a-bernie-of-science - Tumblr blog

[a-bernie-of-science]

If I ever GM a Starfinder game

BBEG is great and all, but I want to see just a bunch of environmental hazards that are harder and harder to navigate. There are some interesting things we can do with physics that aren't usually seen in movies/pop culture. Some ideas:

Slingshot manouver around a black hole, so that time runs faster at one end of the ship than the other, making the ship start breaking apart, maybe with fun penalties to action economy depending on each character's location.

Lost in a star nursery, where sensors cannot penetrate the dense gas. Avoiding gamma ray bursts, being sucked into forming stars, and having to use all the turbulence to their advantage to navigate out.

Using lensing effects of stars to send signals to targets without other ships intercepting them directly.

Battle in a very fine planetary ring, where enemy ships are reflected on the dust, making it almost impossible to aim.

Black hole minefield, where the party has to navigate an area of undetectable black holes, which unpredictably sling their ship in random directions, or into another black hole.

Heads of a teraforming project have to find ways to sustain the project on a planet that suffers frequent hits of solar flares.

Having never played, I don't know if any of these would work, but man, would I love to find out.

[a-bernie-of-science]

Hello World?

I have a very hard time starting something like a blog and putting my opinions or experiences out there unsolicited. Probably, because I have a hard time accepting that there might be people out there who want to hear them.

This compulsive privacy is holding me back in a lot of ways, so I want this blog to be the antidote.

Hi, I’m Bernie. I’m a physicist and mathematician, born somewhere in Bosnia, but have spent half my adolescence and early 20s in Australia. I’m driven by an almost aggressive ambition to understand certain things about nature, which has driven me to Germany, and will probably drive me to other amazing places. 

Everything that Humanity has ever done has been in some way inspired by trying to understand, or better the universe, even the most disgusting and vile of our histories. We rely and defer to natural law so much that most of us ascribe it a consciousness, and imagine that it cares for us as much as we worship it. This worship has evolved over millennia, from angry weather gods, to omnipotent worldcrafters, to vague spiritual oneness. Mine is just another form of this deference. To understand and unravel the laws which govern things. To find out why things change, and what creates the beauty that inspires us so.

Should you keep looking, you might find my landscape pictures, taken while hiking wherever I might be, digital art or polymer clay figurines, DnD maps/worldbuilding, and probably some thoughts about physics, life and the nature of things

[a-bernie-of-science]

Moving back to Germany

Early autumn is beautiful in Tubingen