What's one positive/neutral thing that's happened today?

My oh my I laughed so hard I am crying… I am going to blatantly steal this quote from Sun Tzu (copyright no doubt expired by now) to incorporate as a custom response. Thank you for brightening my day.

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You’ve got a lot of them! Clay is everywhere, and marking it like this—pressing a stylus down into the surface, instead of “drawing” with it—means you don’t make a mess of your surface. So it’s actually a lot faster than trying to “draw” on the clay. (If you try dragging the point of a pencil through clay, you’ll see your lines get very messy as displaced clay piles up on the edges.)

It’s also extremely space-efficient, and space-efficiency was more important than time-efficiency: when you’re trying to carry pieces of clay across the whole known world without them breaking, you want them to be as small as possible! The empires that used cuneiform could support a class of scribes whose entire job was to read and write, but even then, evidence suggests that “fluent reading” (scanning a line of text only once and getting all the words on it as you go) wasn’t possible with cuneiform; reading it was a whole process. But the scribes taking a few more minutes to decipher the text is a lot better than the tablet breaking in transit and needing to be re-sent.

As a side benefit, the system lets the individual scribe decide how they want to trade off between clarity and space-efficiency. You can write every word in the language with just a couple dozen signs if you want (the phonetic signs, which encode sounds), but it’ll take at least five or six signs per word. If you instead let yourself use all the hundreds of signs available (the logographic signs, which encode whole words), it’ll be harder to read, but need only one sign per word. Certain types of documents, like books about magic and divination, could be written with 90% logograms—very space-efficient, and as a side benefit, completely inscrutable to anyone without the proper training!

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Then they would have had to invent TCP! Unless it was streaming data, of course. But in that case, it would need to be easily decodable, which you said wasn’t true.

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Justin Schmidt, of the Schmidt pain scale index, died recently. That is, of course, terribly sad news- (he did so much for general science communications and sparking conversations with laymen and even other people already interested in the sciences but found studying Arthropoda boring, because there was a stunt man dare devil like quality to his index- but he was also a personal favourite of mine because of how many more people he opened up the world of parasitoid wasps to indirectly, with his ranking of the velvet ant) but just like when another of my personal heroes died (Mary Oliver, I have the journal where I had a tear stained and smudged entry from furiously writing in my highschool library when the news broke of her passing), there is a comfort in solidarity from other people who were touched by their work and memory.

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Doodled my main Butterfly Court meowmeows. It was nice to just sketch- you can tell from the lineweight and stiffness in the initial drawing of Andrey that it was when I was still warming up- I’m most fond of the Enoch on that page, and then I did a silly little height chart for my own sake- I love sneaking in a goofy looking Zeke the kitty when I draw Enoch.


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7 posts were merged into an existing topic: Movie Recommendations

I moved the bit of Oscar talk and Everything Everywhere All At Once to the movie discussion topic so it can continue outside this thread.

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Jinx compiled this fantastic gamebook that compiles the lore inside of the Butterfly Court campaign about like, magic, religion, and character relationships, and I’m still laughing about how Taran is just full of seething hatred and Rory has so mewny friends on the relationship chart. (It doesn’t have all of the additional NPCs added onto it, since we’ve all plonked down a fresh handful of meowmeows recently, but it’s really good.)

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Saw the sun still while exiting my night class. The sky is still faintly blue, the way evenings and early mornings are in the summer time. It took me by surprise.

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Decided to take a moment to make a found poem from some of the recent posts’ titles on here.

If I were to write it out/format it as I’d like, it’d go like this:

Seeking

Looking for hidden things.

What do you do?
Which body parts, and why?
(Most ‘productive’ won’t save you.)
Are you listening?

Upheaval that’s happened-
darkness witnessed.
(I need help.)
Is there a way to win?

The first thing you need to understand-
(sabotage, alignment woes-)

Memory allocation error.

New Game:
Going Nowhere.

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wow that’s awesome :star_struck:

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That is certainly a smattering of felines.

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We got a new used pickup truck. Tom is so happy. I am missing the chip that makes people want new cars-- I am 51 and I’m only on my 3rd car. I drive them until they fall to bits. All cars look the same to me. I pity the detective who ever needs me to identify a car. But I take pleasure in Tom’s joy.

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Cars are tools. Tools are meh.

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I like used vehicles, especially well-loved vehicles. You can almost feel the owner’s personality indelibly imprinted onto it in a thousand little ways. My favorite are unorthodox repairs. I once owned a little hatchback Pontiac T-1000 that I bought from an old lady for $300 and a few hours of lawncare and weeding. It had translucent red cellotape over the rear driver’s side brake light as the glass was missing. There was a small hole in the front passenger side floor that you could see the road sliding by through, and the switch that controlled the headlights had been fixed using a standard home lightswitch with OFF and ON written to each side in sharpie directlt on the light switch wall plate screwed into the dash. The driver’s seat was covered in a layer of duct tape and I was never able to identify the smell. Drove it for 4 years and sold it for $1000. Great car.

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I’ll admit my wife and I did love our little 1982 Volvo 242 we bought in 1995 and drove into the ground until it died in 2003. It came with us on our honeymoon roadtrip around the eastern US, visiting all of the drive-in movie theaters, diners, Elvis memorabilia, and Largest X in the World attractions that we could find. We glued plastic aliens and dinosaurs and etc all over the dashboard, listening to Southern Culture on the Skids, Ben Folds Five, and The Squirrel Nut Zippers. We were grad students! This was our idea of luxury!

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Pasta for dinner and breakfast tomorrow. A hot chocolate for an after meal drink.

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I forgot how much I like using my laptop in bed (something I normally only do in the summertime,) but it makes me feel like some sort of sickly boywaif princeking scrawling missives in bed and being a bit silly. So comfortable with all of the blankets…

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I love how the orange kitty has such round little ears and a teeny tiny head. Super cute! They even have little soft swirling patterns like dappled sunlight all over, and that cute little ‘M’ marking tabbies have that’s perfect for forehead smewches.

Very fluffy kitty in the middle, and an adorable little meowmeow who looks like what I think squirrels do a bit, with that dappled darker fur pattern. Staring off at very impurrtant sights, I presume.

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