Luke, I am your Father!

Darth Vader never actually said that in any of the Harry Potter movies or books

I would love the chance to make fun of Feynman for 3 hours

As a teacher, no, memorization is an important step before understanding. I do agree thought that in the times before memorization was a bigger emphasis, but that’s because it was understood that the only information you’d have easy access to would be what youve memorized since we didnt have the internet. Now we teach kids in Literature class how to vet their sources because they are all exposed to the misinformation vortex.

If i remember, the way I was taught was by doing basic single digit multiplication in many different contexts so much that I slowly internalized the math. There were multiplication tables we filled out in class, multiplication videogames, multiplication flash cards, multiplication board games, multiplication storybooks, multiplication puzzles, multiplication games in PE.

And I was primed for learning division in preschool through the concept of sharing. If you have 18 cupcakes and eight friends, how many should your friends and yourself get? If you have a pizza with 12 slices and four friends, how do you share fairly? If you think about it, that’s the multiplication table they were teaching me there, just slower and backwards.

In Trail of Cthulhu, if you suffer madness you must leave the room while the other players and DM debate the most appropriate manner in which to gaslight you. They may, for example, pass notes to each other and exchange meaningful glances. Or, they could all agree that some important recent event didnt happen and will react with confusion when you bring it up. Or they could come up with any number of other thjngs.

I had one that my best friend’s fiancé started hitting me up. Freaked me out becuase they are lesbian and I am a man. That was honestly weirder than the one where I was doing a bicycle demolition derby against Goofy, Mickey Mouse, and Bill Nye

Random Trivia: I gotta start doing this in all my comments

Get a kindle, get on Anna’s Archive, download some books, covert them to .azw3 with Calibri, and then send them via USB cable to the kindle

Dude, you are dealing with a liberal, not a moron. Remember, it doesn’t matter if you’re right if you sound like an asshole. We all were taught in school that Stalin was evil and bad just like Hitler therefore communism = fascism, and some of us were taught in school that Hitler was a socialist.

Please, friends, practice forgiveness. It makes it all easier. Forgive yourself. Just because you can conceive of better doesn’t mean you can do better at that moment.

I mean, whenever I lose something for a while I tend to default to looking for it even after I find it.

Wait, are you Wally? Of the Cincinnati Staplers? Here, take my wallet!

No, really. That’s what most people do.

You know how most people would think you are a hacker if you started running commands in terminal/CLI? Same thing with torrenting. Torrenting is this scary program that hackers use to put malware on your computer.

My wife was raised by an IT guy and uses firefox for everything, and she is also scared by torrenting. She’s more educated on it, sure, but she’s still scared of it because she thinks the FBI will arrest her for downloading pirated software. She’s much more comfortable going to one of those sketchy streaming sites behind the protection of a good adblocker.

Especially since a good ad blocker gets rid of all those ads.

It’s what I do. I know for myself that torrenting would be my personal rubicon. I wouldnt be able to do it, morally speaking, without reseeding, and then I would have to start investing in a home server and get really stuck-in. I’m just not ready to do that until I’m willing to fully commit.

I am looking it up right now. Thanks!

I have a friend that has been trying for the past 2 years to get me to stop using Linux because its a “security risk”. My wife is also scared of piracy and adblockers. This is what most people are like.

You are in a tech-literate bubble.

So, first off, Satanists dont actually believe in magic, but they do believe that people need religion to some extent, that people need to live in a world of wonders. So, they turn things under their control into magick. For example, you combine some ingredients correctly in a baking pan, nurture it with heat for the correct amount of time, and you transmute these base ingredients with the power of life and death into bread. That’s magic. You enacted your agency upon the world to transform it in a manner that you will it to.

LaVey had some very insightful descriptions in the Satanic Bible, which otherwise is fairly useless beyond being an edgy bookshelf decoration, about how ceremonial magick works. (I tend to refer to this as ritual magic, since I think he was rather limited in his imagination). As he puts it, every ceremony needs an appropriate ritual space to invoke the correct state of mind in your audience, a leader (you) dressed in the appropriate vestments, a wand to direct the attention of your audience, and an altar to act as the focal point. You may also need a throne or crown to perform your authority.

When I started DMing, this was how I approached my task. The ritual space is the table with the map and the minis, the DM screen was my altar, my metal dice (or rather their rolling sound) was my wand, my vestments were the stack of rulebooks directly to my left, and the one nice chair I possessed was my throne. Each helped convey a message that supported my authority. My DM screen has transparent pockets that I would put art into that was appropriate to the vibe I wanted. My books, which i would gesture to whenever I made a ruling, had three meanings: first, the rules are what the game derives its authority from since the published rules feel more official; second, I had read them all and my players knew it, so I could usually imply any given rule was in the books somewhere; third, they were mine, but the players could also use them, as I am a generous and benevolent god. The dice also give legitimacy, but I had also found that (if used sparingly) nothing instilled greater dread in the hearts of gamers than the sound the the DM rolling on tables behind the DM screen, which is why i used metal dice rolled on a dice tray I had made by taping two plates back-to-back. Additionally, lending my metal dice to my players was a literally weightier display of my benevolence.

Teaching can be interpreted similarly. The ritual space is the classroom; it should be decorated to go along with your curriculum, and the desks and items in the room should be arranged in a way that encourages behaviors you want and discourages unwanted behaviors. Your vestments are your teacher clothes, because you need to look like a teacher to be respected. The altar is the whiteboard for obvious reasons. Every teacher has their opinion on what kind of wand is best, but I prefer a yardstick over a laser pointer. And finally, the throne is the teacher desk.

This is also why I am really opposed to virtual learning. I cannot create my ritual circle when I am not in the same room as my students. If I am physically present but don’t have a classroom, I can just put more work into my appearance and performance. But I guess i will have to adapt. Besides, I also realized that adhering strictly to Satanic ritual practice made my DMing rather rigid and encouraged me to act like an asshole sometimes, so these days I’m more focused on creating a space having where my friends can have fun with me.

This is sort of the reverse, but I learned how to DM from Satanism. I’m not a Satanist anymore but I still use the framework of magick to talk about the practice of authority. It has come in pretty handy as a teacher.

Damn, I forgot about her for a while