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I just gave the DM a bad idea.

@that-one-engineering-bard / that-one-engineering-bard.tumblr.com

Hey! My name is Lena! I'm an asexual! Cool! I like art and reading and dice. Lots and lots of dice.
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foone

Given how wizards are themed around higher education, with their universities and ivory towers, I wanna see more fiction that goes into their published papers.

Like, there should be massive drama in the Wizarding world about how Fantasy Wikipedia says "There's no consensus about the origins of skydoves" when in fact, there very much is, everyone knows they were created in the first or second dragon wars, and that's uncontroversial. One single wizard at the University of Towers who thinks they're an offshoot of mermaids DOES NOT MEAN IT'S AN OPEN ISSUE.

Papers that are rebuttals to other magical discoveries. Like, look, that spell just won't work, and you can't call it a "theoretical exercise" just to cover up the fact that you've not been able to cast it. You can't combine Ichthyomancy with completely unrelated elemental summonings, that's just not how magic works, in all due respect.

Thesis defense would be significantly scarier when all your reviewers can cast Everburning Fireball on your ass.

Learning Theoretical Evocation from a hungover lizardman TA at 8am, because the professor for this course has been off on the Elemental Plane of Circles for half the semester trying to finish her paper on how Centaurs predate horses rather than the other way around.

Speaking of which, the life of a wizard graduate student... You keep getting called to go on "quests" which are just overgrown research expeditions to help out some professor's project. You spent nearly a month in that damp castle capturing all the spinfrogs you could find, all to help your professor's project on the possibilities of concentrated soul essences. To this day, you still get dizzy whenever you see battlements, let alone a donjon.

Wizarding 'Publish or Perish' is actually quite literal

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I feel lied to. This is where the bugs bunny NO meme cokes from

Ah lads they fucking rotated him

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kalianos
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bi-times-two
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ythok
Me, reading this whole post:
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pope74220

NOW it’s you

Oh yea? Well guess what bro

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polyphonetic

Best post I've seen all day

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ericvilas

This post can't stop me bc I can read upside down >:D

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raynavan

Fool.

.dednahtfel gnieb evol I

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hachama

I'm right handed but I learned to read Hebrew in elementary school.

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We need to lay more blame for "Kids don't know how computers work" at the feet of the people responsible: Google.

Google set out about a decade ago to push their (relatively unpopular) chromebooks by supplying them below-cost to schools for students, explicitly marketing them as being easy to restrict to certain activities, and in the offing, kids have now grown up in walled gardens, on glorified tablets that are designed to monetize and restrict every movement to maximize profit for one of the biggest companies in the world.

Tech literacy didn't mysteriously vanish, it was fucking murdered for profit.

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anoraktrend

Linux is a very good and powerful alternative.

reminder: you cannot Personal Choises your way out of an Intentional Structural Problem

Also. Not for nothing.

  1. Saying that Linux is an alternative to the Google Problem is like saying Firefox makes a good alternative to my dishwasher.
  2. Those glorified tablets run on Linux. Both the android OS and the Chrome OS are Linux-based.
  3. I say this as someone who has been using Linux for more than 25 years: Linux is not a consumer operating system. It is an enterprise operating system. Your average person is going to have a considerably easier time learning to use Windows than they are learning to use Linux, and they're going to prefer the software that's available for Windows--- not to mention that it's easier to install said software.

Tried explaining this to a manager who was easily in his late 50's early 60's. Why did it even come up? Because I graduated highschool just before the chromebook boom and have a decent understanding of how to check off the basic IT checks for a projector and our IT guy was out of office. The man was baffled when I told him that I know kids who wouldn't be able to figure out how to open the file explorer on the computer.

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We need to lay more blame for "Kids don't know how computers work" at the feet of the people responsible: Google.

Google set out about a decade ago to push their (relatively unpopular) chromebooks by supplying them below-cost to schools for students, explicitly marketing them as being easy to restrict to certain activities, and in the offing, kids have now grown up in walled gardens, on glorified tablets that are designed to monetize and restrict every movement to maximize profit for one of the biggest companies in the world.

Tech literacy didn't mysteriously vanish, it was fucking murdered for profit.

Avatar
anoraktrend

Linux is a very good and powerful alternative.

reminder: you cannot Personal Choises your way out of an Intentional Structural Problem

Also. Not for nothing.

  1. Saying that Linux is an alternative to the Google Problem is like saying Firefox makes a good alternative to my dishwasher.
  2. Those glorified tablets run on Linux. Both the android OS and the Chrome OS are Linux-based.
  3. I say this as someone who has been using Linux for more than 25 years: Linux is not a consumer operating system. It is an enterprise operating system. Your average person is going to have a considerably easier time learning to use Windows than they are learning to use Linux, and they're going to prefer the software that's available for Windows--- not to mention that it's easier to install said software.
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Okay okay so:

A elderly ranger who used to be a park ranger before her kids and grandkids made retire for her health and to go enjoy the rest of her life. She's traveling the world and living luxuriously when she meets up with the party, thinking they're also a group of tourists, and decides to travel with them. Any beasts they fight? Oh, they must be invasive in this land! Any evil people? They're poachers/they littered/greedy corporates calling for deforestation! It's so great to see the young people of today so invested in saving the environment! She doesn't appear very strong (pshh, she's just an old lady!!) But she's been working for a national park for years, she's still got it!

Idk, I just love the idea of a granny who looks on the bright side of things traveling around with a party thinking they're all tourists and having the time of her life. Just a silly character with not too much going on, very much a contrast of Elairo.

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Party grannies for the win! Your idea has given me an idea for Arena of Abraxis XD

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Depending on when the next one is, I might use her for that! We'll see lol, I also wanna play a sorcerer again for the chance to use metamagic. Who knows

You're unfortunatly missing the next one. But! There will be more! And who's to say he can't run an arena specifically for our game?

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Okay okay so:

A elderly ranger who used to be a park ranger before her kids and grandkids made retire for her health and to go enjoy the rest of her life. She's traveling the world and living luxuriously when she meets up with the party, thinking they're also a group of tourists, and decides to travel with them. Any beasts they fight? Oh, they must be invasive in this land! Any evil people? They're poachers/they littered/greedy corporates calling for deforestation! It's so great to see the young people of today so invested in saving the environment! She doesn't appear very strong (pshh, she's just an old lady!!) But she's been working for a national park for years, she's still got it!

Idk, I just love the idea of a granny who looks on the bright side of things traveling around with a party thinking they're all tourists and having the time of her life. Just a silly character with not too much going on, very much a contrast of Elairo.

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Party grannies for the win! Your idea has given me an idea for Arena of Abraxis XD

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Can I tell u about the silliest idea I had for s d&d character that I'm probably play the next time I get the chance :D

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I dont know how long this has been sitting here, but do tell!

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Humans are unstoppable...Until they aren’t.

I’m not the most eloquent writer, but I’ve had this idea kicking around for a while and figured I’d put it out into the universe.

A lot of the basis for the “humans are space orcs” stuff is the idea that we’re pretty durable compared to many species, yeah? When it comes to physical trauma, we can bounce back from most things that don’t kill us outright, especially given the benefit of hypothetical space-age technology, and adrenaline is one heck of a drug when it comes to functioning under stress. 

But that doesn’t make us unkillable, and even though we can survive debilitating injuries and not die from shock, it doesn’t mean it’s fun. Dying of shock sucks, but at least it’s probably quick.

So - Imagine a ship, adrift in space, slowly being drawn into a star or something. In order to save the ship, someone has to repair the hyper-quantum-relay-majig on the hull or in the engine or whatever. Bit of a problem though- there’s a ton of deadly, deadly radiation (Wrath of Khan style) or poisonous fumes or, I dunno, electrical current, between the crew and the repair. Like, enough to kill most species instantly, so the crew is just like, ‘welp, guess we’ll die then’. But then.

BUT THEN

They ask the human. Because everyone’s heard the stories - you’re basically unkillable, right? Could you survive long enough in there to fix it? And their human goes real quiet for a second, but still says ‘Yeah, I could fix it’. And the rest of the crew is like, ‘Whaaaaaa, it won’t kill you?’ and the human repeats “I can fix it” (which isn’t an answer, but no one catches that, not yet at least), so they send ‘em in. And the human fixes it, they come back, the ship flies to safety, and the crew is thrilled to survive. If the human is a little quiet, well, they’re entitled after pulling off a miracle. Everyone else is just excited to get to the nearest station’s bar to tell their very own human story, cuz, ‘those crazy humans, amiright?’.

The good mood keeps up until the human is late for their next shift. At first it’s just faint unease, but- but they earned a bit of a lie-in, right? No reason to begrudge them some extra rest, even if it is a little weird for them to oversleep. They’ll be fine. Humans are always fine. 

(Right?)

(…Wrong.)

- What is… help. Help!-

- ake up! You have t-

- been days. You need sleep, you-

- nother transfusion. We could-

- out of sedatives!-

A week later, the crew finally reaches the station. They stumble into the bar, haggard and haunted. And over the next months and years a new rumor about humans starts to make its way through space. A rumor unlike any before.

‘Be careful with your humans’ it whispers. ‘Their strength is not always a blessing. Be sure they don’t do something they can’t come back from, because when a human dies… they die slowly.’

The thing is, humans can be tricky. And if they’re sufficiently pack-bonded with a ship’s crew? And that crew is in danger? They’ll willingly offer themselves up to make sure the crew survives.

They won’t tell their crewmates that whatever danger it is will just kill them slowly, that they can endure the exposure but not the long-term effects.

But the idea that humans can be fragile? Can die later from exposure to radiation or toxins or electricity or even smoke inhalation?

It seems preposterous!

There are too many stories about humans surviving all sorts of conditions that would kill their other crewmates. A human dying slowly, later, lingering and in agony? It’s a creepy story but of course it’s not true.

But then… another crew shares their own story. Their human volunteered to go into the danger zone to fix what needed to be fixed. Or maybe she had to retrieve a critical component or resource. And she lingered. Wasted away. Later the human doctors told their medical team there was nothing they could do but make sure she was comfortable, ease her pain before the end.

And yet another crew, whose human plunged through smoke and ash to make sure his crew could escape. He choked and coughed and couldn’t get enough air. Their medical commander performed an autopsy and found his lungs and throat and sinuses all coated in black soot and blackened mucus and red blood.

So the stories spread. Just because they don’t die of shock, just because they don’t die right away doesn’t mean it won’t kill them. They linger in agony or unconscious or waste away slowly.

But what’s most horrifying of all?

When other humans hear the stories from the traumatized crewmembers?

They aren’t surprised or horrified.

They say “Of course”

They say “I would have done the same”

They say “it was the Right Thing to do”

And they’ll smile (what the crew’s human would have called a sad smile) and toast to the dead. For making “The ultimate sacrifice for the folks they loved” and every human listening will say the name and drink a shot of liquor.

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aethersea

Human: *does a heroic thing*

Starfleet Captain: Good boy! *ruffles the human’s hair*

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kamari3

humans are space orcs. space orcs are good dogs.

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the problem with reading and writing leading to a strong vocabulary is that you tend to know the vibe of words instead of their meanings.

if I used this word in a sentence, would it make sense? absolutely. if you asked me what it meant, could I tell you? absolutely not.

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brionysea

figure out what the word means from context clues while reading -> use the word in a sentence while writing -> realise you're not actually certain what the word means -> panic about your sentence not making sense even though it hasn't been pinged as grammatically incorrect -> look up the definition of the word because You Must Know -> it means exactly what you thought it meant -> oh, good! :) -> immediately forget the definition -> repeat forever

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