Googly Poogly

hell yeah! Bc a lot of people asked here's a recipie with both NA and vegetarian options (not mine, courtesy of my good friend who is both sober and coincidentally works at a very upscale mezcal place, everyone say thank you Ozgur!)

(With reference to this post here.)

It’s Alice’s turn and she controls Zimone and has a Fling, an Awaken the Woods, and a fragmentize in hand. She controls 2 Forests (green mana), a Plains (white mana), a mountain (red mana), as well as two lands that are here because they can be sacrificed.

Both Alice and Bob have infinite mana colorless mana made via an artifact that can untap itself for more mana.

Bob has 10 life and controls a Wasteland and two Forests. He has a Nourishing Shoal in hand. He also controls a Battle of Wits and has 250 cards in his library.

To win before Bob does next turn, Alice needs to create a large creature token with Zimone by casting Awaken the Woods, and at end step Fling the token. However, Bob with his infinite mana can cast an arbitrarily large Nourishing Shoal, gaining 10^100 life for example. Alice will try to Fragmentize the Monolith that Bob controls. In response he will generate the mana to cast the giant Shoal and he has to pick a number.

Then, Alice can cast Awaken the Woods to make her land count a prime number that is bigger than 10^100 so that at end of turn, she can Fling the Primo token at Bob’s face. However, once the trigger goes on the stack to make the token, Bob can Wasteland any of Alice’s non basic lands to make her total land count a composite number, making no token.

But, Alice has a trick! She can sacrifice one of her own Havenwood Battle grounds to make her number of lands 2 less in combination with a wasteland. This would allow her to still have a prime number if she chose the larger of a pair of twin primes as her target land count.

The question is this: Can Alice always make a number of lands bigger than any other number so that if Bob destroys one of her lands, she can sacrifice another, remaining at a prime number, and making the token to Fling for the win?

Somebody reblog with that one Sonic fandub meme of "what the FUCK are you talking about", because that is the EXACT emotion I'm experiencing here.

In plain English:

Alice and Bob are playing Magic: the Gathering. If Alice does nothing, Bob will win next turn.

Bob's current position allows him to respond to anything Alice does by doing a Stupid Card Trick that grants him an arbitrarily large number of hit points. By "arbitrarily large", we mean that Bob can pick any number he wants, but it has to be finite; i.e., he can't say "infinity plus one".

Alice's plan is to do something that will break the setup that permits Bob's Stupid Card Trick, thereby forcing him to pick a number of hit points for it to give him before he loses it. Alice will then follow up with her own Stupid Card Trick which allows her to deal an arbitrarily large amount of damage.

So all Alice needs to do is say a number that's larger than the number Bob said, and she wins, right?

Well, not quite. Unlike Bob's Stupid Card Trick, Alice's Stupid Card Trick only works if the number she picks is prime. If anything Bob does in response prevents her from picking a prime number, she does no damage, and Bob wins next turn.

It so happens that Bob does have the ability to respond in a way that reduces the number Alice picked by one. Any prime number minus one is non-prime, so this counters Alice's Stupid Card Trick.

But: Alice has the ability to counter Bob's counter by reducing the number she picked by a further one. This puts her back in business if and only if the prime number she picked in the first place is still prime after having two subtracted from it.

The question is, then: is it guaranteed that Alice can always pick a prime number that's larger than Bob's number and is still prime after having two subtracted from it, no matter what number Bob picks?

It's hard to tell! Maybe they just popped out because the First Soul is paying attention to this. Maybe they only let her glide?

Never confuse emotional intelligence with academic or professional intelligence. They are completely different.

Getting directly attacked - in Nora and Cresce's case, repeatedly - activates some pretty raw tribal instincts. It has to, it's supposed to, that's how we survive against each other as humans. Your brain looks for what it must attack or defend from in order to keep you and your family safe. It looks for dangerous patterns that match your attacker.

And so many people start fearing everyone in a certain nationality, or race, or political party, or religion, or gender.

It's almost impossible not to do this, it's how your brain works. It's how it evolved to keep you alive. You can actively battle against it - and you must and you probably will, if you're a certain type of person - but it's still going to happen.

I was 20 when 9/11 happened and suddenly I despised Muslim people and wanted to drop nuclear bombs on the Middle East. Everyone around me did. In a hippie-dippie art college! I hadn't even known what Islam was before that day, but I was now super scared of anyone who believed that stuff. Everyone was.

I channel a lot of that old ugly when I write Duane, Lem, and now Nora. It's very logical fear, and fear turns your higher intelligence off; makes you reactive and violent. The kind of intelligence that helps you design a pymaric ogre or write a webcomic is useless at keeping you immediately alive against an enemy tribe that you perceive is working towards your destruction. Survival is always the imperative.

In Nora's case, having first-hand experience and knowledge of her enemy works against them even harder, because she not only fears them, but she fundamentally disagrees with their repressive culture and is even disgusted by how the "innocents" fall in line with the mega-evils of their government. Just like Duane thought the best thing the Litriya children could do was die, Nora thinks the best thing the "innocents" of Alderode can do is die. New lives for all.

Ultimately, this is a sentiment born of utter frustration; an inability to change another group's mind and in doing so, save them. "They're so STUPID!" you think, "They can't be reasoned with!" So instead you wish for their destruction, and think of that as a mercy. Not only mercy for them, who are too stupid and backwards to live, but mercy for your own people, who will now be safe.

You see this sentiment a LOT in current politics (and in past politics, and in all politics forever). Is there not some group of people, Anon, that you (maybe very quietly, very distantly) have this feeling about? A group you wish would just vanish from the earth because they are too STUPID to exist and their existence threatens you or a group of people you care about or belong to? And as a smart person maybe you realise they only behave how they do because of the environment they're in, and that they're "innocent" otherwise, but you know you cannot change who they are or what they think, and you know that their behaviour is harmful. Don't you wish they'd somehow, just, go away?

Here’s the obligatory reminder that if you haven’t read Unsounded yet, you totally should. Book 1 is finished and we have finally arrived in Alderode. To celebrate, I drew some Aldish kids doing what Alds do best: bully each other for having the wrong haircolor.

Feels weird advertising the next crowdfund when the books from the last haven't yet shipped, but so it goes! This won't launch until later in the year but you can follow the Kickstarter campaign page for updates so you don't miss it.

Unlike books 1 & 2, 3 & 4 are entirely new content that's never been in print before, covering the end of the Nevergreen arc, Ethelmik's destruction, the introduction of Ruckmearkha and Queen Sonorie, the arrival at Litriya Shrine, really the thickening of the entire plot! There's also a bonus Kissfist Baxter story, and a special something new I'm cooking up.

•►LATEST UPDATE HERE◄•

Welcome to "The Red Cost," Unsounded's direct sequel. Find the entire 25-page prologue linked above (nudity warning!). If you look around you'll also find a new glossary, and some tweaked odds and ends here and there. Enjoy!

Single page updates will resume next Monday, 1/12. I'll also be posting entries for the Fanworks Contest! I've had a few people ask for an extension on the deadline, so if you just get your entry to me by next Sunday, I'll accept it. There is some really beautiful, compelling stuff in my inbox already~~

If you're looking for comic discussion, check the link box below for access to the awesome reader-run Discord, or consider becoming a direct patron of the comic on Patreon for the high res version of every update, and lots of extra art. Thanks for your patience during the break, and I hope you'll enjoy where the story goes next. "The Red Cost" is deeply personal to me in a lot of ways :)

A cozy little scene inspired by one of the questions on the AMA!

Still a precious preoccupation of mine, such thoughts. I confess they with more excitation orbit around what I might have excised from the hubs than what I might have added. There are too many spellburns, and they engender in aspirants and veterans alike an overreliance on network access rather than good, strong Core Technique. If a spellwright cannot recite Inokae's Exchange at full form, he has but a mouthful of brains; yet since I was a boy I have heard the young braves barking their hubcalls like seals and then puffing their chests like feeder pigeons as though they had the doing of the conflagration their barks bring forth.

Ever there was a call in the service that pymary must be made simpler for the Plats! I say Nay! It must be more difficult; more calculations and mnemonics ere shamid ever ignites port!

He wasn't a bad guy, by most accounts, but the preaching in his Christmas special was a sermon hyperfocused on keeping the Christ in Christmas, more than any kind of broad questioning of consumer culture. 'Cause the dude loved consumer culture.