u/LurkerFailsLurking

The Earth isn't Realistic.

A complex looping network of riverbeds that very clearly aren't going anywhere.

There are so many posts here by people worried that their map isn't realistic enough, and the comments critique their plate tectonics or their distributions of biomes. I'm here to tell you that is nonsense. For every rule of mapmaking, there are real places on Earth that laugh in its face. The vast gulfs of time and interactions between time and temperature, water and wind, roots and fungi, life and death and everything that happens upon and within the Earth means there are literally tens of thousands of one-of-a-kind features that aren't "realistic" in the sense that they required such a precisely unlikely combination of factors to occur that a reasonable creator such as yourself simply wouldn't have allowed it.

What even is this? Why is it abruptly dark? Can your map have weird random looking nonsense like this? Hell. Yes. It. Can.

But beyond that, it doesn't even matter. Does any one of you think that the mountains around Mordor are realistic? Does that diminish the importance and impact and brilliance of Tolkien's work even slightly? No. Nobody cares because the story is good, the world is compelling, and his writing was sublime. So it's fine. If your world is boring, nobody will care how realistic it is, and if your world is evocative and exciting and lights our imaginations on fire, nobody will care if it makes no geologic sense. Your world doesn't even have to be a planet, it could be the surface of the lining of the small intestine of a giant whale swimming through an outer space even stranger than the inner space we see where the stars are distant settlements around the intestine! only the very brave venture up towards the stomach and only the damned venture down.

Does water have to be blue? Can you have yellow lakes that turn red on the shoreline? Yessir! Do you need to explain it? NO.

You don't even have to explain the weird shit you fill the world with. It's allowed to just be there, making us wonder and imagine about it. Is there a canary yellow lake whose rippling waves turn the color of ripe persimmon as they break on the shore? You don't have to tell us about the mineral content or bacteria. You don't even have to know the reason yourself. It's allowed to be a mystery to you too. You can leave these things open and figure them out, or not later.

The world is allowed to be whatever excites you and you don't need to know why

So go ahead, draw a map that makes no sense but nevertheless, somehow thrills you. Draw yourself a map that confounds and confuses our attempts to understand it. Let your map be unsettling and alluring at the same time. Let your map be a demon calling to us from beyond the veil of

https://preview.redd.it/aepsdh6zmmsh1.png?width=1609&format=png&auto=webp&s=ae8e72ab39296488b8dc84e6cfc83f0c3f739d79

Let your map be unrecognizable. What if your map does not appear to be a map at all? What would that mean? What if a map is readable only by a certain kind of person? Make your map useful or a keeper of secrets or the treasure itself.

https://preview.redd.it/a4gpkqcdnmsh1.png?width=390&format=png&auto=webp&s=5c65285a39f20cfc4ce3249c297d96e8721b66eb

As Greenland's ice sheet melts, the entire island will start rebounding up out of the water. How measurable is this process now and is it helping keep the ice sheet from slipping into the sea, or is it a small or slow enough change that it doesn't matter much.

Relatedly, I was wondering if the lifting of the underside of Greenland as it rebounds creates a suction in the aesthenosphere that reduces pressure on the nearby midatlantic fault zone?

This is a mini-game intended to be part of a larger game, and I'm interested in working out about what an average score. It takes maybe 2-3 minutes to play.

The game uses a standard deck of playing cards.

Remove the jokers and face cards, leaving only Ace - 10 in each suit.

Aces can be 1 or 11.

Shuffle and draw 4 cards, when you play a card, draw a card.

Play cards into a 4x4 grid.

Each row and column cannot have more than 1 of each suit.

The values of cards in each row and column must ascend from left to right and from bottom to top.

Play until you cannot play anymore cards.

Your score is the number of cards you played.

The maximum possible score is 16, the minimum possible score is 4. I think the average is about 9.

If you try it, let me know your scores and if you thought it was fun (for being such a lil' game).

Thanks!

There's been much digital ink spilled on how restrictive the rules for Recall Knowledge are, and how it means players often don't use it much.

But I think if we recall a core principle of Pathfinder design, we'll find that Recall Knowledge is both much better than expected and easier to run too!

**Specific Overrides General**

>A core principle of Pathfinder is that specific rules override general ones. If two rules conflict, the more specific one takes precedence. If there's still ambiguity, the GM determines which rule to use.

In the case of Recall Knowledge, there are rules both in the GM Core p54 and Player Core p231, but like always the actual correct of what Recall Knowledge does is defined by the action itself:

>You attempt a skill check to try to remember a bit of knowledge regarding a topic related to that skill. Suggest which skill you'd like to use and ask the GM one question. The GM determines the DC. You might need to collaborate with the GM to narrow down the question or skills, and you can decide not to Recall Knowledge before committing to the action if you don't like your options.
Critical Success You recall the knowledge accurately. The GM answers your question truthfully and either tells you additional information or context, or answers one followup question.
Success You recall the knowledge accurately. The GM answers your question truthfully.
Critical Failure You recall incorrect information. The GM answers your question falsely (or decides to give you no information, as on a failure).

It's this simple: the player asks a question and suggests the skill they want to use. The GM sets the DC, then rolls a secret check and gives information based on the result.

That's it. Everything else is commentary or advice. The rule is what's in the action.

By the text of the action itself, players can ask any question they want - stat block information, lore, whatever.

I was sitting here eating some leftover fried rice and not thinking much about anything when I started imagining the uplift of the Colorado Plateau (as one does). Then this thought occurred to me, but idk if it makes sense or is supported by evidence:

As tectonic forces create an uplift, the bottom of the plate that's uplifted rises. I imagine this creating a suction that pulls the asthenosphere up to fill the gap, cooling it and forming new rock that thickens the crust under the uplift. But that thicker, heavier, denser rock eventually gets massive enough to start sinking despite the uplifting pressures from the outside. So then the uplift stalls and the mountain building stops. But then, the uplifted surface gets eroded away which reduces the mass, which means there's less mass sinking the uplift into the asthenosphere, which allows the pressures uplifting the region to drive it up again.

So I'm imagining this limiting cycle of uplift, orogeny, isostasy, erosion, where the force applied to the plate boundary and the average mass of the plate create a kind of function that determines both the maximum and the minimum height of the uplift above the plate boundary and the uplift will oscillate between those extrema as long as the forces are still applied to the margin.

Is that right?

Sexual predators always come in packs. They protect each other, smoke screen for each other, and vouch for each other. If you know one, you know several. If you don't know any, it's because nobody trusts you enough to tell you the truth.

>A report earlier this month alleged that Moraff was “barred” from Congresswoman Lee’s 2022 primary campaign after her team learned of at least three allegations of “sexual misconduct.” A subsequent story in Semafor then claimed a person close to Lee’s campaign said he was barred “over concerns he was disrespectful to others, rather than allegations of sexual harassment or misconduct.” (A Moraff spokesman denied the sexual assault allegations to Semafor.)

But according to Annie Weinberg, Lee’s campaign manager at the time, the allegations of sexual misconduct were the reason Moraff was told to stay away.

In late January 2022, Weinberg tells The Handbasket, a member of the community came forward to relay six allegations of sexual misconduct by Moraff that had happened prior to the campaign—three more than previously reported. Weinberg confirmed that at least one of the allegations she was told about was sexual assault. “These alarming allegations involved six different people who did not want to be named directly, and none of whom were on our staff team, to the best of our knowledge. This community members’ concerns were then backed up by another one,” Weinberg said. 

Though none of these incidents were alleged to have happened during Lee’s 2022 campaign, Weinberg understood it was important to take them seriously and evaluate how this history would impact their current staffers and volunteers. “Campaigns, I think, have a responsibility to build cultures that keep everybody as safe as possible,” Weinberg said.

My son is in the JAS Street Horns band. They played at Rebrick Center for the Arts today and then he and my wife and youngest child sat on a picnic blanket to listen to the music that followed their performance. When it was time to go, they packed up but he left his flute. 999 times out of 1,000, my wife would notice that sort of thing, but she had a long day and that was their 4th event, so she was pretty wiped and was already wrangling more than enough. We're guessing he left it on the picnic blanket but maybe he put the case down on the sidewalk for some reason as they got into the car parked under the conifers out front.

At any rate, if you found a flute at Redbrick today, please let me know.

We're renovating an unfinished garage and adding a second floor. The dimensions of the studs were recorded wrong on the architectural drawings which was caught almost immediately when the demo team showed up on day 1. Is it normal for the client to be charged for the architect and engineer needing to redraw the plans? Fortunately, the changes were minor and no major structural issues presented themselves as a result, so the cost isn't high, but it also surprised me that we were being charged at all to fix a mistake they made.

I understand that you can't serve people cat food - even for free, but you can give people cat food. I'm not trying to trick people or be duplicitous in any way and I'm not charging people anything. I'm unclear where the line is.

Can I put some cat food on a little round metal button and stick a Popsicle stick in it and give it away on the street for free if I say something like "Can I interest you in this cat food? It's food for cats."

The Nuggets currently have their best defensive rating of any playoffs of the Jokic era.

The problem is their shooting. But they're still getting the open shots, so it's not like they're being stifled by the defense. The shots just aren't falling. But that will happen randomly because shooting performance is probabilistic not strictly deterministic. The sample size of the shooting this series is small enough that the difference between them making their season average might be small enough that it's explainable as statistical noise.

If you flip a coin enough times, you'll occasionally get stretches with far too many heads to seem normal, but what would actually be surprising would be if you never had stretches like that.

I haven't actually worked out how unlikely the Nuggets' shooting this series is, but the games have been close enough that the difference between 4-0 and the 1-3 they're currently at might itself be insignificant.

Idk if that makes me more or less unhappy with what I've seen from them, or if what I'm most disappointed by isn't the scoring or the stats or the wins and losses but the emotions and attitudes.