idiotkobold

[idiotkobold]

I know this is going to make me sound pretensions but I have to get it off my chest. I feel an unimaginable rage when someone posts a photo and is like "this picture looks like a renaissance painting lol" when the photo clearly has the lighting, colors and composition of a baroque or romantic painting. There are differences in these styles and those differences are important and labeling every "classical" looking painting as renaissance is annoying and upsetting to me. And anytime I come across one of those posts I have to put down my phone and go take a walk because they make me so mad

[idiotkobold]

Judge Dredd is an interesting story about the over-militarization of the police, how those in power will remain in power by force, the nature of law and order and recidivism in a poorly managed society, wealth disparity, about nuclear failings and pollution... interspersed with stories like "Oh, this dying man had his brain transplanted into a dog's and then his wife tried to have him put down so he could cheat on him", or "This man turned into a fly because of a possible magical curse", or "This woman has an incurable disease that turns her into a giant spider."

Tonal whiplash is an understatement.

[idiotkobold]

Galactic Forum, human guide section.

I think we found the perfect enrichment for human crew members.

Our humans really enjoyed this area we provided for them.

They can run, fall, climb and more, to their hearts content.

They really enjoy being lifted and thrown into a large pit of foam blocks, or plastic spheres.

Note: our crew is mostly Xarnian, so we possess the necessary strength to lift the average adult human despite the density they have evolved on their deathworld.

Human larvae enjoy it the most, but even the mature humans are also thrilled by these activities.

Incidents involving "acts of human" are down 18% in the first cycle alone since we installed the enrichment chamber.

[idiotkobold]

no sorry i dont really use instagram, i can contact you via ouija board, spirit box, fluctuations in temperature, flickering lights, and certain rituals. i am also on tumblr.

[idiotkobold]

houseplant type friend

[idiotkobold]

[idiotkobold]

Magic Word ✨

[idiotkobold]

gowron is my favorite klingon im always hooting and hollering every time he shows up and not even cause i have any particular strong feelings on his personality or character, but just because he looks like this:

[idiotkobold]

Things like this always gets me thinking of sci-fi with tech-religion, where understanding has been replaced by ritual.

A friend of mine has a partly-finished basement for their weeuns to play in when the weather is poor, plenty of toys and color but it gets chilly so there's also a space heater. The three-year-old knows how to turn the space heater on or off, but only as rituals. Click every button from left-to-right turns it on, the reverse (all buttons right-to-left) turns it off. A fine ritual, intuitive and easy to remember! But there are five buttons, and only two or three are ever needed for activation and only one for deactivation.

Sorry your coworker has the understanding of a three-year-old.

today was the day we finalized the migration of essential software at work from some old and busted shit that was ready to die at any time, to the new cloud version of the same software that we are no longer responsible for maintaining. which is good because no one was actually maintaining ours. it's just been slowly crufting into unusability for a decade. so anyway they set aside an hour for a teams meeting where they'd walk us through the different interface and how to go through normal processes.

"it's not that big a change," they said. "it's all the same stuff, it just looks a little different," they said.

they did not account for the fact that the primary user of this software is someone who doesn't actually know how it works or what it's doing. they learned how to do their job entirely through rote memorization. they know which buttons they are supposed to press in which order, and that is the full extent of what they know. they also did not account for the fact that this person's processes were learned thirdhand from other people who were not using this software normally to begin with.

it's like. imagine if someone had only ever used tumblr in the app. and you try to get them to use it in a desktop browser, but they cannot figure out how to post. and you go through explaining where the button is and how to format text and add tags, even though you could have sworn it was all the same in the app. but then they're like, "okay, but what's the phone number" and you're like "what" and they're like "the phone number to call to make a post?" and it turns out somehow they still had the ability to post by calling a phone number, and every time they posted on the app they called the post in first and then edited the audio post to transcribe it into text before screenshotting the text for a photo post. and nothing you can say to them will make them understand that none of that is necessary or correct. they shouldn't have even been able to do some of that. they can just type into the post box now, like a civilized person. "okay," they say, "but what is the phone number, though? because when i made my account my friend gave me this checklist and the first thing on it is to call the number."

so anyway we were on that teams call for almost three hours and they still don't have a handle on the new software

[idiotkobold]

rpg setting with multiple competing units of damage/resilience used in different regions. you gotta worry about the conversion between hp celsius and hp fahrenheit

[idiotkobold]

[idiotkobold]

I understand why a lot of fantasy settings with Ambiguously Catholic organised religions go the old "the Church officially forbids magic while practising it in secret in order to monopolise its power" route, but it's almost a shame because the reality of the situation was much funnier.

Like, yes, a lot of Catholic clergy during the Middle Ages did practice magic in secret, but they weren't keeping it secret as some sort of sinister top-down conspiracy to deny magic to the Common People: they were mostly keeping it secret from their own superiors. It wasn't one of those "well, it's okay when we do it" deals: the Church very much did not want its local priests doing wizard shit. We have official records of local priests being disciplined for getting caught doing wizard shit. And the preponderance of evidence is that most of them would take their lumps, promise to stop doing wizard shit, then go right back to doing wizard shit.

It turns out that if you give a bunch of dudes education, literacy, and a lot of time on their hands, some non-zero percentage of them are going to decide to be wizards, no matter how hard you try to stop them from being wizards.

[idiotkobold]

Um

[idiotkobold]

*trips and falls and a million rogue trader shit posts fall out of my pockets*

[idiotkobold]

grizzled mercenaries are always being like "I'm sick and tired of being a pawn in someone elses game" like their job isn't literally rent-a-pawn

[idiotkobold]

Once upon a time there was a girl whose wicked stepmother forced her to clean the entire house for Pesach all by herself. So while her stepmother and stepsisters left early for the grand seder at the Prince's palace, the girl spent the afternoon sweeping and dusting and washing and polishing. As she finally burned the last crumbs of chametz in the fireplace, she saw the sun setting and knew she would never make it to the Prince's seder on time, so she began to prepare her own meager dinner: a little Passover pizza. But miraculously, her fairy godmother appeared and transformed the pizza into a flying carpet to take her to the palace, and the cheese into a beautiful dress for her to wear. And to commemorate this story, to this very day, that cheese is named after that girl: they called her Matzah-rella.