Seeker of Carcosa

Ah shit. Reading is hard sometimes.

A pint is 568ml.

Edit: the extra 30ml might be accounted for with the patented Guinness widget, a little ball of nitrogen gas that ruptures and forms a foamy head when the can is cracked.

GPT4 is wrong and it doesn’t require a price per litre comparison to prove it.

4 cans at 440ml cost £4.50. Therefore 12 cans at 440ml cost £13.50, £1.50 less than 12 cans at 330ml.

It’s not a necessary tool for all fields. I don’t know your area but mathematics journals have vastly different style guides and citation standards. The best way to handle this is to export a bibtex citation which is just a list of metadata tags, then plug in the journal’s style header before compiling your TeX.

That’s because mathematicians use log for the natural logarithm. Log base 10 would be log_10

The thing I’d be more concerned with is establishing unreal expectations around sex based on overproduced porn. Like, it’s not a normal expectation to fold someone into a pretzel and jackhammer their ass for 30 minutes.

Hand them 4 pre-gens and run them through the Haunting for Call of Cthulhu. It’s made to be a pick up and play introductory scenario.

Do you keep restarting or wiping on fights? There simply isn’t 120 hours of content in a single playthrough of act I.

I learned all too quickly to never go all in on Isengard attacking Rohan. Despite all laws of probability, my opponent has a 100% chance of having both ent cards and a companion near Fangorn forest.

That’s capitalism and it’s obsession with ever-increasing profits for you. Often times a video game company sees the most layoffs the year after a major release. Cutting expenditure such as employee salaries simulates profit.

The Witcher 2, though it’s more of an exploit.

If you get the sword from the Lady of the Lake in the previous game, you start the prologue of TW2 with two silver swords, one being the Lady of the Lake sword. Unequip the Lady of the Lake sword so you don’t lose it to the dragon.

You now have a mid-tier silver sword that is good for half the game. You also don’t need to find a new silver sword at the start of the game.

The 19 that is face up is the check after modifiers are added. Your unmodified roll is 9 and you have a +10 modifier

This is great news. A school environment, where kids are learning first hand how to socialise and cooperate with one another, is exactly the place where we should be teaching peaceful conflict resolution techniques.

York isn’t in the Americas. It’s also a former Viking settlement, Jorvik. A millenium later and I’m in the same place, following the same diet of meat and bread.

Turns put I’m a bit basic with my choice of Dragonborn Paladin (Oathbreaker Dark Urge). I’m a sucker for charisma classes that can hit like a truck.

I’m hoping for some unique interactions as a tiefling next time around.

I need a HD train suplex.

It’s been a while since I’ve run D&D but there’s some info to be gleaned from how Pathfinder runs swarms. My procedure is based off of some PF2e rules together with some house rulings for off the cuff swarms, and is intended to be quick, minimising admin and adding some exciting flavour to the encounter:

• Choose your creature(s) which occupy the swarm

• Set the AC to the lowest AC among creatures in the swarm

• Don’t worry about the precise number of creatures in a swarm. Just do it based on size. If you want a rough idea of how many creatures fit into a swarm of a certain size, have 4-6 creatures of the same size occupy a space one size category larger. 4-6 groups of creatures of a certain size form a group of one size category larger.

• Take average HP of the most populous creature in the swarm. For each size category the swarm is above that creature’s size category, multiply that average HP by 4.

• Characters can occupy the same space as the swarm with no penalty

• Any creature sharing space with the swarm is automatically hit, assign damage based on the median among damage values in the swarm (5 snakes and 8 kobolds, probably does the damage of a kobold. Could roll luck to see if they take a random venomous bite)

• Swarms are immune to grapple, restrained, prone, etc. Swarms are vulnerable to area spells.

• Optional: Mind altering magic could affect a swarm hive mind as if the swarm is a single creature. This is completely discretionary. You could probably manipulate a swarm of bees with a single charm spell, but not a city-spanning mob.

• Optional: Give resistance to B/P/S damage. If a significant number of creatures in the swarm have a resistance (down to your judgement), add that resistance to the swarm.

• Optional: Characters in the middle of a swarm could probably swing wildly and hit something. Give players advantage if they are attacking the swarm while stood in the swarm

• Optional: Be narrative about the health of the swarm. Every so often mention one or two of the swarm falling dead or disengaging from the conflict.

I usually go to short stories, or old sword and sorcery novellas. For the former my go to stories are Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, Robert E Howard’s Conan, and Isaac Asimov’s Robots. For the latter I prefer Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné, Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and Jack Vance’s Dying Earth. If I’m feeling uninspired or experiencing a block, knocking out a few of these stories always sets me straight. They take next to no time to read and are great fun. I don’t get tired of rereading them.

I’ve recently started setting myself goals. I used to read non-stop before university. During my undergraduate degree I slowed down to finishing only a few books per year. By the time I started my PhD, where basically my entire 9-5 is reading and analysing dense 40-page mathematical papers, I’d completely stopped reading for pleasure.

Last year I set myself a 1 book per week goal and found that I was actively factoring reading time into my daily schedule, which I really appreciated. I managed to get through a lot of my reading bucket list this way, but at the end of the year I decided I wouldn’t set that kind of goal again. I ended up powering through some novels that I would’ve preferred to DNF purely because it was Thursday and starting a new novel would set me back.

This year I haven’t set a hard goal. I’ve decided I am happy with one book per month, and if I’m reading properly then I blaze past that. I’m very much enjoying the ability to augment my main reading with other reading. I’m currently participating in a book club over at [email protected] which I find very rewarding and I wouldn’t have had the spare reading time to participate in this time last year.

Oh, I just remembered as I played one of these last week. There are a lot of standalone scenarios which are cheaper. Searching „Arkham Horror Einzelszenario" should reveal these. They cost about 20-30€ each which is expensive for a single scenario but I find that some have a lot of replayability. The three I have played are Karneval des Schreckens, Mord im Excelsior-hotel, and Der Blob, der alles fraß. All are fantastic.

Googling the standalone scenarios, I found a free fan-made cruise ship scenario which is print and play. Unfortunately, it is only available in English. Perhaps if printing is an option for you, you could find some scenarios this way.

Edit: I did the googling and found pages dedicated to fan made scenarios here and here.