because she will go through the wrong puberty:

“I am so afraid for her. She is in stealth at school, afraid of being stabbed and now she will undoubtedly go through the wrong puberty for her.”

With the rise in hate and transphobia, this ban may well put children and young people at physical risk from their peers, which is more dangerous than any safety issues from puberty blockers.

Much as anti-immigrant rhetoric from public sources in the UK has embolded violent racism, so a government which is seen to withhold support from transgender children emboldens violent bigotry against them. We have already had one despicable, very widely-publicised murder of a transgender teenager in this country. It falls upon us all to prevent any more.

The ban is not firmly based on medical recommendations or evidence. The Cass Review remains controversial, has been criticised for its quality by various professional institutions and is still being critiqued and analysed. Banning puberty blockers is a politically motivated and scientifically unjustified response. The UK is an outlier in implementing a ban and goes against the expert opinions of many professional associations and nations worldwide. Several other countries, including Australia and France, have conducted reviews of their own finding that puberty blockers are a considerable help to transgender children.

Some instances of precocious puberty have been treated with puberty blockers for the past 50 years, with no discernible side noticed. By this point if there was a serious issue, it would be endemic. Contrary to their presentation as being a recent and experimental innovation, Puberty Blockers have been used in the treatment of cisgender children since the mid 70’s and transgender children since the late 90’s, with no discernible epidemic in side effects. We have decades of observational studies which show that for 90% of people transition is the right course of action and even for the 10% who detransition, only 3% of them detransition because they’re not trans at all. (Numbers are from the preliminary results of the world's largest review of detransition rates in the world, the North American Dare Study.) A decade-long study of 200 trans children which showed no decline in mental acuity, was ignored (Arnoldussen et al., 2022).

The Cass Review was conducted without the assistance of Gender Specialists and Endocrinologists due to a perceived bias, that in itself should be cause for concern. Imagine a review of natal services in the UK excluding specialists in that field. Yet, members of SEGM, a designated trans hate group (Southern Poverty Law Centre, n.d.), participated in the NHS Working Group on Gender Dysphoria, which helped to create the Cass Review (https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/eoDownloadDocument?pubId=&eodoc=true&documentID=136692)

I therefore ask you to get in contact with Mr Streeting and to urge him to lift the ban, before more children and young people are hurt.

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

My Furnace Broke :(

Hi kids, it's your favorite storytelling chicken, and my Furnace has decided to die. It also decided to take the A/C unit out with it.

This is both very expensive to fix, and also kind of urgent: the more observant of you may have noticed that it is November, and getting onto winter here in the Rockies.

Look at this little man, huddling on my feet for warmth.

I have *some* emergency funds, but not enough to cover even a temporary fix, and that's also the fund that vet, medical, and car repair bills come out of, all of which I've had too much of this year.

I'm currently pitting four HVAC companies against each other to get the best offer possible, and getting the paperwork done for state subsidies, refunds and other discounts, but I still need your help.

Thank you all, everything you can do helps.

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

Birders: do you ever wonder if this happens?

Original on my site | Patreon

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

...now I wanna hear your Cheese Carving Lecture

trick or treat :D

You get:

A Cautionary Warning Question!

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

Remember to breathe water, everyone! (You were asking a fish, so... That's what you wanted, right? ...Right?)

if you have not drank any water yet today, this is your daily reminder that you are so cute. You're so pretty. Don't let anyone let you think you aren't beautiful. keep sparkling on, superstar