The Feeling of Knowing

To err is human. To admit to erring… well, that’s difficult. Like most people, I don’t like the feeling of realizing that I’m wrong. I always think I’m right (I can’t help it!), but I don’t think I’m always right. Past experience confirms that I do err; it’s consistent but I can’t predict when it will happen. And I feel I’m right… right up to the moment that I’m proven wrong.

 

The subject of Wrong-ology is taken up by Kathryn Schulz in her book, Being Wrong. Our minds are funny things and the way we learn and remember things is much more complex and mysterious than we imagine. We think, as Plato suggested, that memory works like a wax tablet: “Everything you experience, from your own thoughts and sensory impressions to interactions with others, creates an imprint in that wax… an unchanging mental replica of the events of the past, captured at the moment they occurred.” This may contribute to that feeling of knowing, even when in gross error.

 

As a professor, I’m well practiced at professing. Students think you’re more knowledgeable and know what you’re talking about when you present the material confidently. That’s not hard to do because I feel that I know the material. Even when I don’t know it as well as I should, I still present it confidently. Fake it till you make it. Did I do so when I first started teaching? Was I more diffident back then? Honestly, I don’t remember. I’ve learned not to trust my memory even if I feel I can visualize it in my mind’s eye. My spouse provides me a very useful signal when I might be professing with confidence about something I know little about; she says: “You say that so confidently”. That gets me to chuckle, stop, check, and think.

 

Schulz discusses medical cases of brain issues where patients confidently describe or explain something with no correspondence to actual reality. And they seemingly believe it. This is known as confabulation. Here’s how Schulz describes it: “Imagine, by way of analogy, that each of us possesses an inner writer and an inner fact-checker. As soon as the writer begins devising a story, the fact-checker gets busy comparing it with the input from our senses, checking it against our memory, examining it for internal consistencies, thinking through our database of facts about the world, and, once we utter it, gauging other people’s reactions to assess its credibility… When the fact-checker falls asleep on the job, however, our theories about the world can become wholly unmoored from reality. All of us have experienced this, because the one time our fact-checkers reliably fall asleep is when we do, too. Think about dreams again for a moment, and about how weird even just the averagely weird ones can be… Now, two bizarre things are going on here. The first is that your brain is generating representations of the world that are only lightly tethered to the real, or even to the possible. The second is that you are completely untroubled by this fact.”

 

Being surprised is a good wake-up call to discovering error. You’d think that by now I would have gotten used to being surprised every time I err. But I am surprised every single time. Consistently, yet unpredictable in when it will happen. I’m heartened when Schulz writes that saying “I don’t know” is a good sign of brain function because in some forms of dementia, the fact-checker falls asleep and confabulation ensues. It also turns out that being confabulatory is part of how the human brain works. It’s an engine, possibly the engine, of creativity and imagination. I can think about and imagine things that are not real. I can make mental models of things that are abstract or invisible (which I must do frequently in thinking about chemistry). Our minds have adapted to come up with quick instinctive solutions, not always thought through, that do serve us well on many an occasion. The feeling of knowing allows us to act quickly when needed.

 

When grading exams, I still get surprised by the occasional confabulatory explanations of students. A student who has no idea what’s going on is yet able to come up with a fantastical story involving throwing together chemistry concepts completely untethered to reality. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s interesting for me to read these “answers” and try to imagine how a student came up with them. I wonder if that student had the confident feeling of knowing. But actually didn’t. Not knowing what you don’t know isn’t a great situation to be in.

 

Reading Being Wrong has made me a little quicker to say “I was wrong” in my classes when I make a mistake on the board and it is pointed out by a student. I apologize to the class, then thank the student for paying attention and being brave enough to tell me so that I don’t mislead the class any further. While it doesn’t happen often, I feel that as I age it has ticked up in frequency. I’m not as sharp as I used to be, perhaps. Or maybe I am less well prepared because I’m overconfident in the feeling of knowing, having taught the subject matter multiple times over a couple of decades. But if I actually learn something from my errors, that’s a good thing!

Rare Earth: P and N

The idea that Planet Earth is rare and special for being able to host life has a very readable book-length argument, Rare Earth by Brownlee and Ward. Technically it argues why complex life is rare, while simpler life may be more achievable over a broader range of conditions. Given that we only have a sample size of one for life-harboring planets, who knows if life proliferates beyond our star? You can plug a range of numbers into the Drake equation to convince yourself either way.

 

The idea that Earth sits in a Goldilocks habitable zone most often refers to whether water exists as a liquid on the surface of a planet. This assumes that H₂O is crucial to life as a liquid, and that other liquids (ammonia, hydrocarbons, formamide) may not have the same versatility. It’s hard to say otherwise with a sample size of one.  We also assume that carbon-based molecules are crucial for life, which is reasonable from a chemical point of view (diversity, bond energies, or as a carrier). That takes care of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. What about nitrogen and phosphorus?

 

The idea that our rare Earth may be rarer than we previously thought comes from a paper published last month in Nature Astronomy (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-026-02775-z). It examines core formation of rocky planets and estimates the availability of nitrogen and phosphorus under different conditions. Things that are important are the relative redox state of the mantle. Our planet apparently sits in a zone that optimizes decent amounts of N and P (although much less abundant than C, H, O). It’s a tricky balance. If the redox situation is too reducing, availability of P plummets; too oxidizing and N might be lost to outer space by significant degassing. Simulated origin-of-life chemistry in the lab has always worked better under reducing conditions. Thus, the authors conclude: “there is a plausible case to make that only moderately oxidizing planets have both sufficient mantle P and sufficient reducing power to sustain prebiotic chemistry and then life”.

 

Why do we need N? Amino acids. Catalysts. Chemical versatility. We would not have fine-tuning of the thermodynamics and kinetics of (bio)chemical reactions without nitrogen. Why do we need P? I’m not sure. Arguments can be made for its crucial role in nucleic acids (Westheimer’s famous paper). But it’s possible some other backbone might work. Bioenergetic currency relies on phosphates today, but it’s possible that sulfur could have played the early role of energy transduction. Sulfate bacteria are also fierce competitors. I’d be very curious what is known about sulfur availability during planetary formation. We know that outgassing of volcanoes on the early Earth is a source. And I’m also clearly biased because I have a current research grant to study the role of sulfur in origins-of-life chemistry.

 

Final tidbit of the paper that I enjoyed: the authors use oxygen fugacity as their redox measure. When I teach P-Chem, I try to pepper in examples of why the math-and-models are useful. Fugacity is one of those bewildering topics to students, because the math looks like a merry-go-round and having a hypothetical reference state seems strange. Now I can point to another example why learning about fugacity is useful and interesting. The paper makes reference to Mars and other exoplanets in the search for life in the universe.

Second Week: Spring 2026 Edition

I forgot to write last Fall’s First Week edition (so here’s the one from 2024), probably because I was super-busy teaching two sections of G-Chem 1 and one section of Biochem 1. I’m not teaching any Honors section this academic year so last semester I had around 100 students across my three courses. We’re also using a new textbook and online homework system for G-Chem, and it was just my second time teaching Biochem. All in all, more prep work than usual. This semester, I’m teaching one section of G-Chem 2 and one section of P-Chem 2 with around 60 students across both courses. I’m now used to the G-Chem online homework system, and I like the new textbook. This, the semester feels lighter from a workload standpoint. Hurrah!

 

But I was still very busy last week because of the possibility of a government shutdown here in the U.S. (which turned out to be mercifully short, thankfully). I decided to write up my annual report for my current federal research grant and submit it about a month earlier than usual, in case the government shut down. There was some confusion about whether an administrative request that I sent via webform went through because the website was apparently having problems, but eventually some back-and-forth emails confirmed that they received my request and my report. And hence today’s post is happening at the end of Week 2 rather than Week 1 of the semester.

 

After the long winter break, I’ve been enjoying interacting with students in the classroom, in my office, or in the hallways or atrium of my building. I’ve been making an extra effort not to be overly quick or efficient in my interactions, and hopefully students feel I’m not rushing them when they have questions. We’ll see how that shakes out the rest of the semester. I feel I have more energy even though my first class starts at 8am (instead of 9am last semester), maybe because of the lighter load and maybe because I just feel freer. The first week of class I was still struggling with timing in my G-Chem class because I had rearranged the material to match the new textbook. This week I feel I did a much better job without rushing in the last 5-10 minutes of class. I’m not making many changes to the first eight weeks of my P-Chem class so that has been going smoothly timing-wise. (I will be making some changes to the latter half.)

 

I also feel I have time for research this semester! Last semester, I felt that I hardly made any progress on my own projects. I still helped my research students make progress in their projects, but didn’t have much time for my own. This semester, however, I’ve been getting in 5-10 hours of research or writing (working on a paper) per week, which has been very nice! One of my summer 2025 research students who continued working with me last semester is also a very capable writer so I invited her to write the first draft of the research paper featuring her work. The carrot is she gets to be first author! I have revised much of the text, but kept the overall flow intact. She also made all the Figures and Tables. (For many other papers, I make the Figures since I feel they look nicer and more consistent in size/shape, but this student is exceptional and detail-oriented.)

 

I’m not taking on any new service activities because over winter break, I found out that my sabbatical application for AY26-27 was approved! This means fewer committee meetings and more time this semester, probably contributing to my feeling freer! I’ve also decided to try presenting my work digitally rather than in-person at the upcoming American Chemical Society national conference, so I don’t need to block off travel time. More time freed up! I am reading a little more to try to fine-tune a plan for my upcoming sabbatical. There are so many interesting things to explore. Okay, that’s the end of Week 2, Spring 2026 edition. It may be my last such post as I’ve been reducing my blogging activities.

Words and Pictures

I’d read several papers by Richard Mayer on the dual-coding model: Learners have two channels for processing incoming information, verbal and visual. Over time, this was combined with insights from cognitive load theory and learning more about the brain and how memory works. Mayer now calls it the cognitive theory of multimedia learning (CTML) and I read a recent review that goes through the history of how they got there and where to next. The citation is Educational Psychology Review (2024) 36:8, DOI: 10.1007/s10648-023-09842-1. I very much enjoyed the personal insights the author shared about his research journey. Each heading is listed in the bullet points below followed by my thoughts.

 

1. Theory Building Depends on Intellectual Curiosity. Mayer became very curious about how to improve teaching for “transfer” – being able to apply something you’ve learned usefully to a new situation. He did this by first narrowing the issue to the effects of multimedia. I am curious about a lot of things, but I haven’t had the discipline to really narrow my focus, and as a result I remain a dilettante on a broad range of topics. As a result, I haven’t made significant theoretical contributions in my field even though I’ve learned a number of interesting things about a number of interesting systems I’ve studied. It seems I scratch the surface, pick the low hanging fruit, and move on. Maybe I need to change my approach.

 

2. Theory Building is Grounded in Old Ideas. Mayer discusses his reading of classic works in his field. I find reading the historical underpinnings of my research and teaching very enjoyable from a learning point of view. I hadn’t thought much about building new theory off the old ideas in a systematic way. Something for me to consider.

 

3. Theory Building is Not a Straight, Planned-Out path. Mayer relates how he usefully breaks down interesting questions into “shorter 2- or 3-year plans targeted on specific research questions”. This led him to the multimedia principle: “people learn better from words and pictures than from words alone”. I’ve known about this, and it’s common in the natural sciences, to have lots of pictures. I’ve also learned that the pictures I project on the screen should not be cluttered with text as I verbalize my way through an explanation (Mayer’s coherence principle). After doing so, I then write things on the board for students to have good notes, at least in G-Chem. (I’m worse at it in upper division classes.) Mayer also writes about pursuing fruitful paths; I also do this research-wise but I likely move too quickly away from something that looks like it would take more work. I’m lazy.

 

4 & 5. Theory Building is an Engineering Problem [and] an Iterative Process Involving the Persistent Interplay Between Research and Theory. By this Mayer means that it requires tinkering, to make something work better, and going through a development cycle where theory leads to research experiments, the results of which feed back into theory. Mayer discusses fostering generative processing: “motivating the learner to actively engage with the material”. This is a weak area for me. I’ve relied on my enthusiasm for my subject area (which students recognize and comment positively on) but this is likely not enough. My activities mostly require the students to do analysis, but few of them ask the students to be generative. This needs more work on my part.

 

6. Theory Building Depends on Persistence in Collecting New Research Evidence. Sounds obvious, but this requires hard work which is not my strong suit.

 

7. Theory Building is a Team Activity. The days of the lone theorist making substantial novel discoveries are long gone. A good and fruitful collaboration requires work to sustain it, and since I’ve already admitted I’m lazy, my collaborations tend to be short-term and specific, and not dedicated to theory building in particular. Maybe I need to change that.

 

In the middle section of his article, Mayer discusses his “inching towards a visual representation of the theory”. This is very appropriate given what he studies. He starts with simple flowcharts that slowly build up to what has become a compact and useful picture. Here’s Figure 8 from this article. You’ll have to read his article to get all the details, but once you know what each of the boxes and arrows represent, it summarizes the theory in a single uncluttered visual representation. 

 

There’s also a useful Table with his fifteen principles of multimedia instructional design along with their effect sizes from experiments. I already follow some of these, given my prior immersion into cognitive load theory. Here are some that I hadn’t thought about much or haven’t incorporated yet.

·      Presenting material in user-paced segments rather than a continuous unit. I don’t do this well and I need to improve how I cue different segments in class.

·      Sometimes I assume students know definitions and terminology that they don’t and/or present them in an order that confuses them.

·      Apparently in multimedia, using a conversational style works better than a formal style. I don’t know where I am on this spectrum and should reflect more on this.

·      If you’re onscreen as an instructor, high embodiment helps. I take this to mean that being a disembodied voice talking though slides is inferior. In our pandemic all-on-Zoom year, my camera showed me writing on a large white board, and I would sometimes step out of frame so that more of the board would be visible. At some point we’ll have another pandemic and I’ll have to think about this.

·      Generative learning activities help. I mentioned this above; I should design more of these.

While I don’t use 3D immersive virtual reality, apparently studies show that students don’t necessarily learn better compared to a corresponding 2D screen presentation. The effect size of this was small.

 

I have a sabbatical coming up that will allow me to think more deeply about some of these issues. A third of my sabbatical proposal had to do with pedagogy but mostly related to adapting machine learning and data science. And there were a whole bunch of other things in my proposal which are dilettantish, so maybe what I should be considering is how to narrow what I’d like to accomplish into specific questions and design specific activities ahead of time instead of my ad hoc muddle-through approach. But meanwhile I should look over my upcoming class materials and think about the words and pictures and whether I can improve optimizing student learning.

Are you You?

Getting a new phone this month meant moving from thumb authentication to face authentication. It seems to work pretty seamlessly when I pick up my phone – the devices are getting smarter. Also, this month I’ve noticed Gmail regularly Captcha-asking for additional authentication to prove I’m not a bot. Is agentic A.I. causing more issues? I don’t know. But it made me think about how verifying my identity has changed over my lifetime.

 

Everything was done manually when I was young. No computers or internet. I don’t remember how I was verified when I first entered primary school. How did the school and teachers know I was not an impostor? In my most recent videochat with my mother (a former schoolteacher, long retired), I asked her and she told me about the systems they would use. My first major verification that I vaguely recall was the primary school national exams. Apparently, the government sent us letters with an entry slip and a unique number; and this allowed me to take my exams where I think I had to carefully write the unique number on all my exam papers. I vaguely remember teachers drilling us to do this. And while I don’t recall exactly, I think our own teachers were also the ones who verified us because we’d been in their classes for a whole year.

 

After the age of twelve, when I had secondary school examinations, we all had to bring in our identity cards, and place them on the corner of our desks for each exam. Each of us had a specific desk that had our name on it, and the invigilators who were not our teachers, walked around (clipboard in hand) to verify each of us via the identity cards. I still experience this process when I’m at the airport, visiting the bank in person, checking in to a hotel, picking up my badge at a conference, or any other situation where I need to verify who I am because the verifiers don’t know me and wouldn’t recognize my face. If you lived in a small village and never had to leave, everyone knows everyone and verification is easy. But in an era of urbanization, global travel, and not knowing your neighbors, verification becomes trickier.

 

The age of the internet has made authentication even more challenging. Are you who you say you are? How does the system know? There are logins, passwords, two-factor authentications, additional questions for information unique to you, and now voice and face verification. These are going to get more stringent as A.I. makes it easier to “fake” more characteristics. We’ll be increasingly up the wazoo in verification.

 

“Authenticating” is the title of the second chapter in Brian Christian’s The Most Human Human which details his experience as a confederate in an annual Turing Test competition. He’s trying to prove he’s the human against an A.I. competitor. The chapter opens with a story about a man with phonagnosia. He cannot recognize anyone’s voice and growing up had assumed his voice was distinctive because everyone else recognized his voice but he couldn’t recognize anyone else’s which made phone calls an interesting case of guess-the-identity for him. He couldn’t voice-verify. In another vignette, someone easily breaks into the email account of a public figure simply by selecting “I forgot my password” and then verifying information based on internet searches.

 

The meat of this book chapter, however, is about what might be unique between a human conversationalist and a chatbot. Many of the successful chatbots in the early competitions were able to steer the conversation to avoid the tricky out-of-book situation, which is a reasonably strategy when the conversations are timed in a speed-dating like format. Successful bots typically had a single programmer devoted to developing the bot’s personality so that it would seem like a single coherent individual. The bot felt like a singular You. Today’s A.I. large language models however were developed with the opposite philosophy: use weighted statistics from millions of disembodied conversations. Apparently, this is why A.I. translators are weak on long literary novels which require a singular coherent voice throughout, but do just fine on shorter snippets.

 

When you’re conversing with a chatbot today, you’re conversing with a multitude of voices averaged into a response. Your interlocutor is Legion for they are many. They contain multitudes. You are no longer talking to an individual but a host of ghosts. I’ve never had an extended conversation with a chatbot (I have better things to do with my time), and my queries have usually been specific and chemistry-related; I dabble in exploring if chatbots can help my students gain a better understanding of chemistry. So I don’t personally know if I would ever feel that a chatbot feels like a friendly human; I know some of my students do enjoy their chatbot chats. And it may be that sufficient familiarity and multiple chats provides its own authentication, for better or worse, now that chatbots can access their memory store of their personal conversation from you and draw from it. I suppose this is what Personalization is all about. At some point the chatbot might feel like a You. But that’s because of you.

Overly Efficient

I was forced to get a new phone; the old one started to precipitously decline and would randomly restart. I’m a creature of habit and I’m easily bewildered by new technology (shocking for a computational chemist, I know!); I’ve only owned two smartphones in thirteen years (an iPhone5 and a first-generation SE). To minimize having to switch again in the next five years, I decided on an iPhone17. I was dreading making the switch.

 

The Apple store at my local mall was quite busy when I arrived; eventually someone was assigned to help me. I said I was interested in getting a new phone. The employee wanted to know which model, assumed I knew all the pros and cons, was curt in her responses, and I felt rushed through the process. I was nervous about moving data from my old phone to my new one, but was told it would be easy and I should “just follow the prompts”. A new phone was given to me in its box, I tapped my credit card, and I was done. The employee moved on to the next customer. Purchase completed, but anxiety heightened.

 

I stopped by the T-Mobile store for help getting the SIM and info in my old phone transferred to the new one. There were no other customers at the store, and the employee was relaxed and friendly. I said I was feeling anxious about the challenge given my old phone had a very old OS which suggested a more arduous process. But the employee helped me through the steps, which turned out to be short and easy. The phones, placed next to each other, did their info-sync dance. He then patiently showed me some basic moves for my new phone (when to use buttons and how to swipe for different options). He empathized with the challenge of switching to a new outlay, and answered my very basic questions without judgment of my ignorance. It was a very positive experience and reduced my anxiety substantially.

 

The epiphany I had after these two contrasting customer experiences is that I want my students to experience the second one when they visit me in office hours. However, more often than is warranted, they get the first one instead. The problem is me; I’m overly efficient, and sometimes the student feels rushed through a process. If the student was feeling anxious by their ignorance, I haven’t allayed the student’s (usually unspoken) concern. I expect a student to have done some background work and have their questions ready, and I answer them efficiently, especially if there is more than one student in my office. I ping-pong amongst the students so they get their answers efficiently while making sure no one student has to wait long in between. Students have busy lives, many busier than mine, and I don’t want them to experience long wait times if they visit. If there’s only one student in my office, I don’t have to ping-pong but I do multitask and work on something else in between their questions, which I suppose is me trying to be efficient with my own time. But from their point of view, the vibe I’m giving out might well be “I’m a busy person, so get on with it.” Overly efficient.

 

In my student evaluations, I get the occasional comment from a student that feels intimidated about asking questions in office hours and feels I was being dismissive in my answers. It’s true I expect the student to come into office prepared with their questions after working through the material; that’s something they should learn to do as they prepare for the working world. I also have a philosophy of not spoon-feeding; I sometimes respond with a question or ask a student to look at their notes to see the definitions or examples we covered in class. I want the student to understand that they have to put in the time and work to chew over what we’ve covered and not just say “I didn’t understand anything in class” and try to get me to go over it all again a second time. The vibe I’m giving off? Like the Apple employee. Quick, curt, efficient, and expected me to know what I was looking for before I came in.

 

Not all students feel this way. Some like the way I do things and say so in the student evaluations. They felt their questions were answered, that I was helpful in office hours, and felt that I cared that they were successful in the class. They said I was accessible, even when other students were in my office. But these are likely the students who were not struggling excessively with the material, had a reasonably good background coming into class, and were stronger academically. They liked the depth, my varied explanations, and felt that the way I organized the class set them up for success. In contrast, the students who had negative experiences comment that I go over the basics too quickly, I’m not good at teaching beginners, and that I assume prior knowledge they don’t have. How I felt at the Apple store likely mirrors how some of them were feeling. So while I have good reasons for the way I structure my class and office hours, my recent customer service epiphany tells me that I need to make some changes so that the anxious students who feel they are clueless in class feel more welcome to ask questions and feel like they were actually aided.

 

My mantra to myself this semester is “don’t be overly efficient”. When you’re old and set in your ways, it’s harder to change. But that’s not an excuse; rather it’s a challenge I need to overcome. I know that I will revert to my efficiency (hopefully not too often) during office hour visits or during my interactions in class, but I need to keep making the effort to help the struggling students feel welcome. They’re the ones that need the most help, and if they’re not coming to my office, that’s a problem and I’m not helping them. I don’t need to be overly efficient with my own time, and maybe my time-log (which was likely excellent to have in my first several years as a professor) has slowly compounded my overly efficient behavior. I’ve been successful partly because I was efficient, and I want students to learn to be efficient in managing their time and learning. But more importantly, they are students, and still learning. I need to make accommodations and at least not give out an “impatient” vibe in my interactions with them. I think I’m being efficient. They think I’m impatient and that they’re not worth my time. I need to work on this because the whole reason I became a professor at a liberal arts college (and not a research-intensive university) is because I want to spend most of my time teaching students.

 

I tell students that office hours (I’ve called them “Drop-in hours” for the last five years) are my favorite time in my workday. It’s when I feel I actually help them individually because it’s harder to do so in the classroom with many students. I tell them I look forward to seeing them, but it’s clear some don’t believe me and my over-efficiency vibe dissuades them. I feel that fewer students come to my office in the age of A.I., where a friendly chatbot is always there to answer their questions as many times as necessary and makes them feel good while doing so. I’m no chatbot; I should be better than a chatbot (I’m certainly more accurate and I actually care about their learning as a human being). My goal this semester is for more students to feel that I am accessible, especially the ones that should be coming to my office to ask questions. Maybe my new phone can be a visible reminder to be more like the helpful T-Mobile employee and not be overly efficient.

ADOM Update

Nine months later, I’m still playing Ancient Domains of Mystery (ADOM). The character I was playing back when I blogged about ADOM did win, but with plenty of “scum saving” in between. It means that if my character died or did something particularly stupid, I simply restarted at the last save. While that’s not in the spirit of ADOM’s permadeath setup, I felt it was a good way to learn more of the game.

 

After the success of the hurthling archer (level 41), and subsequently losing several other characters in early deaths, my second character to win was a drakeling barbarian (level 35, 96 days in the Drakalor chain). There was also a little scum-saving so I could learn to deal with the strange effects of being cold-blooded. This made the Tower of Eternal Flames quest exciting and nail-biting and the final level was a little harder because my character needed to recover from the cold in the penultimate level. For both these wins, I avoided big boss Fistanarius, used a magic map, a wand of digging, and a wand of destruction on the levers. Both normal endings; I’ve never done an ultra-ending.

 

At this point, I decided I will no longer scum-save even if I have a promising character that makes it to the mid or late game. And many don’t. The next character who almost won, a human necromancer (level 39), died fighting Fistanarius. It was very close and I should have healed but thought I could withstand one more blow and Fistanarius was on his last legs. Then there was the gnome assassin (level 37), who got killed by the emperor moloch – I was doing well on the Filk quest up to that point. My third win, and my first with no scum-saving was a gnome priest (level 39); this is also my highest score at 14,747,264 points. Then there were two deaths (level 27 and level 31 characters) to Katharamandus, the stone dragon. I hadn’t gauged the difficulty because my hurthling archer didn’t have too much trouble completing the Rolf quest. That’s the one and only time I finished what Rolf asked.

 

I had my fourth win this weekend, with a little scum-saving because I had a dwarf chaos knight, which meant a very different game. I had lost several chaos knights in the early game, and when this one made it to the mid-game, I wanted to keep going. I fed the Demented Ratling six artifacts, but had hardly any wild boar encounters and no boar head so I gave up on that quest and decided it would be okay to finish as a most stupid follower of chaos. My character was very powerful (level 40) and I’ve never gotten so many artifacts. I easily beat molochs and balors on the final level. Because the strategy was different, I learned a lot in this last game.

 

At this point I’ve played 60+ characters, always randomly generated by Fate. Interestingly, of the top eight high scores (the finishers and the ones who made it to the mid-game), seven were female including all four finishers. Not sure why; a possibility is that I pay more attention to the Appearance stat and maybe my characters saw less corruption overall. I created my next character on New Year’s Eve, my first on a special day. Fate chose a male gnome wizard; he’s a bit boozy but maybe he’ll survive. And maybe he’ll thrive.