“Update: The student who wrote the letter has been found and we’re in the process of finding a way to reward her for her actions. Very grateful for what she did”

I love this mental image of this quietly horrified and righteous 6th grader just being like ma’am you can’t do that

6th grader:

#the drawing including kids in the bus windows going like :O kills me

All the kids at the same time “ OOOOOOOOOO”

Dealing with auditory processing disorder

LAWFUL: take the parts you heard and turn it into a clarifying question, e. g. "you saw your cousin where?" or "she's writing a what?"

NEUTRAL: "what did you say?"

CHAOTIC: take a wild stab at what the person said, e. g. "you want to baptize a mackerel?"

So apparently the pro-Tetris scene is exploding right now because a 13 year old nerd just reached the game's true killscreen for the first time ever

So, basically, for much of Tetris's history, people believed level 29 was the "last" level of Tetris, as the speed of the blocks would get so high that no human could do anything but lose; the blocks would go so fast that human hands physically could not control them. However, Tetris does not get any faster beyond that point, so if you're capable of playing level 29, you're capable of playing hypothetically infinitely.

Except Tetris, the original version for the NES, is not a hypothetical. It's a physical object, an item you can touch and hold, and it has limits. Many classic arcade-style video games have honest-to-god killscreens, where the game breaks so badly that it becomes completely unplayable. Pac-Man, famously, has a killscreen that garbles half of the playing field and doesn't spawn enough dots for the level to ever end. Tetris was assumed to be no exception, but because of the presumed-impossible difficulty of level 29, the community considered that to be Tetris's killscreen, and all high-leveled Tetris play centered around level 29 being the absolute end of your run, no matter what.

But, and if you've heard literally anything about people getting insanely good at retro games, you'll know what comes next. Of course, someone figures out how to control the game past level 29. In 2011, Thor Aackerlund discovered a technique now known as "hypertapping" (which is exactly what it sounds like, tapping very very fast) - and became the first person to play level 30.

But hypertapping wasn't enough. It was still stupidly difficult to get to, let alone past, level 30. Then this guy named Cheez shows up and finds that using an even more absurd technique, called "Rolling", which was even faster than hypertapping. People weren't just hitting level 30, but then 40, then 50, and then all the way into the 90s. Since all post-29 levels have the exact same speed, once they mastered rolling, they were pretty much good to play forever.

With levels 29+ conquered, now players could face the real killscreen of Tetris. A Tetris-playing AI got the first crash, but since it was playing a very slightly modified version (to show a larger score number, because the vanilla score counter didn't have enough digits), it only kinda-sorted counted. So the community picked apart the game's code to find where the game could hypothetically crash while completely unmodified - and found the current human record was not that far off.

So the entire community fucking scrambles to be the first person to crash Tetris, but then were confounded by another technically-not-game-ending-but-still-pretty-much-impossible-for-a-human bug; after level 138, the game stops choosing the colors for the blocks from where it's supposed to, leading it to display some truly heinously color palettes. Most of them are just ugly, but a few make the blocks you're placing next to invisible. (This was actually known about before the AI even crashed the game, and part of the reason the AI could get so much further than humans; it didn't need to visually see the blocks.)

Just next to invisible, though. You could still sorta see most of the blocks, and when you pass the level, the game pulls a new color palette, so if you can tough it out long enough to get 10 lines, you're probably gonna be able to continue your game for a while after that. It's annoying as hell, but not impossible. So, of course, the runners start getting past them and brushing up against the crashable levels.

And by runners, I mostly mean a 13 year old boy who goes by the online handle Blue Scuti. He'd skyrocketed into fame in the Tetris community relatively recently by achieving scores and levels that most adults couldn't even dream of, so of course he was among the first people to get past both impossible-palette levels, and he was able to keep going.

The game doesn't always crash in one specific spot, though. It just starts having a chance to crash after a certain point. You might have to perform some specific actions in specific windows of time to get it to crash on purpose, and it's much more likely that you'll lose control and lose your run before you achieve that goal.

Blue Scuti missed the first crash opportunity in his run. He was the first person to get that far at all, so it'd be a record regardless, but he was determined to win. He somehow keeps his cool, despite being a literal child with thousands of eyes on him (this was streamed on Twitch, of course), and never loses control of his stack, all the way until he reaches the next crash opportunity all the way on level 157.

And he fucking does it. He gets a single line clear in the middle of level 157 and the game just stops. It completely crashed. A 13 year old boy nicknamed Blue Scuti is the first human being in history to crash Tetris in this way. He is the first person ever to see Tetris's real killscreen. This game is over twice his age, and he is the first to kill it dead.

This kid fucking rules.

(if you want more detail, I learned basically all of the above from this video by aGameScout, please watch it!!)

It's always so disappointing when sci fi and fantasy books call their languages "Basic" or "Common". No language is apolitical or universal if they're all calling one language Basic, who made it that way? Why is THIS dialect "Common" and all the others are Special/Magical/Incomprehensible??? Show me even a hint of the politics, or give your language a real name

Okay so kind of along with this, I think what is really missing when languages are called things like Basic or Common is how abjectly political that actually is. Think of the level of imperialism required to have a language so common it's just called Common. How much do you have to destroy? Who has died in the pursuit of a Common language? Who has killed for it? What does their education system look like?

It's English but they have so stripped it of national and cultural context that it's Everyone's language now. Who did it come from? Has it changed since its origins, to account for all of the people it swallowed, or has it stayed aggressively the same, l'Académie Française-style? Did it flatten out the cultural nuances of other languages or did it assimilate them? Is it a mish-mash or is it one original language that has taken over?

Pippin has unfortunately figured out that if he plays with something he’s not supposed to, he gets my attention

as if he doesn’t get it enough 🙄 it’s just when i’m working and not paying attention to him bc of that work that he decides to rebel

I AM DECEASED

site that you can type in the definition of a word and get the word

site for when you can only remember part of a word/its definition 

site that gives you words that rhyme with a word

site that gives you synonyms and antonyms

THAT FIRST SITE IS EVERY WRITER’S DREAM DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY TIMES I’VE TRIED WRITING SOMETHING AND THOUGHT GOD DAMN IS THERE A SPECIFIC WORD FOR WHAT I’M USING TWO SENTENCES TO DESCRIBE AND JUST GETTING A BUNCH OF SHIT GOOGLE RESULTS

OMG

This one’s an always-reblog, because who knows who needs it and hasn’t seen it yet?

2024 MANDATE

Remember that you

are fucking alive and do

whatever you want

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

Let's get cozy, friend.

[crow-time.com]

The Post-Crescent, Appleton, Wisconsin, May 31, 1930

Ten Year Redraw, Part II

This is the 2013 piece I really wanted to revisit, pretty much ever since I finished it. I was never happy with the rendering or the composition, and even though the text mention's Legolas' small bow, that bow is, like, stupidly small.

"Legolas turned and set an arrow to the string, though it was a long shot for his small bow. He drew, but his hand fell, and the arrow slipped to the ground. He gave a cry of dismay and fear.

...'Ai, ai!' wailed Legolas. 'A Balrog! A Balrog is come!'" -The Fellowship of the Ring

2023 Redraw:

I love this scene, because to me, it's the first moment things get real for Legolas. Up to this point, the journey has been no big deal for him, even on Caradhras, but now, suddenly, he's faced with the literal manifestation of nightmares, a monster that's only supposed to live in ancient battle-ballads and ghost stories. You can't sing or snark your way out of this one, smartass!

Happy New Year to one and all! May your 2024 be gentle and kind and bright!

What a year this week has been.

It’s Monday.

It sure as hell is.

The earlier in the day Monday you reblog the funnier this gets

The funniest is if you reblog this on a Monday that is also January the 1st.

Dude when my social battery runs out there’s like no warning. I don’t get the 20% warnings it’s just I’ll be enjoying my time and then all of a sudden if one more word is spoken I’m going to kill myself and everyone around me.

‪happy christmas to my favourite story of all time‬

on the thirteenth day of christmas my true love was investigated for his many flagrant violations of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918

It was named after a winter party though