Platonic Solids - Tumblr Posts
Things I'm working on at the moment: a giant hyperbolic mass, in super bulky/chunky yarn. This is 12 balls in. (It takes about 40 minutes to get through one ball). And some geometric crochet - beginning with a simple series of Platonic Solids. Currently layering and layering fabric stiffener onto one triangle for the tetrahedron to see how many coats it's going to take to get a sturdy enough facet.
Timaeus 1: tetrahedron prototype.
I’m the kind of person who’s too impatient to wait for there to be good daylight and make sure there’s no crap in the background for me to take photos and post them, so here are some photos taken at night, under artificial light, with some bags in the background (my office is my studio is my lounge. Mess is inevitable).
Anyway, somewhat delightfully ironic to call this a prototype, since prototype can mean both the first thing you make which you then go on to perfect, or the thing from which all future models are derived: almost like a platonic form. The form which is to be perfected in future models and the perfect form from which all later (imperfect) models will be derived are represented by the same word.
Why is that ironic? Because a tetrahedron is one of five Platonic solids (tetrahedron, hexahedron [more commonly known as a cube], octohedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron): it's a platonic form. It's the prototype for all tetrahedrons. Except I'm hoping that the next ones I make will be more perfect that this. My prototype/Platonic form is imperfect and rough. But it is still the first manifestation of the basic concept from which all the others will be built.
I will (hopefully) explain more about the Timaeus (A Platonic dialogue where these solids are mentioned) as I make more and expand/explore/refine.
I have some very strong and correct and nonarbitrary opinions about dice.
First of all, d10s. They don't belong in dice sets. They're fine in systems that utilize them in dice pools (Storyteller) and systems that utilize them for the awesome d100 (BRP, Rolemaster, WFRP) but they should not be a part of the set of polyhedrons from d4 to d20. Why? Because all the other dice in that set are Platonic solids and the d10 isn't. I can't even be bothered to Google what shape a d10 is but it ain't Platonic. This die fucks.
Anyway the set consisting of d4, d6, d8, d12 and d20 are the full set of Platonic solids. The set is also fun in the sense that it contains its own dual polyhedra. The dodecahedron (d12) is the dual of the icosahedron (d20) because the dodecahedron has three pentagons meeting at each vertex while an icosahedron has five triangles meeting at each vertex. The cube (d6) and octahedron (d8) are each other's duals: on the cube you have three squares meeting at each vertex and on the octahedron it's four triangles at each vertex. The tetrahedron (d4) is its own self-dual since it has three triangles meeting at each vertex.
Anyway so the d10 doesn't belong with those five although in certain contexts it can hang. But speaking of d10, while I have a soft spot for the d100 (done through rolling two d10 and reading one of them as the ones digit and the other as the tens digit) the most beautiful arrangement of numbers can be achieved on a 2d10. Look at this shit!
It's the way the probability of getting a result of 2 is 1%, the probability of getting a 3 is 2%, and so on all the way until you get to a 10% chance of getting an 11, after which it starts going down again, until you get to a 1% chance of getting a 20. That's fucking beautiful. It's enough to make you believe that there's some design behind all these numbers. More than that, it's enough to make you realize that this Plato guy was full of shit. His nice set of solids? Yeah they're pretty good. But can they do this? Probably. But not as nicely as this beautiful ten-sided freak.
Anyway, so that's a bunch of really normal opinions to have about dice and surely not a sign of some weird thought processes going on because of my neurons and syndromes.