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Is this anything?

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This is one of my favorite moments in the show:

The demons are just like, "Oh shit, the music started, we're gonna die."

I mean, in any magical girl show when there's a faceoff and a song starts playing then you, the viewer, know that there's about to be an epic ass-kicking. But the fact that in KPDH it's true in-universe -- the bad guys can hear the soundtrack as well as the viewers -- makes it even more epic.

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I remember hearing a story, no idea if it's true, about some feat of ancient engineering where it finally occurred to the archeologists to ask the local indigenous people how it was done. The indigenous people promptly demonstrated, and the archeologists were like, "Wow, that's amazing, how have you retained the knowledge of how your ancestors did this, was it passed down in oral tradition or what?"

And the indigenous people said, we have no idea how our ancestors did it; that's how we'd do it if we wanted to.

pyramid conspiracies are so funny cause like yeah theyre extremely impressive feats of engineering but its not like. crazy unbelievable. i think even as a kid if you asked me how i thought the pyramids were built id be like "i think they probably cut rocks into rectangles and stacked them. it probably took a very long time." aliens or power plants would not remotely be on my list of options yknow.

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If nothing else, the artist may need at least partial payment up front in order to buy the materials to make the piece.

For the purposes of this statement, "rent" and "food" count as artistic materials.

Please reblog. :)

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You know, it occurs to me that it's interesting that Huntr/x won, definitely, but they didn't win a total victory.

They defeated Gwi-Ma and restored the Honmoon, but they didn't turn it golden. Rumi still has her demon patterns. It's hinted that they'll start training the next generation of Hunters to continue to fight demons and maintain the Honmoon.

I think this can be taken at least two ways. One, as saying that partial victories are still victories; saving the day is a good thing even if you have to go and save the next day too. Two, maybe the Honmoon shouldn't be sealed completely and forever, trapping demons in the underworld for eternity; we know that it's possible for demons to make choices about doing evil, so perhaps it's good for the Honmoon to remain semi-permeable.

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She gripes about you selling it even if you didn't.

this woman is literally unsalvageable

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Largely the companions - I love all of them, I love their banter, I love their character arcs, I love being able to help them all with their stuff.

I also, unexpectedly, really enjoy the gameplay - I was dubious about it, since it seemed more action-y than I usually like, but the difficulty controls are flexible enough that I can fine-tune it to my preferences and it turns out to be just a lot of fun to bounce around the battlefield like a stabby ping-pong ball.

(DAV is the first DA game where I've enjoyed playing a mage. Dagger-and-orb mage is now my favorite class to play.)

I also love the lore - we get so much lore dropped in this game, and it fits with what we already knew and massively extends it while still leaving places to explore in the (probably unlikely) event that we ever get another sequel.

I also appreciate the size of most of the missions - they're bigger than bite-sized, but small enough that even if you only have a short time to play you can do complete at least one.

I do have criticisms, of course. The romances are kinda skimpy, and most of the backgrounds make very little difference to much of anything. I miss the Inquisition-style crafting.

But overall I find it a fabulous game.

refusing to acknowledge any part of veilguard as canon is actually so fun you can literally do whatever you want. solas slips on a banana peel and hits his head and hallucinates the entire thing while varric is giving him mouth to mouth.

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It's like... if I have a button on my desk that will give you a painful electric shock every time I push it, with absolutely no consequences to me no matter how many times I do it - but I refrain from ever pushing it - the fact that the button exists in the first place is oppressive and cruel and the world in general and you in particular would be better off if it were destroyed.

dragon age templar: hi i don't think mages are people and feel this justifies them being physically mentally and sexually abused under my watch 👍🏻

players: wow this guy kind of sucks

david gaider: well it's a little more nuanced than that actually. 😏 did you not see the scene where the mages were kind of mean to him? haha i guess that just shows there's two sides to every story 🤷🏻‍♂️

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I will say that I have played and loved all the Dragon Age games, but Veilguard is the only one I've played five times in a row.

refusing to acknowledge any part of veilguard as canon is actually so fun you can literally do whatever you want. solas slips on a banana peel and hits his head and hallucinates the entire thing while varric is giving him mouth to mouth.

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OK, but technically does Alice have to actually name a specific number, or does she have to prove that she theoretically could? Because those are different problems.

Did you see that Magic: the Gathering now has a game state in which you need to prove that there are an infinite number of twin primes to win? I can explain it more if you are interested.

(With reference to this post here.)

By all means, please tell us about the Magic: the Gathering combo which requires proving the twin prime conjecture in order to win.

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<watches 15 minutes of Kpop Demon Hunters>

OK, I doubt we're a big enough demographic that Netflix execs said to each other, "Let's deliberately craft a show that is 100% lab-grade Tumblr cocaine," but danged if they didn't do it anyway.

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there are already quite a few articles that talk about people starting to believe chatgpt is accessing like. a higher form of power and secrets to the universe and its actually really scary to see how quickly people can fall for it and start believing it without any questions. i can send you some archive links if you'd like but basically yeah. it's about what you can probably imagine.

The human brain is a pattern-seeking lab rat that gets a hot bump of cocaine every time it connects two dots and we should not be evaluating the value of those connections based on the enthusiasm of the rat

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Those nice scissors you have? The ones you will literally murder anyone who uses them to cut paper? That only works if you also have crappy scissors that you can use to cut paper and open boxes and pound in nails or whatever. Buy them by the dozen and scatter them around every room in your house. Keep your good scissors in their special Good Scissors Place. Everyone will be happier.

to whoever needs to hear this: give yourself the gift of a new pair of scissors. I give you permission to get new scissors. buy a new pack of scissors, even. it is okay to throw away those rusty dull pieces of shit and take $8 out of your budget to buy new ones.

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At least some exploding dice systems - e.g. Savage Worlds - have a weird quirk where, in very specific cases, it is sometimes marginally less likely to get a success using a larger die.

E.g. unless I've done the math wrong, using SW's rules the odds of rolling a 6 or better using an exploding d4 are 18.750%, while the odds of rolling a 6 or better with an exploding d6 are 16.667%.

There are only a few cases where this happens, mostly using a larger die is unambiguously better, but I know at least one person who avoids SW specifically because of this oddity.

Asking you as someone who knows a lot about Stupid Dice Tricks - what's the simplest way to get a one-tailed distribution using conventional dice? (i.e. numbers from, say, 1 to 5-ish are fairly common, but there's a small-but-nontrivial chance of ending up with results up in the 20s and 30s)

"Simplest" is subjective, but the most conventional way of doing that involves "exploding dice", a dice-rolling method in which each die is read as its face value for any non-maximal result, but when rolling the maximum possible value, another die (typically of the same size) is rolled and added to the initial result. For example, an exploding d6 might roll a 6, then a 6, then a 3, for a total result of 15 on 1d6.

While straightforward, this method has the issue that certain results are impossible; for example, you can never roll exactly 6 on an exploding standard d6, since the minimum result of the additional roll is 1. This has historically been addressed in several ways:

Rolling with a base of zero rather than one. This is most commonly done with d10s, since a standard d10 is already numbered 0 through 9, though it can also be achieved with other die sizes either using non-standard dice (e.g., a d6 with faces numbered 0 through 5 rather than 1 through 6), or by reading a standard die in such a way as to produce equivalent results (e.g., reading the 6 on an exploding d6 as 0, with the exploding result occurring on a 5). This approach avoids unrollable values, but has the drawback that the extra roll sometimes does nothing, which can feel anticlimactic.

Treating the value of the exploding result as equal to that of the highest possible non-exploding result; under this method, rolling a 6 on an exploding d6 would be treated as "5 + reroll" rather than "6 + reroll". This avoids both unrollable values and rerolls that do nothing, but in my experience, a lot of players just can't get their heads around it, and will always forget to read that 6 as a 5, no matter how many times they're reminded.

This technique can also be adapted to "hit-counting" dice pools; for example, rolling a number of d6s, counting each die which rolls 4+ as one "hit", and additionally rolling an extra die for each die which rolls a 6. This is broadly equivalent to variation 1, above, and suffers from similar drawbacks.

Apart from exploding dice, other reasonably popular approaches include various "dice poker" methods, in which a number of (typically identical) dice are rolled, with the result ordinarily being read as the highest single value, except that certain combinations of numbers are assigned special values. One of the simplest variants involves the summing of doubles, triples, etc.. For example, rolling 3d6 and getting results of 2, 4 and 5 would be read as 5, but a result of 2, 5, and 5 would be read as 10; however, a result of 2, 2, and 5 would still read as 5, since the sum of the double is lower than the highest single. Alternatively, the dice can be read so that all doubles beat all singles, all triples beat all doubles, etc., for a more truly poker-like distribution of results, though this can make assigning target numbers tricky.

A notable twist on the above is the "place-value" dice roll, in which the die's face value is read as the "ones" place, and the number of dice showing that value as the "tens" place. This is typically done with d10s to keep the place values intuitive; for example, rolling 5d10 and getting results of 2, 3, 3, 7 and 9 would be read as a result of 23. Hybridised with hit-counting dice pools, the place-value method becomes the One Roll Engine's "width x height" method of reading the dice, which is definitely worth checking out if you want to delve deeper into this topic.

(An important distinction between exploding dice and dice poker/place-value methods in the particular context of dice pools of variable size is that it's always possible, if increasingly unlikely, to make a roll where nothing explodes, but beyond a certain point, "exceptional" results on a dice poker/place-value roll become inevitable. For example, with a pool of 7d6 it's impossible not to roll at least doubles!)

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Sex is like bicycle sprint racing. The goal is to remain as motionless as possible until somebody finally gets out in front, and then you go hell for leather for the finish line as fast as you can.

Challenge: least suitable sport or hobby to construct a "sex is just like [thing]" analogy with.

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"Siri, show me a video of young people who haven't yet developed back problems."

IG@lo.pony

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So FWIW this is my take. I'm not Catholic but I am Episcopalian - about as close as you can get while still technically being Protestant - and I have an M.Div.

The reason transubstantiation is hard to talk about is that (a) the people who formalized the doctrine were using a neo-Platonic philosophical toolkit we no longer use, and (b) the meaning of the word "substance" has changed so radically that it now means almost the opposite of what it meant then.

The Catholic Church has never taught that the bread and wine undergo a physical change into pieces of human flesh and dollops of human blood. They knew in Aquinas' day just as well as we do now that the bread and wine still look and feel and smell and taste like bread and wine.

The model they were using is that a physical object is made of bits of matter, but what is important - what makes a chair a chair or a loaf of bread a loaf of bread - is its substance... literally its sub stance, what stands beneath it. "Substance" in this model does NOT mean "what an object is made of," it means its inner spiritual reality.

And THAT is what changes in transubstantiation. The bread is still made of wheat, but its substance - its reality, its true nature - is changed from bread to the Body of Christ. The change is not physical, its on a level more fundamental, more important than physical matter.

Is the change physical? No. Is the change metaphorical? Also no. Is it real? Emphatically yes.

Or at least so Catholic doctrine expressed using neo-Platonic concepts would insist.

yall have no idea how paranoid i am trying to talk abt the nature of transubstantiation on tumblr considering it is literally SO easy to accidentally do a heresy. this is the sort of shit priests will study their whole lives to try and have a more complete understanding of how it works. in attempting to simplify you will always run into the language barrier. it's like trying to explain algebra to a heptapod. i have to figure out how to communicate the fact that the blood of christ is a metaphor without ever implying it is a metaphor because no it isnt it is the literal blood of christ (it is also still just wine though)(but no it isnt)(do you see the issue here)