Categories
People

Relentlessly Gay

This is great. In four days she’s raised over $40,000 to further gay up her yard.

Categories
Maths Sport

Basketball

[I]t can be expressed as a rule of thumb for determining what the lead and remaining time have to be for a team to have a 90 percent chance at maintaining that lead: L = .4602√t, where L is the lead and t is the number of seconds remaining.* Using the formula, you can calculate that if a team has a 10-point lead with just under eight minutes left (like the Warriors did in Game 6), then 90 percent of the time, they’ll keep that lead for the rest of the game.

A new formula for predicting lead changes.

Categories
Games Me

Ergodic reading

These are books, like digital literature, computer-generated poetry and MUDs, where a “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text”. And they are more common than you might think, especially in geek culture. Game books that allow you to “choose your own adventure” are ergodic, as are fantasy novels with extensive maps and world-building notes. But the RPG handbook pushes ergodic reading to its limit.

From ‘The joy of reading role-playing games’.

I have a fair-sized collection of RPG books: the Advanced Fighting Fantasy books (Dungeoneer, Blacksand!, Allansia, Out of the Pit, and Titan), Savage Worlds, D&D 4E Players Handbook, Mythic, the full set of D&D 5E Manuals (plus some others I’ve forgotten about, no doubt), but I’m yet to really play one.

I once convinced a friend to start an AFF quest, we must have been about 11 or 12, but our story didn’t get much further than one night. More commonly I’d spend hours meticulously constructing characters (on the slim chance I could ever get someone to play) and reading and re-reading the quests and background lore to imprint the worlds and stories in my mind.

Since I bought 5E I’m pretty much back there 20 years on, rolling characters and questing in my imagination.

Categories
Animals

Eagle Club

Tickling a dinosaur like it’s a kitten? Want.

Categories
Natural Science

Jurassic Science

Categories
Comics People

The voice of the lonely child

ch2

To be a lonely child in the world means creating your own fun, your own friends, your own magic.

I got the complete C&H for my birthday this year, I wholeheartedly agree with this: Calvin and Hobbes embodied the voice of the lonely child (it also makes me wonder if I’m still mostly a lonely child).