be gay do maths

(Under) Qualified Part IV is now up on youtube - in which our hapless hero decides to take care of himself for once.

Content warnings: verbal abuse, insect infestation, mild body horror

anyway commentary: going into the previous branch (lock in/stalk the weird guy/go home/change your syllabus) i was prooobably most hoping for stalk the weird guy just bc that was. definitely the comedy route. lots of shenanigans that way lay.

also i, nix tmp, am great at accents. the narrator, who sucks, is bad at them. any critiques you may have can be directed at the narrator its always their fault. unless theres something you like in which case its entirely me.

this definitely is the most coherent narratively/thematically path. even tho this section's definitely kinda bleak. but oof the plans going forward - definitely going into the choice at the end here with 'honestly whatever happens will be lots of fun for me even if it will not be for morris.'

is a happy ending still an option? yes, probably - i was leaning like 'nope we're in the oh god oh fuck' route but actually the themes. there is a way out of the hole. if morris gets real lucky.

(Under) Qualified Part IV is now up on youtube - in which our hapless hero decides to take care of himself for once.

Content warnings: verbal abuse, insect infestation, mild body horror

anyway commentary: going into the previous branch (lock in/stalk the weird guy/go home/change your syllabus) i was prooobably most hoping for stalk the weird guy just bc that was. definitely the comedy route. lots of shenanigans that way lay.

also i, nix tmp, am great at accents. the narrator, who sucks, is bad at them. any critiques you may have can be directed at the narrator its always their fault. unless theres something you like in which case its entirely me.

this definitely is the most coherent narratively/thematically path. even tho this section's definitely kinda bleak. but oof the plans going forward - definitely going into the choice at the end here with 'honestly whatever happens will be lots of fun for me even if it will not be for morris.'

is a happy ending still an option? yes, probably - i was leaning like 'nope we're in the oh god oh fuck' route but actually the themes. there is a way out of the hole. if morris gets real lucky.

Six p.m. on a Friday, and you’re still in your office. Door shut, staring blankly at a computer screen. I wasn’t planning to start off too heavy on the symbolism, but why would you choose to spend your life in a windowless box? It’s the destination, why d’you gotta make it the journey as well?

It’s a bad day for it, too. The sort of day where any sane person would be outside, enjoying the evening air and spending time with other people. Normal people. Interesting people. People who could enrich your life, bring meaning to your muddle, give you the gift of variety beyond the tunnel-vision world that you occupy. But you. You strange, strange, str-str-str-strange thing that you are, you’d rather be there breathing in the chalk dust and staring fruitlessly at a paper. You’re not going to understand it, you do realize? You’ve been staring at it for four hours, maybe five - even I’m not sure at this point - and you’re still not sure what an isolated type is or how in the hell you wound up doing model theory. I mean, you are many things but a model theorist is /not/ one of them. Close the document, I beg of thee.

Of course, you won’t do that. There might be something useful in there, some new way to look at the latest problem you’ve set yourself. After all, your qual is coming up. The big day. The biggest of days. You’re going to have to stand there in front of (gasp) your advisor and your almost-advisor-but-that-one-academic-match-making-meeting-was-kind-of-awkward and some guy from Lie Groups that you dragged in because you did a course at one point and it was the only thing you could think of for your minor topic.

You have to be right where you are. You have to be studying away, with all the diligence of the damned. Buried before you’re dead, except instead of a coffin it’s your office and instead of earth piling up atop you it’s a mountain of definitions you don’t remember and instead of a priest it’s your advisor asking you a question and you stare at her blankly because you do not for the life of you remember what any of those words mean and -

Oh. You’re panicking. Oh dear.

Don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll be fine. Lots of people fail their

Well. A few people fail their quals. It’s not the end of the world. 

Though you’ve never met anyone who failed their qual, have you? Maybe they just won’t admit to it. Shame. Humiliation, even. The unlucky 1%, the only 1% you’ve any chance of making it into you aspiring academic, you.

But you’ll be fi-i-ine. You’ve got a syllabus. Cribbed from a list your advisor sent you, questions some other student of hers you’ve never met presumably survived. How, you have no idea. Because you’ve never heard of half the things on here, even though you d e f initely should have, and you’ve been avoiding learning the other half because they sound scary. But hey, you’ll always have Lie groups.

You’ve got to focus, you tell yourself. You spin in your chair to look at your chalkboard, at the practice problems you’ve hunted-and-gathered from the weird-n-wild corners of math.overflow, to the weirder-n-wilder corners of the brains of your academic siblings. Of the ten you’ve got, you’ve managed to solve two and both of those were rather like pulling teeth.

You sigh and run your hand down your face. This is hopeless. You’re hopeless. You’ll never get anywhere at this rate. No, this calls for some outside intervention.

Do you: A) Reach out to your advisor - she’ll set the questions, maybe if you look pathetic enough, she’ll give you hints about what you ought to focus on. But you’ll be exposing your soft, squishy belly like the desperate little pup you are. B) Email the student who’s syllabus you’re using. He’s still listed as a student at the school, when you google him, though you’ve never spoken to him. Honestly, you’re pretty sure you’ve never even seen him. But he passed the exam using this syllabus. He might be able to identify the key ideas.

C) Beg your academic siblings for help. You’re all in this together, right? They might not be able to help, and suffering shared might not be suffering divided, but at least they’ll be suffering too. If all else fails, you can see if they’ll pity-comp your dinner. D) Surely there’s something in this model theory paper that can help. Or at least something your committee doesn’t know - when in doubt, apply surface level understanding of something completely unrelated. Confusion is always your friend (apart from when it’s your enemy).

Paizo has made an official statement about the OGL 1.1:

We believe, as we always have, that open gaming makes games better, improves profitability for all involved, and enriches the community of gamers who participate in this amazing hobby. And so we invite gamers from around the world to join us as we begin the next great chapter of open gaming with the release of a new open, perpetual, and irrevocable Open RPG Creative License (ORC).

The new Open RPG Creative License will be built system agnostic for independent game publishers under the legal guidance of Azora Law, an intellectual property law firm that represents Paizo and several other game publishers. Paizo will pay for this legal work. We invite game publishers worldwide to join us in support of this system-agnostic license that allows all games to provide their own unique open rules reference documents that open up their individual game systems to the world. To join the effort and provide feedback on the drafts of this license, please sign up by using this form.

In addition to Paizo, Kobold Press, Chaosium, Green Ronin, Legendary Games, Rogue Genius Games, and a growing list of publishers have already agreed to participate in the Open RPG Creative License, and in the coming days we hope and expect to add substantially to this group.

This is massive news! Paizo has assured that their usage of the OGL for PF2 was optional, and meant to help third party content creators more than being something they relied on for their own system.

Now, they will be creating the ORC, which will be a successor to the OGL which many third party content creators will be able to benefit from. They will be taking measures to ensure the ORC won’t belong to any company, so this doesn’t repeat itself, and covering the legal costs of getting it coming to fruition. Which is massive news in these times.

A lot of third party content creators and smaller TTRPGs have already expressed their support to this new ORC already.

Amidst these news, I’d like to remind what has WOTC been doing currently instead:

DnD Beyond suddenly saw their option to unsuscribe disappear, which they blamed on servers. (Trust me: I have coded pages, and it’s not something that just casually can disappear because of server saturation)

A recurrent stream from DnD Beyond was cancelled. They claimed it is unrelated to the OGL news

WOTC has once again delayed a proper official statement about the OGL, and has been holding off from confirming it.

People have been ending their subscription for DnDBeyond as a form of protest, as it’s the metric WOTC is currently using to measure the impact of the new OGL.

Overall, employees have reported that the situation at WOTC right now is a massive mess, as the new OGL was not supposed to be leaked (contrary to what people had theorized). 

Keep pushing WOTC to revoke the OGL, of course. If all these changes have been happening, it’s thanks to the reunited effort from the community and creators to fight against it.

On the one hand, it’s a nice convenient narrative device that doesn’t necessarily need to be explored, but if you do take a moment to think about where it came from or what it might look like, you find that there’s really only 2 possible origins.

In settings where humans speak common and only Common, while every other race has its own language and also speaks Common, the implication is rather clear: at some point in the setting’s history, humans did the imperialism thing, and while their empire has crumbled, the only reason everyone speaks Human is that way back when, they had to, and since everyone speaks it, the humans rebranded their language as Common and painted themselves as the default race in a not-so-subtle parallel of real-world whiteness.

In settings where Human and Common are separate languages, though (and I haven’t seen nearly as many of these as I’d like), Common would have developed communally between at least three or four races who needed to communicate all together. With only two races trying to communicate, no one would need to learn more than one new language, but if, say, a marketplace became a trading hub for humans, dwarves, orcs, and elves, then either any given trader would need to learn three new languages to be sure that they could talk to every potential customer, OR a pidgin could spring up around that marketplace that eventually spreads as the traders travel the world.

Drop your concept of Common meaning “english, but in middle earth” for a moment and imagine a language where everyone uses human words for produce, farming, and carpentry; dwarven words for gemstones, masonry, and construction; elven words for textiles, magic, and music; and orcish words for smithing weaponry/armor, and livestock. Imagine that it’s all tied together with a mishmash of grammatical structures where some words conjugate and others don’t, some adjectives go before the noun and some go after, and plurals and tenses vary wildly based on what you’re talking about.