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still believe that one of the greatest bits of all time was on January 6th, 2021 when. well. you know. and twitter was understandably an echo chamber of panic and fear and Justin McElroy just tweeted a selfie with a filter that was like “have a delicious national spaghetti day” followed by 3 tweets that were like “fuck. i’m sorry. i don’t know how to delete scheduled posts” and as i type this two years later i’m laughing

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there's a lot of valid criticisms of the american government don't get me wrong but I'm not just going to keep letting people say that the electoral college is some kind of broken system that it's not. it's literally so simple. under a two party system, you got a 50/50 chance of winning. But I'm a genetic freak and I'm not normal, so you got 25% chance at best, at beat me. And then you add Kurt Angle to the mix, your chances of winning drastic go down! You've got a 33.3% chance of winning. But I, I've got a 66 and two third, chance of winning, cause Kurt Angle KNOWS he can't beat me, and he's not even gonna try. So Samoa Joe, you take your 33 and a third chance, minus my 25% chance, and you've got an eight and a third chance of winning, at Sacrifice. But then you take my 75% chance of winning, if we was to go one on one, and then add 66 and two thirds per cents, I got a 141 and two thirds chance of winning. See joe! The numbers don't lie, and they spell disaster for you! At sacrifice.

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adhd paralysis sucks bcuz im just sitting there and my brain is like

YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME

no work done no rest gained. literally no point of this at all

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Years and years ago, I read a book on cryptography that I picked up because it looked interesting--and it was!

But there was a side anecdote in there that stayed with me for more general purposes.

The author was describing a cryptography class that they had taken back in college where the professor was demonstrating the process of "reversibility", which is a principle that most codes depend on. Specifically, it should be easy to encode, and very hard to decode without the key--it is hard to reverse the process.

So he had an example code that he used for his class to demonstrate this, a variation on the Book Code, where the encoded text would be a series of phone numbers.

The key to the code was that phone books are sorted alphabetically, so you could encode the text easily--picking phone numbers from the appropriate alphabetical sections to use ahead of time would be easy. But since phone books were sorted alphabetically, not numerically, it would be nearly impossible to reverse the code without exhaustively searching the phone book for each string of numbers and seeing what name it was tied to.

Nowadays, defeating this would be child's play, given computerized databases, but back in the 80s and 90s, this would have been a good code... at least, until one of the students raised their hand and asked, "Why not just call the phone numbers and ask who lives there?"

The professor apparently was dumbfounded.

He had never considered that question. As a result, his cipher, which seemed to be nearly unbreakable to him, had such an obvious flaw, because he was the sort of person who could never coldcall someone to ask that sort of thing!

In the crypto book, the author went on to use this story as an example of why security systems should not be tested by the designer (because of course the security system is ready for everything they thought of, by definition), but for me, as a writer, it stuck with me for a different reason.

It's worth talking out your story plot with other people just to see if there's a "Why not just call the phone numbers?" obvious plot hole that you've missed, because of your singular perspective as a person. Especially if you're writing the sort of plot where you have people trying to outsmart each other.

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I’m really into internet discourse but only pointless and stupid internet discourse like how many holes there are in a straw (it’s 2)

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Star Trek: Deep Space Nine "Past Tense, Pt. 1"

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An adventuring party is in a cage suspended over acid the wizard clears his throat "I just sent a message to my wife she should be here to save us soon." "Wait your married?" Said the rouge "more importantly what is she gonna." The paladin is interrupted by a massive explosion.

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Scolopendra Miku

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Tip: A friend is someone you can talk to about Fantasy Worldbuilding

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i’m so happy, i found my favorite reddit post of all time.  i thought i lost it forever