#principle of combinations

[otaku553]

Save me yi nine sols

(You should play nine sols it’s very very fun)

[anghraine]

I know it's well-understood at this point that Kirk/Spock is much more of a nerd4nerd ship than a nerd/jock thing, but it's just been kind of percolating around my mind that both of them aren't just space nerds but space nerds who were personally bullied.

Like, 18-year-old Kirk was targeted by an older bully who combines "total asshole" with "the most grating man in existence":

MCCOY: Well, yeah, I'm beginning to feel a little bit picked-on, if that's what you mean. KIRK: I know the feeling very well. I had it at the Academy. An upperclassman there. One practical joke after another, and always on me. My own personal devil. A guy by the name of Finnegan. MCCOY: And you being the very serious young— KIRK: Serious? I'll make a confession, Bones. I was absolutely grim, which delighted Finnegan no end.

This was five years after Kirk survived a genocide, btw, and likely well before his stint as an Academy instructor known to be strict and demanding (which is the period the "stack of books with legs" description of him comes from). By the time he's 33, fifteen years after all this, it turns out one of his deepest fantasies is just beating the shit out of his bully, but only if he can do it According To The Rules (the replica of Finnegan sneers, "Always fight fair, don't you? True officer and gentleman, you").

Spock, meanwhile, is viciously targeted by his Vulcan peers for being biracial from at least age 5; he's described as being tormented by other boys by that age, and "at home nowhere except Starfleet." I think he'd have been 18 or 19 when he left for Starfleet and it's... the least bad of his options, but he seems to have spent his entire career among humans and being persistently subjected to raw racism and profound disrespect for his culture at every turn.

Like, their histories of being metaphorically shoved into lockers are not identical or anything, but I think it's interesting that they both have them.

[sentientstump]

💥bombo-genesis💥

[protoindoeuropean]

Photos of a bronze armillary sphere with three layers of rotating rings on an equatorial set up. The sphere is supported by three legs in a row, all decorated with detailed ornamentation and dragon figures. The text on the granite base is in Slovene and Mandarin Chinese (translation and originals under read more↓).

The astronomical instrument (an equatorial armillary sphere) that was unveiled on 6 February 2024 in front of the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia in Ljubljana – facing the location of the old Jesuit college, where its conceptor first received his education – is a full-scale replica of the original, finished in 1754, still in place at the Beijing Ancient Observatory in China.

Ferdinand Avguštin Haller von Hallerstein, known also by his Chinese name Liú Sōnglíng (劉松齡; simplified: 刘松龄) was born in 1703, received Jesuit education in Ljubljana, Vienna and Graz and arrived in Beijing in 1739 as a missionary, set to work at the Imperial Astronomical Bureau (which had been run by the Jesuits since 1669). In 1746 he succeeded the office of the head of the bureau and ran it until his death in 1774 – longer than any of his predecessors. He died soon after a stroke he reportedly suffered upon hearing the news that the Pope had disbanded the Jesuit order (in 1773; that suppression was later lifted in 1814).

Beside the astronomical work (published as Observationes astronomicæ), he also worked as a cartographer (creating a map of Macao and its environs, of Manchuria and contributing to the Jesuit Atlas of China) and is noted for making the first exact estimate of the Chinese population (calculated to have been 196,837,977 in 1760 and 198,214,624 in 1761).

Astronomical instruments at the Beijing Ancient Observatory. Hallerstein's armillary sphere is in the foreground. {x} • {x}

The armillary sphere is one of a kind, combining Chinese and European astronomical knowledge as requested by the Qiánlóng Emperor (乾隆帝), who wanted to both honor the tradition of his ancestors and make the instrument as accurate as possible by the standards of the time. The instrument is 3.7 m long, 2.1 m wide and 3.3 m high. It is made of bronze and weighs more than 5 tons. Its replica is made of the same material and is of the same size, built in China using 3D-scanning technology and later transported to Slovenia, and is also fully functional. The design of the original instrument started in 1744 and when it was finished 10 years later, it was considered the pinnacle of Chinese astronomical science as well as artistic craftsmanship.

The Astronomical Instrument was conceived by Augustin Ferdinand Hallerstein (*1703 Ljubljana, †1774 Beijing), a Slovene Jesuit, astronomer, mathematician, cartographer and diplomat, during the time he lived in Qing China. The original stands at the Beijing Ancient Obsevatory. The replica of the instrument is a gift of the Embassy of the People's Republic of China as an incentive for the continuation of cultural exchange between Slovenia and China. Urban Municipality of Ljubljana, 2022

Zvezdni opazovalnik je v času dinastije Qing med svojim življenjem na Kitajskem zasnoval Auguštin Ferdinand Hallerstein (Ljubljana 1703–1774 Peking), slovenski jezuit, astronom, matematik, kartograf in diplomat. Izvirnik stoji na Starem pekinškem astronomskem observatoriju. Repliko opazovalnika je podarilo Veleposlaništvo LR Kitajske kot spodbudo za nadaljevanje kulturnih stikov med Slovenijo in Kitajsko. Mestna občina Ljubljana, 2022

玑衡抚辰仪 值此中华人民共和国同斯洛文尼亚共和国建交30周年，中国驻斯洛文尼亚大使馆和北京天文馆特赠天文观测仪器玑衡抚辰仪同比例复制��，以兹纪念。玑衡抚辰仪由斯洛文尼亚人刘松龄 (1703–1774) 在华担任清朝钦天监监正期间主持制造，原件陈列于北京古观象台。 二〇二二年

(for the latter, thanks go to this anon!!)

[diabolocracy]

Get healed, fucko 👉🍀 Heavy reference

[prringlecan]

I think arle and Ei should interact . Please it’d be so cool like. I know Ei is on a level of her own completely but if I had to say there’s ANYONE so far that’d come second it’s gotta be arle. An archon with insurmountable power and a Harbinger with origins seemingly out of this world?????? Cmon man cmon let them spar or have tea or smth pleaseeeeeee pretty powerful polearm ladies must stick together

[fencesandfrogs]

re: math post, the comparison to music is kind of apt in my case in that my dyscalculia makes me essentially tone deaf with regard to math. numbers genuinely do not make sense to me, i cannot wrap my head around them at all. i struggle with extremely basic addition and subtraction to the point that playing a ttrpg is basically impossible for me because my turns take 10x longer than they should because i’m that bad at calculating damage. i love all my friends who love math and i genuinely really admire how good they are at it, but it genuinely doesn’t make a lick of sense to me no matter how hard i try, and i’ve even had teachers openly make fun of me in front of the entire class for making mistakes in it. i truly love how it can bring people joy and how it seems to really provide meaning to others, but for me it’s just a source of pain and suffering, even when i try my hardest to get it. (i also can’t read maps at all which is also part of the dyscalculia :( )

I didn’t really expand on it in my tags but I picked something some people legit just aren’t into! Some people just don’t listen to music. It’s weird to me but I respect it. Same w math like I know some people r never going to like it and that’s fine. I just think the fact that such a high proportion of people dislike it is evidence that something about how we expose people to math is deeply wrong.

(For an explanation of what is wrong with it and how to fix it, see A Mathematician’s Lament. The opening analogy is very similar to the one I made with music, and I love it so much I have a tee shirt custom designed inspired by it.)

I’m not gonna force u to explore math, but I will say the math that post is talking about isn’t. Well.

The math that most mathematicians call beautiful isn’t the stuff with numbers. I have no idea if that makes it any easier for dyscalculia (aside: I used to think I had dyscalculia but it turns out my ADHD is simply way worse than I realized) but it might.

Also like music, you don’t need to be able to play an instrument to appreciate that music is pretty!

Again, I don’t say any of this because I think you personally should like math. It’s fine if you hate math! But I want you to know, like.

I guess on top of me wishing people weren’t essentially trained to hate math, I wish more people understood what the core of math is. Because it’s not about numbers. It’s logic. The core of math is and always has been logic.

Uh I could go on for a long time like I think it’s such bullshit that children hate math when the second layer of math is patterns and kids fucking love patterns, they love when shit is regular and follows rules, and also they love testing the boundaries of rules, which is what math is! but anyway

OH also it’s bullshit if the people you play TTRPGs with don’t let you use an electronic dice roller or something to help you calculate damage and stuff. That’s a disability accommodation.

[rararasputins-dick-mind-control]

this guy just be showin up unexpectedly

[mr-aftons-rotting-pussy]

drafting a longer post explaining why i think ppl justifying ignoring the fact that william is canonically fat from a purely character design centered lense in slightly more detail, but in essence i think ppl underestimate what Good character design rlly is and also SEVERELY underutilize fashion in their designs as well.

Williams whole mysterious n spooky shtick can easily be achieved by a very simple but deliberate choice in wardrobe alone,,

[andersdotters]

If you’re into enneagram and you’d like a bit more of a behavioral study on 9s, a good character study would be comparing the differences between Kazuha (9w1 sp/so) and Alhaitham (9w8 sp/sx). Both characters prefer not to have their peace of mind interrupted, but they deal with this in different ways.

[wishbonemotel]

should i make a spiderverse oc. i should make a spiderverse oc.

[lith-myathar]

.

[takemetoasummereve]

omg yes why are they giving him the same amount as lewis?😭 lewis gets it bc of mission 44 and marketing value but what does adrian do apart from partly designing a car😭 pls let this be fake

Like shout out Adrian but 100 mill is INSANE. I thought Lewis was getting more than 100 but either way it doesn’t make sense. Idk if it’s real but my mind can’t even conceptualize that😭

[bluntforcefem]

been rolling around the idea for a few months of a fusion mechanic for interstitial that isnt amalgam-based (pure self-indulgence for when me and my friends do a campaign) which is not... too entirely far off from what about pacrim would be interesting to me as interstitial-based mechanics (read: the drift)

[teamfreelunch]

Nederlanders how are we feeling about the upcoming elections?

[vaspider]

Listen to me. Listen very carefully:

They are trying to wear you out.

They are trying to wear you out, and they own most major social media now, along with many major media outlets. The disinformation machine is cranking along. You are going to have to slow the fuck down and read things before you help them wear out other people, too.

So you just saw a post about a real scary bill, hunh? Republicans want to make it a capital offense to pet dogs and repeal The Sky Is Blue Act of 1793, declaring the new official color of the sky to be squant? Damn, that sounds scary.

Let's go look up this fictitious "Make The Sky Squant Again Act" on GovTracker* & on the official legislative tracker on congress.gov!

Well, let's see... GovTracker estimates it has a 1% chance of even getting out of committee and a 0% chance of being enacted, while congress.gov says this bill has 2 cosponsors who have been in the House and combined total of less than a month. The bill doesn't have any actual text, and it was referred to 5 different committees.

That fictitious bill and a hundred others like it are quite literally not worth your time, and more than that, continuing to wring your hands about it and tell other people about the scary scary squant sky bill only does their work for them. It scares people, it makes them spend time and energy on it, and it wears them out. It is a legislative Gish Gallop, meant to throw so many things at people that we can't keep up.

Even calling or messaging your Rep in this case means their staffer has to waste time responding to you and letting you know that Representative Buttzonheads definitely won't support making petting dogs a capital offense, a thing that will never, ever happen regardless.

Staying engaged in this environment is going to require protecting your heart and protecting your energy, yes, but also protecting the energy of others. This is why WWII propaganda posters also included ones taking people to task for spreading panicky rumors and undermining morale.

Do you know why most observant Jews don't eat chicken and dairy together, even though the ban is on red meat and dairy together bc you're not supposed to cook the calf in the milk of its mother?** It's not because we think that chicken might secretly lactate or Just Because. It's because the rabbis decided that if I'm sitting out in public and eating turkey and cheese together, someone might glance at the turkey and mistake it for red meat and think, "oh, well, I know that Spider is a good Jew, there must have been a change, or maybe I can just justify it to myself that if Spider does it, it must be permissible to bend the rules just that much." And I would then be accidentally leading my fellow Jew astray. We are responsible for being even more careful for the sake of others than we are for ourselves.

It's the same principle here. We need to really be careful about the information we are spreading and check things past reading a news site. Is it true? Is it relevant? Is it meaningful? Is the news site one I recognize? Can I find meaningful independent corroboration on another site, which is to say, if I find an article about it on a second site, is it just quoting or rephrasing this site?

Yeah, that is a lot. But that's how we keep them from using us to lead our fellows astray.

*GovTracker is an independent site. They explain their methodology in their About section.

**I cannot say enough how I am not at this time interested in going on a Jewish Side Quest About Dietary Laws on this post. Usually, I love it, but hold off this time, please, y'all. Let's stay on target this once.