Oh sweet! Congrats!

I really *really* thought we were going to get rid of dark matter. It reeks of epicycles and phlogiston and luminiferous aether, all the ugly hacks and weird leaps we made to fit the facts to our assumptions before understanding dawned. But no! The math keeps working out! It's maddening!

-In mice

Oh, that's a good one

I formulated these rules in 2023 when there was a MOND-friendly wide binary study, the final nail in the coffin for ʻOumuamua being aliens, a supposed room-temperature superconductor (announced and quickly debunked) all within a couple months of each other.

My Rules for Not Getting Too Excited About Scientific Studies:

-It’s not aliens
-It’s not a room-temperature superconductor
-They didn’t break the speed of light
-They didn’t break the standard model of particle physics
-We still can’t get rid of dark matter, I’m really sorry

Dark matter passes a new cosmic test, while MOND fails On cosmic scales, only dark matter (or something equivalent) gives us the Universe we observe. Now, the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect agrees.

Another win for my Rules for Not Getting Too Excited About Scientific Studies (specifically, "we still can't get rid of dark matter")

bigthink.com/starts-with-...

announcing ILÚVATAR, my multi-billion dollar company which will specialize in the dismantling of all other idiotically tolkien-named entities, that they shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite

In the final version Zhalfir stayed where it was, and while I was disappointed at the time, ultimately it was for the best. Bringing Zhalfir back in MoM to fight Phyrexians, the battle Teferi denied them by phasing them out, was much more poetic.

I don't think so. The Amber Prison was certainly on our minds--there was an early version of the story that involved bringing back Zhalfir and even freeing Kaervek to help fight Belzenlok--but I don't recall explicitly making that connection.

Ah, a Battle of Wits deck

A beautiful rumination on one of my favorite illustrations from Dominaria

I don’t remember who chose it, honestly. Winters and I spent that set in a sort of hive mind, so I remember most of the decisions as being made by both of us. But you got the reasoning exactly right—we chose amber for its connection to history.

Amber preserves :)

Sometimes it feels like you are pandering to me personally. Can’t wait to watch!

Played this where my cat could hear it and blew his tiny mind

Yes, the Grink was there. I'm getting to that. He was on that island with me. And I wouldn't be alive to tell my story without him.

As ever, bloodknife.com/everyone-bea...

Indisputable

The Saga of Shmull

Ah yes, the two genders

The Nutella Escape was also a highlight bsky.app/profile/drey...

NASA’s Artemis II Crew Flies Around the Moon (Official Broadcast) YouTube video by NASA

Watching the livestream of the Artemis II lunar flyby, and one of the astronauts was just being an absolute Moon Nerd talking about which craters they can currently see and all the fascinating albedo variations, and I just love it www.youtube.com/live/z-j1uxB...

That’s mine too

I call this feeling “shocked, but not surprised”

“Well done. Here come the test results: You are a horrible person. I'm serious, that's what it says: A horrible person. We weren't even testing for that.”

Image of a Riftbound card called Monch. Its art is a strange magical creature with a very large mouth, and its flavor text reads “Just because it doesn’t exist doesn’t mean it can’t hurt you.”

Image of a Riftbound card called Voracious Gromp. Its art depicts a large frog monster, and its flavor text reads “Oh no! It’s real! The Gromp is real!”

One of my flavor text writers put the cherry on top with submissions that worked for the cards at face value while also nodding to my game. Couldn’t say no to that.

In the end, I decided to put an adjective on the Gromp to leave room for future Gromps. I left Monch as it was, partly because, yeah, that’s a Monch if I ever saw one, and partly to memorialize my game. That’s right—as one designer put it, “You Gromped the Monch!”

Jae Medarda? Easy Gromp. Black Hole Joe? Monch. Ava Achiever, that’s a Monch, right? No? A Gromp? Okay, she stays. Baron Nashor? (Just kidding, I knew that one.) This was both a way to learn League lore and a way to remind myself to check when I wasn’t sure.

This led to my game, where I’d try to guess whether a placeholder name was a made-up Monch or an all-too-real Gromp. (I am now, of course, aware of the Gromp’s significance.) Usually this isn’t too hard, but there are some surprises.