The Gorilla Of Destiny

Bar chart showing the guesses. Physics is #1 at 33%, then astro at 18%, and CS at around 10%.

Asked my followers to guess what my PhD is in:

Cartoon man lying in a puddle of his own tears

Me as I watch Italy beat Scotland in the 6 nations

Alas, my thesis is cooking my brain I fear

This was what the first and now second books have which is the issue. I thought I fixed it for this one but apparently I just uploaded the wrong file...AGAIN 😭😭😭😭

Wizard Spell Compendium is now getting a THIRD proof ordered before I can make it public again 😭😭

A very cute cow that I made a sphere, but they are still smiling

I fear I made Alex The Spherical Cow too cute and I cant stop looking at them

If you give a monkey infinite time to hit a typewriter, he will eventually type out the entire works of shakespeare.

If you give one gorilla a finite amount of time to hit a laptop, he will eventually type out my PhD thesis...I hope

Two snakes in smart attire talking in a corridor. The one on the right is saying "SSSssalesssSSS'

"I'm just so busy in my PhD"
My notes:

Mistyping "The" was 100% intentional to underline my point and NOT bc I was typing this between sets

Thr weirdest thing about doing a PhD is the way everyone assumes you're smart.

If I was smart I'd have known better

Im trying to convince my friends we should try hat-oween, it's like Halloween, but instead of buying a whole outfit, you wear one hat + your normal clothes to try and approximate a character.

I just need to find a way to monetise this idea and ill be living the easy life

POV, you're my PhD supervisor, and you've just told me I need to write my research down

I must sound insane at work to say things like
"Yeah writing my D&D science books has actually been really useful experience for writing my PhD thesis"

Im at a loss for what spell it could be

YouTube video by GorillaOfDestiny Wizard Reading Circle #dnd #dnd5e #dungeonsanddragons #spellwritingguide

A few weeks ago, I came across the @gorillaofdestiny.bsky.social account on YouTube. Who came up with a really cool way of writing spells in DnD (if you are into networks, at least) 2/4

youtube.com/shorts/hXbkB...

Your regular reminder that NSF grants built the internet and helped the U.S. dominate tech.

The proposed NSF cuts in America are genuinely insane. I can't see a single benefit that could possibly outweigh the long-term and short-term costs to every aspect of life.

That is, of course, assuming their goal is to make life better...or that they're acting on any semblance of logic.

Nvm got it

a pixel art drawing of a man with gray hair and a blue jacket ALT: a pixel art drawing of a man with gray hair and a blue jacket

Me trying to figure out why my Druid code stopped working for no reason

Arcane Engineering for sure

Coadded images of NGC 1514 at 7.7 µm (upper left), 12.8 µm (upper right), 25.5 µm (lower left), and a three-color composite image of the three. The origin (0′,0′) corresponds to the position of the central binary star.

New MIRI image of NGC 1514 was released in a recent article.
arxiv.org/abs/2502.212...

The hardest part of a PhD is having to think "I don't envy the person who has to do all that work" before realising you are the person

Genuinely very frustrating

I slightly modified the #DND spell writing system by
@gorillaofdestiny.bsky.social
and built a little tool to supplement my non-existent art skills.

You can mess around with it here: joshgold.me/tools/dnd-sp...

Here are two variations of Phantasmal Force (one of my favorite spells):

Starting a new campaign and realising with much frustration that individual purchases haven't been allowed on D&D Beyond for almost a year.........

Genuinely got me and my players thinking why we bother using digital character sheets anymore

They're doing so well

If true, this would be insanely devastating. Like..."bias"?? "Inclusion"??? These come up all the time in standard scientific writing??????!??

(Also, it'd still be evil even if it was applied in a way that only impacted people...)

"There is a curse.
They say:
May you live in interesting times."
-Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times

I have so many projects to work on and I've had so little time outside of work

Until now...

every example of how AI could be useful is like “if you were eating cereal, AI could tell you what cereal you were eating”