I made a massive random character generator. However big you’re thinking, increase the exponent 1, maybe 2. That’s far too big to just dump on people though, so instead I decided to make a character using it so you can see the thing in action. I’ll direct link the relevant tables as they come up.
Continue reading “Test-driving my random character generator”
I’ve spoken before about my love for random generators, and this one is a crown jewel. You can use it to different depths as befits your needs, such as rolling a small handful of dice to make an interesting background character or rolling a few more to make the culture of a foreign country. It also serves as a fairly robust system for understanding the inner workings of other people and as a descriptive language it helps you to clearly see more aspects of others, though in that endeavour it’s hardly complete. Still, using it as a get-to-know-you tool leaves you with a very good understanding of someone. Much of what follows is not original work, but a compilation of type and trait systems from antiquity and modern psychology. Because of the broken legal system, there’s a strong chance that the science is under copyright, but if it gets taken down I’ll still have my own copy floating around so feel free to message me for it.
Continue reading “Random Character Personality, Culture, & Backstory Generator”
I have alot of terms or phrases I use often that I don’t much see in common circulation. For some, the meaning is clear from the phrase, others are tied up in personal anecdotes or otherwise have an opaque meaning, so I thought I’d put them into a list to make for easy reference for others. This will grow over time as I invent more or identify the ones I use as being uncommon.
Lately I’ve been rethinking alot of the systems that govern my life with the intention of making things more efficient and effective. My largest weakness has been my checklist system, which I hadn’t been devoting enough energy to lately and so I thought I should introduce some metrics to track it over time so I can troubleshoot. My current system is a checklist for each unit of time: today, this week, this month, and one that’s just “eventually”, and at the end or beginning of each unit of time I select items from the larger denomination to promote to the next smallest list in the hierarchy, so usually items don’t actually get check’d off until they hit the daily level. When an item hits the daily level I also like to add a time estimate to it so I can roughly block out my day, as well as improve my ability to estimate the length a given task will take. Anything that doesn’t get done that day has one of a short list of fates: it gets deleted when I decide it isn’t happening at all, it gets promoted back to a larger timespan if it’s untenable today, or it gets roll’d into the next day with a marker keeping track of how many times I’ve not completed it. I also add items to the appropriate lists throughout the day both as I think of things I want to do at some point and after I’ve done something I hadn’t plan’d on. At midday I might be at 8/13, then finish that day at 20/22, as happen’d recently.
Listening to Digibro talk about his newyear’s traditions and CGP Grey’s method of themes lead me to thinking about time itself. Grey setting a theme for the year that approximates what he wants to accomplish is a good idea, but a year is too much time to really predict things meaningfully for the kinds of projects I find myself in. An easy way to illustrate this is to think about media that came out or came to you a year ago: it feels like it’s just become “the past” by that time, which is probably why “best of the year” lists tend to favour the latter part of the year as early things get forgotten. So what’s the best segment to think about time in? For me, an adequately large timeframe would be either a third or a quarter of a year. My intuition is that a quarter will be better, so I decide to set seasonal themes in addition to a yearly theme. In the future I might dispense with the yearly theme, but it’s worth trying at least.
Around the time I was considering this I ran into a series by Arifexian on how to build calendars and the different methods that civilizations built calendars in general over the centuries. Combine this with the Digibro idea of having holidays that are specifically meaningful to you & your lot see the Digifam Plays videos from 2018 January and you get me questioning the ordering of days in a calendar altogether. Newyear’s will be elevated with similar importance to Digi’s Newyear’s, which we’ll leave at Jan 1st for the time being since it’s conveniently recent.
I start’d looking into the Wim Hof Method after seeing this video on it by What I Learned. I haven’t publish’d any of my own new work in a while since it’s all projects that take a long time, so I figured I’d publish my notes on it.
If you don’t feel like watching the video, the breathing technique gives you a massive adrenaline shot by simulating a near death experience, but in the process it trains your chemistry to deal with large environmental changes, modifies your immune system, changes how you deal with inflammation, and can give a burst of concentration. Similar benefits to fasting specifically short term or intermittent fasting or how High Intensity Interval Training conditions your body to better deal with free radicals.
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