My goal for the summer was to finish my PhD. I defended on Friday and am now Dr. Drail, so I actually accomplished my summer task for once. I sacrificed all my sleep and sanity to do so, as I was told at the 11th hour to redo a major analysis that made up 1/4 of my dissertation, but I fucking got it done.

Everything should just be in eV. Particle physics natural units are the best.

I have both ADHD and minor hearing loss that started when I was a teenager (wear earplugs if you frequent concerts and play in live bands, turn the music down on your headphones from max volume). It is a rough combo that led to plenty of awkward situations as an awkward teen.

The worst was when I was on a first date at a SixFlags and my date didn’t tell me she was terrified of rollercoasters. I felt bad, but only went on a few rides without her and spent the remaining time trying to win a stuffy at a carnival game for her, trying to have a good time anyway. She was really really quiet and I was having a hard time with all the stimulus and crowd noise understanding her. Eventually, it got to the point where I was asking her to repeat everything more than once, so I started to autopilot. While we were waiting in line for something, she muttered something and I responded, my brain playing fill in the blanks, “Uh-huh.”

Turns out, when I heard her say “Mumble mumble ride mumble bring mumble with you mumble.” she was not saying, “I really wish I could go on a ride, but I am happy you wanted to bring me with you anyway!”

She was, instead, saying something along the lines of, “It must be so annoying that I haven’t gone on a single ride, I bet you regret bringing me here with you at all today.”

Needless to say, there was no 2nd date. She told me later it was shitty of me to respond like that, and I couldn’t convince her that I just misheard her. Since then, if I can’t understand someone after two tries, I just explain that I have bad hearing and need them to speak up. Asking someone to repeat themselves will always be less awkward than driving her home after that.

Not to dunk on word, if I need slightly more flexibility than a native .txt reader, it will do in a pinch. That being said:

Word: Oh, you want a table? Good luck getting your excel sheet to cary everything over properly, and god forbid you change a formula. You want to write it natively in word? Lol no.

Latex: tabularx goes brrrr

Word: Equations? Have fun properly tracking equation numbers and manually formatting your text to center justified every time.

Latex: $ $, \( \), and \begin{equation} go brrrr.

Word: Figures? Hope you anchored everything properly, it would be a shame if your entire document layout got shifted…

Latex: What the fuck is an anchor? top, here, bottom, those are your options. Add an exclamation mark if you’re feeling spicy.

My former colleague and I both decided on the same template for our dissertation, but hers looked wonky with the default margins. Sacrificing that lamb to have slightly tighter margins was worth it, even if the eldritch ramblings keep me awake at night.

I did all my Quantum Field Theory homework in Latex, the professor required it. My classmates would write everything out by hand and then transcribe it, meanwhile my officemate and I could think/write/math in Latex, so we only had to write our homework once. The prof lifted the requirement halfway through the semester after everyone else complained, but I never looked back.

The only thing that prevented a 100% Latex-only semester was the goddam section where we had to draw Wick diagrams. There just wasn’t a reliable way to draw them on my computer, as the Feynman diagram tools stuggled with the nuances of Wick diagrams. I still included the hand-drawn versions as figures in Latex, but it felt like cheating.

I did figure out how to write the Wick’s theorem bracket notation in Latex though (not that I’ll ever need to again), so that made up for it a bit. I wager that I spent more time researching obscure Latex packages than actually solving the problems that semester.

I love Latex so much, I even made a template for generating profesional looking DND item cards for my table that I submitted to overleaf: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/d-and-d-item-card-template/ndfdspmmxnrn

My boss read the first chapter I turned in, decided I know what I am doing, gave me some basic feedback, and has completely checked out since then lol.

I am half way done with mine, which means I only have 3/4 left to write, then I will be 90% done.

Fighter as a class is only as cliché as the story behind it from an RP perspective imo. An assassin who has only relied on his mental acuity (precision and brain blades) and stealth to reach their goals deciding that they need to more formally learn how to be an effective combatant doesn’t read as cliché to me, it seems very pragmatic. Or having escaped near death time and time again in combat, an assassin learning by trial and error how to improve their odds of surviving direct combat. Or literally extracting the knowledge via their soulknife abilities from every fighter they slay, adding experiences into their repertoire. Loads of potential there for a fun Rogue/Fighter build.

I have three questions that I ask every time I theorycraft an MC build (and some example prompts):

1. Why do you want to MC? Is it to make a more powerful character/to diversify your skills/to fill a niche in the party/for narrative completeness/etc?

**2. Why is your character developing these new skills? ** Does your character have a latent predisposition to this change? Did they get challenged in a way that necessitated change? Did a party member/mentor influence them to try out a new skillset?

3. Do you want the change to alter your concept for the character (both in combat and RP), and how does that fit with the character you play?

Answering these questions helps me a lot in deciding how to explain the MC decision, flesh out the character concept, and work it in to the game as written. If you just want to mix it up or beef up your character, that is fine too, but I think it is more satisfying when you can bridge the RP and the mechanics.

Ah, damn, you are totally right!

My two cents is that multiclassing should be driven first and foremost by what seems cool or fun, then looking at story consideration, and finally looking at optimization. Rogue is one of the best classes for MC, it has endless synergy with basically every other class, so I don’t think there is a wrong answer in terms of viability. Rogue/bard is super fun, allowing for a super versatile character in terms of being the face and skillmonkey, rogue/fighter is a potent martial combination, and warlock rogue has neat RP potential and some nice interplay between invocations and roguish abilities (darkness, mask of many faces, etc.)

How has you character been played so far? A dashing trickster would lend itself to bard (swords, whisper, or lore), a deadly and efficient assasssin would lend itself to fighter (BM or echo knight if allowed), or a curious seeker of secrets would lend itself to warlock (hex blade is the best choice for a mixed martial imo).

In physics- Like “quart” with a k In the Joyce novel- rhymes with park.

Gell-Mann said it sounds like “quart”, Joyce rhymed it with Park, it is a silly word and the pronunciation is as fluid as you desire.

Physics is a mixed bag with this stuff. Gell-Mann came up with the name quarks after a line from Finnegan’s Wake because Joyce referenced them as coming in three. It was a nonsense word inserted just to rhyme with Mark, Park, etc, so its pronunciation in physics isn’t even correct, but it was fun and physicists were just having a good time with it.

Three quarks for Muster Mark! Sure he has not got much of a bark And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.

Then we got the strange/charm and top/bottom (which was originally the beauty/truth, so bullet dodged there) so the quarks really got all the fun names. Strong Force physics in general gets the good stuff: Axions were named after a detergent because they helped “clean up” the strong CP-violation problem of the standard model. Fantastic, no notes.

Neutrinos (my field of study), had so much potential for fun, stupid naming that was squandered. The neutrino was originally proposed with the name “neutron” by Pauli, but then the actual neutron was discovered and observed first, so the name got pinched. To remedy this, the electron neutrino was dubbed “neutrino” or little neutron (they didn’t know that other flavors of neutrino existed). Meanwhile, the muon neutrino was originally supposed to be the neutretto (before they realized that the neutral leptons were related by the different particle generations), so we could have had a world where each generation of neutral lepton was just another combination of neutron + diminutive italian suffix.

1. Neutrino
2. Neutretto/neutronetto
3. Neutrello/neutronello

Then, when the mass eigenstates were confirmed, we could have diversified and gone with big suffixes to indicate that neutrinos have mass.

1. Neutroni
2. Neutrachione/neutronachione
3. Neutrozzo/neutronozzo

But noooooo, particle physics decided to just give neutrinos the lamest possible names, electron/muon/tau neutrinos for flavor states and m_1/m_2/m_3 neutrino for mass states. I am ashamed of my predecessors for what they’ve done.

Don’t even get me started on the J/Psi debacle…

As one of the most senior grad students in my dept, holy fuck this hits hard.