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Holy crap, Thomas Edison’s lengthy 1888 to-do list reads like an exhaustive list of sub-items for the main task “Refashion industrial society & usher in new century.” I wonder what Elon Musk’s to-do list looks like. (Open Culture):

December 16, 2016 Leave a comment

Holy crap, Thomas Edison’s lengthy 1888 to-do list reads like an exhaustive list of sub-items for the main task “Refashion industrial society & usher in new century.” I wonder what Elon Musk’s to-do list looks like. (Open Culture):

http://www.openculture.com/2016/11/thomas-edisons-hugely-ambitious-to-do-list-from-1888.html

[…] Vacuous Ore milling Large Machine
Magnetic Separator Large
Locking material for Iron sand
Artificial Silk
Artificial filiments [sic]
New [illeg.]
Uninflammable Insulating Material
Good wax for phonograph
Phonographic Clock
Large Phonograph for Novels, etc. […]

Boosting some questions I asked over on the Autarch forums:

December 16, 2016 Leave a comment

Boosting some questions I asked over on the Autarch forums:
1. The description of the efreeti bottle states that the efreeti will “loyally” serve the opener, but the description of the efreeti in the monsters section states that “they will attempt to twist the meaning of their orders and obey them only to the letter.” Which takes precedent?

2. What happens when the opener of the efreeti bottle dies and the efreeti is out of the bottle? Does it rampage like an uncontrolled elemental, return to its home plane, or something else?

go on, tell me you can’t use this as a campaign setting.

December 11, 2016 Leave a comment

go on, tell me you can’t use this as a campaign setting.
Actually, let’s do Mateo Diaz Torres some good and make a Sea of Osr island here. Why is Disappointment Island so named? What’s with the fjordy coastline?
1. it’s not a question mark, it’s part of a Yellow Sign. Rituals cast from the high places can raise the other two legs from under the sea.
2. the circular bay is the open mouth of an enormous sea creature, asleep these long years, waiting for the right bait.
3….

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Auckland_islands_topo.png#mw-jump-to-license

In medieval iconography, Saint Nicholas is sometimes presented as taming a chained devil, who may or may not be black. Although no hint of a devil, servant, or any other human or human-like fixed companion to the Saint is found in visual and textual sources from the Netherlands from the 16th until the 19th century,[12] Zwarte Piet and his equivalents in Germanic Europe, according to a long-standing theory,[13] originally represented such an enslaved devil, forced to assist his captor. This chained and fire-scorched devil may have re-emerged as a black human in the early 19th-century Netherlands, in the likeness of a Moor and as a servant of Saint Nicholas.[14][not in citation given] A devil as a helper of the saint can still be found in the Austrian Saint Nicholas tradition, in the character of Krampus.

December 6, 2016 Leave a comment

In medieval iconography, Saint Nicholas is sometimes presented as taming a chained devil, who may or may not be black. Although no hint of a devil, servant, or any other human or human-like fixed companion to the Saint is found in visual and textual sources from the Netherlands from the 16th until the 19th century,[12] Zwarte Piet and his equivalents in Germanic Europe, according to a long-standing theory,[13] originally represented such an enslaved devil, forced to assist his captor. This chained and fire-scorched devil may have re-emerged as a black human in the early 19th-century Netherlands, in the likeness of a Moor and as a servant of Saint Nicholas.[14][not in citation given] A devil as a helper of the saint can still be found in the Austrian Saint Nicholas tradition, in the character of Krampus.

Gameable?
Yes, I’m well aware of the controversy around this blackface tradition. My question is, would you put it in your dnd?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwarte_Piet