i know this means absolutely nothing to most people but basically all of the little web game things I've made recently (angels in automata, hex plant growing game, d.a.n.m.a.k.u., life music, sudoku land, the metroidvania style map editor, etc etc etc) are all entirely self-contained individual client-side html files that can be downloaded and run offline and have literally no libraries or frameworks or dependencies, because i'm an insane woman who enjoys hand coding my input handling and display code from scratch in vanilla js and having it all live in one single html file with the game logic and the page structure and the page style all just living and loving together side by side in a universal format that can be run by any web browser on any devixe. i'll even include image files as base64 data-uri strings just to keep every single asset inside the one file.

the sudoku one is gorgeous and a really intuitive way to play sudoku

i also really love the hexplant one

(reaching the purple aquare with the three exlamation marks is how you 'win' this game)

I hope OP doesn't mind, but the activity on this post has been fascinating me for the past week, and, I think, proving why reblogs on tumblr are so important for spreading joy.

I was delighted that a big blog reblogged this from me because the whole point of me reblogging it was to share it further, and now more people were getting to see it!

what was also fascinating to me is that complete strangers kept reblogging my reblog from me, and are still doing it - so my particular reblog must be showing up on the for you page. I am NOT a big blog. I have about 1000 followers, half of which are probably defunct blogs. I have been here since 2011. no way all of those followers are still active.

most of my reblog notifications from the past week are for this particulr reblog of this particular post. so from where I'm looking, I can see two ways this post has reached more people, from me.

I have tumblr labs turned on so I looked into the reblog bubbles to see the wider impact and the trajectory of the post:

this shows only the first 1000 reblogs, but it shows very clearly that it only took two smaller blogs (I'm sure @jackironsides has has more followers than me though) to reblog this post for it to reach a big one (@headspace-hotel), who put the post in front of more eyeballs.

here's the same graph again, but now showing all the reblogs:

the full graph shows how far and wide this post spread after just 4 reblog chains. that was all it took. it also shows how many people are reblogging my 2nd reblog from me, via the for you page.

(does it bother me that my 2nd reblog not only has a typo in it, but refers to the purple hex as a square? yes. but it looks like nobody else noticed, or cared enough about it for it to be a deterrent.)

in conclusion: share the posts that bring you joy!!!

just found out i've been abandoned by god which means he's not watching anything i do anymore. you should come over.

“nobody cares about women and i can tell bc of fanfic trends”

how about i can tell nobody cares about women bc i didn’t know shiv from succession existed as a character through months of man-in-a-suit family-infighting gifs.

I told her you don't even have a woman here, and you know what she said? "Well, he probably doesn't have one, he's got eight!"

↳ Top Gun (1986); dir. Tony Scott

+ Bonus:

You're a dumbass who the fuck says something like that

a few months ago my friend called me and told me she was moving back up near me from 7 hours south in the middle of nowhere and asked if i would help her because she couldn’t move the furniture by herself and the town was so small there was no moving company (there were actually only 5 or six businesses in the whole town including both restaurants) and she had no one else down there to ask. 

And even though money is pretty tight for her, she told me I could name my price if I would help her, because it was so far away.

I told her she was a dummy for thinking i would take her money but that i would accept the traditional helping-a-friend-move price: a meal (i know she would feel wrong about herself if she didn’t do something for me in return, that’s just how she is) Tradition suggests pizza and beer, we opted for enchiladas and a margarita.

we crashed on the floor of the empty place and left back north in the morning - when we got back to the city three more friends met us at her storage place (the place she was moving into wouldn’t be vacant for a couple months) and we started to move all her stuff up to a storage room on the THIRD FLOOR (because large city storage places be like that)

we had just taken the first box out of the truck when the (only) lady working there walked by and told us they closed in an hour and twenty minutes, and she couldn’t stay even a little late because she had to get to her other job.

One hour twenty minutes. To completely un-jenga a large uhaul and re-tetris it back into a similar sized room on the third floor.

We all just, shared a look, took off hoodies, and got the fuck down to business. 

It was actually.. I still cherish look we passed around. The tiny eyebrow quirks and chin nods. The eye glints. The bigger breath we each took as we prepared to kick it up several gears. That moment of wordless connection, when we all just silently agreed that we were damn well going to do the impossible and didn’t even waste the time it would take to say anything, just got to it.

And we did it too. Finished with exactly two full minutes to spare. And then we all went for dinner and drinks to celebrate. And my friend’s friends that came to help? Two of them were acquaintances/friends of mine already. Like I lived with one for a year a decade ago sort of thing. But this experience? Brought us all closer. Made myself a new friend too.

And the friend i helped move? She and I are closer than ever because of it.

When i left our storage success diner to go home, she asked me again if I was sure i wouldn’t take any money.

I said “I ever tell you when I was 22 I went down to Hollywood to try that scene out? Anyway ten months later, when I just couldn’t do it anymore, and needed to come back, I called one of my best friends and said i can’t do this anymore i need to come back. You know what he said? He said: I’ll be there tomorrow. Not how much will you pay me, not what do i get out of it, not will you be able to cover my gas, just: I’ll be there tomorrow. Okay? You’re my friend. If you need help, I’m going to be there”

If helping someone move ruins your friendship, you’re doing at least one of those two things very wrong.

Reblogging for the last line

for the life of me I cant imagine peoples voices in my head, it just doesnt work. The thought of being able to do that is magical to me.

The best milk commercial ever

wait, THAT’S where that gif is from???

And that gif!

This starts out as a nice gesture, then quickly becomes absolutely ridiculous.

1,024 dice. Man.

The transition from innate human kindness wanting to pass something forward and monkey brain want make chaos is really sharp and sudden.

Can you hold your bow at full draw? And should you?

Either way it does look cool sometimes, I’ll give them that!

If you like my content please consider supporting me on Patreon (or at least give some of my videos a watch on YouTube!)

Bravo, @blumineck!

I've been muttering about this "Hold...Hold..." business for years. That includes the non-verbal kind, see "The Adventures of Robin Hood" (1938) where Robin threatens Guy of Gisbourne like this for several seconds as if pointing a gun at him...

...and "Henry V" (1944) where the archers stand like this, also for several seconds, until Henry signals them to loose.

Holding a heavy bow at full draw just wasn't done, for the reason explained in @blumineck's video - prolonged strain makes your aim go wobbly and, thanks to fine muscle tremor, it'll stay wobbly for several shots afterwards.

FAIK a protracted hold combined with one of those really heavy historical bows of the kind found on the "Mary Rose" draw weight) might actually tear something in the muscles / tendons / ligaments department. There's already enough archaeological evidence of repetitive-stress bone changes to make archer skeletons easily identified, and that's just the effect of regular shooting over many years.

In addition, there's an old archery saying that "A bow full-drawn is nine-tenths broken", and holding at full draw - or loosing without an arrow, so the energy for propelling the arrow snaps into the bow-limbs instead - adds a real risk of unexpectedly reaching ten-tenths broken and picking splinters out of your arm, teeth, face, eyes...

A heavy bow was drawn and loosed in one movement, since archers didn't need to hold or pause for aim. Years of legally-required archery practice meant they were able to aim as they drew as instinctively as someone throwing a stone.

*****

Incidentally, while pictures of archery target-practice features in medieval art...

...and as this photo from modern Bhutan shows, looks almost the same nowadays...

...Clout-shooting at long range and high angle gives a better idea (IMO, anyway) of what medieval war archery would have looked like.

Here are sport archers...

...and re-enactors...

...and the targets at which they shoot ("clout" is an old word for cloth).

Increase those archers to the ~5000 present at Crecy or Agincourt, and clout-shooting would accurately replicate the effect of an arrow-storm descending on a massed target at a range correctly estimated by much practice.

Anybody in the area where those arrows fell was likely to get hit and, if not armoured, hurt. IIRC, the modern military term for this is a "beaten zone".

Even if the range was too great for much injury against armour, it would force armoured men to protect their most vulnerable area, the face, by "buttoning up" - another modern term, for a tank with all hatches shut - by closing their visors, which causes reduced vision and ventilation, as well as a loss of communication and situational awareness.

Invoking this useful tactical advantage didn't need a full-on arrow barrage, just a few arriving every couple of seconds like a bolt from the blue. (Yup, originally an archery term, though "bolt" rather than "arrow" suggests it originated with crossbows).

A knight could leave his visor open if he wanted; it would probably be okay - until the instant, as happened to Henry V (then 16-year-old Prince of Wales) at Shrewsbury, when it wasn't okay at all...

Henry survived thanks to the cleverness of surgeon John Bradmore, who not only invented special tongs to get the arrowhead out, but prevented infection by flooding the wound with honey, a natural disinfectant.

I've also read that the arrow may have had less velocity and impact force - and hit Henry at the angle it did - because it was a ricochet from someone else's armour. (Leaving helmet visors aside, this is an example of why face / eye protection in the workplace is A Good Idea...)

Also, since armour and its padded underlayers aren't exactly breathable fabrics, they'd start overheating through exertion, followed by chilling down if it was a cold day because the sweat-soaked padding and metal casing were now an excellent heat-sink.

(Can any armour-wearing re-enactors confirm or refute this effect? Please and thanking you.)

The Battle of Towton (1461) was fought in a snowstorm...

...and I remember reading somewhere that men-at-arms went from dehydrated heat-exhaustion to sweat-chilled hypothermia in the course of a couple of hours. Not fun.

NB, the windblown banners in Graham Turner's painting demonstrate another detail: that wind gave the Yorkist arrows longer range while reducing the Lancastrian ones. It reached a stage where the Yorkists advanced a bit to shoot at the Lancastrians with their own spent arrows.

If the enemy was readying a mounted charge on unarmoured horses (as they often weren't until the late Middle Ages) that arrow-storm and the resulting hedgehog-prickled horses - even if not dead, they'd be Very Unhappy and uncontrollable - would throw the charge into confusion before it made contact, or even before it started.

This clip is only a movie, and an old one at that with some annoying errors such as knights being craned onto horseback, but the thudding, whistling release of (cartoon, hey-ho) arrows remains highly impressive 80 years later.

Some day I want to see a show that does the “no filler episodes” thing from the opposite direction. Just a whole season worth of low-stakes character pieces that seem to move the overall story absolutely nowhere, then episode 26 pulls all the triggers at once and this massive Rube Goldberg machine of a plot the show’s been quietly setting up in the background the whole time hits you like a truck.

Incredible one-liners as always

When I was a kid my family pretended to get raptured so I would think I was left behind on earth while they all went to heaven.

I was like 8 years old and my sister and mom had gotten really into the Left Behind novels (bible fan fic about the rapture). In the books when the rapture happened the clothes that people were wearing when they got raptured were left behind in neatly folded piles.

One day when I was getting home from school my family decided that they would leave piles of neatly folded clothes around the house, and then hide in the basement.

The intended effect was that I would get home and see the clothes then, think that my family had been raptured and that I wasn’t good enough to get into heaven… or something?

The problem was that I had never read these books, and didn’t really think about the rapture very often. There was no reason that I would see some laundry on the floor and think “The rapture happened and I’ve been abandoned by God! I’ll never see my family again!! Oh nooo!!!!”

I just sat down and watched cartoons and eventually my family got bored and revealed that they were all hiding in the basement.

It’s a good thing I didn’t understand the joke, otherwise that shit would have been traumatic.

Wait for it

Que weno

is anyone going to tell the people in the notes who are calling the driver an idiot that they did not, in fact, wait for it?

(or that the driver that other people so clearly see is, in fact, not)

ok fuck that got me

There is a decent point being made here about the way copyright law is inconstitently and selectively enforced depending on what works for the benefit of capital, but sadly a lot of the notes here are a perfect illustration of what I was saying the other day about how letting emotional backlash become the backbone of the anti-AI art position inevitably leads to uncritically spitting out some very reactionary things about copyright law.

I scrolled the notes for a bit and saw enough comments saying some variation of "Impossible to create without copyrighted material? That sounds like a glaring admission that these tools shouldn't exist then huehuehuehue ',:^)" to make my blood pressure spike.

Like if you're about to write an argument of the sort I implore you to think for two seconds about some other things it might be applicable to. Like I shouldn't have explain why "Can't exist without copyright infringement = Shouldn't exist" is a very dangerous idea to lend validity to for the sake of the Sick Dunk you're trying to score on all the AI techbros or whatever. If the thing you're about to say about AI art can be said about fanfic without changing anything about it I don't think you actually want to be saying it.

the key to understanding kermit is that line from the original muppet series where lesley anne warren is like "i thought you were the only person here who wasn't crazy" and kermits like "me not crazy? i hired the others" that guy loves chaos. he loves crazy shit, and he loves being the guy who has to handle the crazy shit. he deliberately creates these circumstances! he puts himself in these positions! and then he's like "i cant believe youre making me do this." anyway that frog is more human than any of us

classic behaviour for the manager of a community theatre company.

I'm cackling over how Odysseus Hades 2 says "We rarely get where we must go the fastest way we can." Like, yeah, that's very true and wise of you to say, but also are you sure you're not an extreme outlier here, Mr. Namesake of Circuitous Journeys?

Despite what you may have heard Bruce Wayne is not, in fact, a furry.

He is, however, very opinionated.