I have been itching to share this with you guys for a couple of weeks now but had to wait for the license and then for Spotify, Apple, etc to process it. I’m still waiting for it to show up on Youtube Music, which is taking a while, but I didn’t want to wait another week to share this clip because I’m so happy with it conveying the idea I’ve been hearing in my head pretty much since I heard the song.
I just realized I am practically doing calculus in my sleep. (Calculus being defined as deriving/creating a formula to solve for an unknown and then solving said formula)
I use AMDroid as my alarm app, which has different options for challenge prompts to disable the alarm. I use the math problems option. There are different difficulty levels, and I have mine set to the hardest level that I can manage in my head in a half sleep state. (Which I verified years ago by trying the next level up and finding I could not solve it and probably pissed off my neighbors with the alarm continuing to go off.)
As other posts and polls have mentioned, us ND folks, but also anyone quick/good with mental math, tend to solve problems in non-standard ways.
One of the problems it gave me this morning (I have to solve two to disable the alarm) was:
8*9 - 9
A more direct way to solve this, for someone who is awake, would be to know that 8*9= 72 and 9 less (or minus 10 plus 1) is 63. Or to reduce it to 7*9 and know that is 63.
What my sleep brain did is this (expanded to show work):
8*8=64
8*9-9= (8*8) -1
8*9-9 = 64-1
8*9-9 = 63
Mainly because 8*8=64 is in a more accessible quick recall part of my memory than any of the 9 times table. (Which, side question, do schools still have kids memorize times tables now that everyone has cellphones? Or did that die with the 90’s/00’s just like cursive?)
But I realized that in doing so, I determined that:
X*(x+1) - (x+1) = (x*x) -1
And I thought, eyes closed as I had snoozed the alarm, did this work because of 9 being 9 or does it always work?
It always works.
I could sort of write a proof by reducing it out or something but it’s 8:06 and I need to get out of bed, so just use 3 and 4 to check:
In case you need it for your D&D games or siege actions— here’s what the ballistic trajectory of a flaming pumpkin fired out of a trebuchet looks like.
Actually, this is very helpful for visualizing a ballistic arc.
Right? I’ve already sent it to my math teaching friends. One occasionally brings in a tiny trebuchet for his class and this might encourage him to up his game.
Everyone’s thinking “witch” but the owl was actually going as a cowboy.
Iirc the original images are from years ago, and everyone was worried that the owl was actually stuck to the toy - but apparently the townspeople had seen him put it down to hunt and such, and then go back to pick it up again. Which straight up triples my enjoyment of this story.
thinking again about TvTropes and how it’s genuinely such an amazing resource for learning the mechanics of storytelling, honestly more so than a lot of formally taught literature classes
reasons for this:
basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.
like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why. Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.
here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.
TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.
Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”
all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope does and why its specific characteristics let it do that
I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.
But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.
In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.
On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”
like, storytelling is inextricable from context. it’s inextricable from how big the writers’ budget was, and how accepting of homophobia the audience was, and what was acceptable to be shown on film at the time. Tropes beget other tropes, one trope is exchanged for another, they are all linked. A Dead Horse Trope becomes an Undead Horse Trope, and sometimes it was a Dead Unicorn Trope all along. What was this work responding to? And all works are responding to something, whether they know it or not
An incomplete list of really useful or interesting reads from TvTropes.
please note that yes many of these are concepts that exist elsewhere and a few are even taught in fiction writing classes but TvTropes just does an amazing job at displaying the range of things that can be done with them
legitimately so much of the terminology I use to talk about storytelling, and even think about it in my own head, i learned about from TvTropes
The Hays Code - not a trope but a very good breakdown of how the Hays Code affected storytelling in film
this is just a really short list of examples I encourage people who write or otherwise create stories to browse around on this site it’s so useful
Informed Attribute is one of the ones I reference most often as an editor.
Theory of Narrative Causality is one of my personal favorites, because it’s kind of fun when a story acknowledges that things are happening in the story because that’s what makes it a good story.
Also Applied Phlebotinum, because sometimes you don’t need to know how something works, it just does, and that’s all that matters for the purposes of the narrative.
When I was active on TV Tropes in the early days, I summed it up as “crowd-sourced literary analysis.”
(There are a few pages I started on there, though most of them have been revised so many times that very little of my original content is left.)
Found this in my bookshelf, it doesn’t have the dust jacket and honestly I don’t quite remember how I wound up with it?
:) My first independent best seller (as opposed to ones for licenced properties like Star Trek).
The SF Book Club / GuildAmerica sold 250,000 copies of this, setting the record—still unbroken, I think—for the volume most bought by new members joining the club.
The Mark Ferrari cover isn’t exactly my favorite, but (shrug) it’s hard to get too worked up about it at this late date…
This blog is rainbow colors, baby animals, puns, creative food, nature, supernatural, etc. Lawyer, writer, musician, photographer. I speak English, Spanish, and French. I want to make change in this world. My main goal in life is to make an impact and to be remembered after I'm gone. **tumblr changes messed up my code and widgets so have a plain header I guess. Also sidebar links are probably out of date, sorry.**
This blog is rainbow colors, baby animals, puns, creative food, nature, supernatural, etc. Lawyer, writer, musician, photographer. I speak English, Spanish, and French. I want to make change in this world. My main goal in life is to make an impact and to be remembered after I'm gone. **tumblr changes messed up my code and widgets so have a plain header I guess. Also sidebar links are probably out of date, sorry.**