Reblog To Give The Person You Reblogged It From The Energy To Do One (1) Chore Or Maybe Many

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Reblog to give the person you reblogged it from the energy to do one (1) chore or maybe many

I just... I was trying to sleep, ok? And I am back at my parents' for the summer and the place has just been hit by a pretty heavy summer storm, so the power is a bit touch-and-go (it blinks out from time to time), and.

Like

I was trying to sleep when I was yanked awake by a series of mechanical sounds along the lines of:

```CLUNK```

- beep!!

```BAAAAAAAAAAAAA, ska-KLANK!```

- Boop👍

And for a moment I was like, WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT, but then I remembered that Dad installed a "continuity group" (that is, a battery that sits between the wall socket and the modem/router to make sure that the power fluctuating doesn't knock out our wi-fi) and an auto resetting braker (that, when tripped, tries to fix itself three times, then gives up).

And like,

Did I just witness a discussion between them????

The power went down for a split second -> the braker tripped -> the battery yelled "oi! Power's down over here! -> the breaker went, "my bad, lemme fix it" -> the battery booped in satisfaction, then turned off.

And like, I knkw that's not what happened, and they were just working indipendently. But it's so stupid, I feel oddly sentimental about this?? Like, it's machines working and all that, but that's beautiful in its own right! No?

Magi

I'm a big fan of wizards-as-programmers, but I think it's so much better when you lean into programming tropes.

A spell the wizard uses to light the group's campfire has an error somewhere in its depths, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. The wizard spends a lot of his time trying to track down the exact conditions that cause the failure.

The wizard is attempting to create a new spell that marries two older spells together, but while they were both written within the context of Zephyrus the Starweaver's foundational work, they each used a slightly different version, and untangling the collisions make a short project take months of work.

The wizard has grown too comfortable reusing old spells, and in particular, his teleportation spell keeps finding its components rearranged and remixed, its parts copied into a dozen different places in the spellbook. This is overall not actually a problem per se, but the party's rogue grows a bit concerned when the wizard's "drying spell" seems to just be a special case of teleportation where you teleport five feet to the left and leave the wetness behind.

A wizard is constantly fiddling with his spells, making minor tweaks and changes, getting them easier to cast, with better effects, adding bells and whistles. The "shelter for the night" spell includes a tea kettle that brings itself to a boil at dawn, which the wizard is inordinately pleased with. He reports on efficiency improvements to the indifference of anyone listening.

A different wizard immediately forgets all details of his spells after he's written them. He could not begin to tell you how any of it works, at least not without sitting down for a few hours or days to figure out how he set things up. The point is that it works, and once it does, the wizard can safely stop thinking about it.

Wizards enjoy each other's company, but you must be circumspect about spellwork. Having another wizard look through your spellbook makes you aware of every minor flaw, and you might not be able to answer questions about why a spell was written in a certain way, if you remember at all.

Wizards all have their own preferences as far as which scripts they write in, the formatting of their spellbook, its dimensions and material quality, and of course which famous wizards they've taken the most foundational knowledge from. The enlightened view is that all approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but this has never stopped anyone from getting into a protracted argument.

Sometimes a wizard will sit down with an ancient tome attempting to find answers to a complicated problem, and finally find someone from across time who was trying to do the same thing, only for the final note to be "nevermind, fixed it".

xkcd — How Water Filtration Works

I used to love drawing stuff like this as a kid! I even got a stencil from a garage sale that had all kinds of labware shapes in it.

Shoutout to all my fellow ppl who see themselves as being simultaneously a boy and a girl. People who often wear clothes traditionally associated with their agab, or who don’t feel extreme dysphoria towards their body. People whose gender issues stem from within, and from knowing that they can’t just metamorphosise on a whim. People who’re a multiplicity in of themselves. People who’ve never known a life of gender singularity. People who’ve always been this way, people who’ve never known different. People who live exactly how they are, as confusing and conflicting as it may be sometimes. People whose friends and family would be beyond shocked and surprised if they told them they weren’t cis. People who love being this way. People who love having their own unique version of the masculine and feminine experiences, who use contradictory sets of pronouns. People who don’t really know if they can call themselves trans, but definitely aren’t cis, and altogether definitely don’t really care. People who are boys and girls and men and women and both and neither all at the same time. I love you. We’re the coolest. <3