While server-side physical dice is a late stage capitalism wet dream still relegated to science fiction, I have seen a bunch of different products attempting to sell me a digital D20. One of them would light up when rolled and flash red on a low roll and play a jingle when landing on a twenty. Another would connect to an app that would… display the result of the roll on your phone. Not quite as exciting, but technically impressive.

My question is always how do you make sure the die is fair with all those electronic bits in it? Teeny lithium batteries, wireless charging coils, and a PCB with ICs powering LEDs all have wildly varying densities. Have you seen the crazy bananas things they do to keep a bowling ball balanced? And I’m to believe that these guys on Kickstarter with the fancy graphic designers have figured it out at a miniature scale where the error margins are so low it would make NASA engineers double-check the math?

Semi-related tangent, I once chipped the edge a D4 I liked a lot so I set out to see if it was still fair or not. Did a hundred trials and had trouble telling, so I looked it up and statistically it takes tens of thousands of rolls to prove a D4 is fair. And it takes exponentially more to do the same for a die with five times as many faces at roughly the same radius. I don’t have the dozens of hours to setup the image recognition rig and robot arm to compensate for the fact that I don’t have the hundreds to roll dice over and over again.

Well at least until it’s the Tarrasque’s turn. Then your minute’s up.

Ja.

]]> https://www.picklezombie.com/2026/06/07/it-dices-and-uh-dices-and-thats-it/feed/ 0 https://www.picklezombie.com/2026/06/07/yahtzee/ https://www.picklezombie.com/2026/06/07/yahtzee/#comments Mon, 08 Jun 2026 03:21:14 +0000 https://www.picklezombie.com/?p=5410

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Nope.

Now, the threat here might seem akin to a minefield, where the field is the portion of the mattress where I sleep and the mines are tiny shards of ABS plastic with sharp corners. But the reality was a brick-built statuette of a praying mantis standing just beside the pillow where my shoulders would go. An insect famous, among other things, for eating her mate after copulation.

Her ways are subtle and unsettling.

I kind of feel for Lennon in this one. I can’t count the number of times my wife has been doing her delicious sorcery in the kitchen and dispatched me to fetch some simple thing she was missing. Like flour. And I manage to return with too much of the wrong kind of flour that I paid way too much for. She guesses she can use the entirely wrong butter I got with it.

But the muffins. Mmm.