Garrett Rooney

I was one of like three non-catholic kids in my catholic high school (I was raised Unitarian, but my family had stopped going to church by then) and to this day I regularly feel like I was one of a very small minority of kids who actually paid any amount of attention in religion class.

It’s remarkable how much “it’s fucking dark and everyone is low key pissed about it” can skew things.

You mean there are things you can do that don’t result in broken bones? Big if true.

I can't imagine what it would cost to insure the contents of the Louvre, and well, it's not like you can just go buy a replacement for typical historical artifacts.

It will never happen, but we all wish it would.

The more clear it becomes that people don't include all the bad shit America has done in their mental model of what this country is, the more I wish I'd studied that stuff in college and not learned how to make computers push bytes around. The relative importance is much more clear in retrospect.

I admit, I’m a little torn. I like a lot of cards from those sets, for cube or EDH, but at the same time I know that putting cards into modern without having them pass through standard shattered any interest I have in playing the format. Modern used to be my favorite format, and now it’s dead to me.

Honestly, it bothers me way more in 60 card constructed formats where it feels like people are forced into using UB cards for the competitive meta. In Commander if I don't want the cards in my deck I just don't play them, and other people playing them doesn't bother me all that much.

That card is so fun in my Agatha deck.

Llanowar Elves is the one jumping out at me.

Not having looked deeply at the cube (although the commons/lords concept is very cool!) I'd probably say Jewel Thief.

Yes

This isn't even just a reading thing, or just a young kids thing. We had middle school math teachers who were giving enough extra credit for kids to come home with As while not being able to pass placement tests. Clearly not learning math, but it looks fine to us because all we see are the grades!

Or a further indication that I’m too willing to make shit up and roll with it.

Is it wrong to want this to happen just for the inevitable stories?

I always think I’m going to use it for reference, but I never do. mostly it’s for hiding minis and fudging rolls.

I love how I'm clearly not the only one who is just buying parts of random pauper decks because someday I might want to play it.

My wife and I are rewatching ER now, and it's remarkable how many episodes are just unrelentingly bleak, with zero positive outcomes for any of the storylines. I find it impressive how The Pitt managed to avoid that trap. It has bleak episodes, but it doesn't have ALL bleak episodes.

This is like the historian version of telling an author you enjoyed their book. It turns out they're almost always going to be super happy to hear that.

Getting to the point where the medical professionals recognize that you're actually capable of reading scientific papers and aren't just some nut who spent too much time online really does have marvelous results.

The sad thing about this is how often doctors aren't trained to read those papers.

(This story is also great because my wife has a Neuroscience PhD, which makes it pretty hilarious when the doctor starts explaining what's on the scan in normie language and she responds in "I got my PhD in this" language.)

My favorite "interesting from a medical point of view" is when my wife got the results of a neuro work up for her vertigo and the doctor told her that her brain was unremarkable. Now you can take that any number of ways, and basically all of them are funny ;-)

Interesting, precisely the sort of word you don't want to hear from your doctor.

I have to assume that parts of R&D still unconsciously make assumptions based on a world that doesn't so much exist anymore, and this is one of the side effects.

It doesn't help that the most popular format now uses 100 card singleton decks, so the number of playable cards you need to actually make a deck is huge. Back when kitchen table magic was 60 card constructed that otter deck didn't need much more than you got in Bloomburrow to work. Now not so much.

I mean, I'm talking about a group of people who also hacked up a wireless receipt printer so they could play IRL MoJoSto. The scannable cube cards thing didn't even make me blink.

His default randomization is for vintage cube and thus is just randomly assigning cards to each pack, but he also has the code to make set cubes resemble the retail limited packs.

A buddy of mine has rfid tag stickers on the inner sleeve of each card, and uses software to do the shuffling for him. He just scans each card with a phone app and it tells him which pack to put it in. The tags can also be used to track what cards were drafted by each player. It's fiddly but cool.

I can attest to this. octagon@ was a spectacular manager, with an enormous impact inside Google. People who knew her, even tangentially, were so sad to see her go.

I have a small binder of cards I kept for nostalgia related reasons back during the various times I sold off all my cards. My favorite things in there are my beat up mismatched playset of FBB lightning bolts.