Mayday Plays - Heroes You Should Know: Ada Lovelace

Episode Date: April 29, 2021

Allegra and Aaron discuss British polymath Ada Lovelace. This is audio from a live Twitch stream. Join us for Heroes You Should Know live at twitch.com/maydayroleplay.

discussing Ada Loveless who is basically the reason we can do any of this. She was a mathematician in the 1800s and she's pretty fucking cool. We're gonna get into it in a minute. As you might know if you've seen this before, on here as you should know I find an obscure historical figure who I think is important that we don't ever talk about for a plethora of reasons that I'm sure you can imagine. And then I tell you about them and then we turn them into D&D characters because why would we not? This is the double nerd show, of course we do. So here we go. Ada Loveless was born Augusta Ada Byron on December 10th in 1815 in London. So she was born to her mother Annabella Milbank who was a well-educated mathematician like kind of a

higherborn woman which was pretty rare to have like a well-educated woman in that time, whatever. And then also her dad was the poet Lord George Gordon Byron who was as I said a poet and a notorious horny boy. This is the only child he had in wedlock. He had two other daughters, one of whom shares my name which is neat. I mean she did die of typhus or malaria at age five but still cool I think I guess. Anyway her dad was expecting a glorious boy but was of course disappointed when she was a girl. Also he had a habit of not calling his kids by their given names. Allegra was a name he gave to his second daughter who was Alba at birth. Augusta is Ada's given name which is named after Byron's half-sister but he's the one who started calling her Ada. So

he just kind of disregards anything which is fine. Also we'll talk about Augusta, his sister in a little bit. Right? I mean he wasn't around for a lot of either of their lives but you piece the fuck out. Yeah that's the that's the mood. So yeah he does that and then as I just insinuated he and his wife separate a few weeks after Ada's born and a few months after that Byron leaves England and Ada never sees him again because he dies in grace when she is eight years old. So he kind of like immortalizes their parting in a poem which goes is thy face like thy mother is my fair child Ada soul daughter of my house and heart.

That's it that's all that's like all he has to say about her. Yeah that's it. So at the time in England the law was the full custody of the kids would go to the father in a separation but since Byron wasn't into it he just had his sister keep him updated on his kid and that was that was the scope of his involvement with her. He was like yeah that's fine I'm gonna go like have another kid then I'm gonna go to Greece maybe I'm another kid and then I'll die don't worry about it. So yeah so her mom is pretty understandably bitter about about all of this and she's she's trying to keep her kid sort of like away from the like the poetic flights of fancy that Byron was prone to.

So she from a very early age pushes her towards you know like math and logic and reason and all this kind of stuff. Ada also didn't see a portrait of her father's face until she was 20 years old. Damn. Which is a whole new level of petty that I appreciate. Also side note I realized I had not put my microphone on the stream so just want to point out that I fixed that. That's okay. We're doing our best tonight. We're it's been rough we're going though. Yes so okay so Ada's mom is on her own. She's pretty pissed about Lord Byron being an absolute fuck off and she kind of rails against him publicly for his immoral behavior which is a pretty big deal because everyone's

already kind of on the the father's side in this time in society. So the fact that she's making even more of a stink about it continually doesn't really help them that much. And add to that her mom wasn't super interested in her too much. Like in there were a couple letters where she called her an it as a child. Yeah right. So it's just she like kept a good face for the public so it looked like she was very doting. But it was mainly Ada's maternal grandmother who cared for her and she was very doting and lovely. So and also Lady Byron had people like her friends keep an eye on her daughter and her teenage years to make sure that she wasn't like morally deviant and following in her father's footsteps which has to be very disconcerting.

Also on that similar note her mom was uninterested but also overbearing. So very very conflicting messages from mom here. And Ada was also very ill as a child. She had headaches that affected her sight. She was paralyzed briefly with a piece of measles. She was on bed rest for a full year. All of this coming also from her mother is kind of like well if you're in bed you can't do anything bad. So just stay a mess. Keep her in the attic man. I essentially she was just like no no no you stay with my mom. You don't leave bed. You learn math. Those are my three words and that's it. Anyway so by 1831 when she was about 15 she was able to walk with crutches. She could walk before in her life but like there was a time there was a period in that year that she had to use crutches

to walk and eventually she was she didn't need them anymore. But despite all of this nonsense she was super into her studies. It was all very like math like like I said math and logic based and by age 12 she decided that she wanted to fly. So she researched materials for wings. She studied the anatomy of birds and the proportion of their wings of their bodies. She even wrote a book called Biology which had like plates of designs and like all of her findings about like what she might need. Isn't that the cutest shit? Is this a book I can go buy? I don't know but I hope so. Like imagine a little 12 year old on bed rest just like I'm going to fly and this is how I'm going to do it and these are the kind of like materials I'm going to use for the wings. It just

warms up. And write the whole book about it? Write and like have written out designs and like sketches and plans. Like she wanted to even add a compass to the to the to the design so that she could cut across the country in the most direct route. She's so sweet. Anyway so in early 1833 when she is 17 she has an affair with a tutor and tries to elope but she gets caught and her mom freaks out and covers the scandal as we would expect from her mother. Great. She never she never met Allegra but she did have contact with Elizabeth Medora Lee who was either her half-sister or her cousin or both. I'm not going to think about that too hard. Yeah there are very many whatever there is speculation pretty heavy speculation and potentially like evidence

for the fact that Lord Byron may or may not have been in an incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta and Elizabeth may have been a product of that. We don't know for sure. Anyway uh yeah there's a there's a distinct possibility that that was either her half-sister and her cousin or it could be just her cousin. So in adulthood Ada became very close with another one of her tutors named Mary Somerville who introduced her to Charles Babbage in 1833. Charles Babbage was a mathematician of the time. I'll talk about him more later but she and she and Ada and Mary were very very close friends throughout Ada's life and she I mean she outlived Ada by 20 years and died at 1991.

So wild. A quick little thing about Mary Somerville she was a Scottish scientist, writer, and another self-proclaimed polymath. She studied mathematics and astronomy specifically. She and another contemporary scientist Caroline Herschel were the first women nominated to be in the Royal Astronomical Society which was a big deal in England at the time. And she conducted experiments about the relationship between lights and magnetism and then I had to stop reading about it because if I didn't I was going to get distracted by Mary Somerville and we were going to talk about two people and this episode would have been three hours long. So I made myself stop. Mary Somerville was super interesting when I was reading about her.

Go check her out. You'll get to him. Yeah and there's also Charles Babbage who was a philosopher and a mathematician and inventor and a mechanical engineer. So he worked on a like kind of like a very very basic original concept for a digital programmable computer and he also basically broke the visionary cipher just because he could. Very smart people. On a quick side note I am very good at history things and I'm very good at like language things and as it wouldn't it doesn't seem like that but I like that's something I feel like I'm good at. Math is not one of those things. Aaron though Aaron's good at math so when we get to the math things Aaron's gonna talk about things. I'm gonna say the very broad things and then Aaron might be able to explain them a little

better than I will because even with my research I have no clue what I was reading about. You just let me know what you want me to expound upon. Yes please. Anyway so back to Ada for now. She also became with a ton of other scientists of the day including Andrew Cross who did early experimentation about what could be done with electricity. Sir David Brewster who was a he worked in physical optics which was mainly like studying the polarization of light and the discovery of the Brewster's angle which is where the polarization and the light waves mesh and basically looks like things are invisible like like the that's like with polarized lenses right how you have to like turn your head with polarized lenses. Yeah I'm hesitant I'm hesitant to say honestly because I

don't I don't know off the top of my head and I don't want to be wrong. I'm pretty sure that's what it is. I looked it up and I did the reading and I think that's what it was but honestly science and math I love but I'm very takes me a long time to get them. Charles Wheatstone as well who invented invented the concertina which is the the musical instrument the stereoscope which was the you remember when you were a kid and you had those like goggles you put over your eyes and you click it and they would have a disc yeah he made that the thing which was a device that shows you two of the same image in either eye and they appear as 3d image and also he created the play fair cipher. She also worked with Michael Faraday who did electromagnets and electrochemistry

and the author Charles Dickens so she was very popular in court she was super brilliant and she went often and people were all about her and so math became like her big focus when she was 17 she had like two like multiple tutors from multiple different like schools William friend William King and the aforementioned Mary Somerville and so she's like math focused and then in July of 1835 she marries William the eighth baron king not king is in like a ruler king but his last name is king and so she becomes Lady King and they have three kids Byron named after her father Anna Isabella who they called Annabella after her mom for some reason and then Ralph Gordon who was also named after Ada's father and then Ada had a bout of sickness for a few months after Anna Isabella was

born which you would expect from a person who's kind of chronically had this issue and then they find out that Ada is a descendant of the barons loveless which is something important in Britain and it has like land things I have really no interest in social hierarchy nonsense so I didn't really look this up I looked it up kind of a fronk to relate to be like this is a place I think um no clue but she become her husband becomes Earl of Loveless which makes her the countess of Loveless and then boom there's her name Ada Loveless yeah that's that's all I want to say about how she got her name and the place because a hierarchical society bullshit doesn't interest me so 1843 and 1844 Ada's mother who is still very much involved in her life

sends a William Benjamin Carpenter who was a physiologist and inverted physiologist and a physician to be her children's tutor and Ada's moral instructor and also he like tutors her a little bit too because he has different like areas of expertise than she does um but that doesn't work out super great because he falls for her and he keeps trying to like get her to run away with him and she eventually just cuts him off and she's like no we're done and so he's not the kid's tutor anymore and she gets a different tutor um what does it with these English tutors man usually you're tutoring children get your heads out of your ass like kid what does it being a tutor mean you can't control yourself are tutors just inherently horny have they've

been like looking at books must be they're like I need a person come on dude get your shit together have a little bit of self-control and don't be a creep anyway on that she also apparently loved to gamble and formed a gambling syndicate with her dude friends of course she does right so she bets on horses and she even tries to create like a mathematic model of course she did yeah right for like more successful large bets it it doesn't go well and she ends up deeply in debt which of course it did which we saw coming um she's also seen as socially scandalous for her relaxed views on extra marital affairs um which is hilarious because she's like no fuck this tutor but like don't like actively

fuck him but I'm not interested in him but she did have an affair with Andrew Cross's son John I don't I don't know was it like I don't oh I I think I got her husband and her dad confused for a second so so don't mind what I was about to say but I think this is where her dad's coming in this is where her like father's yeah her father's influence is appearing anyway uh yeah so she's kind of scandalous in society and I'm pretty sure that doesn't help her case with her mother but like she's an adult so exactly like her mom shouldn't be like this under business not not that I'm saying she should be having extra marital affairs but like she's a grown ass woman she can make her own choices whatever they may be

um so it's the 1840s now she works she's working with Augustus De Morgan on some advanced calculus as well as Bernoulli's number Aaron what the fuck is Bernoulli's numbers um fuck I don't know off the top of my head I at one point I knew at one point I knew in this at this moment I don't know I spent all of my time understanding what what these babbage engines are so that I could explain those but I wrote it down somewhere I don't remember where you know what keep keep talking I'll I'll google it and I'll read one sentence and I'm sure I'll remember one of it yeah Aaron's gonna come back to us on Bernoulli's number because I read multiple things about it and remember nothing so hold please while we do that I'll tell you that right now though she often integrated poetry

in science with her with her math and she kind of thought that like intuition and imagination were a super valuable part of applying the mathematics and scientific concepts so like marrying those two was what made her kind of stick out from others because for the most part people were very much like what's in the book is what's most important what's like you like like emotions and imagination and all this is over here math and science and logic is all over here and it doesn't mesh and she kind of found a way to mesh the two which is why you know what what kind of leads her to the eventual the eventual note she has on the analytic engine which we'll talk about soon I'm getting through her life first and then we're going to talk about her work

because if I tried to if I tried to mesh them it would have blown my mind personally Aaron do you have anything on Bernoulli's number um yeah basically it's uh it's just it's a sequence of rational numbers that comes up a lot in in different places um so it's like it's it's a thing but it and it comes too often to be a coincidence but it's just like like they don't have anything else for it it's just a really it's a really specific sequence of rational numbers fascinating well there you go uh so she has information about Bernoulli's numbers I I'm sure I wouldn't understand them even if I knew what that information was if you are a science or math minded person and that interests you please go find her notes they I'm sure are very easy to

find the internet is a wonderful place we have her to think for it um anyway so she's also super interested in metaphysics which is pretty pretty common in in you know Victorian era yeah especially yeah and so like and but like why should logic be everything there is like if you if we've found logical reasons for all this other stuff why why can't we have logical reasons for things that seem illogical right now it was her kind of approach to it which I think is very interesting and very open-minded of her and then Ada dies at 36 on November 27th 1852 from uterine cancer which is very sad uh at the end of her life her mom's basically taken over everything who she sees what she reads what she does uh she kind of excludes Ada from all her friends cuts them off um she

uses contact with her husband after she tells him something that made him leave her side no one's really sure what it was uh and then she has a religious transformation which leads uh her to repent from her misconduct misconducts and then she's buried next to her father and that's that's her life essentially is this very like big smart top and then her mom comes in and is very controlling so strange yeah it's kind of like heartbreaking yeah she's clearly brilliant and her mom's just like no i'm i'm in charge of this now it just rubs me weird anyway onto her work now the important the important things i mean her life was very important too her like how she lived and everything was important but the things were were were here to hear about um so as you know she was super into

math and science uh and metaphysics so she so we'll talk about the the metaphysics part of it first which is phrenology which is basically the study of the bumps on your skull to predict mental traits as well as mesmerism mesmerism or animal magnetism it's it's essentially like midichlorians or the forest or whatever it's an invisible natural forest that's in all living things that could have physical effects like healing so why not why couldn't why couldn't that be a thing if if Bernoulli's number pops up everywhere why as far as they as far as they knew well sure yeah so she even tries to create like a mathematical model for how the brain makes thoughts happen and like connects the nerve like how the nerves connect to feelings and called it like

the calculus of the nervous system which isn't sane to me because i i don't i still don't think that we fully understand that in these days getting closer we're getting closer there's there's some there's some gray areas but we we know probably more than you think yeah but like it's it's still it's just very interesting to me that like way back when she was like okay well i can i can math this i can math this feelings thing i love it i love it i love it uh so as i said previously she meets Charles Babbage in 1833 and a month later she's still like 17 mate she's mate no she's still 17 because it's in june um he invites Ada to see his difference engine which is an automatic mechanical calculator created to tabulate polynomial functions

do you want to talk about what sure so the difference that it was basically just it was like uh is like the calculator you have on your desk right now only it was a bunch of um gears it was a mechanical thing and it had little dials that you could put numbers in which were basically just the coefficients of you know the polynomials that you you did an algebra so you have like x x blah x cubed x squared you know that whole thing uh you got little dials you put the coefficients on there was a little something something you push to make it or i don't know if it was like a crank or a lever or something but you know you put the numbers in that you did something to make it do its thing and then on a different set of gears it spat out the results

the answer ah wild i so i get especially in this one i got very caught up and people make things do things and i don't understand it which sounds very simplistic but just like the fact that like okay we have this mathematical thing that we can do i'm going to create a machine that does this faster for me you want to know i think i think the fact that anything exists is wild so you want to know what's even crazier like you think you look at the everyone looked at the difference engine they're like oh my god this is so crazy yeah it turns out the greeks did it like 2 000 years before they did it's called the anti-cathara machine mechanism from uh around 200 bce it's a hand-powered ori that's used to predict uh astronomical positions and eclipses decades in

advance so it's basically the world's oldest analog computer and you want to know what's even crazier we still can't replicate that thing people have been trying and they can't figure out how it works i i love but i my brain can't take it it's so what what must we what must we have forgotten in the entire history of human beings that would blow our minds today just this one this one made my brain explode a lot not just because it was math things but also because it was like people make things happen i know this sounds insane it sounds like i'm very high i'm not this is just things i think about on a daily basis i mean it'd be okay if you were but i mean no i know but i this isn't even me high thinking this is just me regular thinking

anyway so she hangs out with babbage a lot babbage is cool they they're both very similarly minded um the machine fascinates her and in turn he thinks she's brilliant and intellectual and analytical and he like he really likes working with her and like respects her knowledge and he calls her the enchantress of numbers because why not it sounds like a rejected marvel super villain the enchantress of numbers she just like throws math at you yeah no i i got rid of the fun years to go i haven't thought about like math like this in literally five years so this was a lot um so about 10 years after she meets babbage she spends nine months translating an italian mathematician's article about a new machine his name's luigi manabrea and the machine is the analytical

engineer so he hasn't made it yet it's just kind of like the concept of it which is basically incorporating math logic and then control flow and condition branching and loops and integrated it's it's basically trying to create a computer as we would understand one today it was a computer as we understand one today yeah like it doesn't have a screen it doesn't have you know like buttons and video chat or whatever but it's it's it's a it does be computing it is a computer um and i it's it's got like it's got a finger and like the allen turing pie which we were going to talk about him and then i i switched to her for some reason i don't even remember why ah but at some point we're going to talk about allen turing so basically it's like the logical

structure of the analytical engine is is what we have now just without a screen basically so as she translates she adds her own notes and the notes end up being three times longer than the article itself because of course they do and they include methods for calculating the sequence of renewals number using the analytical engine and explain the difference between like the original difference engine um and she she's just got like all these like thoughts and she's integrating all of her ideas into something more than just a computing machine a machine to compute um and basically this is basically the first computer program making her the first computer programmer which is nito mosquito i mean yeah objectively the first or um not objectively ostensibly

because it wasn't like it was not like she you know went to a coffee shop and and dusted her laptop off and you know wrote some java script but like as we understand programming and computing that's basically what she did it was a sequence of you know she laid out like uh basically you know computers have these things that we call instructions which is just hey do this thing with with these numbers and she stepped that out for uh i i think uh not not just the burduly numbers but i think there were a bunch of different like little pieces of software that she she wrote i mean they didn't call it software then right they didn't like oh ancient software it's the next hit nick cage movie

if that's if that's national treasure three i'm here for it obviously whatever give me more national treasure i say um so she does make a very clear um clear distinction in her notes that this is not artificial intelligence it doesn't originate anything new it simply follows the orders it's given and shares the data um so there are a lot of people that try and rebut that and say that like it's technically information that didn't exist before so it is artificial intelligence including Alan Turing he also was like no this is definitely artificial intelligence and she's like no i gave it data and it did what it was supposed to do like it's not it's not coming up with new thoughts which is weird because Alan Turing invented the Turing test yes he did

so you know he's he's he's a he's a complicated guy we'll talk we'll talk about him don't worry he's cool i like Alan Turing um anyway so she translates the paper and gives her notes and they're published in the september 1843 scientific memoir under the initials aal which is probably i guess ate a lovelace because you know at the time she probably wouldn't have received any attention credit for being a woman so she had to do it you know what yeah um so in her notes she also kind of sees that there is potential for the analytical engineer to deal with data that isn't just numbers uh to quote objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations and which should be

susceptible to adaptation to the action of operating notation and mechanism of the engine she's literally just imagining a modern day computer more than a hundred years before right and you know what's crazy is because like you're saying you know she was the first one to realize that you know you this you could use it something like this to not only you know crunch numbers right but you could do it she she specifically gave the example of something like this could be used to make music yeah which i thought you know i thought was super cool like whoa you know she predicted pro tools was going to exist before you know anyone thought of she's the reason you make our cool fucking music dude yeah i mean she's yeah i mean with you know yeah if she didn't lay

one of the reasons if she didn't lay that framework out you know i don't i don't think the world would look the same way that it does right now yeah i i think i think eventually like the the knowledge is there and the uh intuition is probably there too but it would just i think the fact that it happened when it happened is the reason that we history is the whole butterfly effect banded anyway i should stop rambling about these because i get excited about things um so this all turns back to her imagination and intuition have a place in science it can't all just be like one thing which is i think is a nice reminder to everyone to like broaden your horizons or whatever i dropped my drink hold on good thing it had a lid it fell again it doesn't matter

i put it on a slanted a slanted object twice like a dumbass and here we are this is my own fault i must anyway so she's the inspiration for countless books and plays in comics she's been featured as a character in character in super different shows including doctor who there are biopics documentaries about her there is cryptocurrency named after her computer languages awards university buildings micro satellites like all of these things carry her name she and charles babbage are pages in british passport passports um there is an academy called the aided developers academy which is a year-long software development intensive that is like intentionally to diversify gender within the programming game which i think is super cool and

lovely um and definitely something that i think she would she would feel very proud to have her name on and aida loveless day is the second tuesday on october in england and in the u.s it is october ninth with the purpose of raising the profile of women in stem and showing romanos finger people there's also uh there's also a uh web store called aida fruit where a lot of people like me go to buy our little who's it's and what's it's needs i didn't know that that's so cool yeah you should check it out i have no use for anything there i don't think but i will just look at it yeah yeah so yeah that is that is our lady aida loveless who it's kind of the reason we're here um so erin do you want to you want to tell me what you built sure yes um so i mean i

think let's let's face it we were we all had we both thought the same same two thoughts one was is she an artificer or is she a wizard and i did also have those thoughts i decided that she was a wizard nice because i mean artificers are like you know they make things you know they like get their hands on something and they make it she was more on like the theoretical side so i'm like if dnd has mathematicians they're wizards and then i got to thinking about well what kind of a wizard is she and i decided enchantment because it's like enchantment is kind of like a dnd version of writing software yeah and she wrote the first software there you go that makes so much sense to me dude uh i mean obviously i made her her intelligence super high so i was like 20 intelligence

um oh what other defining features do i need to point out what i like the defining the defining stats and skills uh so arcana which is math dnd math history and investigation nice i don't know i like her all the way uh back i went with a noble background which just it seemed obvious uh just because of her i mean she was yeah did you uh did you have any feats or did you just pump everything i did i gave her keen mind ooh that's a good one right which gives you a little bump on intelligence uh and it it's it's you know it just means you're super smart and that you hate your dungeon master but other than that yeah i i shudder for the day one of us is like i'm gonna take a keen mind because i think whoever's

running the game is going to explode it's gonna be me and i'm gonna say i can do whatever i want now fair point fair point uh spell wise i went with like you stuff like you know minor illusion uh what's the other uh fant fantasmal force you know anything where you're like you know i i guess i guess where i'm going is the power of the power of imagination you know uh yeah any any other major spells that kind of jump out at you for her uh you know i tried to not do like any combatty kind of what she didn't really see much of like uh she doesn't seem super interested in violence right uh so i didn't i didn't really they're all you know uh what what's the uh what's that the cantrip that i i can never pronounce

thomaturgy thomaturgy and presto vegetation or you know you kind of just make a a neat little thing happen always yeah nice what was what did you what did you end up dumping for her uh so i went with i went with constitution yep because just you know i mean she was unfortunately ill a lot of the times um i went with uh as like a like a secondary high stat i went with charisma hey me too works well for for in the court yeah so i mean she seemed popular yeah did you did you roll hit points for her just out of curiosity i i did she she's level 10 and she has 32 hit points oh boy that minus in con is rough yeah there's no if you're if you're playing if you're actually playing deed there's no reason you should do that oh no this this is a

build that i was like this is not something i would ever build ever ever for a game ever however to be historically accurate this is what i'm doing uh any other any fun like enchantment things that she gets as an enchantment wizard not really honestly the enchantment like as like a subclass it's not my favorite yeah uh there's not a lot i mean you can do hypnotic gaze where you look at you know you look at something and and and charm them you know hypnosis as you do uh i don't know i don't know if that's relevant to her but i but i think it's i think it's like like kind of like beguiling because everyone's kind of enchanted sure i mean yeah that's true that's every account of her it seems you know that's something that's someone

that that that gets mentioned like glowing and very interested in everything you're doing or the enchantress of numbers yes dude that's awesome did you have any anything like any um any special like items for her or like languages or anything like that so i picked i was like what you know she kind of she was programming before we had like programming languages is a thing which means that basically she was writing an assembly language which is what which is the which is the code that code gets compiled into so you write your code and then it gets turned into this other code called machine language and that's basically what she was doing was machine language her assembly uh so i gave i was like what's the the weirdest like most difficult to understand language in d&d

so she can speak draconic nice oh it's so good dude that's awesome i love i love enchantment wizard for her that's that makes a lot of sense to me i went very convoluted good love it convoluted i too had the thought of okay wizard or artificer and i was like no you don't get to just choose wizard or artificer that's like no you don't get to do that so i was like all right do a little bit of either one of them but you have to add something else in there and then i had a lot of something else in there and very little wizard so she is a wizard to warlock warlock nice nice so i gave her order the scribes as a wizard and then the patron is the seeker for warlock which is just like a voracious knowledge monster basically which makes sense to me

so she gets all kinds of nuts shit um oh her her her charisma was a 17 her intelligence was 18 i didn't i didn't do any feats i just gave her stat bombs the entire time i also dumped her charisma or not charisma her constitution and she get and she's a sage so she gets five languages common elvish sylvan primordial and deep speech i went a similar direction of like coding is complicated but primordial and deep speech for me nice um so as a um where is it there as as a order of the scribes wizard she can make a special magic quill that doesn't require ink and it just writes in the color you want it to and instead of it taking two hours per spell level to copy a spell down it takes two minutes which is very nice just whip it out the speedy

computation um and then she also gets an awakened spell book which is basically she has a sentient spell book which is horrifying it's and it's called uh it's called biology that's what it that's your biology book from childhood that's absolutely what it is um so she she can use it as a spell casting focus um she can so here's the weirdest one she can if you cast a wizard spell with a spell slot you can temporarily replace its damage type with a type that appears in another spell in your spell book which magically alters the spell's formula for this casting the latter spell must be the same level uh of the spell slot you which is very confusing i don't understand why it's like but i think it's interesting that she's changing things back and forth i think it's neat

i think it works for like programary things yeah that sounds that sounds vaguely like code that sure um and also if you cast a wizard spell as a ritual you can use the spell's normal casting time rather than adding 10 minutes so like basically you get an extra spell slot if it's a ritual casting spell uh you can only do it once for long rest so that's neat for for order the scribes um and then the seeker warlock has a bunch of crazy shit so at first level you get this thing called shielding aurora which is like as a bonus action you create this like whirling aurora of brilliant energy that swirls around you and at the end of your turn you get resistance to all damage or until the end of your next turn sorry you gain resistance to all damage types

and if uh if there's a hostile creature within 10 feet of you it takes radiant damage equal to your warlock level and your charisma modifier which would be 11 points of damage which is pretty cool for just saying that there um and then she also gets astral refuge which means that as an action she can just bit to the astral astral plane um and so she can take like two actions of casting spells that target only you so like basically you can pop over do like buff yourself and do like spell stuff and then come back which i think is neat not terribly uh kind of a kind of a dick move for everybody else in your party but like a full round of like i've got myself protected what are you doing so that's those are the those are the big things you can do that she also gets um

featherfall jump levitate locate object clairvoyance sending arcane eye and locate creature without it like counting against the spells that she already knows as a warlock which is insane and then more nonsense appears because i have i didn't count how many spells i have but it's a ton and i only have five spell slots three of which are first level because i'm a level two wizard so so there's a whole bunch of knowledge and only this much energy to use it which kind of makes sense to me i think that's very interesting i also have nine cantrips so we went with uh let's see good ones mage hand because i think that would be helpful if you were like you're doing math and you need an extra hand to do oh man how cool would that be

you're like go to the chalkboard and you know you're like in a lecture hall in front of a bunch of people and you're for some reason scribbling math with two hands and you're like but wait there's more third hand sprouts out yes that is exactly what i was thinking it would be like i also gave her a true strike because i thought it would be useful for like i'm gonna true strike that math as well as guidance to guide me to better math how you do it but i don't that's what i do i do simple i do simple math very well fractions and i are very good friends i can build things with very simple math anything else no no no that's too much for my my small my small tired brain

um what else did i give her a charm person illusory script identify unseen servant i gave her ray of sickness because i felt bad with her not having anything to protect herself and i was like ray of sickness makes sense because she was sick a lot and she's inflicting it on other people so are you implying that she's just walking around vomiting on people it's the 1800s everything smells terrible i also gave her invisibility tongues suggestion rave and feeble knit for the same reason uh banishment because i thought it felt well with the astral refuge thing dispel magic counter spell hypnotic pattern all all very like support cool

stuff um and then of course i gave her eldritch blast because i can't i can't i literally physically cannot make a warlock without giving them eldritch blast it's not it's not just so you can say eldritch blast exactly because it's fun eldritch blast is fun to say um and then she has also invocations which is uh i gave her book of ancient secrets which so so because of book of ancient secrets and because she's a wizard she got to add like four extra spells to the ones that she wouldn't have like i should i logically should not have three six nine 12 15 18 21 22 23 24 25 i shouldn't have 26 spells at my disposal for five spell slots but here we are that's what you get with a warlock wizard multi-glass uh book of ancient secrets which i was i so if if the if the awakened spell

book is biology book of ancient secrets is her her notes on the article uh i gave her devil sight which gives her sight in any darkness magical or non-magical because why would you stop doing math just because it's dark um eyes of the rune keeper i have to look up up again because my brain forgot to excuse me one moment while i grab my handy dame book hello friend eyes of the rune keeper is something to do with reading i think it's that you can read anything if i'm remembering correct that sounds right you can read all writing yep that's what it is um agonizing blast because charisma added to eldritch blast just so she's so she's at least a little bit playable not she's not terribly playable but if if she was that's maybe a way to help uh and then ascendant

step which allows her to cast levitate on herself about expanding a spell slot just so she can fly like she always wanted to as a kid aw and then her hit points are 35 she has 35 no you got oh you edged out a little bit higher than me that's all you need um yeah and that's pretty much pretty much all of her all of her cool stuff she's like i said not a terribly playable character um but fun fun to build i'm happy hey play smart not hard and if you can't play smart keep playing anyway because it's fun but maybe like a barbarian or something yeah we'll play a barbarian when you inevitably die play barbarian um yeah but that's about it for this week of uh heroes you should know erin my friend thank you for joining me and explaining math things where i failed to thank you

thank you for having me and i'm sorry i didn't know more about Bernoulli numbers that's honestly i the fact that you even had a passing understanding of what they were before looking them up is impressive to me so i i can't judge you i have no idea what Bernoulli's numbers are even now we just talked about it and i'm still like it's numbers that exist in a lot of places cool there you got it you nailed it that's all the balance that's what uh is there anything you would like to plug my friend or talk about before we before we say our goodbyes nope other than that we're on a little bit of a hiatus from releasing ashoka episodes this month but we'll be back roaring soon yes back in back in uh in may um but you can join us every week for lots of other

content and nonsense from us um this friday we're gonna be having a pretty chill little game night with with us we'll be streaming it on twitch we'll be playing some some jackbox games taking a breath taking uh taking a little bit of time to breathe for ourselves and enjoy and enjoy enjoy each other's company and each other's friendship and game times just disclaimer it will not be chill and none of us will be breathing no none of us literally none of us are chill none of us breathe ever um but we have the illusion of it um and then as always on monday watch erin play a video game are you still doing arkham i i missed i finished arkham i finished it i'm sorry i missed it it was okay it was it was hard it was a big the biggest accomplishment of my life

but we're uh we're doing um we're doing assassin's creed three now which is very history focused like the american revolution very neat very come watch me make fun of a bunch of characters in it love it uh yes erin's erin's doing that uh we'll have surge and ironsworn back next week um i believe kayla is joining him um in two weeks i'll be back with another another friend and another historical figure you should know and um fridays we're gonna have a couple one shots we're gonna have a couple children game nights we're gonna see what happens it's gonna be it's gonna be a good time no matter what um and thank you for joining us for heroes you should know i really appreciate y'all being here and hearing about some some nerdy folks um yeah have a good have a good evening

friends take care of yourselves good night bye