Whitennerdiest

The Daily Adventure Prompts Masterpost

After several years of running this blog, it’s become more and more evident that I need some central reference where people can access all my different DM advice posts, important tags, and ongoing series. Sharing my ideas with people and helping to improve the art and craft of being a dungeonmaster was always the point of DAP after all, and its of no help to anyone if the answers to important questions are buried under a hundred or more pages of my rambling.

To that end, I present this post as an ever expanding catalogue of my thoughts. Something that you can page through at your leisure in hopes some of my hardwon lessons will be of use to you.  

but i was naïve. it's apparently about every positive experience. enjoying a meal? you're so lucky, children are starving. spending your day off cosy in bed? wow, so selfish, homeless people are freezing to death.

Dreamwidth accounts are now completely open and free, instead of requiring invite codes!

Why Dreamwidth is good:

- You have FOUR different privacy levels to choose from with EVERY post: Public, Private, My Access List Only, A Specific Special Access List Only. You can make as many special access lists as you want. You can 'f-lock' your whole journal if you want. Privacy is good!

- All comments stay on your OP, there is no reblogging. No more posts suddenly getting out of hand and running away from you, it all stays central on the OP, and replies are nested into threads! It's like having a little mini message board on every post!

- Tiered privacy--you can subscribe to someone, and you can also grant them access. Separately. This means you can read someone's journal without having to let them read posts you have locked.

- Put your interests in a linked list, if they light up as a link you can click and suddenly see everyone--and every community--that has that interest listed! Make friends! Join communities (comms, as we call them)!

- Communities! Which can also be locked to members only! Communities also have moderators (and rules the moderators may or may not have!), which makes them safer.

- Lots of customisation options for how your journal looks. Back in the day we used to match journal themes with our bffs or lovers!

- Multiple icons! We used to use this feature to have different icons to indicate moods/tones. Fun! Let's bring that back. You can have 15 with a free account, and more with a paid account.

- 100x100 icons! So big! Gifs allowed! Like on AO3!

- MOOD ICONS. This is an extra icon on your posts that has a mood attached. People with paid accounts have custom themes! Mine is Great Mouse Detective.

- Paid accounts are subscriptions but if they lapse you just go back down to a free account, you don't get your account's functionality taken away! And likewise, the extra icons and custom mood theme are still there; all that changes is if you change your mood theme you can't go back to the custom one until you get a paid account again. Paid accounts just give you extra customisation for how your journal looks, and help support the site, because...

- THERE ARE NO ADS. THERE IS NO ALGORITHM. THERE ARE NO SUGGESTED POSTS. NOTHING IS SPYING ON YOU.

- Please join Dreamwidth!!!

Come check out Dreamwidth, it's pretty awesome there! And if you have any questions, I am happy to do my best to answer them!

Me, age 12, just started drinking coffee:

It's supposed to look like this:

Unicode, the technical standard describing what text symbols exist in computers¹ and how they are encoded², has a block containing Egyptian Hieroglyphs. And since there exists an Egyptian Hieroglyph depicting a penis³, they included it in the standard. And since most computers follow that standard, they can display a penis.

You can check out unicode characters for example here:

1) There do actually exist different standards describing which characters computers should use and how they should be encoded. These days pretty much everyone uses UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format) because when exchanging data between computers or programs everyone must use the same encoding to get readable results.

This also means that unicode must (try to) support pretty much everything any human could ever want to write, which means it includes many things like mathematical symbols, special symbols for just about every language, emoji, combining characters that modify other characters, a variety of spaces, box drawing symbols, control characters for eg. text direction, ...

2) Which is actually somewhat complicated. Unicode assigns each symbol a number, but then the text (sequence of symbols) needs to be converted into a sequence of bytes. This is done via the Unicode Transformation Format, which actually results in different characters needing differently many bytes to store.

Also, certain emoji (flags, anything with skin colors or gender, emoji depicting multiple people) are actually multiple characters that get squished into one symbol when rendered.

3) There actually exist three. The above, a version with cloth (𓂹) and one with emission (𓂺).

look at it! 𓃲

𓃲𓃲𓃲𓃲 <- herd!

and the newborn hartebeest!!! 𓃛

𓀥 𓁆 𓀕