No, said Aziraphale, it's ineffable.

teaandgames

In Making A House A Home, I explore what it’s like to settle down a build a house in video games. It’s a completely peaceful life. Promise. First up, is Skyrim.

I’m beginning to think that I might’ve missed a trick by spawning in all that gold. Maybe the enjoyment from Hearthfire comes from when you put all of the hard earned gold you’ve gained from killing billions of draugr into your own little home away from home. If it’s done in bitesize chunks, maybe you don’t notice the tedium. In case you haven’t guessed, I started thinking this while mining more quarried stone. Maybe I could bear it if I was able to fast travel over to my mansion whenever I wanted a break from the main game. Then I just leave him there, mining away.

But as I made the silly choice to do this, I don’t really have that option. I’m here to see what the whole package is like. Come to think on it, I’ve never really laid out any guidelines as to what constitutes good house building in a game. We can’t just point to something like Minecraft and leave it with that, as these things have to operate within the rules of the game at hand. And it’s a bit hard to punch trees to bits in Skyrim. I ponder this as I wander back over to the drafting table to see what else I can staple to my mansion.

Keep reading

Trek of Cards

bad-startrek-aus

An AU wherein a selected crew member breaks the fourth wall like Frank Underwood from House of Cards to provide insight and commentary.
TOS: Dr. Leonard McCoy
TAS: Captain James T. Kirk
TOS Films: Commander Hikaru Sulu
TNG: Captain Jean-Luc Picard
TNG Films: Counselor Deanna Troi
DS9: Lieutenant Commander Jadzia Dax and Lieutenant Ezri Dax
Voyager: Ensign Harry Kim
Enterprise: Chief Engineer Charles Trip Tucker
Kelvin Universe Films: Lieutenant Nyota Uhura.

elodieunderglass

The leader, a grizzled West Country type, started this by saying it was a crow-scaring dance. But he said it wouldn’t work on puffins. “I hate puffins,” he growled, “that’s why I hate Lundy.” As soon as he said that I started filming because I knew he was going to be👌👌👌 an A+ Good Quality Character.

But Dr Glass dragged me off. Morris dancers make him uncomfortable. So here is 0:17 of My Day Today At Avebury.

beccy

Wait, do you also have Gothic Morris Dancers in the West Country? Because I was so confused when I moved to Brighton and saw Morris Dancers who looked like this:

And this:

…When I’ve only ever seen Morris who look like this (in the Home-Counties):

…My mum laughed at me when I told her we had goth Morris Dancers in Brighton :|

elodieunderglass

In Brighton??? Oh dear!

Black-clothed, feathery-goth, black-face-painted Morris dancers are doing the “Border Morris.” (Or possibly Terry Pratchett’s Dark Morris.)

The black makeup is the subject of Troubled Discourse and is potentially Problematic. The pagan side of the debate says it’s nothing to do with black people; makeup made from soot and the ragged clothes were simply a way for medieval people to cheaply disguise themselves as anonymous forest spirits, to practice under feudal Christianity.

The social justice side of the debate just needs to say “blackface, tho? really?” And that’s all they really need to say, I think

As I’m not really qualified to voice an opinion and haven’t researched the topic, I’ll leave it there!

But you usually see the black plumage variant in the Border counties, I think!

petermorwood

Raggedy-clothed soot-faced Morris dancers and ghillie-suited camo-creamed snipers; both concealing their true appearance? Just a thought, taken no further.

The only live Morris I’ve ever seen was at a UK Eastercon in the mid-90s, and it wasn’t any ordinary team but the Royal Liberty Morris, whose performance then was… Vigorous. Yes, that’s a good word. (Internet search suggests they might have calmed down a bit. Might…)

It was vigorous as in dressing like bikers, wearing Great Big Boots with associated heavy stomping, and using spanners or steel scaffolding tubes instead of wooden staves. Said tubes were stuffed with burning cotton-wool when dancing outdoors after dark.

It was Morris dancing as mixed martial art, partly inspired (IIRC) by the Lancre Morris Men who had made their first appearance a couple of years earlier in “Lords and Ladies” (1992).

Con guest Lois McMaster Bujold’s reaction could have been bottled and sold as a feel-good potion…

elodieunderglass

Omg Peter

The snarXiv

The arXiv is a site that collects preprints of scientific papers. In some fields it’s the major archive for the vast majority of the papers…but since the papers are mostly pre-publication and not yet peer-reviewed there’s also a vast variation in quality. Combined with the difficulty of understanding, say, theoretical high-energy physics if that’s not your field, and you get some confusing paper titles.

The snarXiv, on the other hand, is, well:

The snarXiv is a random high-energy theory paper generator incorporating all the latest trends, entropic reasoning, and exciting moduli spaces. The arXiv is similar, but occasionally less random.

It uses a context free grammar to generate paper titles and abstracts.

I like the list of things you can do with it:

Suggested Uses for the snarXiv^[3]

1. If you’re a graduate student, gloomily read through the abstracts, thinking to yourself that you don’t understand papers on the real arXiv any better.

2. If you’re a post-doc, reload until you find something to work on.

3. If you’re a professor, get really excited when a paper claims to solve the hierarchy problem, the little hierarchy problem, the mu problem, and the confinement problem. Then experience profound disappointment.

4. If you’re a famous physicist, keep reloading until you see your name on something, then claim credit for it.

5. Everyone else should play arXiv vs. snarXiv.^[4]

That last item, arXiv vs. snarXiv, shows you two paper titles and invites you to guess which one is real. The results are illuminating.

The snarXiv is far from the first scientific paper generator, and probably won’t be the last. Since the snarXiv is presently limited to high-energy physics, there are a great many other papers that are waiting for their own generators.

thewigmonsters

so who else is in the mood to run off to a series of small, interconnected caves with me, and be cave neighbors for the next ten years,

thewigmonsters

cons: we wont know about any new memes

pros: we make our own cave neighbor memes about the bugs we see doin weird shit and that one cave that leaks when it rains except we can’t find the hole it’s leaking through

thewigmonsters

cave memes i’m submitting for your consideration:

*aiming hunting implements at anything that isn’t a bird* this bird is gonna be delicious
personifying rocks, constnatly,
“my digging skills are delightful, which you would know, if you ever bothered to know me the way you know your beetles”
throw the stone, Maurice.
one of our cave neighbors is a geologist. they know the names of all the kinds of rocks. the rest of us mispronounce them constantly on purpose and correct each other’s pronunciation with even more wrong ones.
making up elaborate insults towards bugs, and saying them, to the bugs
the implications of Ji-won’s moss beds (the joke is nobody can ever agree on the implications)
mushrooms in places they dont belong
yelling “hhchruckkkk!” in a high-pitched voice, several times in a row, whenever
“the best tasting dirt comes from Jamal’s cave”
worm disco

feel free to submit your own cave memes