It's On The Ceiling! Roll d12:
1. d100 Swords of Damocles
2. City of the Intellectual Bats
3. Manhole-like trap door to maintenance level
4. Tapestry of webs depicting events in spider history
5. Stalactite pueblo dwellers: evil dungeon fairies
6. Adventurers impaled on barbed spikes
7. The furniture: nailed up by prankster
8. Alarming amount of dripping water and muddy seepage
9. Pulsating illumination from strange glass tubes in metal fixtures
10. Shriekers!
11. Eyes (d1000)
12. Hand-chiseled diagram of dungeon level
This and many other useful tables for DM improvisation at
The Dungeon Dozen. New table every day!
posted by JHarris
on Feb 3, 2012 -
22 comments
Your mind subconsciously interprets
this line drawing of an impossible cube as a three-dimensional object, even though it is not actually possible for such an object to exist.
[more inside]
posted by Nomyte
on Jan 10, 2012 -
49 comments
Though best-of-the-year lists seem
soooo two days ago, the end of holidays may require a comedy break, and the increasingly excellent Splitsider has produced a really nice review of the
year in humor.
The Year's Best Humor Writing features, in addition to the
best of The Onion, pieces like
Sometimes State Flags,
The Most Emailed New York Times Story Ever, and Roger Ebert's
one star reviews (you may want to check out
last year's list as well). There is also a list of the
17 best comedy web series,
best comedy podcasts,
funniest video games, and
moments in 2011 where comedy made you think (featuring lots of video).
posted by blahblahblah
on Jan 2, 2012 -
26 comments
What is art, really? Is it dependent on context? Do you need an art history degree to appreciate it? Was Jackson Pollock an artist or a scam artist? Are Grand Tour portraits considered art merely because of their age? These questions have been objectively unanswerable -
until now. Through the power of the internet, and the experience of Hot or Not, we can measure the democratic answer to these questions.
posted by Pants!
on Dec 29, 2011 -
93 comments
The special duty of a Jewish Christmas baby by
Sheila Heti Most of the people one deals with say, “Oh! You're a Christmas baby! You must get ripped off when it comes to presents, right?” Their eyes light up.
It's a hard question to answer. The honest answer is, “I'm a Jew, I don't celebrate Christmas,” but saying this always seems chastising, and the person who asked then feels embarrassed (as they should) and I feel embarrassed that this is my accidental role in the world: reminding everyone that Jews exist. The times I say, gruffly, “I don't know. I'm Jewish,” they usually say, “Oh, I'm sorry!” But this always sounds to me not like, “I'm sorry I assumed you were Christian,” but rather, “I'm sorry that you're Jewish.” Given all this, I usually reply simply, “Yeah, it's awful. I get ripped off every year.” [previously from Sheila Heti]
posted by KokuRyu
on Dec 25, 2011 -
119 comments
A decade on, the Coen brothers' woefully underrated
O Brother, Where Art Thou? [alt] is remembered for
a lot of things: its sun-drenched, sepia-rich
cinematography (a pioneer of
digital color grading), its
whimsical humor,
fluid vernacular, and
many subtle references to Homer's
Odyssey. But one part of its legacy truly stands out:
the music.
Assembled by
T-Bone Burnett, the soundtrack is a cornucopia of American folk music, exhibiting everything from
cheery ballads and
angelic hymns to
wistful blues and
chain-gang anthems. Woven into the plot of the film through radio and live performances, the songs lent the story a
heartfelt, homespun feel that echoed its cultural heritage,
a paean and uchronia of the Old South.
Though the multiplatinum album was recently
reissued, the movie's medley is best heard via famed documentarian
D. A. Pennebaker's
Down from the Mountain, an
extraordinary yet
intimate concert film focused on a night of live music by the soundtrack's stars (among them
Gillian Welch,
Emmylou Harris,
Chris Thomas King, bluegrass legend
Dr. Ralph Stanley) and wryly hosted by
John Hartford, an accomplished
fiddler,
riverboat captain, and
raconteur whose struggle with terminal cancer made this his last major performance. The film is free in its entirety on
Hulu and
YouTube -- click inside for individual clips, song links, and breakdowns of
the set list's fascinating history.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Dec 22, 2011 -
107 comments
How Computers Work. Recently recovered & scanned in by the good folks at BoingBoing, this was an early textbook explaining the fundamental concepts & inner workings of modern computing systems. I believe a slightly different edition of this book was my own introduction to computers when I was in 6th grade or so, which explains a lot about my approach to using them.
posted by scalefree
on Dec 22, 2011 -
44 comments
An "Exciting Guide to Probability Distributions" from the University of Oxford:
part 1,
part 2. (Two links to PDFs)
posted by JoeXIII007
on Dec 15, 2011 -
17 comments
"Imagine a world where casual and hardcore gamers can enjoy games together? So instead of hardcore gamers pretending to like wii sports just so they can spend xmas with their family they actually prefer it as opposed to just going off and playing the best hardcore games such as Skyrim or Fable3." From the often hilarious fake Twitter account for "Peter Molyneux 2" comes
cascore. Finally, bowling and survival horror come together.
[more inside]
posted by jbickers
on Nov 14, 2011 -
13 comments
"For the last two weeks, people have been like, "talk about sluts on Halloween!" And at first I didn't even really want to make this video because you, my friend, are talking to a slut on Halloween. But because people kept bombarding my social media platforms with requests for me to do a video on sluts on Halloween, I'm gonna do a video on sluts on Halloween. But I'll tell you one thing right now: you're not gonna like it."
(nsfw language, her avatar is a lingerie pic, plus it's a single-link vlog post)
[more inside]
posted by juliplease
on Oct 28, 2011 -
146 comments
Because it's Fall, f*ckfaces. Realizing that McSweeney's is disfavored on MeFi, and that many will have seen this before, I offer this nonetheless. Because it's that time of the year, and goddamit, it's funny.
posted by mikeand1
on Oct 20, 2011 -
59 comments
David Malki!, of the "illustrated jocularity"
Wondermark, has released
Wondermark Kinetic. It's a series of ad-libbed, paper-puppeteered videos in an approximation of his usual, surreal style. (If you're unfamiliar with what that style is, he conveniently keeps a list of
his own favorite strips.) I particularly like how a story slowly emerges from the rough start of
this one.
[more inside]
posted by gilrain
on Sep 30, 2011 -
2 comments
