Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

Re: the unwritten sci-fi story:

Having to scrap a speech by one of the characters about how some creatures require preying upon others in order to reproduce because the intended audience character has never encountered a non-human animal outside of historical references.

 

It's interesting talking to my friend who is trying to get his first fantasy novel published, because he mentions the wordcount limits that publishers tend to stick to, and I'm thinking about the fanfiction that I tend to read, where if the authors stuck to the wordcount limit for sf/f then they'd be allowed maybe three or four chapters per book.

 

Don't think of it as regression, think of it like a Metroidvania: you're revisiting old areas but now you have new movement abilities and can get some of the stuff you missed the first time around.

 

RIP Jacques Tits

 

Some more creatures that look like dogs:

Anti-cryptid, in that it appears blurry except in pictures and video, where it looks like a dog.

Appears to be a dog except when you look at it your framerate drops.

Appears to be a dog except when you look at it from the corner of your eye, where it appears to be a different dog.

 

Thinking to myself: what if I gave the two main characters variations of the same name?

Unfortunately, that would conflict with the part where they get into a debate about accents and irritate each other by exaggeratedly mispronouncing each other's name.

 

Ah, yes, we've reached the Extreme Static time of year

 

Like hangnails on a chalkboard

 

Note to self: for the Creatures That Look Like Dogs series, the not-dogness should only manifest as perceptual effects.

 

I honestly haven't grokked that validation is a thing that people like to get from other people. The whole identity label thing now makes like 10,000% more sense to me than it did five minutes ago.

 

Once again learning that I am not good at long-term planning vis-a-vis board games

 

Getting your face licked by a dog is a slightly new experience when you're wearing a mask, both for you and probably also for the dog.

 

The Gavle goat was burned. Not really burned down, the metal skeleton is still there, but all the flammable bits have been torched.

 

A fun thing about NFTs supposedly being about ownership is people selling NFTs of things they don't own. If it weren't for the environmental damage I would consider this just another amusing to determine who I get to dismiss as hopelessly naive, but alas.

 

Speaking of proof-of-ownership:

On the one hand, the no-verified thing on tumblr is probably for the best. On the other hand, Neil Gaiman keeps having to prove that that's actually his tumblr because finding the previous post where he proved that that's actually his tumblr is impossible due to tumblr not having a useable search function.

 

Somehow got stuck on a Eomer/Lothiriel binge.

 

Nuances on the signals sent by refusing to vote. Or perhaps more properly, nuances on the signals received. In the US, not-voting is rarely seen as a meaningful message of defiance, as a good portion of the population doesn't vote anyway and the powers-that-be don't really expect them to, so loudly refusing to vote just gets seen as noise.
In Hong Kong, however, the Communist Party has staked part of its legitimacy on people voting, and so there refusal to vote is in fact received as a message of defiance, maybe even sedition.
The fact that all of the candidates on offer in Hong Kong were picked by the Communist Party is perhaps relevant to those of us who vote in the US, but there are of course people in the US who don't see a difference between the candidates on the US ballots.

 

Looking across the aisle every once in a while and realizing that over the course of the oddly-long ceremony the attendants on the bride's side have been one-by-one replaced with crash-test dummies.

 

When he tells you that he's been teaching the undergrads about finite fields and so you're like "oh, cool, finite fields. What did you go over exactly?" and after some painstaking, blood-from-a-stone extraction it turns out what he meant was groups of Lie type over finite fields.

Anyway, I'm glad I never had to TA for him.

 

Getting to the point where I can remember that most mathematicians consider real finite-dimensional vector spaces to have canonical inner products, but only after I have a moment of confusion as to why people would try to use something that isn't invariant under the full general linear group.