Skip Navigation

User banner

drailin

@ drailin @kbin.social

Posts
19
Comments
100
Joined
3 yr. ago

Just a guy, bout to get my PhD in experimental particle physics. I like hockey, basketball, DND, science, and audio equipment.

Go Nuggets! Go Avs!

Until current site stability, federation sync issues, and front-page spam in kbin are resolved, I have migrated to fedia.io:fedia.io Account Page

  • I will preserve all the things

    Jump

  • My table's necromancer has a homebrew staff formerly belonging to a mummy-priest that allows him to cast destroy water, and it becomes an at will spell if used on a corpes to mummify it. The demon lord of drought and the patron of mummifcation demands it.

    It allows for convenient storage and transport of the corpses he ...procures...

  • World's Oldest Revolver (1597)

    Jump

  • So in my DND campaign setting, I had planned on black powder being a pretty recent discovery, called flashsand by the country who discovered it. One of my players wanted to be a gunslinger, so we worked out that he would have the first gun, built by his father who had to hide from the military to keep it out of the wrong hands. He wanted a revolver and to be a proto-desperado type, and I frankly didn't want to litigate logistics with a first-time player. I had been having a tough time squaring the circle between "first gun" and "revolver" but this is a perfect middleground!

  • If you got COVID and lost the ability to taste things, did it ever come back? Otherwise, did you experience any other long term consequences from the pandemic in general?

    Jump

  • Totally lost my sense of smell for about 2 weeks, but it came back pretty quickly. The worst long term symptom has been a substantially heightened gag reflex. Talking while chewimg gum has become a balancing act or I start heaving, just brushing my molars is enough to trigger gagging some days, and brushing my tongue after my teeth is a sprint to avoid puking. It's trash.

  • Šaškė should have been named Nibbler

    Jump

  • It is for your own sake. In the time it would take to utter one letter of their name, a trillion cosmoes would flare into existence and sink into Eternal Night!

  • what are your silly character ideas?

    Jump

  • An old granny bard, based in no small part on my own grandma. She doesn't channel her magic through song or dance, but through her sassy remarks, telling stories about her childhood, and making baked goods, sweets, and presents for her adopted grandkids (the adventuring party).

    Bardic Inspiration? Reminding you how much she loves you and is proud of you. Alternatively, giving you some candy for later or promising that if you do well, she will bake you a pie or take you out for icecream for being so brave.

    Healing spells? Blown kisses, band-aids, and warm cookies.

    Hypnotic Pattern/Hold Person/etc? Telling a rambling story (that she forgot what the point/moral was before she even started) but the enemies are too polite to interrupt her.

    Dissonant Whispers/Visious Mockery/etc? Asking when you are going to get a boyfriend/girlfriend, graduate, get married, or get a real job. Telling bad (and slightly innapropriate) jokes, for her own amusement, often messing up the punchline. Asking if you have talked your mother recently ("You know, she won't be around forever, and I am sure she wishes you'd write more.") Simply saying "Bless your heart."

    Party Buffs? Giving you knickknacks, homemade gifts, or old hand-me-downs she really thinks you'll like. Passing down age-earned wisdom and giving encouragement to just try your best. Making breakfast for the party, using far too much butter, cream, and other artery clogging goodness.

  • The ESA Has Announced That E3 Is Officially Dead

    Jump

  • I didn't know the European Space Agency organized E3. Learn something new every day.

  • 1.1 History

    Jump

  • It is interesting, but it feels like there are too many compromises made at the expense of observational data.

    1. The first issue is the reliance on a ~2eV neutrino to compensate. While sterile neutrinos could theoretically be that massive, we have yet to find conclusive evidence of steriles and don't know the absolute masses or the mass ordering of the neutrinos mass eigenstates we have observed. (I am in neutrinos, so this is the point I am most familiar with.) While the discovery of steriles could occur, my buddy works on a search for eV scale sterile neutrinos and all of his findings have shown that there is no preference for any sterile signal at or around 1-100eV. Normal neutrinos also can't work: While we don't know the masses of each neutrino mass eigenstate individually, we know the sum of the neutrino masses, ~0.06-0.1eV, eliminating normal neutrinos from contention as well. This is a core failing, as it relies on the presence of an equally unproven particle as DM, but isn't as good a fit as DM in many ways, leading into point 2...

    2. It has a hard time fitting to galactic cluster data. The Bullet cluster is one of the best observational proofs of DM, and MOND doean't offer a good explanation for what we see. It also doesn't account for gravitational lensing, which is a problem given we can see that quite clearly. Since it is only effective at huge scales and can't be easily checked in a lab, it needs to at least consistently describe observations before I can consider it over DM, which does an excellent job of describing observation. This leads into my final point...

    3. There isn't really any way to experimentally verify/refute it. I am an experimentalist, and while not every theory needs to have a labrotory confirmation, it seems like there is no way to falsify MOND. DM experiments have long proposed models that allow for some DM particle interaction mechanism, however infrequent, with barionic matter that would confirm/deny those models. While far from exhaustive, it at least allows for the ruling out of certain models if the expected flux isn't there. MOND seems opaque to even this sort of experimental checking.

    There are other issue too, but I am not well versed in GR, which is where many other tensions exist. Overall, it seems like an interesting math problem, but I can't take it seriously until it gives us something to test or describes what we see much more accurately.

  • 1.1 History

    Jump

  • Sometimes stuff does. Othertimes, it is more open for debate. As a rule, I like to imagine that stuff might, but only if it will make stuff more confusing.

  • 1.1 History

    Jump

  • This is the truth. I am a few months away from getting my PhD in particle physics and the core questions being raised in all levels of the field at the edges of our decent big-picture understanding are so exciting.

  • tube tester

    Jump

  • Not just guitar audio! I own a tube amp for my guitar and 2 tube amps for driving my higher-end headphones! They are neat little pieces of electronics history, not just in how they run, but also because most of the best tubes are old military surplus. My oldest pair are from 1945 and were made for early army/navy radar systems.

    1945 JAN-6AK5 tubes

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • There have been hiccups, and we aren't always at 100% attendance, but I am really proud of my group for making the time to play (almost) every other sunday at a set time. On the weeks we miss, they are also good about adjusting their schedules so that we do a back-to-back weekend instead to make up for lost time.

  • D&D Item Card Template- A LaTeX Template for making simple, effective item cards by me!

    Jump

  • Overleaf is free (the paid tier is mainly for work stuff, collaborative document editing and the like) or you can install a LaTeX interpreter and run the files locally on your computer. Then you can print it off at home, at a print shop, etc.

  • D&D Item Card Template v1.1- A Simple, Effective LaTeX Template for Generating Item Cards

    Jump

  • Not dumb at all. If you aren't familiar with latex, the easiest way to use it would be to make an overleaf account, open the template, and follow along through the comments in the document. Most everything is formatted for plug-and-play entry, so you just fill in the required fields. It is a bit technical, but should be mostly readable even without markup experience. You can also copy the text from the .tex files (itemcard.tex, ItemCommands.tex, and tcolorboxSettings.tex) into chatGPT along with your item description and it will convert it for you.

  • D&D Item Card Template- A LaTeX Template for making simple, effective item cards by me!

    Jump

  • D&D Item Card Template v1.1- A Simple, Effective LaTeX Template for Generating Item Cards

    Jump

  • All shall tremble before the superior typesetting experience.

  • D&D Item Card Template v1.1- A Simple, Effective LaTeX Template for Generating Item Cards

    Jump

  • Thank you!

  • D&D Item Card Template v1.1- A Simple, Effective LaTeX Template for Generating Item Cards

    Jump

  • Thanks! If you end up using it, let me know!

  • D&D Item Card Template- A LaTeX Template for making simple, effective item cards by me!

    Jump

  • Hey, the printable card setting has been implemented (just waiting for Overleaf to publish it), but I thought I'd show off the result here first:

    Printable Card Example

    It fixes the card size to a 5:7 ratio, the same as any playing card (usually 2.5×3.5in), so it will fit any sleeve for game cards when printed.

  • D&D Item Card Template for LaTeX

    Jump

  • It was funky and felt distinctly un-LaTeX with the pdf cropping and graphic declarations, but was super fun. Way different from academic writing or even hobby typesetting with normal, pre-made classes (the DnD 5e LaTeX Template by rpgtex is a gamechanger for homebrewed dnd content and was the catalyst for this). The standalone document class is really weird to work with, and using tcolorboxes as the main document content feels like I am fitting a square peg into a non-euclidean hole, but it is still working!

    I am just glad I decided to use LaTeX and not python for this.

  • D&D Item Card Template for LaTeX

    Jump

  • They are, and will always be, iconic. I only used one other source when making this, mainly for the font pack and the potential to add a texture map to the text block in lieu of solid gray.