gracefulfallen

[gracefulfallen]

#reference #happy tag #elephants

[gracefulfallen]

#mine is a con artist #grew up on the streets and learned she was better than most convincing people of things #trained under another bardic con artist

[gracefulfallen]

you came back wrong and i am racked with guilt because i cannot bear to see you like this and i should have let you rest. i loved you so much that i defied death itself but i do not think either of us are happy

#investing at less than 600 #👀 #🍕

[gracefulfallen]

If you like frogs. Or possums. Or cool builds. Or happiness. This is the video for you.

#reference #happy tag #frog #… frod

[gracefulfallen]

#keladry of mindelan

[gracefulfallen]

griddleharlectostasia brainrot hours

#this is gorgeous #tlt

[gracefulfallen]

Steve Oster [producer of DS9] - about 4.06 - Rejoined

#this ep helped me realize I was gay

[gracefulfallen]

The haunting ancient Celtic carnyx being played for an audience. This is the sound Roman soldiers would have heard their Celtic enemies make.

#reference

[gracefulfallen]

#reference

[gracefulfallen]

Hang on. This is a fucking awesome idea.

You are a graduate student at Fancy Prestigious Magical Academy. You had to study hard and prove your intelligence to get accepted. There were tests. There were interviews. There was your college thesis, which you had to present to all of the current Arch Mages seeking apprentices at FPMA.

But you see, that's why everyone wants to get in here - it's a 1:1 Arch Mage to student ratio. If you manage to secure a spot here and make it through your own studies, you can write your ticket to do anything. You will have been tutored, one on one, by one of the most powerful Arch Mages in the land. It's a chance to elevate yourself, your family, your descendants. Instant win.

You don't know that you're smart enough to earn a place here. That's where your secret weapon comes in - you're charming. None of these other students knows how to hold a conversation. You do. Your research may not be the single best piece in all the land - but you know how to get people to like you. Maybe that's what FPMA needs.

And, holy shit, it works! You get selected by Sr. Arch Mage of Morally Questionable Research, Elfname Not-a-lich. Master Not-a-lich is a very demanding teacher. He expects top tier research into the arcane from you, and for your graduate thesis spell to be a work of brilliance.

First, though, he needs to teach you. He won't teach you for free, though - he needs you to go out and do things for him. He chose you, he says, because you're socially skilled enough to do things other magical students aren't.

This request from him makes sense, of course. Most Arch Mages aren't altruistic. You know this. You're not stupid. So you go do something for him. Something that seems... small. Reasonable.

When you get back, he grants you access to his spell book. Something equatable to the service you rendered him. It's... surprising easy to learn. You study it briefly, turn, and are able to do the magic he's asked of you. You ask him if it shouldn't be harder, but Master Not-a-Lich just asks if you're questioning his teaching methods?

Of course not! And in the end it works, doesn't it?

So you do something bigger for him. More difficult. You use the spells he taught you, sign on to an adventuring group he's asked you to join. He teaches you bigger spells. All, he says, in the name of helping you develop a spell worthy of one of his apprentices.

You start bringing him back things. Artifacts. Pieces of creatures. Things you find interesting. Maybe you realize he's subtly guiding your research efforts. Maybe you don't. Maybe you assume it's just the mark of a good teach, to help you puzzle out things on your own. You study them in your down time. Play with their magical essences.

In the end, it becomes a question for you; How far will you go for power? How far to graduate?

What happens to you when you do?

warlock patron: your graduate thesis advisor

­

#d&d #d&d meta #graduate advisor warlock patron #i think they should be considered a warlock of the old one because that's funniest

[gracefulfallen]

note: am v aware i have horrible taste lol

#dislike bean #don’t like watermelon #like overcooked broccoli

[gracefulfallen]

first 5 faceless emojis are how your summers gonna go

#🍑👺🦠💯🥞 #I get some booty? #I get sick? #then I get pancakes?

[gracefulfallen]

This was awesome lol.

#happy #kelly clarkson #anne hathaway #reference

[gracefulfallen]

#listen #water monsters are real

[gracefulfallen]

do me a solid and just reblog this saying what time it is where you are and what you’re thinking about in the tags.

#almost midnight #trying not to think

[gracefulfallen]

Show up at work like hi boss sorry I'm late my I was helping my mother track down one specific 90s dungeon crawler for the purposes of obtaining a muffin recipe the developer hid in the files

#reference #food

[gracefulfallen]

Years and years ago, I read a book on cryptography that I picked up because it looked interesting--and it was!

But there was a side anecdote in there that stayed with me for more general purposes.

The author was describing a cryptography class that they had taken back in college where the professor was demonstrating the process of "reversibility", which is a principle that most codes depend on. Specifically, it should be easy to encode, and very hard to decode without the key--it is hard to reverse the process.

So he had an example code that he used for his class to demonstrate this, a variation on the Book Code, where the encoded text would be a series of phone numbers.

The key to the code was that phone books are sorted alphabetically, so you could encode the text easily--picking phone numbers from the appropriate alphabetical sections to use ahead of time would be easy. But since phone books were sorted alphabetically, not numerically, it would be nearly impossible to reverse the code without exhaustively searching the phone book for each string of numbers and seeing what name it was tied to.

Nowadays, defeating this would be child's play, given computerized databases, but back in the 80s and 90s, this would have been a good code... at least, until one of the students raised their hand and asked, "Why not just call the phone numbers and ask who lives there?"

The professor apparently was dumbfounded.

He had never considered that question. As a result, his cipher, which seemed to be nearly unbreakable to him, had such an obvious flaw, because he was the sort of person who could never coldcall someone to ask that sort of thing!

In the crypto book, the author went on to use this story as an example of why security systems should not be tested by the designer (because of course the security system is ready for everything they thought of, by definition), but for me, as a writer, it stuck with me for a different reason.

It's worth talking out your story plot with other people just to see if there's a "Why not just call the phone numbers?" obvious plot hole that you've missed, because of your singular perspective as a person. Especially if you're writing the sort of plot where you have people trying to outsmart each other.

#this is cool