cannot overstate how much i love that lou, brennan, and aabria all went into this knowing it was erika’s first time GM-ing and were like “into the deep end for them, we’re gonna throw the most batshit curveballs. the goat is on reddit now.”
and i mean that both as a joke and genuinely. there’s so much trust at the table that every out of left field ask or character choice will be not just accepted but met and built on, and it makes for a kind of storytelling that’s truly magical
For real dungeons and drag queens is so nice to watch. It’s like watching a movie with a friend and you’ve seen it a million times but you see them experiencing it for the first time so you get to share those exciting feelings with them
Something I love about Brennan Lee Mulligan as a GM is how he tailors the D&D experience for each of his players! As someone who is fairly new to the D&D/actual play world, it is so nice to have a GM who can walk you through all the nuances of playing while also never sacrificing the quality of play and Brennan does just that. He is so gentle and kind when explaining the rules and the world to all of the queens in Dungeons and Drag Queens, which makes their first experiences playing D&D the best it could possibly be! Even though this season is admittedly a lot slower feeling than the other seasons with much more experienced players, I am so sure that Brennan’s gonna hit it out of the ballpark with the drama and storyline and emotional punch through these four episodes and I personally cannot wait to see it all happen.
Worlds Beyond Number is wild because Brennan Lee Mulligan uses every ounce of his philosophic and empathetic learnings to create the most heartrending situations and scenes
Then, like an emotional devastation katamari, this fucker picks up THREE whole ass other people like him. Lou Wilson, who will make you cry while you’re in the middle of laughing. Aabria Iyengar, who is a fucking genius and dives full ass into her character’s flaws because your heart will die of a thousand cuts when it all hits. And Erika Ishii. At first blush, a bit of a clown, albeit a sultry one when they want to be. More than happy to play the fool. Lets you underestimate them, so you let them get close, and when you realize how deep you’re in it’s too late
So these FOUR chucklefucks, these four geniuses of humor and tragedy, hire a fucking Maestro of Sound Design in Taylor Moore to produce their home game. And everything is tighter. And even more immersive. And heartwrenching and hilarious and cozy and creepy.
Anyway, this team of FIVE people decide that they’re going to make one of the best podcasts currently airing and it’s only nine episodes in.
i think it’s p awesome that the first compasses invented in china were not magnetic, but in fact mechanical - the cart with the little wooden man pointing south was built in a way that no matter which way the cart turned, the little man would always point south
this is a model of what it looked like
how does this work? it’s so cool and confusing
the gears are aligned in a way to always turn the little man in the opposite direction as the cart at the same rate of rotation. so if the man points at you, and you turn the cart clockwise 90 degrees, the man will be turned counterclockwise 90 degrees, and still be facing you. if you turn the cart counterclockwise 90 degrees, the man will be turned clockwise 90 degrees, and still be facing you
as for how they got the cart to point south to begin with, that goes into fengshui and cardinal direction geomancy. but long story short, the workshops that built these carts would have their front doors facing south to begin with (using the sun and the stars to figure out which way is south), so all they would have to do is build the cart facing that direction, and the little man will always point south
apparently europeans have the impression that US Americans never learn the metric system.
like our science curriculum from day one is entirely done in the metric system. we just don’t use metric in our day to day lives.
yeah actually we kinda just do it for the bit :)
I have had people try to gently and kindly explain to me the workings of the metric system, as if Americans are having trouble with the concept of a base ten system. like no. we get it. we were taught this when we were like eight. it’s just that like. we don’t really wanna do it that way. for the bit.
It’s like formal and informal tense.
It’s kind of even more fucked up than that, really
Soda: big bottle is liter, small bottle is 20oz, can is 12oz (buying a soda with a meal is just small/medium/large, don’t ask what the numbers are)
Fun runs are often measured in kilometers, but literally no other distance uses metric
People who get fancy with coffee use grams for weighing the grounds but the final beverage is measured in ounces
On the whole, Americans just use whatever unit makes the most sense for the thing in question. Whatever rounds to the cleanest number or is the easiest to estimate/calculate.
Like, we know we want about a certain amount of soda in a larger bottle and a “2 liter bottle” is easier to say and estimate than a “70oz bottle” but a “foot long sandwich” is easier to say and estimate than a “0.3 meter sandwich”. It’s 70 degrees Fahrenheit outside because small increments of temperature make a big difference in how comfortable I’ll be, but my 3D printer, which gets up to extremely high temperatures, is printing at 215 degrees Celsius.
I might drive a mile (a larger unit, because the exact distance doesn’t need to be as precise) but I ran 2k (a smaller unit that allows for a more precise measurement of the distance without breaking the units down to fractions).
It’s all about what works best for the situation at hand.
I'm a bisexual Mormon mom of two, married to the sweetest man alive, fan of Marvel heroes but not always their comic writers' decisions, and I work as a freelance writer and have published my own books, including the Scaleshifter series! And if you want to read my fanfiction, I'm on A03 by the same name.
