Because it’s easier to throw the latest Monster of the Week at players than it is to craft NPCs and relationships such that there is compelling drama. Combat is easy. Drama is hard.

American cakes, cookies, and breads have waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much sugar. (Eating American white bread hurts my teeth.)

Yeah, like I said I was gone long before the Ketamine Kid took over so I didn’t have to watch that pattern develop.

I just got this creepy “we don’t know what ‘consent’ means” vibe from their continued forcing of accounts I don’t give a shit about on me. I’d open each day by blocking each and every “recommended” account and figured out that I was spending more time doing that than actually using the site.

So I ditched.

I have no autism superpowers and spotted the pattern that Twitter was a toxic shitpile before Kaptain “Ketamine” Kidd took over the helm.

All it took was for me to recognize “you know, every time I use Twitter I feel like shit”.

“Think” is doing some very heavy lifting there.

Theramin? “One of these things is not like the others!”

I wish I could afford one of those. They look fascinating.

You’re on an internet chat board. By definition you’re uncool.

You’re just less uncool than other such places.

🤭

I share what you like (smaller, more intimate) along with the absence of ads, and the more original content over just cutting and pasting that I find in other equivalent large-scale boards.

A lot of very good guitarists (Alex Lifeson leaps to mind) are almost entirely self-taught.

The left hand has all the buttons on a piano accordion, but also has cheats. The second line from the top is the tonic and the top line is the third from that tonic. The tones go up by fifths along the length.

The third gives you the major chord of the tonic, the fourth gives you the minor chord, the fifth gives you the dominant 7th, and the sixth (on the one I owned) gives you the diminished 7th. So you have automation for chord accompaniment and rarely have to play anything of significant complexity on the left.

Which leaves the bellows and half a piano on the right. 🤣

Yes, you are really.

I have zero musical ability so I’m in awe of anyone that has any

Unless you literally have congenital amusia (a.k.a. tone deafness), there is no such thing as zero musical ability. About 1-2% of people are thought to have congenital amusia, so it’s not out of the question but … uh … can you distinguish songs when you hear them? If so, you likely don’t have it. (There is expressive amusia, but it’s the least prevalent of the types.)

So, barring amusia, anybody has musical ability. All you need is exposure, practice time, and the patience to learn. If you really want to learn, pick up a simple instrument (a wind instrument with a fipple mouthpiece like a recorder, tin whistle, or ocarina; a kalimba; a small, cheap keyboard) and just start. Keep it cheap because if you don’t enjoy it you don’t want to have spent a lot of money.

I started off with an accordion at age 4. (Yes, before I actually went to school!) I got good enough at it that by age 16 I got 4th place in a Baden-Württemberg state level championship.

But before that, at around the age of 8, I’d actually paused at the accordion (for complicated reasons stemming from how early I’d started and the workload that was expected of me at the music school) and started playing the organ instead, with home lessons. I got pretty good at it before a move to Germany (and subsequent re-uptake of the accordion) ended that around the age of 12.

While I was in Germany, parallel to continuing with my accordion, I joined my school band. There really wasn’t a place for accordion in that curriculum so I picked up the saxophone and got almost as good with it as I was with my accordion.

I then, in my final year of school, at age 17, I had to make an important choice for my future: basically did I want to study music and go pro, or did I want to study business and marketing? I chose the latter because I had this inkling that I would not do well as a pro musician.

That being said, I still played music. I still had my accordion (the saxophone was the school’s and I wasn’t going to spend the cash to buy one for myself: them things are EXPENSIVE yo!), and I had a knack for picking up other instruments. Even in school I’d already picked up the clarinet because it was similar enough to a saxophone I could get to the point of playing decently with little effort.

I did drop the accordion after about ten years, though, because it was just too big to constantly lug around as I bounced around from apartment to apartment and city to city. I donated it to an old man who was a pro player (retired) and bored in his old folk’s home.

Since then I’ve picked up the following woodwinds to the point that I can reliably play simple tunes at least:

• dizi (I have at least 5 in various keys)
• xiao (I have 4 in various keys and fingerings)
• guanzi (only one; fiendishly difficult to play!)
• bawu (one end blown, one side blown, one double-barrelled side blown)
• hulusi (one wood, one “single-belly” gourd)
• LittleSax (one 8-hole, one 10-hole)

(This may sound ridiculous, but really the fingerings are so similar that it’s trivial to learn a new one’s and instead you focus on the embouchure.)

I’ve also picked up a couple of woodwind-adjacent instruments:

• ocarina (one “serious” transverse one and a bunch of cheap novelty pendant ones, most of which I give as gifts to students)
• xun (another fiendishly difficult one; a clay 8-hole, a clay 10-hole, and three 10-hole bamboo ones in various keys)

Finally I’ve lately become quite enamoured of the kalimba and have five of those (17-key box, 17-key solid acrylic, 24-key, 34-key chromatic, and 42-key chromatic, the last three in solid wood). I initially got the first one while bored during the COVID-19 lockdowns and it was so much fun I got a few more.

Don’t. You likely personally know more than the greatest polymath of the third century CE in any nation. There was just less to know.

Polymath just means “knows a lot of subjects”. (It was easier to be a polymath back in ancient times.) Zhuge Liang was a philosopher, a general, a skilled warrior, a poet, an inventor, a …

🤷‍♀️ If you insist.

But you’re wrong. You’re just atrophying your ability to think in exchange for hallucinations. Still, you be you.

I’d go back to about 222CE to the period of the Battle of Yiling. Not for the battle itself, but for the aftermath.

See, the novel Three Kingdoms mentions an incident where famed genius general Zhuge Liang ambushed an army chasing them down near Yufu, which is near present-day Zigui County, Hubei Province.

There are two versions of the story. In the first he uses a “Stone Sentinel Maze” to trap the pursuing army of Lu Xun of Wu while his own and Liu Bei’s troops escape. They wandered, lost, in this bizarre arrangement of natural stones until they were guided out by a local elder, but by then the people they were chasing were long gone.

The second version has him using an “Eight Trigram Formation” to confound and trap the Wei army commanded by Sima Yi, before magnanimously releasing it, demonstrating both that he could have destroyed said army, but chose not to.

These are fiction, I stress, but they’re fiction based on folklore, and folklore often has a basis in tenuous, grossly distorted fact. (For example the story of Hou Yi shooting the ten suns is very credibly a story based on a calendar reform that introduced China’s solilunar taking ten days off a month to bring the calendar in line with the novel creation of the 24 solar forms. The shooting of ten suns may have been a folkloric encoding of a calendar change.) So for the facts of this clear work of fiction:

1. The Battle of Yiling is documented very well, and is supported by physical evidence.
2. Zhuge Liang is a historical personage who was noted as being a polymath genius, including, but not limited to, military strategy.
3. The Battle of Yiling did not go well for Liu Bei (it effectively destroyed his army) and he was, in fact, chased by Lu Xun mercilessly after the fact.
4. The territory around Zigui has some of the most confounding terrain imaginable with weird rock formations and treacherous nearness to riverbanks.

So it is not out of the question that Zhuge Liang in desperation misled or trapped a chasing army in the weird terrain around Zigui giving the remnants of Liu Bei’s army (and Liu Bei himself) the opportunity to finally escape. Then, over time, as history faded and mythology grew around the giants of the Three Kingdoms era, a desperate, last-ditch effort to escape turns into a brilliant military plan in which Zhuge Liang toyed with a rival general in a catch-and-release program.

I want to watch and see what really happened. I want to see the truth behind the millennia of myth.

Only after it got really, really, really, really bright. 😄

You must have been eating rolled or, worse, coarsely ground oats if you got the texture of boogers. If you want a completely different experience that tastes great and has a nicer texture, try cut oats instead. They take longer to cook, but they’re MAGNIFICENT.

This is a problem with vegetarians and vegans in general: they try to pitch “meat substitutes” that are absolutely filthy-tasting with terrible mouthfeel. They show off the absolute worst side of the ingredients instead of selling the ingredients where they’re strong.

There are tofu dishes that shine (like mapo doufu): make those, don’t try to gaslight people into thinking that a tofu burger “tastes just like the real thing”. It doesn’t.