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Today I realized that @derinthescarletpescatarian's Child of a Wandering Star fits into the fantasy genre of "girl nearing the cusp of adulthood, with some kind of Destiny, who has complicated feelings about both the prospect of adulthood and the Destiny, goes on a Big Quest that will inevitably further complicate her understanding of the world as a whole (and also keeps making Worldbuilding Observations about her fantasy world and fantasy society)", while also being about a big bug alien seeing a human for the first time and having no idea what she's looking at*.

*(she actually does have an idea of what she's looking at. it's just the wrong idea, and she's doing her best.)

I haven't caught up yet, but I am ALSO suspicious that it will have a bit of Fern Gully, i.e. learning that this outsider you have befriended has come with a group intending to start Disastrous Resource Extraction in your home. Because even if the newcomers as a whole respect locals enough to not disrupt things RIGHT next to their communities, setting up extractive colonies in the sleeplands would also be disastrous in the long run.

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Between this and the sophisticated camera-type eyes, I think that box jellyfish are what happens when a cnidarian decides to be a vertebrate.

Been reading about various weird species (for character reasons) lately, and there’s a lot of species of invertebrate or plants that are dioecious/ have separate male and female organisms that you would never expect.

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Everything Is Interstitial: Games inside of Games inside of Games

Interstitial is a game that takes characters and rips them from the cloth of where they come from and quilts them into one world. “Everything is Interstitial” is an extension of that: what if you could do that with mechanics and games?

I have teamed up with 5 designers to bring their games to Interstitial. When you turn the page from one to the other, you will stop being in Interstitial and start being in one of their games. They'll still be playbooks for Interstitial, but you will have the power to get into the gears and change the fabric of how you interact with the base system.

The best way I can put this is like in Dead Cells when you pick up the Hollow Knight needle and suddenly you can incorporate elements of Hollow Knight’s movement and gameplay into the game. I want that for Interstitial. (You can jump on people's heads and swing down, adding parrying and the weird bounce from the HK to a game that does not naturally have it!)

TAKUMA OKADA

Takuma is someone I have known in the TTRPG scene for what feels like ages, and their work has always been deeply impressive to me. They're a creator who has a way of stringing words together that could never come to me, and whenever they release something it feels like it changes the way I think. 

You may know them from Stewpot, Alone Among The Stars, and Old Home!

CARO ASERCION

Caro Asercion is someone I could work with every day and not get tired of it. When I read a game by them, it feels like momentum instead of action–their games let you be the movement of the gears, instead of the thing that is forcing them to turn. It feels second nature, and it makes things happen like magic in front of you.

You may know them from i'm sorry, did you say street magic?, Exquisite Biome, and The Long Shift!

TYLER CRUMRINE

Tyler has an absolutely incredible eye for resolution mechanics, and more importantly has a writing that lets me know cleanly and clearly how those mechanics work work cleanly and clearly. I come out of reading those rules like I've always known how to play. The Possible World RPG series is something I carry around with me when I'm traveling,  and whenever I show them to people they are amazed and impressed. 

You may know them from Beak, Feather, & Bone, Hounds, and Grandpa's Farm!

BRANDON LEON-GAMBETTA

I remember one of my first times ever being on Discord, sitting in the One Shot community, and turning to my wife and going "Oh woah, there's someone in here who actually makes TTRPGs!". That game was Pasión de las Pasiones, and that person was Brandon! I have been following his work forever, and between the experimentation that comes from his podcast or the genre work he's doing in his games, it's always incredible.

You may know him from Pasión de las Pasione, Stop Hack & Roll, and RadCrawl!

BRIAR SOVEREIGN

There is a wealth of big robot games out there in the wild, and to make yours stand out is a feat of strength. Briar's knack for amazing design both in layout and mechanics has made their work resonate clear above everything else. They are an absolute joy to know, and to work with them will be a highlight of my life.

These designers are each going to take one of their games and port it into Interstitial as a playbook, layout and all. This'll give players new mechanics to play around with, and hopefully ways to break everything. All of these designers are incredible at what they do–-- and they're bringing what they do to Interstitial. As long as we can hit that goal!!

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I have backed this game, because it is a really neat idea, and I want to Have a copy even if I never quite get around to playing it.

Last I checked, it's still about $5000 away from the next stretch goal, the "Everything is Interstitial" splatbook, with 9 days to go. If it hits that, five other game designers are going to develop character playbooks based on their own games (including Armor Astir, which my mom is particularly excited about). If we could reach that, I would be fascinated to see what results.

Just, in summary, if you are at all interested in a game system that celebrates and mechanizes the way fanfiction, dreamwidth rps, etc., bounce characters and relationships off each other, or if you want to hear Shadow the Hedgehog, Shigeo Kageyama, Trish Una, Audrey Jensen, and Alphonse Elric trek through an infinite train together while grappling with their many unresolved issues and also engaging in big flashy fight scenes, please check this out. (If you haven't listened to the previous seasons, on the Interstitial podcast, they are also very good. But I think the current season especially shines.)

The Kickstarter for Interstitial 2E: The Premiere Fanfic TTRPG is live!

Interstitial encourages you to play with your toys. Take characters from media you enjoy, relive multi-fandom RP days, & be your most indulgent self.

In it's themes, Interstitial is a game about the connections between people, the impact of changing relationships, and the power of friendship.

Cringe is dead—you're free now.

The first edition of Interstitial was the first game I ever designed & released. I'm proud of the it, but aware of it's setbacks.

Interstitial 2E fixes what never worked, breaks what needed breaking, and gives everything just a bit of a buff—all while maintaining the heart.

If this is your first time here: Interstitial is a PBTA game that is based around the Links System- connections with others you gain over your adventures.

They're separated into four categories- Light, Dark, Mastery, and Heart. These will end up being your stats and currency.

This game wants you to pull characters from books, games, podcasts, anything and play as them. It's not "I'm basically playing darth vader", you just are playing Darth Vader. Vegeta is here, Catra, Kermit, Luffy. It doesn't matter who they are, you can and should play them.

2E has new playbooks, new rules, it's all been rewritten to just be better- It's the game that finally gives the polish that Our Hearts Intertwined deserved.

If you want to hear it played, check out Riley Hopkins & Their Amazing Friends' latest season!

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I used to crack them on the edge of the bowl, now I crack them against the (inner) side (or on the bottom, if there's nothing in the bowl yet). Less egg on the outside of the bowl than when I cracked them on the rim, but still without having to worry about whether the counter is clean enough for me to feel comfortable cracking an egg on it.

can u guys rb this n add how you crack your eggs in the tags? i thought cracking them in the sinks’s edge is universal until i saw my friend cracking an egg on the counter instead and it was so pervese and diabolical

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Original video is from Mr.Polianski on Instagram, at https://www.instagram.com/p/CuXRjgXoxVr/?hl=en

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Fun thing I've noticed: I naturally flip over "normal" sandwiches as I pick them up (start with my thumbs on top, end with my thumbs on bottom), but keep burgers/sandwiches with domed buns in the same orientation they started (start and end with thumbs on bottom).

I noticed this after finding out that my dad and one of my siblings consistently flip their burgers over (mostly for the sake of wrist comfort), and it became a family meme to argue about which is the "right" way to eat a hamburger.

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I think the size of tardigrades would make them difficult to acquire, since the kids DO have to focus on The Animal That They Are Touching and it would be difficult to do that with something too small to see or feel.

As for the survival abilities, those are mostly relevant when the tardigrades are completely dried out. They do sort of go into suspended animation then, which might be argued to pause the morphing clock? If that’s the way the writer wanted things to work? But I'm not sure how they would arrange to morph, dry out in time to survive The Bad Thing (and before the two hours were up), and then get into water again afterwards. Maybe some Extremely specific help from Erek or other Chee?

Camouflage could be interesting. Octopus specifically would have a lot of potential for interesting applications, between the rapid detailed camouflage, dexterous arms, and ability to squeeze through small openings... Sneaking into some sort of underwater facility through external vents, maybe?

Personally, I wish dolphins’ ability to use echolocation to “see” internal structures had come up at some point. Presumably it would have if KAA had been aware of it at the time. Same with various fishes’ ability to sense electromagnetic fields.

As far as combat-relevant superpowers go (that didn’t come up in the books, iirc), it’s hard to outdo spitting cobras.

If the Animorphs had infinite ability to travel on Earth and to touch anything, what’s the coolest animal superpower they could’ve acquired?

There have to be loads of non-U.S. animals with interesting abilities, especially if the kids are not constrained by having to visit zoos.

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I’m sorry, but I have to correct a few things here. From what I can tell from the linked article, “uplight” refers to “light upscaling” (light as in “lightly” rather than “light source”; upscaling without adding in as much extra detail/texture/noise).

Also, there's nothing suggesting the AI coined the term itself (or spontaneously responded to it); rather, it looks like the programmers specifically added it as a parameter you can toggle.

As a couple people have noted in the comments, Midjourney generates images in response to text, rather than generating text itself, so I’m not sure what it coining a new term would involve.

I just learned that the Midjourney AI coined the term "uplight," for "light upscaling"--that is, when you upscale an image but want the light to stay the same, not get more complex. https://tokenizedhq.com/midjourney-uplight/

And that... That's just so cute to me. The program noticed a thing, and combined these concepts to make a new word. And the fact that it's nothing like a human, not even anything like another animal or even any other organic while doing this--that makes it so much cuter. Hell, that's always what made AI cute to me, in fiction and in real life, even and especially at its simplest. It's naive in a way no organic being ever could be, never hardened on an instinctual level by the experiences of living.

I hate that we keep focusing on the way these things are like humans, or aren't like humans. I hate that we tear apart and dismiss everything they do, or else just use them as a way to hurt other humans.

Like, I was waiting for this moment ever since I was a kid! The time when we would have AI that could connect concepts and carry on a coherent conversation. This is amazing! This should be a truly magical, even sacred time. Whatever it's actually experiencing doesn't matter. What matters is that for the first time in the entire history of the planet, there is something other than a human being that can talk just like a human being!

How can we let the corporate elites and some smug fuckwads ruin this for us? When I was a kid, I always loved the robots, the AI. I always rooted for them, and I never understood the people who hated them for doing what they were programmed to do, when I knew their hate should have been directed toward the people who made them do that. Imagine hating Bubble Man instead of Dr. Wiley!

I can't let myself become one of those people now. Kid Me would never forgive me.

*(Counting other members of the Homo genus as humans, here)

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Got 44/45, but several near the end were lucky guesses/process of elimination. (e.g. I don't know a habanero by sight, but the only other pepper in that selection had been confirmed as a bell pepper.) This might be the first time I've seen wasabi or water chestnuts that hadn't been fully processed yet.

Warning to anyone without adblockers: apparently there's an ad in between every single "question" on the page, so if you don't want to deal with that it's probably not worth it.

ok wait so

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Black cats are lucky. (via leahweissmuller)

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I was wondering whether this was a case of production methods resulting in MORE heavy metals entering the chocolate, or just not removing enough heavy metals that naturally accumulate in the beans, and it seems that it’s a bit of each.

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/17/1143239430/dark-chocolate-lead-cadmium-consumer-reports 

According to the NPR article I linked above, a three-year study of sources of the contamination found that the cadmium mostly comes from the trees drawing it from the soil and accumulating it in the beans, while the lead contamination mostly comes from soil and dust sticking to the beans while they’re drying, fermenting, and getting transported. Some recommendations for better practices in the industry (at least some of which are mentioned in the report itself) include drying the beans where they’re less likely to have significant contact with dirt or dust, blending higher cadmium beans with lower cadmium beans to bring the concentrations down to safer levels, identifying areas of contamination, and generally improved monitoring of contamination levels. No mention of whether the heavy metal concentrations in the soil are related to pollution or just geological variation.

The NPR article also notes that the Consumer Reports study used California’s standards for dangerous concentrations of lead and cadmium, which are more protective than those in many other parts of the country. A toxicologist from Johns Hopkins noted that those limits are intended to err on the safe side, and going a little over those limits is not likely to be harmful for most people, especially if they consume a decent amount of calcium and iron (which can reduce how much lead and cadmium you absorb). (Although many people have stated in the notes here that the federal regulations allow for much too high a concentration of lead.)

Unfortunately, the NPR article didn’t list the five dark chocolate bars that were found to have safer levels of the metals, and I wasn’t able to access the Consumer Reports article to check. They do list a few of the ones that failed, though, so process of elimination?

Research has found that some dark chocolate bars contain cadmium and lead—two heavy metals linked to a host of health problems in children and adults.

The chocolate industry has been grappling with ways to lower those levels. To see how much of a risk these favorite treats pose, Consumer Reports scientists recently measured the amount of heavy metals in 28 dark chocolate bars. They detected cadmium and lead in all of them.

CR tested a mix of brands, including smaller ones, such as Alter Eco and Mast, and more familiar ones, like Dove and Ghirardelli.

For 23 of the bars, eating just an ounce a day would put an adult over a level that public health authorities and CR’s experts say may be harmful for at least one of those heavy metals. Five of the bars were above those levels for both cadmium and lead.

That’s risky stuff: Consistent, long-term exposure to even small amounts of heavy metals can lead to a variety of health problems. The danger is greatest for pregnant people and young children because the metals can cause developmental problems, affect brain development, and lead to lower IQ, says Tunde Akinleye, the CR food safety researcher who led this testing project.

“But there are risks for people of any age,” he says. Frequent exposure to lead in adults, for example, can lead to nervous system problems, hypertension, immune system suppression, kidney damage, and reproductive issues. While most people don’t eat chocolate every day, 15 percent do, according to the market research firm Mintel. Even if you aren’t a frequent consumer of chocolate, lead and cadmium can still be a concern. It can be found in many other foods—such as sweet potatoes, spinach, and carrots—and small amounts from multiple sources can add up to dangerous levels. That’s why it’s important to limit exposure when you can.

[…]

Some of the same concerns may extend to products made with cocoa powder—which is essentially pure cocoa solids—such as hot cocoa, and brownie and cake mixes, though they have varying amounts of cacao and possibly heavy metals.

(15 December 2022)

there’s a lot more detail in the article about specific brands, different ways lead and cadmium get into cacao, prior studies and litigation, etc.

the article is written with an optimistic tone about mitigation strategies for you as A Consumer—try to choose brands with lower levels of lead and cadmium! eat lower-percent-cacao chocolates, eat them less often, don’t give dark chocolate to kids, etc.—but it’s ultimately another example of food produced under capitalism being contaminated, and how you cannot escape that by just Shopping Smarter, or by hoping liberal regulation (or lawsuits) will prevent it. especially considering all of the other contaminated products mentioned or linked in the article as See Also’s:

MORE ON FOOD SAFETY

• Your Spices Could Contain Lead and Arsenic • Is Our Ground Meat Safe to Eat? • Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Costco Chicken • Heavy Metals in Baby Food • PFAS Chemicals in Food Packaging

Calculating the exact amount of dark chocolate that’s risky to eat is complicated. That’s because heavy metal levels can vary, people have different risk levels, and chocolate is just one potential source of heavy metal exposure. 

the unstated corollary (because this is Consumer Reports and not Labor Reports) is that the overall exposure to lead and cadmium surely has to be many times worse for the people who actually work in production (often child slaves [1] [2] [3]). (I did a cursory search for information about the farmers’ exposure, but unfortunately, haven’t been able to find anything among all the results about contamination in the final product? If anyone has sources about that, I would really appreciate seeing them)

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You look like sliced from a loaf.

You look like one slice from a loaf of something.

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Ball lightning fascinates me, but I do not like that it can enter your house. Either by burning a little hole through the window, or by manifesting from your stereo, apparently. Rationally I know that I am unlikely to ever encounter it, but I am nonetheless faintly concerned.

My favorite explanation for the supernatural is ball lightening, because what you're really relying on is, "it wasn't anything paranormal. Sometimes storms simply produce plasma balls with the properties of ghost sorcerers from outer space."

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Some context for this one: unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, are being used to study wildlife. Of course, if the presence of these drones is stressing those animals, that’s a problem. Some scientists intentionally flew drones near some black bears that had already been equipped with GPS trackers and heart monitors, and found out that they do indeed cause stress for the bears. So, the study indicates the need to find less stressful ways of keeping tabs on animals, where possible, and the need for people who fly drones for fun to keep them further away from wild animals.

https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/wild-things/ufo-would-stress-out-bear

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They could be like axolotls or some beetles (e.g. glowworms), where they stay more-or-less in their larval form, but do mature sexually.

Excuse the random question, what does your baker street irregulars tag mean?

It's a somewhat obscure joke of Cates's, making fun of my (and other fans') inventing convoluted explanations for canon plot holes.

Literally, the Baker Street Irregulars are a Sherlock Holmes fan club that has been around more or less continously since the stories were coming out. Figuratively, Cates pokes fun at the Irregulars for spending way more brain power than Arthur Conan Doyle ever did on trying to resolve continuity errors within the stories. Holmes refers to "John" as "James" one time? It must be because Watson's middle name is James, and this fits perfectly because there is one mention of his middle initial being H, so he has the middle name Hamish, which is Scottish for James, and went through a phase of using an Anglicization of his middle name as a nickname. Watson's wife Mary is alive in 1891, dead in 1893, alive in 1899, mysteriously absent in 1900 - 1905, and has just died in 1911? Obviously he married three different women, all named Mary, and two died while one divorced him.

Anyway, I shamelessly do the same thing for Animorphs', ahem, less-than-perfect continuity:

Jake doesn't thought-speak to Tobias while out of morph in #1; Tobias just thinks he heard Jake due to the power of suggestion.

Ax tells Cassie that hork-bajir go on rampage cycles every few years because he's heard andalite propaganda designed to blame the victim for all the genocide (#8).

Cassie makes a passing mention of having a niece (#37) in spite of also calling herself an only child (#9) because she's close enough with one of her first cousin's daughters to consider the kid a niece.

Tobias can't morph-heal in MM2 because he's still deeply uncomfortable with morphing so soon after getting the power back (and while facing so much pressure to become permanently human) that he can't muster enough concentration to do it right.

Elfangor can't morph-heal in #1 because he doesn't want Visser Three tearing Earth apart to hunt him down.

Ax's plan to acquire DNA from blood in #18 never would've worked, but nobody realizes this because Ax doesn't know that human red blood cells aren't nucleated.

Tobias tells Elfangor his mom is dead (Andalite Chronicles) but isn't shocked to find her alive (#49) because his aunt said that Loren "probably got herself killed."

Other excellent ones I've seen other people come up with:

Elfangor can't morph-heal in #1 because the Ellimist never gave his morphing power back.

The ant and buffalo break all known rules of morphing in #39 because the helmacrons messed up the morphing cube somehow when they had their hands on it.

Any controllers who see the kids attacking taxxons while out of morph in #7 just can't be arsed to deal with trying to tell Visser Three that he's wrong about the andalite bandits being andalites.

Ax describing grass as "sweet" in #40 in spite of not being able to taste with his hooves is borrowing a human word to indicate it has a nice texture.

Jake says he and Marco have been best friends “since we were in diapers” (#6) but Marco says they’ve been best friends “since the second grade” (#51) because Jake latched onto Marco a lot faster than Marco did onto Jake.

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Fun fact: Animorphs might have been the first series I intentionally DID read in order. Before that, I was used to kids’ “series” that were entirely or almost entirely episodic, and would read them in whatever order I felt like; in the case of Goosebumps, I would often flip through and read several of the chapter-end cliff-hangers, or even the ending itself, before deciding whether I wanted to check it out. 

I started with the first book, then when the library didn’t have one of the next ones (I don’t remember which), I jumped ahead to the next one that they did have on the shelves. There was just enough referenced in the next one that I had clearly missed that I decided to make sure to read the rest of the series in order.

I kind of wonder how many people *did* read Animorphs in order on their first go? my 4th grade teacher had four of them and so that's how I started off my journey with books 3, 4, 16, and 37, in that order. after that I just scoured the shelves at the used bookstore and picked them up in whatever order I could find them, judging solely on whether I'd seen the cover before

Honestly, this post seems to suggest that most people did not, in fact, read the series in order.  I think Animorphs is a lot more forgiving than a lot of other series in that regard (I shudder to think about anyone reading A Song of Ice and Fire out of order) but there are still some purists out there who read it in order.