Category: Miscellaneous babble

Random mutterings

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Mug o Dice

At Dragon*Con, the dice booths are always chronically busy. There you can find all manner of dice for gaming. There’s also the large tanks full of dice where you can buy a cup, container or pitcher of dice, either randomly scooping it out or picking them out yourself (which costs more).

I’ve always been a sucker for dice, so I picked up a random mug scoop-o-dice to play with and also to fill the dice bag I was expecting to receive.

I figured it was time I went through and looked at what I got out of the random mug.

  • 17d20
  • 12d10
  • 4d8
  • 15d6
  • 2d4

A total of 50 dice. Not a single d12 in the entire mug though. A little disappointed. d12s are one of my favourites.

I’m not sure why, but I’ve always enjoyed just picking up a handful of dice and rolling them. Most times I don’t even bother looking at the numbers. Feeling a handful of dice rolling around in your hand, hearing them clatter on the table. Rinse and repeat. It’s got kind of zen quality to it.

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Cthulu in the office

Orange Cthulu arrived at my office today and promptly started into discussions with Cylon Snowbot

Orange Cthulu in discussions with Cylon Snowbot

“This is of no concern to you, mortal”. Uh oh.

'This is of no concern to you, mortal'

Then he floated over to meet with Dogbert and Tux, using the Mug of VI as his platform

Orange Cthulu meets with Dogbert and Tux

More hushed whispering. It wasn’t long before Brain and Snowbot joined them

Orange Cthulu, Dogbert, and Tux are joined by Brain and Snowbot

Orange Cthulu, Dogbert, and Tux are joined by Brain and Snowbot

I think I should be afraid.

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Unboxing an Old One

In the mail today there was a package. A smallish package, but a highly anticipated one (by some).

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Removing a page torn from a volume of the California Law Review revealed Orange Cthulu from @cthuluchick!

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Orange Cthulu rose out of his box to survey his new domain

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and meet two of his new subjects

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One of them had other ideas though

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Random Charleston memory: Not what I thought

Just a few days after moving to Charleston, I was in an oddly named grocery store called Publix (at the time I thought it was an odd name).

Walking to the checkout lines, I saw this girl wearing shorts. A fairly ordinary pair of shorts, except printed in great big letters was the word “COCKS”. Right on her butt. Pretty hard to miss.

“Wow, that’s pretty bold advertising” I thought. I mean really, it said “COCKS” in great big letters right on her ass. What else was a guy supposed to think?

It wasn’t until a few of weeks later, after getting a little more settled in and a little more familiar with the local vernacular that I realized her shorts must have referred to the USC Gamecock, and not the other thing I originally thought of.

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Things that don’t change

Keeping track of – signs has always been the bane of my attempts at math. Somehow I always manage to lose track of at least one – sign during the course of working out a problem.

On one notable occasion working on a homework assignment for a boundary value problems class (partial differential equations galore), one question evolved into 13 pages of math scribblings. Eventually I decided it was far too ugly to be any kind of correct, so I pitched it all and started over. I found my mistake in a single – sign on the second page and wrote the solution up in 4 pages.

20 years later, things haven’t changed. Still making the same mistakes with – signs or other silly little math errors. On the BioE 846 quiz I got back today, one of the easier questions I ended up getting wrong because of an off-by-1 mistake.

One positive: with the additional years of experience, I’m at least catching most of my stupid little mistakes earlier.