danex

hey they brought back the “currently viewing” thing

that was gone for a while right, im not going crazy?

Gran Turismo is literally so well made.

Also fun fact, I have officially decided I will be going into film, so that's fun ig

So I've gotten Spanish down. 

What language should I learn next?

I dream the same way I sleep

which is to say

‘if I do, not well’

i have a lot of complaints with anime

but i think a lot of them can be summed up in the age old adage “show don’t tell”

like the number of times i’ve seen a character state the obvious, or worse, have a *narrator* give hugely important exposition….

its just

kinda awful

maybe a good amount could be due to translation errors.

 

but sometimes i can’t help but think “i could totally do this better” 

So...I know it would probably flop, and I'd need to work on it more...

But what if we tried an RP where, instead of making a character, you made something akin to a noble house, or even an entire planet, for a more large scale political Dune-esque thingy?

So, you might have control over a few main characters, but otherwise you'd be maneuvering politically and militarily an entire noble house, which might have control over several entire planets.

Is that something people would be interested in, if it ever started? Should we focus on RP's that are already going instead? Is it too big of a scale? Are there any people who'd be willing to help me come up with some ideas for it, and maybe figure out a basic plot?

Gauging interest.

So...

Hi! 

Today I had the thought (one I've had before) that I missed the community on the Shard and finally decided to act on it. So I'm back! I don't think I'll do much for now, I'm trying to ease back into it so I don't overwhelm myself. But just opening this gives me good feelings, so I hope to do so much with all the amazing people here! 

any of y’all play modded terraria?

thinking of trying out calamity again

and i def have an addiction to starting public gaming servers but that sounds fun doesn’t it?

Wanna meet my pins?

You’re gonna meet my pins.

I’m reorganizing my hat

Thinking about how old things are is a lot of fun - but some of those things are objectively cooler by virtue of still existing.

Sure, you could look at stuff like stars and galaxies, but like... we just can't comprehend that. Too many numbers. No good. Even if you look at just the history of Earth, stuff like multicellular life forms have existed long enough to remember when the galaxy finally calmed down a little and stopped making quite so many stars. And looking up at the stars doesn't exactly fill us with a sense of "holy moly, germs are old" - because they're just little dots. We can't really observe them.

When you're thinking about old things in Lord of the Rings, you don't look at Eru Iluvitar and call it a day. You look at how Elrond is still around and kicking during the events of LotR, knowing that he has been around for six thousand years old - and even he's little more than a child compared to Galadriel who's been around for roughly eight thousand.

They're old because they're still around, and they can remember the Old Days. No one cares about what Manwe is on about, because he doesn't talk to anybody anymore. We want the stuff that can tell us about the many eras they've been around for.

Anyways, back to not-so-middle Earth. Here are some old things to kick things off:

• Tish was a goldfish won at a fair in 1956 - he won a Guinness World Record for living 46 years.
• Harriet the Galapagos Tortoise died in 2006 - She was born in 1830, and collected by one Charles Darwin as a specimen for his expedition.
• The Greenland Shark is the longest-lived vertebrate, with one specimen being placed at upwards of 500 years old. Perhaps they lived alongside one Leonardo da Vinci.
• In the East China Sea and Southern Ocean, there are aquatic creatures known as Glass Sponges - it might be a slight overestimation, but it's possible that several have been around for upwards of 10,000 years, placing them almost as old as writing itself.

You might've heard that Cleopatra lived sooner to the moon landing than to the creation of the Great Pyramids. You might've heard that Cleopatra lived sooner to the internet than to the creation of the Great Pyramids. Truth is, Cleopatra will live sooner to the present day than to the creation of the Great Pyramids for roughly another five hundred years.

The Great Pyramids are 4.5 thousand years old by the estimates I found on the internet, and they're still around. Egypt is roughly 5000 years old, which is - if you recall - only half as old as some of those sponges up there.

What about geological features? The oldest glacier is roughly 7000 years old. The Namib Desert has been dry for 55 million. 

But I'm going to cut to the chase:

yeah

but I was curious, and looked up Oldest Geological Features. First I found someplace called Mount Roraima, which looks EPIC AS HELL:

and then I came upon a massive meteor that struck the Earth 3 BILLION years ago, nearly five times as large as the infamous Chicxulub asteroid (y'know - the dinosaur one)... which smacked into a special little place called the Barberton Greenstone Belt:

these, my friends, are the oldest things on Earth.

My favorite hymns have got to be:

Praise to the Man

A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief

If You Could Hie to Kolob

1000 is divisible by 8 and idk why but that just feels wrong to me

1000 is divisible by 8 and idk why but that just feels wrong to me

1000 is divisible by 8 and idk why but that just feels wrong to me

Guys, I need sci-fi.

Like, interplanetary space opera sci-fi.

Well developed universe with good characters and science that makes sense sci-fi.

Please, give me your recommendations.

If it's not space-opera sci-fi I'm probably not interested right now.

Does anyone else ever have the sudden urge to gather together the lego minifigures for all the Fellowship of the Ring and leave them lying around the city along with a note saying that they're going on an adventure and to move them someplace else and take a picture to add to a dropbox somewhere and see how far it gets or are you all normal.

i kinda want to go through my entire post history and graph the frequency of my SUs

like graph the length of time between each one

i feel like theres probably a trend there

On average, one Earth day is less than 24 hours

i kinda want to go through my entire post history and graph the frequency of my SUs

like graph the length of time between each one

i feel like theres probably a trend there

Watched J.J. Abram's Star Trek for the first time. I like the OGs better, but something about Chris Hemsworth being Chris Pines' dad is just hilarious to me.

Some scientific facts:

• Monty Python is the cinema equivalen of jazz.
• The scariness of a spider is not proportional to the size of the spider, but rather to the length of the spider's legs. Tarantulas are awesome and everyone knows it, but black widows are the freakiest and most hideous creatures known to man.
• When you're staring at the glowing red numbers on your alarm clock and all the shapes start to warp and corrupt, it is not your eyes playing tricks on you but rather your mind being suspended to the Plane of Dreams.
• Right next door to that is the Plane of the Forgotten, which is where pencils go when you drop them behind the couch and can't find them again.
• There was a little turtle tank in the nurse's office at my elementary school. This is not relevant but I just remembered that which I think is cool.
• There are three types of Ghibli fans: The normie Howl's Moving Castle enjoyers, the inexperienced Spirited Away watchers, and the chad Nausicaa stans. I've yet to meet another soul whose favorite Ghibli is Castle in the Sky yet, which means that the Truth has yet to spread to the masses
• Cool ranch doritos are meh at best and you know it.
• The masses fear the weebs, for people fear what they cannot know - that is, they do not fear true weebs, but rather the Demon Slayer junkies who haven't the spine to watch or read anything longer or more braindead than that. In fact, true weebs fear these junkies as well.
• People who ship Legolas and Gimli are stupid. People who ship Legolas and Aragorn are not. If you require an explanation for what happens with Arwen in this universe, simply leave it to Gimli to put on the charm because turns out he's really into elves.
• People who ship Frodo and Sam are stupider, and anyone who says otherwise will taste my katana.
• Before TotK came out, I considered BotW to be the best Zelda Game, and A Link to the Past to be the best Zelda Game. With this new addition to the cast, both those titles hang in the balance.
• I will not read your writing if it's in Arial font. All good prose deserves serifs.
• The Batman (2022) has no right being as good as it is.
• If you put me in the trolley problem scenaro to gather data you'd have to rule me out as an anomaly because whatever I decide to do is ultimately at odds with my innate clumsiness.
• I wonder if emptying your brain is a good way to knock yourself unconscious for the night? Or am I just forcing it to think harder about things that it really shouldn't when I'm trying to sleep?
• That last one wasn't a fact.
• It was a question.
• Tamales are either gross or made by a bona fide mexican guy and there is no in-between.
• It is impossible to make a good churro, which is the point.
• Sheev Palpatine really needs to work on his branding. The "Tragedy" of Darth Plagueis the Wise is barely a few lines of dialogue long - that isn't a tragedy, that's a synopsis. Give me a remake where the opera Anakin meets him at is a three-act musical about the rise and fall of Darth Plagueis, complete with a greek chorus and dudes wearing coconuts.
• Everyone says The Minish Cap is the most underrated Zelda game, which I think is ironic.
• By cubic meter you're actually hotter than the sun. Light also escapes you much faster than it does the core of that thing.
• I'm tired. I just yawned. What a day.
• You're yawning too now.
• Goodnight.

would you be interested in playing a minecraft server like this

1. Void world. everyone spawns on a 3x3 bedrock square. no other blocks in the world at all.

2. every minute (or every 30s or whatever we decide works best) every player receives a different random item. could be a block, a weapon, a spawn egg, a potion, an enchanted book, literally any vanilla item.

3. Add a /dupe plugin. If you’ve never played with one before, it allows you to duplicate whatever you’re holding. so one block of dirt is really infinite blocks of dirt. 

those are the main 3 ideas, the following are more “maybe this’ll work” ideas, ranked in order of most possible to most “ehhhhhhh”. 

4. keepinv on. you won’t lose any items if you fall in the void.

5. Lifesteal plugin. If you kill another player, you get +1 max heart, and they get -1 max heart. if you die to the void or a mob, you still get -1 max heart but nobody gets the +1. if you die when you’re at 1 max heart, you respawn in spectator mode, essentially out of lives and out of the server. 

5b. Add a respawn mechanic for completely dead players. Maybe an alive player can sacrifice 5 of their max hearts to bring another player back to life at 1 max heart. 

6. irl reward for last player standing??? prob just like 10$ or whatever because i’m not rich but just something to encourage some small amount of competition.

 

you see what i’m going for here? it would naturally have a limited lifespan with the lifesteal mechanic, it would encourage teaming and faction-building to pool unlocked resources, the balance of the server could change dramatically if a player gets lucky with random item drops, just seems like a pretty fun idea overall. 

 

and a few more possible variations on the above ideas:

-whitelist interested players before server starts to disallow new players joining late on and increasing the total number of “lives” in the economy. 

-limit duping to a cooldown of some sort

-lifesteal doesn’t activate until a few hours in so people have time to build away from spawn

-dying to void doesn’t cost a life

-dying to anything other than a player doesn’t cost a life

-have a small fee to join the server, all of which goes toward a pot for the last player standing. e.g. 10 people join, each paying a fee of 1$, last player standing gets 10$. (this one really only works if there’s like, a lot of interest. would also depend on how much people are willing to pay.)

 

 

would you be interested in playing a minecraft server like this

1. Void world. everyone spawns on a 3x3 bedrock square. no other blocks in the world at all.

2. every minute (or every 30s or whatever we decide works best) every player receives a different random item. could be a block, a weapon, a spawn egg, a potion, an enchanted book, literally any vanilla item.

3. Add a /dupe plugin. If you’ve never played with one before, it allows you to duplicate whatever you’re holding. so one block of dirt is really infinite blocks of dirt. 

those are the main 3 ideas, the following are more “maybe this’ll work” ideas, ranked in order of most possible to most “ehhhhhhh”. 

4. keepinv on. you won’t lose any items if you fall in the void.

5. Lifesteal plugin. If you kill another player, you get +1 max heart, and they get -1 max heart. if you die to the void or a mob, you still get -1 max heart but nobody gets the +1. if you die when you’re at 1 max heart, you respawn in spectator mode, essentially out of lives and out of the server. 

5b. Add a respawn mechanic for completely dead players. Maybe an alive player can sacrifice 5 of their max hearts to bring another player back to life at 1 max heart. 

6. irl reward for last player standing??? prob just like 10$ or whatever because i’m not rich but just something to encourage some small amount of competition.

 

you see what i’m going for here? it would naturally have a limited lifespan with the lifesteal mechanic, it would encourage teaming and faction-building to pool unlocked resources, the balance of the server could change dramatically if a player gets lucky with random item drops, just seems like a pretty fun idea overall. 

 

and a few more possible variations on the above ideas:

-whitelist interested players before server starts to disallow new players joining late on and increasing the total number of “lives” in the economy. 

-limit duping to a cooldown of some sort

-lifesteal doesn’t activate until a few hours in so people have time to build away from spawn

-dying to void doesn’t cost a life

-dying to anything other than a player doesn’t cost a life

-have a small fee to join the server, all of which goes toward a pot for the last player standing. e.g. 10 people join, each paying a fee of 1$, last player standing gets 10$. (this one really only works if there’s like, a lot of interest. would also depend on how much people are willing to pay.)

 

 

Several things:

• If you have the chance, and you haven't been, go to Yellowstone.  That was the fricken coolest.  200% increase in geysers seen, 400% for bears seen in wild, just neat geothermal things (fumaroles!)  And also the colors.  Holy cow, there's so many of them, no wonder artists love that place.
• The fact that I can't logic my mental health using controlled, manipulated, and responding variables is actually kinda annoying, but eh.  At least the picture's getting cohesive?
• Oppenheimer's coming out, and I am actually remarkably excited.  I'm not usually big on movies, it's very hard for me to be comfortable watching one the first time, so I usually don't.  But I really want to see this one.
• I'm currently weirdly at peace with the fact that I have very few people who I am in regular contact with (by which I mean go and do things, hanging out) and I don't know what to do with it, cause I'm in that weird spot where most of my friends are just enough older than me that they're leaving and I'm not yet, so on one hand, what's the point?  On the other, I know I need interaction, it's just exhausting to seek it out because it doesn't come naturally in the slightest.
• The Sun Eater is still a very good book series, I just reread book three and loved it.
• I have three Secret Projects on hold right now, and have read none of them, which is utterly hilarious to me (Tress is soon, though)
• I know I'm barely active on here at all anymore, but I think I'm going to be less so.  Tbh the wider internet kinda scares me (Not y'all, the Shard is lovely) and I really need to double down on figuring out how to be a functioning, healthy member of society before I spread my wings and immediately spiral into tragedy.  I'll still peek in occasionally.  And I like talking with y'all.  The trouble is that I forgot how to do that, I think, and relearning is something I have to do IRL so I can carry that over.

Catch you on the flip side!

...Where did you get that muffin?

Muffin Button.

But I didn't install a muffin button.

...Then where did I get this muffin?

Where did you get that muffin?

Muffin Button.

 

and it continues in an infinite loop

 

(I'm eating a muffin)