Zackc43

By the end, a nightmare of growls and weird echoing sound effects. (more…)

Andre was so impressed with the existential crisis of a butter-passing robot as depicted in the cartoon Rick and Morty that he created his own, and shows you how to make one for yourself. (more…)

Artist Maeril made this illustrated guide a few months ago, but it’s now more relevant than ever. You can find more of Maeril’s work on her Tumblr and Twitter.

We all know how common elements like oxygen and helium are used in every day life. But gallium? Selenium? Rhodium? Keith Enevoldsen has created an interactive periodic table that illustrates exactly where you may encounter even obscure elements on the chart. It’s like taking high school science all over again, except without the tests, and you’re welcome to keep using your phone.

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Courtesy of Nathan W. Pyle, who also created NYC Basic Tips and Etiquette. You can find more of Pyle's relaxing images on his Instagram.

 

It’s almost November and time for the 2nd annual #mapvember challenge! It’s an open challenge for all interested in drawing fictional RPG maps.

#mapvember2016 will be held between the 1st and the 30th of November 2016.

About #Mapvember

#Mapvember was held for the first time in November 2015 and all by accident. Around 2014 I found out that some talented people were making really amazing RPG maps and sharing them online. I studied these maps with awe and a growing urge to draw maps, but I never really got the reason or the time for it. Or so I told myself. Then, one day, I got a sudden inspiration to draw a map, but all I happened to have was just a pad of post-its. I drew a small mini-dungeon on a post-it note, but came out as a map that could be played as a short adventure. It was so fun that I wanted to draw another one right away.

It happened to be the beginning of November and as it’s a fad to have all kinds of themed months, so I thought why not make this a “mapvember”! People like me, could have the reason to draw maps again or start drawing maps for the first time. Anyone interested in drawing maps can spare at least 15 minutes every day, or at least every other day, of their lives to draw a small post-it map or such. It really doesn’t take more than that to draw a small map with a couple or rooms. Also, as the idea is to share the maps with others, anyone can benefit from this. Just search from your favorite social media service using #mapvember or #mapvember(year) as the keyword or google it up and hopefully you will find something useful. Isn’t internetz amazing, or what?!?

OK, I’m in!

Great! You can learn more about #mapvember HERE or at www.mapvember.com. Please feel free to share the website so we can get more participants to share their creations all around the social media.

 

"Our guys are behind your father. We need him in there," Dick Yuengling Jr. told Eric Trump this week as he gave the wealthy young scion of the Trump empire a tour of his brewery Pottsville, Pennsylvania.

What will Mr. Yuengling's display of support for Trump do the brewery's bottom line? Maybe nothing in the long run, by most comments on Twitter are from people swearing to never drink Yuenglings again (I've included a couple of tweets from Trump supporters to keep things fair and balanced):

@EricTrump I will never drink another goddamn ounce of @Yuengling_Beer as long as I live. Many others I know will do the same.

— TrumpCrafts (@TrumpCrafts) October 24, 2016

An alcohol company endorsing a sexual predator, that's in no way indicative of rape culture. Way to go Yuengling! #NeverTrump

— Sane Ppl 4 Hillary (@SanePpl4Hillary) October 27, 2016

.@Yuengling_Beer I was a lifelong Yuengling drinker I mean LIFE. LONG. Will never touch it again, consider it poison https://t.co/1AloxdsncV

— Daniel Esposito (@dje432) October 26, 2016

@KeyserSozeBro1 @Yuengling_Beer been drinking my entire adult life, buying a case tomorrow

— ']['RUMP ]|_ANDSLIDE (@cucktastrophe) October 27, 2016

@KeyserSozeBro1 @Yuengling_Beer been drinking my entire adult life, buying a case tomorrow

— ']['RUMP ]|_ANDSLIDE (@cucktastrophe) October 27, 2016

@Yuengling_Beer pic.twitter.com/HnXUP78shJ

— Alvaro Valiño (@alvarovalino) October 27, 2016

Trump photo by Gage Skidmore.

I made a generator to provide images from Twitter after The Fourth Debate. It picks random frames from TV footage and draws conspiracies on them. Reload the page for another set! (more…)

A kitten interpretation of the Bene Gesserit Litany of Fear, from the David Lynch movie masterpiece “Dune,” based on the great Frank Herbert science fiction novel.

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Luke Cage, the series chronicling a wrongfully-convicted ex-con with superpowers, is making waves with its timely commentary on political and cultural issues. It's so good it even works well recut as corny 90s sitcom Family Matters. (more…)

I have a bunch of unfinished projects that will never be finished. There is lots of blog drafts and artwork hanging around, and I want to attempt to get some of them out there without actually finishing them. So here goes.

The image below (click to biggen) is an 8 inch by 8 inch grid of dungeon rooms and also some vertical and horizontal room connectors. Along the left side and top of the dungeon rooms are coordinate numbers; think in battleships terms. To generate a random dungeon you would have two d8s, of separate color, that represented each axis, and you’d roll the d8s to see what room you got. Most of the rooms are single inch grid spots but quite a few extend into multiple grid spots. If your roll was any part of the large rooms then that would be the room you got. For example: if I rolled a 3&4 or 4&3 or a 4&4 I would get a pretty cool large room, but a 7&4 is a small boring room. (x&y).

I didn’t finish this project because I couldn’t think of a decent way to generate doors and all that stuff, and I honestly lost any interest in the project a while ago. So here it is for you to take and remix and expand upon and all that shit. Just don’t sell the artwork and you can do whatever you want with it.

Number 1, of course, is the source of the Amen Break. But a surprise or two lurks in the top 10, as calculated by Who Sampled, a truly amazing website that tells you the when and where and what of samples for singles over the last few decades. (more…)

As court cases go, the State of Georgia V. Denver Fenton Allen may be one of the most insane legal proceedings in history. After all, it’s not every day a defendant repeatedly tells a judge “go fuck yourself” and “suck my dick.” (The entire transcript is truly a thing of beauty, truly.)

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Comics artist Robot Hugs is a pro when it comes to boiling down complex social issues into easy to understand comics. And in this particular comic, they delve into the thorny issue of tone policing.

[via Everyday Feminism]

you asked for it and now it is happening and you have no-one to blame but yourselves

Benjamin West (1738-1820): Started as a wargamer; wrote his own mass battle system and uses it whenever he gets the chance. His system broke down spectacularly when he tried to use it to model 'Everyone vs. the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and also a lion' at the end of a long-running campaign.



John Flaxman (1755-1826): Has a long-running Mazes and Minotaurs campaign, all about the exploits of a bunch of heroic warriors who go around battling monsters in Mythic Greece. Doesn't understand why so many of his friends, including Blake and Fuseli, insist on  making their games so weird and creepy all the time.

Joseph Gandy (1771-1843): His love of dungeons grew so great that he ended up running games in which the dungeons functioned as the setting, the antagonist, and the treasure, all at the same time. His players swiftly learned that, when all treasure hauls came in the form of thousand-pound lumps of statuary, teams of hirelings are not optional.


JMW Turner (1775-1851): A devotee of ultralight abstract minimalism, determined to boil the game down to its purest essence. Has pruned OD&D down to two pages and is always looking for opportunities for further cutting. Smiles enigmatically when people point out that, under his rules, there's no difference between a monster and a natural hazard like a wave or a storm.

Can you spot the cyclops?

Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863): At his best when running bloody, grubby campaigns about low-lives and violence. Runs Al Qadim whenever anyone will let him, but tends to get a bit carried away with his breathless descriptions of naked harem girls.


Samuel Palmer (1805-1881): Began as one of William Blake's players, but started his own group after the disintegration of Blake's long-running 'Jerusalem' campaign. (The revelation that the PCs were Jerusalem all along didn't go down very well.) Loves fairytale adventures. A big fan of Beyond the Wall. Has never run a single scenario set during daylight hours.



(See also: Jacques Callot at Honor and Intrigue, and Thomas Cole at Zenopus Archives. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery!)

This to That does one thing: it asks you for the two things you need to stick together, then tells you exactly what sort of glue to use. The next time you need to glue styrofoam to glass, you'll have options! [via Cryptovariable] (Pictured is Styrobot, by Michael Salter)

Another recap of last night’s debate:

My feelings about the debate all day.

Whewww they got that restroom spelling right. 

[via]

Kevin Garnett’s retirement from the NBA on the weekend was a sad day for Timberwolves fans, but it’s also a big deal for sports video game trivia nerds, because with KG out of the game there is no longer a link between the 16-bit era and the modern NBA.

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One interesting annoyance of my gender transition was the surprise that many jackets and pants for women do not have functional pockets. Chelsea Summers delves into the politicized history of this phenomenon: (more…)

Giovanni Piranesi (1720-1778): Loves megadungeons. Claims to have run a 'wilderness hexcrawl' once, but this actually just turned out to be a vast network of interconnected dungeons several dozen miles across. His floorplans give the party mapper a headache, but pushing monsters off catwalks never gets old.





Hubert Robert (1733-1808): Took the notes from one of Piranesi's unfinished campaigns and ran with them, eventually developing them into his own distinctive 'ruinworld' setting. His games are much more mellow than Piranesi's, whose version of D&D always seem to devolve into paranoiac nightmare fuel after a couple of sessions.



Heinrich Fuseli (1741-1825): Runs weird, creepy horror campaigns. Uses the 'Insanity Points' system from WHFRP and gives them out like candy. No-one ever has any idea what's going on in his games (partly because their PCs are usually insane), but it always seems to be extremely ominous.

Francisco De Goya (1746-1828): Runs super-disturbing, ultra-violent horror games. Widely agreed to 'have issues'. Keeps 'accidentally' traumatising his players. Most of his games end in TPKs.


Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840): Loves wilderness adventures. Claims that all the weird and creepy stuff in his games is 'symbolic'. Won't tell anyone what it's supposed to be symbolic of.



John Martin (1789-1854): Runs non-stop action scenes. Everything is always BIG and EPIC and IN YOUR FACE. His players joke that any time they arrive in a city, it will inevitably be destroyed by invasion, disaster, or the literal wrath of god before the session's end.

This one is his Fall of Babylon, which really has to be seen full-sized to be believed. (Those tiny white blobs near the middle? Those are war elephants.) You can see a big version here.

About 170 years ago, during Japan's Edo period, a 34-foot scroll called Fart Battle (He-gassen) was created by unknown artisan(s). The work lives on in glorious hi-res digitized collection at Waseda University. (more…)

Ok so this is the Arnolfini Wedding by Jan Van Eyck--a classic of the Northern Renaissance (the better Renaissance) and one of the first examples of not only oil painting (artists used egg tempera until then) but of a level of then-unheard-of realism in art. It also has a funny dog.

Art history records some odd facts about the Arnolfini wedding:

-Nobody knows who the woman is--the woman people thought it was didn't roll up until after Van Eyck was dead. One theory holds it's Costanza Trenta. "...this would make the painting partly an unusual memorial portrait, showing one living and one dead person"

-Art historian Erwin Panofsky claimed the portrait was actually a marriage contract with the force of a legal/religious document.

-The bride looks like she's already pregnant which--seriously WTF AD1434 posh people?

-The mirror in the background shows additional hidden figures.

-A 1516 inventory including it says "It is necessary to put on a lock to close it: which Madame has ordered to be done."

-By 1599 it had a new frame with a quote from Ovid "See that you promise: what harm is there in promises? In promises anyone can be rich."

-By 1816 a British Colonel James Hay had it and historians say it basically fell off a truck during the Peninsular War.


In reality...

Panofsky is right, but much else is wrong.

The painting actually depicts (as a 1523–4 Mechelen inventory correctly records) a merchant of Vornheim named Arnault Fin and a succubus (Isvin Othvyx of the Fourth Insidious) wearing the skin of the deceased Constanza Trenta.

Folkloric texts found in treasure hoards, sages of highly civilized lands, a DC 19 history check or, in Call of Cthulhu, an Occult roll or a successful Library Use roll made at a sufficiently specialized antiquarian archive will reveal that just before their (essentially shotgun) marriage, Fin (pronounced not like the guys in Star Wars and Adventure Time but like the French would, so like you're about to say "Fuck" then get turned into a sheep then get punched in the nose in the space of half a second) woke late one night to find his fiance missing. He headed to the pantry to get a pear and then chanced to glimpse her, naked atop a wide and spreading oak, throwing stones at the moon and eating the loosened flakes as they fell to the ground. Fin instantly recognized that this was not a proper diversion for a potential bride.

Othvyx's scheme was simple: seduce-, become impregnated by-, and marry- the prosperous Fin and proceed to birth into the emerging merchant aristocracy of Vornheim a strain of tieflings with which to manipulate and intrigue to the advantage of Hell against- and from within- the great cities of the Northern Continent.

Two minor obstacles obtained:
-According to the law of Vornheim, a spouse must obey any promise made to their partner during the first month of marriage.
-Demons can't break contracts.

Othvyx planned to circumvent these by using the false name that went with her false skin: Constanza Trenta.

However, once Fin discovered his wife's demonic nature, he consulted a witch-hunter, who instructed Fin to go on with the marriage and the usual marriage contract, but to also, unbeknownst to his new wife, enact the contract in a non-verbal form--thus the commission of the painting, which Othvyx, unschooled in art, mistook for a mere curio. Fin then playfully extracted from his new bride a pillow-promise to always be good and to teach their children and all the fruits of their line good things and Othvyx agreed, thinking herself safe due to the treacheries embedded in the written contract. Fin then burned the written contract, leaving only the painting--a loophole-free document of the reality of their marriage, and Othvyx was forced to be good and to teach her tiefling children goodness for all time.

The line of Fin is, incidentally, one of the sources of those non-evil tiefling PCs that pop up in D&D campaigns.

As for Othvyx (immortal and still extant long after the natural death of Arnault Fin): This rankles.

The Hellish siblings of the Fourth Insidious have inculcated many schemes over the years to free their sister and her descendants from her long-ago promise to Arnault Fin. Their various stratagems include:

-Destroy the painting

Seemingly the most straightforward scheme, but a demon can't destroy a contract, so it requires either manipulating resourceful mortals with unusual access into doing it. Complicating this is the fact that the artwork is discreetly protected by (in the D&D eras) various responsible clerical orders (thus the 1516 lock on the painting) and (in the Call of Cthulhu eras) clubby secret societies of Templars and whatnot, to one of which Colonel James Hay--who actually wrested the painting from the hands of a Spanish diabolist and scion of a corrupt family in Salamanca who had acquired it from the Inquisitorial libraries of the Dominican order and totes did not steal it off a truck like some parody of an entitled British world-heritage plunderer--belonged.

-Besmirch the good name of Arnault Fin

Divorce won't do it, but if the Church or State can be somehow persuaded that the Fins could never have been married in the first place and thus trigger an annulment then Othvyx is free to work once more her wicked way in the world. Generally this is easier in a D&D game than in a Call of Cthulhu one as the only entities extant still capable of annulling the marriage in modern times (the Catholic Church and the government of Belgium) seriously do not care. Either way, the most obvious way to do this would be to somehow smear Arnault Fin, finding someone in authority willing to retroactively and officially declare him a close relation of Othvyx, a changeling, a bard, or some other entity denied the ordinary rights of a citizen.

-Get the witnesses to recant or be declared unfit

The convex mirror in the painting shows two witnesses. One is presumed to be the painter himself, Jan Van Eyck.

In D&D, agents of demonic forces might hunt down these people themselves and cause them by threat or guile to recant their witness to the marriage of Fin and Othvyxx. In any game taking place long after the painting was finished, the task of ruining the witnesses is not unlike discrediting Fin himself--it will require convincing an authority figure that the witnesses were not what they seemed or in a state of disordered mind (drunk or possessed) rendering them incapable of proper witness.

Either way, you'd have to get a good look at the painting in person in order to figure out who these witnesses are or were.

So anyway...

If this painting happens to turn up in a treasure hoard or on a the wall of a great hall, it's valuable to a lot of people for a lot of different reasons and could start a lot of trouble. Keep an eye out.
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Make your own "Stranger Things"-style logo at makeitstranger.com. Does exactly what it says in the title.

Who the fuck is my D&D character generates succinct character concepts for you to roleplay. It's clever how evocative it is! It's by Ryan Grant; the underlying code uses the WTF Engine. (more…)

The Moral Machine is a website from MIT that present 13 traffic scenarios in which a self-driving car has no choice but to kill one set of people or another. Your job is to tell the car what to do. Think carefully before making your choices, because one of the goals of the website is to crowd source the behavioral rules for self driving cars in the future. By participating, you could affect the outcome of who lives and who dies.

From self-driving cars on public roads to self-piloting reusable rockets landing on self-sailing ships, machine intelligence is supporting or entirely taking over ever more complex human activities at an ever increasing pace. The greater autonomy given machine intelligence in these roles can result in situations where they have to make autonomous choices involving human life and limb. This calls for not just a clearer understanding of how humans make such choices, but also a clearer understanding of how humans perceive machine intelligence making such choices.

Recent scientific studies on machine ethics have raised awareness about the topic in the media and public discourse. This website aims to take the discussion further, by providing a platform for 1) building a crowd-sourced picture of human opinion on how machines should make decisions when faced with moral dilemmas, and 2) crowd-sourcing assembly and discussion of potential scenarios of moral consequence.

Martin O'Leary not only made a cool fantasy map generator, he's giving away the source code and has described the process at a high enough level for an idiot like me to partly understand how it works.

I wanted to make maps that look like something you'd find at the back of one of the cheap paperback fantasy novels of my youth. I always had a fascination with these imagined worlds, which were often much more interesting than whatever luke-warm sub-Tolkien tale they were attached to.

At the same time, I wanted to play with terrain generation with a physical basis. There are loads of articles on the internet which describe terrain generation, and they almost all use some variation on a fractal noise approach, either directly (by adding layers of noise functions), or indirectly (e.g. through midpoint displacement). These methods produce lots of fine detail, but the large-scale structure always looks a bit off. Features are attached in random ways, with no thought to the processes which form landscapes. I wanted to try something a little bit different.

It's an odd feeling to look at these instantly-generated, detailed maps and realize that they represent nothing. I feel like I'm being wasteful pressing the "Generate high resolution map." The Uncharted Atlas is a twitterbot that posts a new map every hour.

If you’ve ever wanted the tabloid staple “stars, they’re just like us!” to be about role-playing games, then Dan Harmon has the show for you.

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