name is Mia, she/her, spend most of my time on the internet. still figuring it all out and trying to avoid being too much of a disaster. into cheesy jokes and complaining a whole lot
A new co-worker tried to assert his nerd dominance over lunch by explaining to me what Dungeons & Dragons is.
Rate the efficacy of his depiction on a scale of 0-100%?
He seemed to be under the impression that the Dungeon Master has their own secret character (also called the Dungeon Master), and that becoming powerful enough to fight this character is how you win the game.
hey I have a new rule I’d like to propose for all editions of dungeons and dragons
saying “you are a burden on society” is just such a weird framing of priorities
It’s like saying “wow, think how much better gas mileage your car would get if you weren’t sitting in it” or “think how dry that umbrella would be if you weren’t holding it in between you and the rainstorm”.
the things we create? they’re for us. they are meant to carry us. they are meant to protect us. we are meant to hold them up to keep us dry.
why do we even have a society if not to take care of each other?
Good Backwards World Building: In the Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery mobile game, your player character must learn the charm Silencio, which causes the target to temporarily be unable to make any sound,during their fifth year at Hogwarts. During the class, it is revealed that one of the side effects of a failed Silencio charm is for the target of the spell to begin to swell uncontrollably. For players who are clever and remember the books, this will ring a bell- it was never explained why Aunt Marge in The Prisoner of Azkaban started swelling up when Harry got angry, only that he accidentally did magic. This reveal shows that in anger, his subconscious was likely trying to “shut her up”, causing a mis-cast Silencio charm, and therefore the side-effect of swelling. The reveal doesn’t change anything about the characters or their motivations, or add anything in particular to the plot. It’s just a neat bit of trivia.
Bad Backwards World Building: JKR tweets that [x] was part of [x minority group], even though there was no indication of such in the text, simply because it adds representation in hindsight.
honestly the funniest thing about the lord of the rings is how gandalf is literally a minor god sent to middle-earth by The Big Man Himself and yet literally nobody apart from the elves seems to recognise this or take him seriously
like yeah gandalf is pretty grumpy most of the time but how would YOU feel if you were the fantasy equivalent of an angel and a bunch of people who only come up to your knee were just like “oh fuck it’s that spooky old wizard” every time you showed up for a friend’s birthday party
The quotes from this Washington Post article are funny, sure, but here’s a longer quote about some of the theories behind this phenomenon:
“A seal’s preferred prey — usually fish, octopuses and, of course, eels — like to hide within coral reefs to avoid being eaten, and since the marine mammals don’t have hands, they have to hunt with their faces.
“They like to stick their faces into the coral reef holes, and they’ll spit water out of their mouths to flush things out. And they’ll do all sorts of tricks, but they are shoving their faces into holes,” Littnan said.
Perhaps, he said, a cornered eel decided that the only way to escape or defend itself was to swim up its attacker’s nostril, and young seals who are “not very adept at getting their food yet” were forced to learn a tough lesson.
But Littnan said that theory doesn’t make much sense.
“They’re really quite long eels, and their diameter is probably close to what it would be for a nasal passage,” he said.
He added that a monk seal’s nostrils, which reflexively close when they are diving for food, are very muscular and it would be difficult for any animal to push through.
“I struggle to think of an eel really wanting to force its way into a nose,” he said.
The other way eels might be ending up in nostrils is through throwing up. Similar to how people sometimes end up accidentally spewing food or beverages from their noses, that could also happen to seals, who often regurgitate their meals.
Still, Littnan said it doesn’t seem possible that a “long, fat eel” would end up going through a seal’s nose rather than out of its mouth. The “most plausible” theory, he said, is that monk seal teenagers aren’t all that different from their human counterparts. Monk seals “seem naturally attracted to getting into troublesome situations,” Littnan said.”
So while it’s possible that this is some sort of ridiculous teenage seal behavior, please also remember that there might be alternate explanations and that at this point, they’re all based on conjecture.
Also, it’s criminal that OP didn’t screenshot the last line of the article.
“If monk seals could understand humans, Littnan said he has a message for them: ‘I would gently plead for them to stop.’“
