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!

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • 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.









  • 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.



  • LaTeX is a typeset that is written in plain text with Markup language. Word, docs, acrobat are all WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors, so you type the words and use toolbars to edit formatting. In markup, what you write is what you get: you type everything, including the commands for alignment, spacing, etc. It makes control and customization of your document easier. If you ever have tried to use MS Word to make a good looking equation and wanted to die when it messed up your images and spacing 10 pages back, markup typesetting is the solution.

    My tip would be to find a few templates on overleaf that you might find useful and just mess around and try to come up with what you want to see. Could be for work documents, could be for a hobby, whatever. Overleaf, the website I shared this project on, is great because it handles the backend stuff like compiling, software installs, etc. and allows you to easily copy templates over from premade projects in the gallery.

    I learned to use it for writing scientific publications, but eventually I used it for all my homework, making ‘official’ looking DnD content, keeping a log of my work; basically most documents that are longer than 1 page. It is particularly good for science and math writing, but is almost as versatile as HTML for whatever you want to make.








  • I just started Adderall 10mgER last month after trying Straterra (25mg->40mg->80mg) to no success. The biggest side effects I have noticed are hyper sexuality, the sensation of sounds peripheral to my current activity being “un-muffled,” and a lack of instinct to go to sleep (not the inability, I just have no drive to get into bed, turn the lights off, and close my eyes. Once I am there, falling asleep is easy).

    I also have noticed a flip in how it impacted my appetite. At first, I just wasn’t hungry at all and was actively reminding myself to eat. Then, out of nowhere, I became incredibly hungry and painfully aware of it.

    All the other notable stim effects fell off pretty quickly; no more jaw cleching, fidgeting, or sensory overstimulation.





  • I printed the map using a poster/plotter printer in two sections that I split up in photo shop, scaling the map size and resolution to fit a 1in player grid (the grid marks are there, but faint).

    I then taped 12 2ft×2.5ft foamcore boards together and glued down the map, using gluesticks for the majority and hot glue to keep the edges down. I taped it so that it is a trifold, condensing down to a single 7ft×21in panel for storage and transport.

    Someone else here in the comments suggested cottons balls for fog of war, so I am gonna get those and some poster tack to keep it all vertical. I am gonna track their progress by making player tokens and using poster tack to keep them on the board.