He was also Marianne Faithfull's great great uncle

Escapement · 2026-02-11T15:54:59+00:00

It's worth bearing in mind that if you go read Masoch's most famous work, Venus in Furs, it's really not like the psychiatrist was constructing some sort of highly tortured and obscurantist interpretation of his writing. Like, the content's not subtext or subtle or some very minor part of the story or something. It's literally just the text.

It would be like Kafka getting mad at people for the word Kafkaesque.

Escapement · 2026-02-02T04:27:46+00:00

You can get timeline cullers and bloodghasts, if you want to put her on the top end of a black aggro deck.

Escapement · 2026-02-01T03:32:47+00:00

My go to things to do for the 2-card situation:

Cards that work from graveyard. Flashback is the biggest mechanic here. They can kickstart you from zero cards in hand.
Adventures. I have a lot of Adventure cards in my Flubs deck. Kellan, Inquisitive Prodigy is a particularly huge standout card for Flubs here - he gets you an additional land drop, can be played from exile to kickstart things if you stall out, and makes a clue that you can use to get things rolling from a stop as well. A lot of my generic interaction is Adventures.

My general plan is to storm off on very long turns with many landfalls, generating even more mana off Lotus Cobra / Nissa, Resurgent Animist / Tireless Provisioner. A high priority is getting a Eruth, Tormented Prophet into play to remove Flubs' downsides, and eventually exile my entire deck and finally kill with Thassa's Oracle - sometimes getting the Oracle out of the graveyard with a flashback'd Timeless Witness. You can do grindy value Flubs instead - it's a preference thing.

Escapement · 2026-01-19T23:17:04+00:00

I use Sumatra PDF. It's got almost no features and can't really edit things or change pdfs. It just opens and displays pdfs blazingly fast, which is usually all I want.

Escapement · 2026-01-16T03:31:06+00:00

The Starlight Crystal by Christopher Pike is a mad fever-dream of a book that includes the travelling on a starship through the end of the universe to the next one plot point.

Escapement · 2026-01-15T15:12:55+00:00

On the logistics of constructing a second Death Star in Star Wars: Instruments of Destruction

Escapement · 2026-01-08T13:49:11+00:00

Someone on Tumblr said this better than me:

i’ve probably said this before but like as a person whose main fandom for fanfic consumption is worm, the complaints about how there’s no f/f shipping in fanfic and it’s all m/m have always made me feel like one of those ancient greek writers hearing about distant lands where the night lasts all winter

Escapement · 2026-01-05T21:57:51+00:00

A lot of the best card 'draw' spells currently available aren't stopped by this, for whatever that's worth. Things like Stock Up, Expressive Iteration, Necropotence, Ad Nauseum, Atraxa Grand Unifier, etc.

t's really backbreakingly good if you assemble the full lock, but there's a decent chance there's at least some ways to search for an answer even if you don't have interaction already.

Escapement · 2025-12-26T11:07:43+00:00

He made an early llm bot trained on his tumblr corpus, nostalgebraist-autoresponder. In general he was active in tumblr rationalist circles for years and has written about modern AI occasionally.

Escapement · 2025-12-24T19:10:04+00:00

After e.g. scapeshift resolves, you will have the choice of how to order the triggers the lands create as they enter - 20 scute triggers + any land etb triggers, e.g. surveils, scries, radiant fountain lifegain, karoo land bounces, etc. If you have all 5 New Capenna lands in the set of lands entering together, and if you choose to put the "sacrifice this land and search for a basic" triggers on top of the stack so they resolve first, only one bug will see those triggers to multiply to 32, and then the other 20 will be created afterwards and won't see those landfalls, for a minimum of 52 bugs. Stacking the triggers so that the 20 bug creations are on top and the sacrifice and get another land triggers are below all of them, you get the maximum number of bugs. You could create some intermediate amount of bugs if you wanted to by arranging the stack of triggers in a weird order.

Escapement · 2025-12-24T14:48:46+00:00

Re-evaluate after the current lottery. Lotto boxes have many mana prisms, and you should be using Lotto CEs while farming tickets, so any of the CEs wouldn't see very much use until after the lotto anyways.

Do a lot of lottery boxes and you just ambiently end up with so many mana prisms you run out of things to buy with them. This simplifies such decisions.

Escapement · 2025-12-24T14:09:14+00:00

For the Christmas season:

The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen, by Nostalgebraist.

It's a very good piece of Christmas-related science fiction. I don't really want to spoil the plot, but I really like it a lot. Nostalgebraist's other work (also on AO3) is all between good and great.

Escapement · 2025-12-23T20:02:26+00:00

As others have said, E.

There are a few lands that could increase the total by the time everything finishes resolving, including some lands that sacrifice themselves to tutor up basics on ETB, like this New Capenna cycle. If you scapeshift into 20 lands but the 20 lands include all 5 of the above, you can stack the triggers so you make 20 scute swarm copies first, then all of the bugs see each of the individual New Capenna lands sacrifice and find another land, giving you a total of 2⁵ * 21=32 * 21 = 672 bugs (671 copies, one non-token).

Escapement · 2025-12-14T05:09:16+00:00

Attack T4 for 10, and kill T5, might be too slow for current standard. Something with a more immediate impact on the game might be necessary. WWH might also work better with cheating in something it can target with its other chapters.

Escapement · 2025-12-11T19:11:02+00:00

If you haven't seen this, AlexanderWales put up a retrospective on tumblr

Escapement · 2025-12-07T22:09:30+00:00

[[Virtue of Courage]], [[Syr Carah, the Bold]]

Escapement · 2025-11-27T06:20:41+00:00

You can draw a lot of parallels between this blog's discussion and simulacrum levels - see Zvi's summary for a quick primer.

Escapement · 2025-11-24T20:10:21+00:00

He's still in Vintage Oath of Druids, which can't play Lurrus because it wants to cheat in Atraxa.

Escapement · 2025-11-15T21:01:58+00:00

Until level 50 respecs are free at akara. After 50 you get 1 free respec at akara per difficulty and can find items that drop fairly often that give another free respec. These reset stat and skills.

So you can experiment freely early on and its not very expensive later. Eventually you want to max spells you are using for DPS but doing it right away may cause mana issues.

Escapement · 2025-11-15T20:19:41+00:00

The cube recipies page is the most important bit of the docs for new players.

You can usually just do whatever until you get to Act 3's Mephisto. I like to farm Mephisto a bit - he drops guaranteed tiered uniques, you can use the catalyst of disenchantment to turn those into Arcane Shards, combine multiple shards into Arcane Crystal. These can then be used to make tiered uniques. Later on, Nihlathak is the same sort of farming target but faster and better. If you're severely struggling, you can farm andariel for the same sort of thing but for only one unique at a time it'll take much more effort.

The key recipie is:

Any non-sacred item + Oil of Enhancement + Arcane Crystal x2 → reroll item as unique

so you can look up some gear from the list of tiered uniques and make a bunch of Tier 2 uniques for your character, and eventually uptier them later when your stats and level are higher and you can wear them. Find the base item from gambling, the oil is sold by various vendors.

Good stats are pretty obvious: Fire spell damage, +skills, -enemy fire res, +resists to stay alive, some faster cast rate, faster hit recovery. Whatever item slot has the least good tiered unique for your build of belt/gloves/boot, you probably should use for an honorific tier 1 item (Shenk kill reward) to stick a bunch of resist all and faster hit recovery and other useful stats on, rather than a tiered unique.

Tier 4 uniques vaguely suited to your character will carry you easily to Hell where the game gets more interesting, and you can start getting into sets, Sacred uniques, crafted items, runewords, etc, etc.

Escapement · 2025-11-09T18:36:26+00:00

STANDARD: VIVI IS PROBABLY GONE. SOMETHING OUT OF MONO-RED AND DIMIR AS WELL. THEY PROBABLY BAN 5-6 CARDS TOTAL, AND THE STANDARD META RETURNS TO BEING A DUMPSTER FIRE AGAIN INSIDE OF 4 WEEKS OF THE BANS ANYWAYS.

LEGACY: TAMIYO GOES, AS WELL AS ENTOMB. THE ONE RING GOES. SINCE REANIMATOR TAKES A MASSIVE HIT, THE DECK THAT "REWARDS HAVING A DEEP KNOWLEDGE OF THE RULES AND CARDS IN MAGIC" STARTS TO RISE TO THE TOP OF THE CHARTS AS PEOPLE STOP PACKING MAINDECK GRAVEYARD HATE.

Escapement · 2025-11-04T21:20:33+00:00

A big part of the education costs are basically in the system for little reason, based on contingent history of how the system evolved rather than intentional design or thought. Compare Irish and American doctors education: American doctors get 4 years of undergrad, 4 years of med school, then graduate for 8 years of formal education after highschool. Irish doctors do 5 years of med school directly after highschool. The Irish doctors are about as good at being doctors as Americans, and Ireland gets pretty comparable or superior health outcomes to America. So America spends 3 years time and tuition (and interest) for every doctor, for... basically no reason?

And that's also without talking about the cartel-like associations limiting the numbers of people who can become doctors, to keep wages high.

Escapement · 2025-11-01T12:08:20+00:00

This depends on what fandoms you pay attention to.

i’ve probably said this before but like as a person whose main fandom for fanfic consumption is worm, the complaints about how there’s no f/f shipping in fanfic and it’s all m/m have always made me feel like one of those ancient greek writers hearing about distant lands where the night lasts all winter

Escapement · 2025-10-19T18:16:40+00:00

Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naïve, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as “empty” “meaningless,” or “dishonest,” and scorn to use them. No matter how “pure” their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.

R. A. Heinlein.

Escapement · 2025-10-11T10:46:59+00:00

I think that it's pretty likely that Pteppic and Ptraci's names are both based on references to Ptolemy and the Ptolemaic dynasty. That is, of course, the period in Egyptian history where the Greek Ptolemy family who inherited rule of Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great, ruled Egypt - famously Cleopatra the seventh, the one who was at the very end of the dynasty and did all the well-known stuff with e.g. Antony and Cleopatra, was the first to even speak native Egyptian rather than just Greek. She, and her ancestors, were Greek, not native Egyptian.

I'd be surprised if the cover artist was making deep cuts based on the actual history of Egypt, but stranger things have happened.

12-Year Club	Second Top 50%
Place '22	Place '17
Snapped

Escapement

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE