"smart" lock designers don't consider that they are designing locks, they design consumer tech products that happen to lock. this is evidenced by the fact that many smart padlocks can be disassembled while locked.

I love cases where they legally determine how to classify stuff because it's one of those things where they have to create some sort of specific line that bears little resemblance to the way we actually classify things!

clever trap!

I saw a gif of this on twitter with less explanation a while ago and I felt suddenly enlightened. This is cool. It's so neat how geometry feels like a specific thing contained in its own bubble of "maths about shapes and that's it" but actually it's just another way of writing equations and relationships that can be really useful in things that aren't to do with actual physical shapes in the real world.

not great honestly, my mental health has taken a huge hit for obvious reasons, I couldn't find a job and don't exactly want one at the moment because going into a school is a bad idea at the moment. also two of my closest friends had an argument today and I was there and it made me sad and anxious because I'm super conflict averse and they both kinda vented to me about it a bit after and idk what to say.

on the plus side I 3d printed a neat dice tower

this is why media theory is the only good academia

this video made me excited about teaching again

room

this is very cute!!!

especially for someone who expected Suran's House of Earthly Delights from Morrowind

yes but I think it is not correct and that I would find a different way to be messed all the way up

Shadowrun Dragonfall is probably my favourite single player story based game.

When I first beat it, I immediately started a new game and played it through a second time. It absolutely nails the difficult moral choices that so many games struggle with.

Also there's a dog!!

Hong Kong is good too, but if you're gonna play em both, start with Dragonfall because Hong Kong made some good quality of life upgrades to stuff like the inventory system and I'd hate for people to miss out on Dragonfall because it feels like a step backwards.

according to the game super mario 64 DS yoshi is the pre-evolution of mario, luigi, and wario, and he evolves by using a stone shaped like a hat.

(I mean it should stand on its own but I'm kind of obsessed with the parallels between the themes of shelley's ozymandias and the long term nuclear waste warnings and this is kind of a riff on those ideas. shelley's poem can be read as saying 'how foolish ozymandias was to declare himself the mightiest and to think he'd never be bettered' and I wanted to write something that was like 'how foolish of us to presume we can tell what people in the past were thinking')

perhaps this big bone is from a giant horse

oh sorry, I meant they never used the name, they definitely used the city!

I mean of course they called it byzantium when it was called that, but it was changed to constantinople when constantine upgraded it to the new capital, so it was never called byzantium during its big role in the empire if you get me.

My point is that calling the Eastern Romans "Byzantines" is a bit like calling people from France "Gauls". Like, yeah that is where Gaul was physically located, but the modern nation of France is a different thing.

it was, that's the point of my rant :p

I am 100% convinced that the fall of the western empire is traditionally considered 476 because the emperor whose deposition caused it was called Romulus Augustulus which is like... such a perfect bookend for the empire? city founded by Romulus, turned into the empire by Augustus, and the last ruler shares a name with both of them? But this time it's an ironic echo because the empire is a shell of its former self.

Nevermind that Romulus Augustulus was a usurper who was never officially recognised and that the man he deposed was recognised as the legitimate emperor until 480.

Nevermind that the Domain of Soissons existed, a province in northern Gaul where the governer insisted that it was merely another Roman province waiting for a new emperor. The locals called it the kingdom of the romans. It existed til 486 when it was conquered by the Franks.

Nevermind that Roman culture and art and administrative structures stuck around in the west for hundreds more years! Especially in somewhere like Britain where Romano-British culture was such a huge influence on our borders that we still feel its fallout today.

It's all too easy to make history fall into neat stories. And I love the story of Rome falling in 476 because so much of why it happened echoes why Rome was such a powerhouse. But it's not really an accurate representation.