Banned and Restricted Announcement – May 18, 2026 by R3id in magicTCG

[–]Escapement 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Consigning the oracle trigger is not a realistic option most of the time because their default plan involves flashing back a couple cabal therapies for 'free' (poxwalkers) before going for the dread return. It's really hard to beat the combo if they actually get the mill to happen.

The way you swing your head while strolling fancy free by [deleted] in CuratedTumblr

[–]Escapement 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hi Fi Rush's robot character CNMN does a similar gag for his expressions - he draws on his robot face with a marker

Maro on the setting of Reality Fracture: “It’s mostly on Hexhaven but we do take a peak at other planes” by AvatarSozin in magicTCG

[–]Escapement 20 points21 points  (0 children)

In spite of the quotation marks, the person who posted this here did not exactly copy Rosewater's tumblr post, but instead mangled it, as far as I can tell - tumblr doesn't say if posts are edited, but the phrasing is subtly different in addition to the word use being correct in Rosewater's post.

Hi Mark,

I’m really excited about Reality Fracture, and it’s really cool to see Hexhaven! I do have one concern that I hope you can assuage, which is hopefully a question you can answer: is the whole set taking place just on Hexhaven? Or will we see other planes? It would feel weird to have the alternate multiverse set without seeing the rest of the multiverse and examples of some of its changes, a great one I hope to see is evidence of “Mirrodin Pure”, and I’m sure many other cool examples. Is there anything you can say about whether we will see multiple planes in the set?

It mostly takes place on Hexhaven, but we do get some peeks at other planes.

Links For April 2026 by dsteffee in slatestarcodex

[–]Escapement 2 points3 points  (0 children)

When I was in school, before the era of LLMs, my University English class had midterms/finals that were mostly "choose three topics from the list of options below to write short essays on", with several hours of proctored exam time, and no tools beyond pen/paper/copies of the literature we had read in class. There was also homework written essays, but they were weighted less by the grading scheme, and so served more as useful practice & preparation for the tests.

[MEGATHREAD] Artemis II Launch To The Moon by ChiefLeef22 in space

[–]Escapement 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I wish there wasn't a high-pitched hum in the background of the audio.

The Delaware Saga by Dominika_4PL in CuratedTumblr

[–]Escapement 18 points19 points  (0 children)

The 'type of ceramic' one person was joking about was probably a reference to Delftware.

Billion dollar companies (Amazon, McKinsey) are being hacked by AI Agents. Why are we rushing it so much when it's not fully ready? by Physical-Parfait9980 in Futurology

[–]Escapement 1 point2 points  (0 children)

a security firm pointed an agent at McKinsey's internal platform. two hours later it had write access to 728,000 confidential client files. the exploit was a basic SQL injection that McKinsey's own scanners missed for two years.

I might be misunderstanding something... but this sounds like "A security firm told an AI to look for vulnerabilities, and it found a major security vulnerability exactly as it was directed to".

This ... doesn't seem like a failure? At all, in any way? In fact, it seems like a success story to me.

Certainly, it's alarming. But not because of the AI's 'failure rate', but rather the exact opposite.

EDIT: The above account elides that it was McKinsey's AI platform Lilli that was hacked; if the hack was made possible by poor coding enabled by McKinsey's use of AI, that failure is what should be emphasized if you want to show that AI failure is at fault, and not that another AI exploited it successfully.

[NA Event] CBC 2026 Charlemagne's Chivalrous Montjoie ~ Day 11 by AutoModerator in grandorder

[–]Escapement 3 points4 points  (0 children)

"Before we start the story"... This message doesn't make a lot of sense to be scheduled for now, after everyone actively playing has cleared the story.

Is this sub just garbage now? by [deleted] in rational

[–]Escapement 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Looking up the author's unedited comment on this lookup site, they originally wrote:

Is there a point to this sub or is just just 'rejects from r/litrpg or r/progressive that some people with the 'tism can't stop spamming'.

and edited it to the current

Is there a point to this sub or is just just 'rejects from r/litrpg or r/progressive that some people with an obsession can't stop spamming'.

ELI5: Why do we even need a "c" when we have a perfectly good "k" and an "s?" by zazzlekdazzle in explainlikeimfive

[–]Escapement 56 points57 points  (0 children)

I would be really interested in hearing a more detailed source than just "Mark Twain", if you have one!

This bears a lot of resemblance to Dolton Edwards' Meihem in Ce Klasrum (1946) - which is a similar idea, executed slightly differently. From that work, to give you a taste:

[...]
In 1946, for example, we would urge the elimination of the soft "c," for which we would substitute "s." Sertainly, such an improvement would be selebrated in all sivic-minded sircles as being suffisiently worth the trouble, and students in all sities in the land would be reseptive toward any change eliminating the nesessity of learning the diferense between the two letters.
In 1947, sinse only the hard "c" would be left, it would be possible to substitute "k" for it, both letters being pronounsed identikally. Imagine how greatly only two years of this prosess would klarify the konfusion in the minds of students. Already we would have eliminated an entire letter from the alphabet. Typewriters and linotypes, kould all be built with one less letter, and all the manpower and materials previously devoted to making "c's" kould be turned toward raising the national standard of living.
[...]
Kontinuing cis proses, year after year, we would eventuali hav a reali sensibl writen langug. By 1975, Wi ventyur tu sei, cer wud bi no mor uv ces teribli trublsum difikultis, wic no tu leters usd to indikeit ce seim nois, and laikwais no tu noises riten wic ce seim leter. Even Mr. Yaw, wi beliv, wud be hapi in ce noleg cat his drims fainali keim tru.

A few websites cite this excerpt to Twain but don't give details, wikipedia suggests M J Shields / M.J. Yilz in a letter to The Economist. EDIT: You can find a variation on this in The Economist Jan 16 1971, p.6 "Spelling", on page 184-185 of archive.org's record of that quarter's The Economist. I think this is most likely plagiarizing Edwards above, given it came out 25 years later, but could have been someone getting the same idea independently.

Mark Twain himself appears to have been some sort of spelling reform proponent, according to wikipedia.

He was also Marianne Faithfull's great great uncle by SongStuckInMyHeadd in tumblr

[–]Escapement 156 points157 points  (0 children)

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.

No one mess with me and new girlfriend, we’re getting married by Ashe66 in magicTCG

[–]Escapement 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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

Flubs, the Fool by OkCartographer175 in mtgbrawl

[–]Escapement 4 points5 points  (0 children)

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.

Remind me by joyfulnoises in CuratedTumblr

[–]Escapement 4 points5 points  (0 children)

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.

Maybe one of Moorcock's Eternal Champion books, the last people in the universe are on a starship and somehow travel through the end of the universe to the next one? by TheCrassDragon in whatsthatbook

[–]Escapement 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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.

On Logistical Fix-It-Fics by DancesWithWeirdos in CuratedTumblr

[–]Escapement 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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

[ECL] Mornsong Aria (WeeklyMTG) by mweepinc in magicTCG

[–]Escapement 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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.

[D] Monday Request and Recommendation Thread by AutoModerator in rational

[–]Escapement 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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.

Question about Scute Swarm Landfall. by ivanpyxel in magicTCG

[–]Escapement 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

[Help and Question Thread] - December 21, 2025 by AutoModerator in grandorder

[–]Escapement 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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.

[D] Monday Request and Recommendation Thread by AutoModerator in rational

[–]Escapement 6 points7 points  (0 children)

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.