etherwraith - Dead Air
Dead Air

Mostly nothing, but every once in a while something will fill the void.

203 posts

Etherwraith - Dead Air - Tumblr Blog

10 months ago

i know vitamin c basically neutralizes adhd meds but lemonade good


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10 months ago

In 1850, a farmer found a secret village. It was later determined to be older than the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Archeologists estimated that 100 people lived in this village named Skara Brae, the "Scottish Pompeii." The houses were connected to each other by tunnels, and each house could be closed off with a stone door.

In 1850, A Farmer Found A Secret Village. It Was Later Determined To Be Older Than The Great Pyramids
10 months ago

when you try to get into the png nightclub but you see the dotted rectangle surrounding the bouncer stretch him wider to block the entrance cus ur not on his clipboard

10 months ago

We all know this site is US-user heavy, but I wanna know how many are vs aren't from the land of capitalism.

10 months ago

Don’t worry, if Cal dies in the next game Merrin will use any and all nightsister magic at her disposal to drag his ass out of the afterlife. She’s not letting get away that easy.

LOL wait good point, Merrin has the potential to be a really late healer

Dont Worry, If Cal Dies In The Next Game Merrin Will Use Any And All Nightsister Magic At Her Disposal

(commission info // tip jar!)

10 months ago

It's often remarked how D&D 5e's play culture has this sort of disinterest bordering on contempt for actually knowing the rules, often even extending to the DM themselves. I've seen a lot of different ideas for why this is, but one reason I rarely see discussed is that actually, a lot of 5e's rules are not meant to be used.

Encumbrance is a great example of this. 5e contains granular weights for all the items that you might have in your inventory, and rules for how much you can carry based on your strength score, and they've set these carry capacities high enough that you should never actually need to think about them. And that's deliberate, the designers have explicitly said that they've set carrying capacity high enough that it shouldn't come up in normal play. So for a starting DM, you see all these weights, you see all the rules for how much people can carry or drag, and you've played Fallout, you know how this works. And then if you try to actually enforce that, you find that it's insanely tedious, and it basically never actually matters, so you drop it.

Foraging is the example of this that bothers me most. There's a whole system for this! A table of foraging DCs, and math for how much food you can find, and how long you can go without food, etc. But the math is set up so that a person with no survival proficiency and a +0 to WIS, in a hostile environment, will still forage enough food to be fine, and the starvation rules are so generous that even a run of bad luck is unlikely to matter. So a DM who actually tries to use these rules will quickly find that they add nothing but bookkeeping. You're rolling a bunch of checks every day of travel for something that is purpose built not to matter. And that's before you add in all the ways to trivialize or circumvent this.

These rules don't exist to be used, that is not their purpose. These rules exist because the designers were scared of the backlash to 4e, and wanted to make sure that the game had all the rules that D&D "should" have. But they didn't actually want these mechanics. They didn't want the bookkeeping, they didn't care about that style of play, but they couldn't just say, "this game isn't about that" for fear of angering traditionalists. And unfortunately the way they handled this was by putting in rules that are bad, that actively fight anyone who wants to use that style of play and act as a trap to people who take the rules in good faith.

And this means that knowing what rules are not supposed to be used is an actual skill 5e DMs develop. Part of being a good 5e DM is being able to tell the real rules that will improve your game from the fake rules that are there to placate angry forum posters. And that's just an awful position to put DMs in (especially new DMs), but it's pretty unsurprising that it creates a certain contempt for knowing the rules as written.

You should have contempt for some of the rules as written. The designers did.

10 months ago

"immortality sucks because all your friends die" all your friends die anyway. those we do not mourn are those who mourn us.

"immortality sucks because you forget who you are" we always forget who we are. do you remember who you were at four years of age? who you were at fourteen? "who i am" is a shadow cast on the wall.

"immortality sucks because" skill issue. skill issue. skill issue. give me your liver

10 months ago

Man's epiglottis has a skill issue

etherwraith - Dead Air
10 months ago

I think the real question here is what colour? And also if you need 250,000 a year I suppose. If you can have lots of different shades of the colour, something like Blue would be good, because you can have darker Navies and lighter Sky blues etc. A Dark Grey might be nice too if it has to all be the exact same colour, because you could still wear a lot of formal clothes, even if you might not be able to get into Black Tie events.

10 months ago

they almost look like pieces on a massive Settlers of Catan board

etherwraith - Dead Air

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10 months ago

When a “funny” dude likes you and anytime he sees you anywhere he will be like “yoooo wassup it’s Jelissa!” (Or whatever) like “omg Miranda is here whaaaat” for literally no reason why do they do that

10 months ago

An amazing nest!

etherwraith - Dead Air
11 months ago
Thanks to Bookshop, There Is No Reason to Buy Books on Amazon Anymore
Independent bookstores, and booksellers, get a lifeline just when they need it most.

Independent bookstores around the country have a particularly clever lifeline, one perfectly suited to the unprecedented moment we find ourselves in. The strange part? It came into being just weeks before the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, and before the bookstores started closing up shop wondering if they’d reopen at all.

The lifeline in question is called Bookshop. 

In simple terms, it’s a super clean, user-friendly online bookstore whose raison d’être is supporting independent bookstores — not simply with exposure or resources (though that’s certainly a factor), but with cold hard cash…

11 months ago

American elections are crazy. I know gerrymandering can happen in many voting systems, but the american system has that on top of every other possible flaw with a voting system.

11 months ago

tier tier list

Tier Tier List
11 months ago

I believe that if Harley Quinn was on roller skates and Batman had to apprehend her, he would simply level the playing field and chase her on skates too. I trust him to be a man of equality in this regard

11 months ago

hello dear physics explainer, can you explain to me how/why photons are both a wave form and a particle?

oh that’s easy. light isn’t a wave or a particle.

I mean that’s it’s not a wave, and it is also not a particle.

light is light. it is a strange substance that has a lot of strange properties. we can model the behavior of light in a few different ways, however. If we are working with light and we are interested in interference, then it is useful to model it as a wave and treating it as a wave will predict its behavior reliably. If we are trying to do something with the photoelectric effect, then it’s far more useful and predicative to model light as a particle.

think of it like map projections. this is the mercator projection:

Hello Dear Physics Explainer, Can You Explain To Me How/why Photons Are Both A Wave Form And A Particle?

it wildly distorts geography the closer you get to the poles, so it is not useful for finding the area of any sea or landmass; however, the lines of longitude are perfectly straight, which makes it a very useful map for navigation.

This is the Goode-homolosine projection:

Hello Dear Physics Explainer, Can You Explain To Me How/why Photons Are Both A Wave Form And A Particle?

This is quite a good map for accurately finding the area of landmasses. But because the lines of longitude point in different directions across the map, it’s worthless for navigation.

asking why light is both a wave and a particle is like asking why the Earth is both Mercator-shaped and Goode-homolosine shaped. It isn’t. It’s not. The earth is round. We just need multiple models in order to interpret it two dimensionally.

photons are quantum objects. the only way to accurately model them in totality is via quantum theory. but that isn’t useful for most of the things you’d want to measure photons for, because it’s much too complex. wave-photons and particle-photons are both practical simplifications of quantum-dimension objects.

11 months ago

I'm getting mega hyped right now over my next D&D campaign just because I've worked on it a tonne more than any game I've run in the past. I only have a couple pages of work lmao.

I keep almost everything in my head but that means nothing when it'll all dissolve in a second thanks to my forgetfulness.

etherwraith - Dead Air
11 months ago

re: that last post, ive said it before and ill say it again: no one deserves to die (deserving is fake and death is bad) but some people need to be stopped and choose to make death the only way to stop them

11 months ago

Now I'm sad. o7 Clammy

You are angry about something. “Clam down,” I text you. You assume I have made a typo, but in fact I am holding a small soldier clam in my hands. He died so young. War is hell

11 months ago

not even JRR Tolkien, who famously developed the concept of the Secondary World and firmly believed that no trace of the Real World should be evoked in the fictional world, was able to remove potatoes from his literature. this is a man who developed whole languages and mythologies for his literary world, who justified its existence in English as a translation* simply because he was so miffed he couldn't get away with making the story fully alien to the real world. and not even he, in extremis, was so cruel as to deny his characters the heavenly potato. could not even conceive a universe devoid of the potato. such is its impact. everyone please take a moment to say thank you to South Americans for developing and cultivating one of earth's finest vegetables. the potato IS all that. literally world-changing food. bless.