Originally posted to /r/WritingPrompts.

Prompt by /u/Zaquarxys:

The sun is shining for the first time in a long time.

For the first time in twelve years, the sun shone on the reinforcing struts of Aditya 2.

This was very bad.

Shilpa checked the time on her phone again. 11:39. Still technically morning.

“We’ll get through this,” Anit said. He placed a hand on Shilpa’s pregnant stomach.

Shilpa met her husband’s eyes, but said nothing in response.

It was summer in Jodhpur, and the electricity was off for the second day in a row. When the debris punched a hole through Aditya 2’s solar array, it had knocked out the microwave transmitter that beamed power back to the receiving station on Earth.

Failover power stations had kicked in, but they were overloaded within minutes due to high demand. The backups had been designed without properly accounting for the shift in future risk due to ongoing population growth and climate change. What had been in the ninety-nine-point-ninth percentile a decade ago was in the ninety-ninth percentile now. The black swans were waddling their way into the pond.

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I recently encountered the following story on Stack Exchange:

In 1969, D. J. Lewis wrote a paper about Diophantine equations, in which he wrote that the equation \(x^3 + 5 = 117 y^3\) is known to have at most 18 solutions, but the exact number is not known. Two other mathematicians studied the equation and, in 1971, they published a short but difficult proof that there are no solutions. Finally, in 1973, another mathematician found an astonishingly simple proof of the same fact! The proof is:

The quantity \(x^3 + 5\) is never a multiple of 9, but the quantity \(117 y^3\) is always a multiple of 9, so there are no solutions.

I decided to try to verify the short proof at the end of this amusing anecdote. It is easy to show that \(117 y^3\) is always a multiple of 9, because 117 is a multiple of 9. It is somewhat less obvious that \(x^3 + 5\) is never a multiple of 9. This statement is equivalent to \(x^3 \not\equiv 4\ (\text{mod}\ 9)\). I couldn’t come up with an easier way to prove this than just checking all 9 congruence classes individually.

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Originally posted to /r/nethack.

NetHack 3.6.1: YAFAP on my first time past the Castle. Orcish Barbarian, no intrinsic protection, killed Demogorgon

This was the same run I posted about a couple times here recently. It felt like the game was fighting me every step of the way in this run.

• I got Orcish Town in Minetown.
• A werewolf put on the amulet of reflection in Sokoban.
• I screwed up the Medusa fight and she teleported away—I ultimately found her on dungeon level 1 during the ascension run! I don’t even know how she got up there.
• There were no priests I could chat to in the entire game: no temples generated in the main dungeon, Orcish Town doesn’t have a priest, and my pet minotaur immediately murdered the guaranteed priest in the Valley of the Dead before I could get to him.
• The only artifact I ever got was the stupidly-heavy, two-handed, pet-whacking, Yeenoghu-angering Cleaver. I used a pair of ordinary silver sabers for all of Gehennom and the ascension run.
• Orcus wouldn’t let me stand on an up staircase and ended up summoning Demogorgon.
• I fell in the guaranteed spiked pit and instapetrified myself while slapping monsters with a chickatrice corpse in Rodney’s zoo. Fortunately, I had an abundant collection of amulets of life saving.
• I never found a can of grease and lost most of my scrolls and potions to the Plane of Water rather than wishing for an oilskin sack.
• On Astral, I had to try all three altars to find the correct one, dying twice in the process.

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Originally posted to /r/nethack.

I, a thoroughly wiki-spoiled but not actually very good player, finally made it to Gehennom for the first time. I am doing pretty well so far in this game, all things considered. I made dragon scale mail from a silver dragon I killed back in the Castle. I got a silver saber out of polypiling and enchanted it to +5, then found another silver saber just lying around in one of the early Gehennom levels, and now my orcish Barbarian is dual-wielding those to cut through every demon in sight.

Heading down, I bribed my way past Asmodeus no problem. Juiblex’s swamp had no Juiblex because I had wand-of-digging-ed him previously after summoning him back in Orctown with my accidental same-race sacrifice of orcs.

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Originally posted to /r/nethack.

I just got to Medusa’s level. I wanted to follow the same strategy I’ve had success with previously: dig down to skip the water, magic map the maze to find the stairs quickly, blind myself, walk up the stairs, and apply an uncursed mirror at her to instantly turn her to stone.

The first thing I did was try to dig down on the starting island. I promptly learned that water fills in pits that you dig adjacent to water tiles. Now my armor is rusty and some of my scrolls got blanked.

After using a scroll of earth and pushing the boulders into the water to make enough land tiles to dig down on, I made it to the maze level. The magic mapping went fine and I walked up the stairs with my blindfold on and my mirror ready. I even had reflection this time so I shouldn’t even have needed the mirror according to the wiki.

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Originally posted to /r/nethack.

I’ve been trying on and off to ascend in NetHack for years now. I was just running one of my best games yet…

I started with a dwarven Valkyrie to make things easy. The RNG gave me 18/02 STR and 20 CON for my starting stats, so I had plenty of carrying space. This proved to be important when I ran into a huge general store early on. I purchased a leash from the shopkeeper and then used my little dog to rob him blind. By stealing high-level spellbooks and other expensive items and then selling them back to that same shopkeeper, I was able to build up enough cash to buy a plate mail from him. Together with some other armor, this brought my AC down to -5 by dungeon level 2. I was also able to identify lots of items in the process, including most notably an amulet of ESP which I again stole from the same shop.

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Originally posted to /r/WritingPrompts.

Prompt by me:

“Before purchasing a dragon, make sure to check the safety ratings from the National Dragon Transport Safety Administration.”

Thank you for purchasing the 2019 Volksdrachen Puk®! The stylish, compact, and efficient Puk sets a new standard in serpentine design.

Your dragon features:

• All-wing drive
• Tail-mounted backup camera
• Pitot tube airspeed indicator
• 11.5 inch bio-electrical touchscreen with Bluetooth support
• Sail-fin antenna
• Air lane-keeping assist
• Parking claw suitable for most surfaces
• Ten airbags with bronchial inflation
• Adaptive cruising altitude control
• Power steering

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Originally posted to /r/WritingPrompts.

Prompt by /u/ElectronicLoad:

You’ve developed telekinesis, but to your dismay you can barely manage to lift a pound, with no hope of becoming any stronger

The potato wobbled. I concentrated, contorting my face. Lift. Lift.

Nothing. It was too heavy.

Zapped by lightning and dipped in radioactive sludge at the same time, and this is all I got. The ability to make vegetables wiggle.

Could I lift my own hand? No. I couldn’t even feel my own hand with my power. Apparently it didn’t work on living matter. No ripping the heart out of someone’s chest.

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Originally posted to /r/WritingPrompts.

Prompt by /u/BronzeHeart92:

Your roommate is a supervillain with the ambitions to take over the city. Nothing out of ordinary, right? Thankfully, he prefers to spend the time watching b-movies and munching on popcorn.

“So, Mike, what’s on for tonight?”

Hearing my name caught my attention just enough for me to realize I had heard my name. I was sitting on the couch, and the sound came from behind me. “Did you say something?”, I asked, craning my head around.

Alex hauled his old laptop out of its case. The thing weighed like ten pounds without any cables or peripherals—I knew from past experience, from that time I had to lug it through the airport. The laptop clunked as he set it down on the fake wood surface of the kitchen table.

“Yeah”, Alex said. “I said, ‘what’s on for tonight?’.” He repeated the words slowly, enunciating each sound like he was talking over a bad phone connection. I hated when people did that. I wasn’t listening the first time; I was listening now. He didn’t have to act like he was talking to a toddler with a learning disability. Condescending.

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FiveThirtyEight’s weekly Riddler column has a really nice problem today:

From Joseph Converse, a puzzle of digital manipulation:

Imagine taking a number and moving its last digit to the front. For example, 1,234 would become 4,123. What is the smallest positive integer such that when you do this, the result is exactly double the original number? (For bonus points, solve this one without a computer.)

Here is the solution… (spoiler warning!)

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