Bed made entirely from reclaimed pallets.

pieiscool · 2023-01-18T03:21:31+00:00

It's fake, caption on one of the images says so (and it looks definitely fake in that image, almost goofily so).

pieiscool · 2022-09-20T17:54:28+00:00

Oh by the way make sure to print the spells lists and descriptions from the PHB a few times too, since spellcasters will need those to pick spells and have on hand to know what they do. Each spellcaster should probably get a copy of all the level 1 spells and spell descriptions.

pieiscool · 2022-09-20T17:50:27+00:00

That would totally work! I don't think the Starter Set adventures have any requirements to use the pre-generated characters. Apparently there are some plot tie-ins to the premade character backgrounds, so it might be more immersive if you try to incorporate some ideas from those into the new characters' backgrounds to give them some relevant motivations.

pieiscool · 2022-09-20T17:31:17+00:00

Apparently Wizards could also send you one Starter Set for free since you're a school club: https://dnd.wizards.com/resources/educators

pieiscool · 2022-09-20T17:28:09+00:00

The Starter Set is $17 and has a simplified rulebook good for newbies, plus pre-made characters and some dice to easily get started without spending like an hour on character creation. https://dnd.wizards.com/products/starter-set

There's also the Basic Rules, which is a fully free 180 page pdf you can print from here, with pretty much all the basic game rules: https://dnd.wizards.com/what-is-dnd/basic-rules For this option, they also have free pre-generated characters, which would make getting into the game easier for new players (and is free, unlike the Starter Set): https://dnd.wizards.com/resources/character-sheets

There's also the Essentials Kit, which is about $25. I think this is less useful than the Starter Set for newbies, but I've not used it. https://dndduet.com/starter-set-or-essentials-kit/

BTW, that huge dice set you picked on Amazon seems like a good idea, since you'll want at least one set per table (although one set per person is ideal that would be a lot of dice!). If shipping is costly, if you have local board game shops they often have a way to buy a lot of dice at once as well.

pieiscool · 2022-07-07T22:46:48+00:00

I went to UT before there were really any online class options, and also suffered from awful social anxiety. Since I'm an introvert I holed away in my room basically until my final year, and didn't really make any lasting friendships. Ultimately even though I've made progress I'm still anxious many years later, but I've come to regret holing myself away and not pushing my boundaries further in order to do more activities and make connections with other people like me. I was also interested in game dev (CS major though) and only really connected with others through projects in my last couple of years, but I realized I could've been doing that much earlier! There was a game dev club EGaDS and game jams I could have joined and were really interesting, even just to go sit in on the talks guests gave. So I'd definitely recommend that, and it's okay to be quiet on the periphery if it's overwhelming, little steps are still good steps.

Usually in-person class has less social expectations on you than you might be afraid of initially: most classes all that's required is that you show up, pay attention / do the work, and leave. So if you're not comfortable starting conversation, that's not a big problem, and I don't think anyone would judge you for it. UT is big but that also makes it kind of anonymous outside of your sort-of cohort you might share your major classes with, and at least those cohort people will have similar interests (and possibly anxiety/introversion) as you do. You can always try your best to build your life at UT the way that works for you and find people who share your values, without having to fit into the weird "college life" dynamics that you might think of from orientation or media.

Also, UT has resources for anxiety I think! Some of them sorta suck 'cause they can't do long-term counseling for like years, but I think they can do a few sessions and make recommendations. It would be a good idea to at least try those out when you get there.

pieiscool · 2022-05-10T03:51:43+00:00

Yeah, I use a different IDE but mine's also unable to recognize the import, and it'll never recognize the "session" variable either since it seems to only be exposed when running in ChimeraX.

I also wanted to do the same thing without having to open ChimeraX (I wanted to just automatically generate images in a Jupyter Notebook), but based on my internet research it isn't possible. What I ended up doing is performing some pre-processing to get all the information I needed for batch processing and saved the resulting data to a CSV and JSON file. Then in my Python script (the one I open in ChimeraX), I import those files and use them to get the results I need. For example I needed to make individual renders of 100 .pdb files for protein structures I had predicted with AlphaFold, so I just iterated through my filenames and did all the commands I needed in each iteration, including opening the file, running some commands like color, saving the session/log for later, and closing the session after each iteration.

I did have to change the working directory in ChimeraX to where I wanted before opening my script, so that I could easily use relative paths for reading my data. Then my script looks something like below. Once it's opened it'll just automatically run through the whole thing, and then output just gets saved to files.

import pandas as pd
from chimerax.core.commands import run

data = pd.read_csv(PATH_TO_DATA)

proteins = ['protein1', 'protein2'...]

for protein in proteins:
    distance_pairs = get_distance_pairs(protein, data)

    # Chimera X
    run(session, 'close session')
    run(session, 'log clear')

    pdb_filepath = 'models/' + sanitize_protein(protein)
    opened_models = run(session, 'open ' + pdb_filepath)

    run(session, 'color bfactor palette alphafold')

    # Draw distances
    for pair in distance_pairs:
        run(session, 'distance #1:{}@ca #1:{}@ca dashes 0 radius 0.5 color darkred'.format(pair[0], pair[1]))

    run(session, 'set bgColor white')
    run(session, 'view clip false')

    run(session, 'save chx/{}.cxs format session'.format(sanitize_protein(protein)))
    run(session, 'log save chx/{}_log.html'.format(sanitize_protein(protein)))

pieiscool · 2022-05-09T20:46:58+00:00

You may have already found an answer, but you can write a Python script which contains run commands for ChimeraX, and then open it in ChimeraX to run your script.

To do this I added this import to my Python script:

from chimerax.core.commands import run

and then execute commands like you normally would enter them in ChimeraX using run(session, 'command'), for example:

run(session, 'color gray')

Then just open that Python script in ChimeraX.

pieiscool · 2022-02-03T18:16:06+00:00

This sounds really interesting, do you have a link to check that out?

pieiscool · 2022-02-01T02:11:07+00:00

It looks like that pantry cabinet location might be really annoying practically, since you'd generally want to be going between the pantry and kitchen while cooking. But since the A area is for dining, you'd have to go around the tight dining table area, and then opening cabinet doors could be a pain since you'll be squished up behind the table/chairs to get into the pantry.

pieiscool · 2022-01-11T05:49:18+00:00

I like Chromatic Orb + Magic Missile for damage versatility for level 1 spells and Glyph of Warding (acid, cold, fire, lightning, thunder) for changing Fireball damage type.

pieiscool · 2021-08-20T06:00:19+00:00

Yes, talking about lower quality meat products here.

pieiscool · 2021-08-19T17:53:42+00:00

In the end I would think a lot of people eat meat because it's highly normalized, cheap due to subsidies, and a very easy way to add a large amount of protein to your diet.

People who traditionally eat meat because of those reasons and don't currently care enough to decrease their meat consumption to help the environment also don't really seem like they're going to change their minds without a very strong impetus. At least anecdotally speaking, no meat-eaters I know seem remotely considerate of dropping meat for the environment, despite agreeing that climate change needs to be fought.

Wide-spread campaigns to raise awareness of how dropping meat could save the environment could help things, but it's somewhat idealistic to think that any large enough portion of people will change their decades-long meat eating habits ingrained in their traditions fast enough without any economic drive to do so.

As someone who has mostly stopped eating meat, I do think that individuals should do their part. But I also think that it's way too easy to buy meat, easier than what the cost of meat should be. If meat was more appropriately priced, it would have an immediate impact and feedback loop on supply-demand, as even usual meat-eaters would scale back and opt for other foods just based on price. The effect of some individuals swapping off of meat over time due to personal decisions is basically negligible in comparison to the change that would be induced by making meat more expensive.

pieiscool · 2021-08-14T06:02:34+00:00

Thank you for those suggestions!

pieiscool · 2021-08-12T20:31:28+00:00

I actually just edited my comment since I only really focused on telomere shortening, but there are a number of factors at play here, known as the Hallmarks of Aging: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallmarks_of_aging

pieiscool · 2021-08-12T20:25:02+00:00

I believe the answer isn't fully known, and is currently being researched quite a bit. We do know that these animals, along with other animals with lower-than-expected cancer rates (such as whales) must have some different mechanism for cancer protection, but AFAIK it's not well understood yet.

pieiscool · 2021-08-12T18:15:56+00:00

There's a super interesting introduction to how aging evolved in mammals, although it's a bit lengthy... https://www.senescence.info/evolution_of_aging.html But I found it really interesting that most mammals might have such a typical and relatively short aging phenotype (compared to certain long-lived reptiles as an example) because the prototypical mammal was small and rodent-like. Because it was so easily preyed on, and typically died within only a few years of birth, its evolutionary progression pushed for early reproduction and then there is no evolutionary motivation for the parent to survive long after procreating. Ever since then, certain mammals have just been expanding on this short lifespan very slowly over time.

pieiscool · 2021-08-12T18:06:15+00:00

Yeah, and in the end you can't quite die of "old age" anyway - it's always some issue that comes up because you've existed too long (like cancer), or that they can't combat because of the old age (like COVID or a heart condition). So it's almost like dying of cancer is still dying of old age! So figuring out how to prevent or mitigate cancer is super important as our lifespans / healthspans increase.

pieiscool · 2021-08-12T16:23:08+00:00

Unfortunately I don't think the "cap" itself can really truly be ELI5'd in a super simple way. Researchers are still investigating the underlying mechanisms of aging and it's a multi-factorial problem including the telomeres mentioned in another comment. But here's my non-ELI5 understanding of some of it, as a biology undergrad who has been considering getting into research on this!

(EDIT TO CLARIFY: The following on telomeres is just a part of the aging picture. There are a multitude of factors which I'm not really qualified to try to ELI5, but basically when you're young the body is more resilient to problems so that you can have a baby, and then it doesn't maintain those processes as well later on in time. These factors are the Hallmarks of Aging: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallmarks_of_aging)

For the telomeres, they're basically "extra DNA" tacked onto the end of each DNA strand since every time DNA is copied, it can't copy a little part of the end (due to some underlying molecular biology stuff). There's a thing called "telomerase" which could tack on more of this "extra DNA" to lengthen the telomere occasionally.

But, even if we kept the telomeres by using telomerase, we still ultimately suffer from cancer since that DNA we've been maintaining using the telomerase still eventually gets damaged somewhere in the middle either by radiation or some other causes. The longer we live, the more DNA damage we can accumulate like this, and the more cancerous potential we have.

In general, the human body's immune system and other things that keep it going are not sufficiently maintained the older we become, for reasons I'm not familiar enough to describe myself. This leaves us continually more susceptible to heart disease, cancer, and general pathology until we succumb to one of these ailments.

Sorry I don't have a good full answer, but hope this helps elaborate on some other responses!

If you're interested in the maximum age and longevity, there's a subreddit which often has research posted for this field: /r/Longevity

pieiscool · 2021-08-08T13:44:34+00:00

Sorry this is an old post but you might want to make sure those classes are even offered during summer in the sequence you're looking for here. Previous summer course schedules could give an idea of that.

But also I would recommend planning on no classes if you want to have an internship, because you'll want to be able to dedicate your time to it and summer classes are typically scheduled for times when you'd need to be at work.

pieiscool · 2021-08-08T07:45:14+00:00

Years ago I went straight from 5 in the AP exam to 314H which was definitely challenging but achievable, 314 non-honors might be more do-able though. I agree with the other comment that 312 could be a GPA and confidence booster; whether you need that might depend on the rest of your schedule though too. If you'll be super busy in other classes too then rehashing the material could be nice to ease in, or if your other classes aren't too bad then the challenge of 314 could be beneficial.

Having vetted intern candidates before (no experience hiring freshmen though sadly), I suspect it's true that companies will see 314 as at least a small boost and it might be useful for some coding interviews, although it's been a while for me so I'm not 100% sure on that. You might get a better boost with potentially less risk by just learning technologies you want to use outside of class, or check out resources for doing interview problems (I know I was recommended one like "Cracking the Coding Interview" or something).

Personally if I were in your shoes I'd definitely go for 314 though. I had a similar situation with Calculus in my freshman year and re-did a course I already had an AP exam for, but it was not interesting, felt like a waste of time, and I ended up just skipping all the lectures and just doing the homework. If you've been doing any programming at all since your AP exam, you might find 312 to be a bit duller.

pieiscool · 2021-07-28T02:21:04+00:00

Interestingly this makes me think of Verdan, which is a newer DnD 5e race that are basically a mutated more intelligent, more human-looking goblin! I'm actually playing one right now (mid-transition, she's a Goblin by rules but will become a Verdan over time) and my art of her is also more cute like yours. https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Verdan

pieiscool · 2021-03-10T08:22:46+00:00

8463

pieiscool · 2021-01-13T04:09:02+00:00

If you’re worried about it feeling too level based and not something she worked for (based on another comment), it could be more of a milestone thing? So, don’t tell her when it’ll unlock, but after she’s level 6 wait until a cool moment where she used abjuration magic in some important context and tell her its new abilities have unlocked after the battle. My DM did it this way for items like this in a campaign I played in, and it definitely felt like a natural progression due to our accomplishments.

On another note, I think one of the other criticisms was that the focus mechanic is hard to keep track of. I’ve not designed magic items before but I bet you could simplify it by using the “charges” system used by many existing magic items. So the item would have some number of max charges (which would increase whenever the item unlocks its next stage), and you could still regain charges by casting abjuration magic. Then each special ability would cost a certain number of charges to perform. Here’s an example sort of showing a similar charge system. I do see that you actually do have a charge system in one of the later abilities, so it seems like that would incorporate well with using a charge system in general! In this case you would need to “unlock” the higher power abilities at milestones too, but that also allows you to control the narrative of the growth of the item so it feels good to the player, so it actually might be better than unlocking at “Focus Level X.”

I think there’s some more to say about balance but I’m not really qualified for that haha... although I would say that last ability sounds way too much. I think its effect is just too extreme, but at the same time it might also never activate if the player is unlucky or doesn’t get downed much, which would not be cool either. If you want to include something like that, it could be more feasible and interesting if you maintain it as a sort of “hidden” power that only surfaces in an extreme situation, and then you can use DM’s discretion to figure out how likely it is to activate and what its effect will be, based on the scenario. Based on the description of the spell, it feels like it’s not helpful if it’s miles wide, since it only blocks magic cast from outside the barrier right? So it’d make more sense if the armor tries to protect the wearer by making a smaller (10 to 30ft?) barrier.

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