Slush 2024-07
The cat’s claw in my tongue. My snoozed reminders.
Select units of time by increasing duration.
- Millisecond (ms). seconds.
- Jiffy. Variably small, depending on field.
- Shake. seconds.
- Second (s). Defined by the vibration of a Cesium atom.
- Minute (min). 60 s.
- .beat. day; 86.4 s. The basis of Swatch Internet Time.
- Moment. 90 s, on average. of a solar hour.
- 刻 (kè). day; 14.4 min. Traditional Chinese unit.
- Kilosecond (ks). 1000 s; ~17 min. This seems useful, if not always diagetic.
- Hour (h; hr). 60 m; day.
- Solar hour. 60 min, on average. of the time between sunrise and sunset.
- Watch. 6-8 hrs; ¼-⅓ day, depending on the system. Useful for games.
- Shift. 8-12 hrs; ⅓-½ day.
- Day. 24 hrs.
- Sennight; week. 7 days. The archaic “sennight” is any seven nights, while the modern “week” is counted in common.
- Megasecond. 10⁶ s; ~11.6 days.
- Fortnight. 14 days; 14 nights.
- Month. 28-31 days; ~ year.
- Quarantine. 40 days. Enough time for the bubonic plague to show symptoms and run its course.
- Kilohour (khr). 1000 hours; 41 ⅔ days.
- Quarter; trimester (academic). 8-13 weeks. ¼ of the portion of the year when classes are in session.
- Quarter; trimester. 3 months; 90-92 days. A period of financial reporting; roughly a single season; ⅓ of a human pregnancy.
- Semester (academic). 15-18 weeks. ½ of the portion of the year when classes are in session.
- Semester. 6 months.
- Year. 365.25 days. One rotation of the Earth about the Sun.
- Olympiad. 4 years. The time between the Olympic games.
- Lustrum. 5 years. The time between two Roman censuses and the corresponding purification rituals.
- Decade. 10 years. An informal index of the evolution of culture.
- Indiction. 15 years. The time between Roman tax reforms.
- Score. 20 years, kind of. Really a term for any quantity of 20, like “dozen” for 12.
- Generation. 20-30 years. The time between a cohort being born and then having their own children.
- Jubilee. 25 or 49 or 50 years, depending on the system. The time between big religious celebrations of forgiveness.
- Century. 100 years. Loosely related to saeculum, the time between a given moment and when the last person who witnessed that moment dies.
- Millennium; kiloannum (ka). 1000 years.
- Age. Thousands to millions of years. Enough time to create a distinct strata of rock; the smallest unit of geological time.
- Eon. A billion years. Unthinkable.
- Eternity. An unending time. Infinitely more than an eon.
Trouble sleeping? Melatonin not cutting it? Try new megatonin.
- Phishing is when an attacker attempts to deceive you into revealing sensitive information over email.
- Vishing is phishing over voice. This is completely not a word made up to fill a slide deck.
- Smishing is phishing over SMS. This too, is a real word said with a straight face by one expert to another.
- Quishing is when an attacker attempts to deceive you into scanning a malicious QR code.
- Psyshing when an attacker attempts to deceive you into thinking about sensitive information.
- Spear phishing is targeted phishing that uses personal information.
- Pot phishing is a targeted attack that attempts to convince you to create particular sensitive information. Inception for passwords.
- Pharming is an attack that manipulates broad patterns in security behavior to engineer more common sensitive information.
- Fishing is phishing over a fax machine. Mostly happens to doctors.
- Bishing is when your neighbor attempts to pair with your Bluetooth speaker, but maliciously.
- Kitsching is when an attacker hides keyloggers in USB-powered tchotchkies and plants them in thrift shops.
- A Liam Neeson Attack is when an attacker attempts to frame you for phishing, in the hopes that you will reveal sensitive information in your defense.
- A Golden Ticket Attack is when an attacker guesses arbitrary information at scale to build trust with a random subset of people, in order to extract sensitive information from them. “If your social security number ends in 1234, you may already be a winner!”
- Cyberphishing is like phishing, but more cyber.
- A Synchronicity Attack is when a hyperconscious individual exploits an unknown noncausal connection between their own experiences and your sensitive information.
- PhishAIng is when, look, I can’t, I just can’t put this souped-up statistics, this overgrown ML, this “AI” bullshit in even my own pointless nonsense.
- Chain Phishing is when attacker attempts to deceive you into putting sensitive information on the blockchain so that you can never get it back.
- AIM Phishing is when an attacker sends you a compromised shareware CD in the mail.
Who makes cursed items? Enemies. You didn’t find a cursed sword: your sword got cursed. (This is why you don’t pick up swords if you don’t know where they’ve been. It’s like plugging in the parking-lot USB stick.)
Why are droids and computers separate in Star Wars? (In the Watsonian view, of course.) In the early days of hyperspace travel, all the navigational and astrogational control was given to a single machine, and all was well. But that machine went rogue: it plotted a course outside the galaxy, and was never seen again. Ever since, the two duties are divided.1
- Is this why droids are so mistreated in Star Wars? Is this the original sin of the metal men?
- What does that ship look like when it eventually makes a return trip? What is the Star Wars answer to Event Horizon, or even just the Mary Celeste?
- What did the machine think it was doing? What did it know?
Random crossover bullshit
All effects are temporary.
- Sky turns red.
- Alignment inversion.
- Superpower shuffle.
- Half of everyone vanishes. Nobody notices.
- New costumes all around.
- Half of everyone is a bodysnatcher. Originals reappear momentarily.
- Political boundaries redrawn, religions spring up, leaders change overnight.
- Everyone is more easily frightened and demotivated than usual.
- Cool new drug is going around.
- Magic temporarily broken.
- Cool new material available.
- Kaiju on the loose.
- New planets in the sky, close-up like.
- Everyone gets a parallel universe doppelganger.
- New guy shows up out of nowhere. Really strong, busy elsewhere.
- The gods aren’t talking to mortals right now.
- Everyone has to drop what they’re doing to believe in someone they’ve never heard of.
- Sky turns black: no stars, no sun, no moon.
- Magic patrons start to call in debts.
- That city doesn’t exist anymore.
- Everyone has “weird dreams.”
- It’s a year later! Nobody remembers it, but the calendars all agree.
- Everyone is individually offered a contract with a devil.
- Everyone is dying of this new plague. A cure will be discovered and globally aerosolized soon.
- The animals are rebelling against humanity.
- Everyone is stuck in a time loop. Nothing to be done; it’s someone else’s loop to break.
- The plants are rebelling against humanity.
- The dead walk! Mostly it’s just upsetting.
- The rocks are rebelling against humanity.
- The civilians have had enough of this bullshit.
“The Svalbard Global Meme Vault”
Falsehoods Programmers Don’t Believe about Names
- All names are won in single combat.
- There are only 144 names.
- Nobody is really named Rumplestiltskin.
- A “true name” can only be represented in IPA.
What’s an example of a phantom cog? I propose the FATE adjective ladder. A common example of play might go:
GM: OK, roll burglary.
Me: My burglary is “good,” so I’ll roll 4dF+3. Ok, that’s a 5, which is “superb.”
This gets even sillier if the GM is making an opposed roll, and has to do the same back-and-forth conversions before ultimately comparing the outcomes.
I think this is sad. The FATE adjective ladder should be better because it does serve an important purpose: it reminds you that even a +0 is still “mediocre,” that the characters in general are succeeding even with small numbers.
I think this is also a missed opportunity. Perhaps no game would really really benefit from comprehensive VTT tools more than FATE. A good VTT could hide these mechanics and operate completely in the language of the fiction. It could also probably simplify zones and such. (Maybe this exists somewhere, but it doesn’t for the one we’ve been using.)
To the Mac Nac Feegles, the world is so obviously good that they assume it must be their afterlife (and it even might be). When a feegle dies, they believe that they have returned to the land of the living, and only mourn that they won’t be together for as long as they could have been. This influences feegle behavior, imparting a certain recklessness and aggressive hedonism.
This is somehow linked in my mind with the “heart rate” mechanics of games like Lacuna, Deep Morphean Transmissions, and Ag3nts of C0ntr0l, where rolling dice (for any purpose) affects a fluctuating stat that represents both superhuman ability (or at least extraordinary competence), but also nearness to some apparent death. What if that was a whole group of people? What is life like for people who have to consciously modulate their own “heart rate?”
The best I can imagine is a kind of adrenaline-junkie Vulcan. But maybe you get goblins or tortoises or something.
Much has been made of the dramatic loss when the minotaur became a minotaur. But Deadalus built his maze of mirrors, not stone, and the minotaur has dwelt there long. He makes no distinction between himself and his brethren reflections. All minotaurs are the minotaur.
Sphere of Annihilation
At some point in college, I tried to model the Sphere of Annihilation as a boundary value problem. If you’re unfamiliar with it, Gygax describes it in the original Greyhawk thusly:
Sphere of Annihilation: An absolutely black globe of nothingness, 2’ in diameter. Anything which comes into contact with it is completely and irrevocably destroyed, wishes notwithstanding. Control of this item is based on both intelligence and level of Magic-Use.
The math is lost, but these notes remain.
- Assume an inertial frame of reference fixed w.r.t. Earth’s rotation to avoid circular divots all throughout its crust. Why does a tear in reality care about human frames of reference? Perhaps for the same reason it’s responsive to psychic control: the sphere is somehow human in its concerns.
- Given a constant ∆P of 1 atm, what kind of air current (consumption) does it have? How quickly can it deplete the Earth’s atmosphere?
- If ∆P = 0, then there are still diffusion effects to consider. Are there local temperature effects as hotter gases diffuse into it faster?
- Unless, we assume that there is some kind of surface effect that prevents diffusion, or indeed entry, without overcoming a minimal force requirement.
- The sphere is said to “swallow” people and objects that even only partially enter it. Can this be explained as a syphon-like effect given a complete vacuum on the other side, or is additional negative force required?
- What is the sphere? It’s a poisonous “gift” to our reality from jealous gods that don’t exist.
- What is the sphere? It’s the contrail of the 6th-dimensional craft that the ancients used to exit our reality.
- What is the sphere? It’s the rough draft of a black hole.
I swear I read this in a WEG Star Wars thing somewhere, but I’ve never been able to find it again. Regardless, it’s a great bit.↩︎