A clever casserole of concepts

persona non grata

Sometimes when Izzy says something cute or embarrassing (in a good way) to me, I want to send a cute reaction gif as a response, because sometimes that says it better than words. I wish the animated gif search engine that's built into the keyboard of every pocket computer (god, computers have gotten weird) had an option to filter out any gifs that contain footage of an actual human.

I just think it's weird. This might be a misplaced empathy thing somehow rooted in my neurodivergency, but I'd feel very uncomfortable if someone sent a short video clip of me to a friend as a representation of their own feelings. I don't consent to my image being used in that way, and I have no reason to assume anyone in the gifs does either. Golden rule, y'all. I guess it's okay if they're no longer alive. As long as you don't do a creepy undead Orville Reddenbacher thing (look it up.)

Anyway: cartoons, animals, and cartoon animals only, please. No human people, like me. Wait, I mean, I'm a raccoon. No humans or sapient animals like me, is what I meant. Phew. Nice save.

media log

I don't know what it is about the way Robert Evans is describing Christopher Columbus in Behind the Bastards, but I'm picuturing him as portrayed by Alan Rickman. His self-centered, dour, unassuming brand of evil puts me in the mind of a Snape or a Scrooge (who I assume Alan Rickman must've also portrayed at some point)

cascading criticals

This is an idea I had for a new tabletop RPG dice system: the default die you use for all rolls is a D10. If you roll a 0 (i.e. a 10) then you re-roll using the next die size up, a D12. You take the higher of the two rolls. If you roll a 12, then you go the next die size up, a D20, and take whatever the highest roll is. If you roll a 20, then you go up to D100, and finally, if you roll 100, it's considered an automatic success, no matter how impossible the thing you were trying to do is. If it's a number roll, it's considered effectively infinite. You could kill a god. You could find enough treasure to buy a kingdom.

The same works in reverse: If you roll a 1, you go one die down, and you take the second result. Critical misses also cascade, So starting with a 1 on the D10 roll, you drop down to a D8, then D6 and D4 if you continue rolling 1s. If you roll a 1 on a D4, whatever action you were trying to perform is botched so badly that it ends with your unavoidable death.

Any time you roll the highest or lowest number on a die, you start moving that direction up the chain. So for example, say you start with a D10 and roll a 1. You move down to a D8 and roll an 8. You move back up to a D10 and roll a 6. Your final result is 8, because when you reroll after a high crit you take the higher of the two rolls.

I wouldn't use this system for anything where the players are expected to play the same characters for awhile, since it's a lot easier to die than to perform some impossible feat, but it'd be good for a Gamma World-like setting with a lot of chaos and entropy. In this rule set, entertaining chraracter death is a feature, not a bug. If you accidentally stab yourself to death with your lockpicks trying to open a door, laugh it off and roll up your next character.

parenthetically speaking

The markdown editor I'm using at work now (editplus with the markdown syntax enabled) has the fun side-effect of making every bit of text between two parentheses a different color, not just ones that are part of a hyerlink. I like it. I wish there was a way to automatically do that with CSS, but there's no way to regex-select an arbitrary bit of text within a paragraph. I suppose I could create a new combination rule (strikeout+bold or something) to fake it, but I dunno, the thing that's neat about it is that it happens automatically. I don't want to have to think about it every time. I made all kinds of little tweaks exactly like this to the markdown parser when I was using oddmuse. Pour another one out for self-hosting, I guess.

shoes

Minor positive development in the I-don't-understand-how-shoes-work saga: I've started taking my shoes off at work.

Why not? I work in a little office room with two other people. and we're all separated by office partitions. We have our own water dispenser, restrooms, fridge and microwave. I'm in this room for 90% of the work day. The only times I have to leave are if I'm going to the basement vending area or the copy room, and I can put my shoes on temporarily. I wear clean socks every day, and I put tea bags in my shoes to absorb any accumulated odors (a little bonus lifehack for the careful reader) so there are no objectionable odors going on. I guess if my co-workers are really offended by the gross unprofessionalism of seeing my socks and they ask me to stop, I will, but I don't think I'm doing anything wrong.¹

The upshot is that, with my feet free for the majority of the day, they're mostly pain-free by the end of it. It makes it more likely that I'll want to run errands or, in a hypothetical post-covid world, engage in other after-work activities. Further bulletins as events warrant 🦝

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1. It seems absurd that anyone would object, but I've had co-workers at other jobs complain to HR because I would sometimes comb my hair at my desk. Some people will take any chance they get to assert dominance in an informal hierarchy.↩