Brian Bình

I'm a simple man: I like my beer cold, my music loud, and my swords laser. I write TTRPG stuff & design nerdy t-shirts. (he/him/anh/anh ấy)

Games: https://brianbinh.itch.io
More games: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/18250/Pufferfish
Nerd shirts & merch: https://pufferfish.threadless.com

Public Key

npub1hq787n8cwgvfc7j3ghx4a00w0uut9mf33gzh7dacvhuyvc4pnjeqzqjfrd

NIP-05 Address

brianbinh_at_dice.camp@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsts0rlfnu8yxyu0fg5tn27hhh87w9ja5cc5ptlx7uxt7zxv2seevsprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntqy8hwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnddakst8xv5v

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relay.momostr.pink

nostr.mom

nos.lol

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npub1hq787n8cwgvfc7j3ghx4a00w0uut9mf33gzh7dacvhuyvc4pnjeqzqjfrd

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Last Notes

2026-09-27 07:01:15 UTC

Today while playing #dnd with my son, he mentioned that he thought magic weapons with simple names were more intimidating than the more complicated names.
"Yeah," I agreed. "'Mountain Cleaver, Death of Kingdoms' is an impressive sword, but 'The Throngler'?"
"I don't wanna get throngled!"
"I don't know what throngling is, but I know I don't want it to happen to me!"
Then we laughed until we cried like a couple of nerds. I'm living the dream.

2025-12-09 04:41:43 UTC

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The grave of Jules Verne features a statue of a man breaking out of the grave and reaching towards the sky. It's metal as hell.
https://cdn.masto.host/dicecamp/media_attachments/files/115/687/758/838/028/410/original/07f9cded31b8ccf5.jpg

2025-11-23 22:49:19 UTC

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Speaking of the Greeks, Aristocles of Athens laid the foundation of Western philosophy. It's been said that all European philosophy is just a series of footnotes to his work, which has been consistently studied for 2,400 years. He is mostly known by the nickname he got as a wrestler with a massive chest and shoulders: Plato, meaning "broad or wide"*. Some busts show him as a bald guy. The father of philosophy was basically "The Rock" with a beard.
*This is the same "plat" in "platypus", btw.

2025-11-23 22:25:32 UTC

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"Electricity" comes from the Greek word "elektron", which means "amber". They discovered that if you rub a piece of amber on fur, it will attract small, lightweight objects. Many centuries later, scientists figured out it was static electricity. The world was forever changed by the knowledge of how to drag your feet on the carpet to shock your friends (among other applications).
This means electrons and women named Elektra are also named for amber.

2025-11-20 04:39:07 UTC

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I watched the movie "300" in a cinema in Saigon with Vietnamese subtitles. They kept translating "you" as "khanh", but only when Leonidas spoke to his captain. I'd never encountered the word before, so I looked it up in my big unabridged dictionary when I got home. That's how a king says "you" when speaking to his favorite subject. It's a word for "you" which is only spoken by kings and only when speaking to one particular guy!

2025-11-20 04:33:08 UTC

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Vietnamese has pronouns that are only used in fiction, because they describe relationships that don't exist in the real world. Some are for feudal relationships that no longer exist in the modern world, but are still used in historical settings. Some are relationships that only exist in fiction.
There's a 2nd person ("you") pronoun for addressing talking animals in folktales or cartoons. This is different than the word used to talk to pets and farm animals that aren't expected to talk back.

2025-11-20 04:27:17 UTC

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When I say Vietnamese has a lot of pronouns, I'm not exaggerating. There are pronouns for almost every specific family relationship. Not just "aunt" or "uncle" but "the aunt who is my father's younger brother's wife". For some reason "parent's older sibling" is just one term though. Also "cousin" isn't really a thing: they're just "surname siblings" that are addressed like siblings.

2025-11-01 08:14:01 UTC

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Vader speaks formally to Luke as an arrogant superior addressing an unknown young man. When he says "I am your father", he suddenly switches to the pronouns used by a father to his child. He continues addressing Luke as father to child until he dies. Luke continues speaking as a humble peasant addressing a mandarin until the next film when he finally tells Leia "he's my father". Then he speaks to Vader as a child to his father.

2025-11-01 08:10:21 UTC

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Everyone addresses Vader as if he were a high ranking imperial mandarin, which he kind of is.
Leia is addressed as a princess. Han constantly butchers it and mixes up her rank constantly until the Carbonite/"I know" scene when they start addressing each other as lovers.

2025-11-01 08:04:13 UTC

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Because of the complexity of its pronouns, the Vietnamese translation adds an extra layer of depth to the otherwise shallow dialogue of the Star Wars original trilogy, which I watched on TV in Vietnam.
People speak to droids with the pronouns used to speak to pets or farm animals. Droids address people as professional superiors.
Droids speak to each other like they are siblings.
Vader speaks to everyone (except the emperor and Tarkin) as an arrogant superior addressing an underling.

2025-11-01 07:59:20 UTC

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The Vietnamese language has *many* pronouns for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person. I can think of dozens off the top of my head and I suspect it's actually hundreds. They vary based on both relative and absolute age, social standing, incredibly complex family trees, profession, politeness, marital status, and more. Vietnamese people tend to ask a lot of personal questions when first meeting someone, which foreigners think is kind of rude, but they need that information to know how to refer to you.

2025-10-30 10:30:01 UTC

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Michael J. Fox's real middle name is Andrew, but he didn't like "Michael A. Fox" as a stage name. By SAG rules, he had to use a name other than "Michael Fox" because there was already an actor with that name, so he just stuck a J in the middle.
In his hit movie "Back to the Future", his character's father, George, says he has to get home so he doesn't miss his favorite TV program, "Science Fiction Theatre". "Science Fiction Theatre" had only 8 episodes. Four starred the original Michael Fox!

2025-10-22 02:32:39 UTC

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Upper and lowercase letters were two different alphabets stuck together to give us capitalization. If they had chosen a different majuscule alphabet, we could have had sentences like this:
"Тhe Лord of the Рings" was a sequel to "Тhe Хobbit", both of which were written by Д'.Р.Р. Тolkien. Иt tells the story of the Оne Рing after Бilbo gives it to his nephew Фrodo and Гandalf tells him to destroy it.

2025-10-22 02:22:15 UTC

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When scribes started using miniscule, they only used miniscule. it was its own alphabet.they wrote completely in lowercase letters.they also didn't space out their sentences much.parchment was expensive so they didn't want to waste space.
It wasn't until Charlemagne's time that scribes invented "mixed case": using capital letters to start paragraphs and mark proper nouns while using miniscule for everything else. Capital letters helped break up the wall of text so it was easier to read.

2025-10-22 02:13:28 UTC

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You've heard how "uppercase" & "lowercase" letters are called that because typesetters literally stored them in cases with the majuscules on top. Did you know that majuscule & miniscule letters are two different versions of the Latin alphabet? The ancients wrote in majuscule letters. That's right. THE ROMANS WROTE IN ALL CAPS LIKE AN ANGRY INTERNET COMMENT (when they weren't using Greek to look fancy and dignified). Miniscule letters came much later around the start of the Middle Ages.

2025-10-21 02:45:15 UTC

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Serifs were not extra bits added to letters as decoration. They were a natural consequence of writing with a quill. The tip of a quill has a little split through which ink flows by capillary action. When you press the quill to a page, the end spreads open on contact then narrows as you ease up on the pressure when you draw it across the page. That initial spread meant each stroke started with a serif "flare" (and sometimes ended with one if you pressed hard at the end, like in capital legs).

2025-10-21 02:34:04 UTC

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Speaking of the Middle Ages, you've probably heard that "ye" was actually "the" and was never pronounced with a Y sound because they used the Y to represent the letter thorn, Þ. You may wonder why they picked Y as a substitute for a letter that looked more like a b superimposed on a p. It's because in a lot of handwriting, it looked like a Y. The runic form was a stick with a triangle on the side. Later forms were rounder. Some miniscule forms were much curvier like a fancy Y.
https://cdn.masto.host/dicecamp/media_attachments/files/115/409/807/822/300/136/original/80493df09c481e0e.jpg

2025-10-21 02:18:26 UTC

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Saccharomyces cerevisiae & S. pastorianus are the two species of yeast used to make beer. S. pastorianus makes lager. S. cerevisiae makes ale, but also wine, liquor, mead, & bread. "Winemaking yeast", "champagne yeast", "baker's yeast", and "distiller's yeast" are all breeds of the same species: S. cerevisiae. S. pastorianus is a hybrid species that appeared when S. cerevisiae crossbred with another species of wild yeast in a brewery in Munich in the 1600s. There was no lager in the Middle Ages!

2025-10-21 01:54:53 UTC

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Wine ages in the bottle because it isn't distilled. It is more than just alcohol. It has sugars, tannins, & other stuff that continue to react chemically to change the flavor profile. This change isn't always for the better. Depending on a huge variety of factors (temperature, light, type of grapes, etc.) wine quality generally follows a bell curve: it improves, peaks, then degrades. Most wine peaks between 6 months & 5 years old. Very old wine is bad but costly because people think it's linear.

2025-10-21 01:43:16 UTC

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If you buy a bottle of 3 year old Scotch and put it in your cupboard for twenty years until you bring it out for a special occasion, you don't have a bottle of 23 year old Scotch. You have a twenty year old bottle of 3 year old Scotch. Liquor ages in the barrel and picks up flavor from the wood. It doesn't pick up anything from the inert and nonporous glass bottle.

2025-10-21 01:37:25 UTC

In an attempt to break up the constant doom scrolling, I'm going to post random little snippets of information I've picked up over the years. Stuff that is not at all topical because I need a little break from the present horrors.

2024-12-18 05:08:49 UTC

It's been 181 years since Charles Dickens pointed out that life could be better for everyone, both rich and poor people, if we just convinced the rich people to share their wealth instead of hoarding it and we still haven't come up with a better plan to do that than "I dunno. Scare them with ghosts?"

2024-11-19 01:02:30 UTC

I watched "Alien" & "Aliens" with my kid. I think "Aliens" is better because there are more personalities bouncing off each other. He thought "Alien" was better because "there's more tension with one alien picking the crew off one by one". He also said "I really like the biomechanical aspect of the xenomorph's design", because apparently he has an impressive vocabulary.
Which do you think is the better film?

2024-11-11 17:58:39 UTC

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US company: Nobody wants to buy our $7 widgets when they can get the Chinese ones for $5.
MAGA: Let's put a 100% tariff on Chinese goods!
US company: So the Chinese widgets are now $10?
MAGA: Yes! Now everybody will buy American!
US company:
MAGA:
US company: Due to supply chain issues and rising costs, our widgets are now priced at $9.50.
MAGA: *surprised Pikachu face*

2023-09-08 17:07:55 UTC

The English suffix "-ard" (as in "drunkard", "laggard", "braggard", and "sluggard") is used to make adjectives into deprecating nouns.
"He's drunk" is just a description.
"He's a drunkard" is a moral judgment that finds the subject lacking.
The same process turned "he's wise" into "he's a wizard".
"Wizard" was the medieval equivalent of "smartass".