So there I was, trying to watch a simple video about how Huns are Huns, even on Black Forest, where they have a reputation for being a weaker civilization. In a private browsing window where the only other video I had watched was the end of another Rage Forest game. And what did YouTube decide I wanted to watch, and recommend to me? This.
Yesterday I had this thought,
similarity of YouTube algorithm optimization to planned obsolescence or whatever, products made at low quality so they need to be replaced. A video that changes your life, no need to watch more videos: channel dies.
The episode from Person of Interest, and the dialogue, made me think about that line from Dark Lord of Derkholm (p76):
"It's no fun to have to think of yourself as a murderer. . . . A bit like being mad, except that you're sane, I've always thought. So what stopped you?" He was shocked to hear himself sounding truly regretful as he asked this question.
I'm not completely blameless. If someone says, "killing people is always wrong and murderers are bad", I point to the example of An Jung-geun (안중근) who killed Japanese politician Itou Hirobumi.
About this video, which I did not watch, naturally: people are told when they are young that killing people is wrong. The US is 69% Christian (notwithstanding a video that, naturally, I didn't watch, with the title "What's the Difference Between Christians & Protestants?"), with other religions being only 4%, so it's fair to say that basically everyone in the US has heard of the ten commandments. One of which is popularly translated as, "Thou shalt not kill."
It seems like there are lot of people who think that this commandment is a lie for children.
Along with the comments of that video, many of which praise people who killed others 'for a cause', I also found Assassination of Empress Myeongseong while looking for the name of the Korean person I mentioned above. "The defendants were acquitted of all charges, despite the court acknowledging that the defendants had conspired to commit murder." And the Ten Commandments article links in its lead to the Galician peasant uprising of 1846, in which "peasants killed about 1,000 nobles" but otherwise is so non-notable that I'm not even bothering to understand its relevance to religion. I think The Centurion's Empire by Sean McMullen had a good depiction of violence against nobles at a particular moment in history; a dramaticized account that, by describing the manner of death of fictional persons in more detail than we can know of any real person who died so long ago, makes those people more than a statistic.
Coincidentally, the "lie for children" article mentions Terry Pratchett. I never read The Science of Discworld because it wasn't available at my library. Another thing I thought of on this topic was the ending of Pratchett's novel, Night Watch.
But I don't want to say exactly why I thought of it, because of spoilers. Also, the start of the book was very unrealistic: flowers remind the main character what day it was, and he says that he always forgets every year, but the flowers would have been there the previous day as well. The audience doesn't experience that previous day. But it happened. (And I'm sure that there were many elements of the book that I didn't appreciate, because I never read Les Misérables.)
Wikipedia says about not killing that "Eliezer Segal observes that the Septuagint uses the term harag, and that Augustine of Hippo recognized that this did not extend to wars or capital punishment." I'm pretty sure that, with all the wars described in what's known in Christianity as the Old Testament, that whoever recorded this commandment did not think it was a ban on wars. But I do think that they did not mean, "it's bad to kill someone unless they're racist".
To summarize, a lot of people think that there are hidden rules for behavior, that even justify killing other people. What exactly these hidden rules are is not known, because they are hidden. And people justify attitudes that rely on these hidden rules, instead of thinking that this is insane and they should fix the problems that result in hidden rules for morality. (I already linked the scene from Gegon's Clash of the Ovski that used a relevant song, I won't link it again.)
It seems likely that Greta will post something on Instagram before Autumn's birthday. Acting on the dubious assumption that it won't cause harm if information is revealed: it seems I am procrastinating by waiting until Greta posts something on Instagram, before I watch Pey's videos and check your Twitch and YouTube accounts for what I assume will be the final time.
I have watched the first two hours. The way that Hera uses "unc" to refer to older males, just like your friend used it to refer to himself upon reaching 30 years of age. I think this is an example of a good prejudice. People don't like to be seen as old, and the use of "unc" forces people to acknowledge their age and strive to have a life where they will not be embarrassed to be called "unc" when it happens.
Notably, someone who acknowledges their age will probably put more focus on having children. Muslims have higher fertility than the average; both Hera (who was fasting during these games, due to Ramadan) and your friend are Muslim, and I'm guessing the use of "unc" is common for English-speaking Muslims as I have not heard other streamers use the term. I think its use might be both a cause, and an effect, of higher fertility: an effect because if everyone has large families, then many people will have uncles.
Despite the use of "uncle" and "aunt" also being somewhat common in Korea and China to refer to unrelated older people, I think it's a little different. People still usually don't like to be reminded of their age, as seen with prank videos where younger females are called auntie or younger males are called uncle. Currently, China and southern Korea have much lower fertility rates (1.0 and 0.72) than countries like Saudi Arabia (2.28), Iran (1.5), Morocco (2.23), or Lebanon (2.24, population 65% Muslim). So people have more actual uncles and aunts, and therefore more people with actual nephews or nieces. An actual nephew or niece cannot cause offense by calling their aunt or uncle by that title, so it's more acceptable on the Internet or in conversation to refer to a male as "unc" based solely on his age. There is a higher probability that a niece or nephew of that male already does this, compared to China or Korea.
About the actual game and gameplay. I feel like when I linked a gameplay video (featuring Gabi) a few days ago, and you posted an unrelated TikTok video, it indicated a lack of interest in the game. So why do people play games at all? Etc.
"A game should be fun for the first hour that you play it." Why would people ever disagree with this statement? (Edit: "because a new player is bad and should be unhappy about being bad at the game".) After Hera made a video a few days ago about a "new overpowered strategy that has no counter", I looked up one of his opponents who quit about four minutes into the game (~140 seconds of real time, since game runs at 1.7x). That player and basically everyone they played against had thousands of games played, at about 1800 rating. (I also saw that the website shows campaign progress for players, and the few players I checked had done almost none of the campaigns despite thousands of multiplayer games, so it would be interesting to investigate more about this. And I found one player who had quit about five games in a row a minute in, apparently in order to lose rating and be matched against easier opponents.)
Someone with thousands of games played is obviously not really in the learning phase. They can name every standard technology, building, and unit in the game. There is, in other words, a high probability that they have forgotten what it was like to learn to play, and they might not have any interest in changes which are designed to help people to have fun "during the first hour that they play the game, after installing it".
Before this showmatch, there were some jokes that Hera might be playing against some people who had literally just installed the game. One of the original players decided not to play, and he might have been in that category of "literally hasn't played at all", but it seemed that, to Hera's surprise given that most of his opponents hadn't been practicing in the preceding weeks, they were all well past the initial stage of learning game mechanics and units.
So, spoilers, although a poll in chat had a minority of people saying that Hera would win the first game, he lost and it wasn't close.
Relevance to my suggestions:
Free-for-all placement matches, where it doesn't matter as much whether you're spending a lot of time reading descriptions or tooltips, would make the first hour of play more fun.
Just controlling a few units would be a lot more interesting to someone who is participating in a match like this and playing AoE2 for the very first time (and for new viewers), compared to controlling an empire. Like, it could be 1v3 for the number of empires, but the larger team could have an extra four players who each only control a few units. Or the game could allow for even more players, like up to 12, if they share player numbers. So 11 players sharing three empires, or one empire with three players and two with four players. The starting number of units and town centers would be more similar than in a 1v7, but the larger team would still have an advantage in the number of people pressing buttons.
Then, basically, instead of the new player being stuck in Feudal age making 10 spearmen against a flood of 40 fully-upgraded paladins, they could control units that are equally as strong as what their opponent is making, just a few of them at a time. Since I recently watched The Fellowship of the Ring, I just think of that. Something that's so old that it was from before YouTube, so it was made as a gif animated image:
There was that post from Roger Ebert, "Video games can never be art." The original had thousands of comments when I also commented on it in 2011; these comments might be visible on the Internet Archive. I can't remember what my comment said anymore, but the whole view of 'art' being 'the <appropriate verb> of new goals'. If you look at AoE2, you might think that the goal is just to win. But what if you are limited to controlling specific units, with no easy way to switch to other units? Then you can easily end up acquiring the goal, "keep these units alive", which can conflict with the goal of winning the game. Like, one of my suggestions is that you wouldn't be able to execute the units. Executing units that are about to be converted by an enemy monk is common, so not being able to do this is a disadvantage (while also being a way to prevent easily switching the units that one controls).
So it can allow people, both players and viewers, to think about the game in a different way. Basically, roleplaying the units they control, which starts with thinking about what someone in a certain situation would do, and 'staying alive' is a goal that almost everyone who is still alive has.
From a competitive standpoint, focusing on a few units also allows players to see possibilities that they currently do not see. Simplified, a lot of this is "use walls to prevent units from being killed by other units".
But why care about Age of Empires II specifically, whether it's controlling an entire empire or just a few units? Well, I'm just saying, again, that games that focus on guns are boring. (AoE2 has some units with guns, but most of the time during gameplay they aren't available, and the player has zero influence on whether a gun that is fired hits its target, no aiming.) When I watched ExtraEmily play Valorant during the streamer tournament, there was a moment when she started laughing incredibly hard, to the point that she could no longer play, when she saw that Esfand had been given the same instructions that she had — to stay in one place and shoot anyone who came near. Despite that she was completely new to the game and would probably never play it again after the tournament, she found someone who was apparently just as new, and just as bad at the game.
Some games are mainly decorative. To players who like these games, a main attraction is probably that you can't lose. To players who dislike them, not being able to lose is probably a negative point. In "Why economists are wrong", I intended to write about how "confidence in one's actions is essential for spiritual and psychological health, requires both freedom of choice and a way to measure progress." A game in which one cannot lose does not provide any feedback about how well one can solve problems, or whether one's ability to do so has deteriorated.
Hera's gameplay errors:
Now the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand. Thus do many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat: how much more no calculation at all! It is by attention to this point that I can foresee who is likely to win or lose.
The Art of War, I.26. Villagers attacking military units: a villager kills a militia in 14 hits, or 28 sec. Militia costs 70 resources, which takes ~210 villager-seconds to gather. If seven players each devote seven villager to gathering the resources for militia, they will each train one militia every 30 sec (training time is 21 sec). If those militia stand passively without attacking, then Hera could kill those seven militia using seven villagers in 28 sec.
It is, in other words, barely effective to attack passive militia when 1v7. The math is similar or even worse with other units. The game featured Roman men-at-arms, who if they had armor upgrade, were taking just 2 damage per arrow from archers, so they would die in 46 sec. (And also obviously worse if each militia kills 0.3 or even 0.1 villagers.)
Basically, despite all the 1v3 and 1v4 games that Hera has played, he was still doing things that 'win' in 1v1 games, but not in 1v7 games. He needed to avoid taking damage until he had better units, or more units.
It wasn't just that his opponents played well, because he remarked after the fight on the woodline where he lost two villagers to militia that he had made the right decision to fight there. He made an incorrect strategic choice — to not wall when he saw early pressure — and did not realize it, due to his lack of calculations.
(For the record, I guessed that Hera would win the first game)
Based on your latest TikTok video, I am no longer checking your accounts. I will still check your Twitch and YouTube accounts one more time, because it's possible that some activity there would change what a reasonable person would think, but I think that either you don't read this (I actually don't think this is likely, but I've been wrong before), or you're fine with a reasonable person thinking you don't read it.
I don't think there's anything that I try to make a reasonable person of average intelligence think, that isn't true. For example: on the post about the first petition, when I said that problems are due to our assumptions and prejudices. My oldest brother apparently thought that I was saying that prejudices and assumptions are bad. There were some comments or discussions that I don't really remember, but I think he thought I wanted to deny that people with different skin colors in the US get different test scores. I remember looking up whether the 'racial' gap in test scores was smaller in the UK than in the US, to support my belief that environmental factors (both physical, and social like the "controversial" Pygmalion effect) play a significant role in the gap observed in the US.
It wasn't until the car ride in which I left the Seattle area that I think my brother understood my views. We travelled with a younger cousin, who mentioned a play in which a person from a cultural minority is — perhaps unfairly — accused of a crime and either lynched or executed, and my lack of unreserved criticism of prejudices led to my brother remarking that I had a like complex or nuanced view.
For example: the question of whether females would prefer to encounter a bear, or a human male stranger, in the woods. Is it misandry, or in general a prejudice which deserves criticism, if a female says she would prefer to encounter the bear?
The fact is that people make decisions based on limited information. A recent video:
A male might have been more reluctant to help the female stranger, and she might have been more reluctant to accept help from a male. Scene from a TV series I know nothing about, other than knowing this scene:
Of course, it's these same prejudices that sometimes cause people to fall victim to scams, when someone who seems trustworthy turns out to be dishonest. (Like in the Black Mirror episode, Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too, or the drama Ryuusei no Kizuna, or many of the surprises in the drama Liar Game, or in Squid Game.)
The point is, I wasn't trying to make people think that prejudices were bad. I said that people's assumptions and prejudices caused problems; it wasn't my intention, or my fault, if people did not realize they had prejudices about prejudices.
Anyway, I was just going to say some things about giving stuff away. Suppose you had a normal job, but also streamed and made videos, and the amount of money you made from videos was less than the value of the gifts that you gave away to people.
The video from your birthday party last year was very popular. I didn't and couldn't look at the comments, but I assume they were very positive. I assume your friends appreciated the gifts and that people on TikTok thought they were great gifts and it was a nice thing for you to do.
In your previous TikTok video, you were giving away a purse, to someone in the comments. Who comments on TikTok videos? People with lots of time, who might be poor, but almost certainly have a smartphone. They also know English, which in many poor countries is a big help, due to jobs that require it.
There was a comment on the 'Luxury Beliefs' video that I forgot to include in the previous post:
"Luxury" is right. I work with unemployed people, people with psychological and addiction issues, et c. None of them are interested in DEI; they're too busy trying to survive. Equally, the DEI activists at the local university never come to get their hands dirty helping us.
From Why economists are wrong, which I probably linked to you before, I pointed out that "charities are not in the business of giving people jobs". In other words, you are helping people who do not really need help. You are giving happiness to people who already have a lot of happiness. Perhaps you think that this is all that you can do, as you are not Samsung with $200 billion in revenue per year (it claims $200 million per year in corporate social responsibility spending, like charity).
It's hard for me to criticize people's goals (as opposed to pointing out mistakes in achieving a goal, like in gameplay). Ok, that quote:
>Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The original proverb is "Give a man a fish and he can eat for a day, teach him to fish and he can eat for the rest of his life."
Disappointly, not everyone finds Pratchett to be funny. My oldest brother is one of these. Why is this funny? The ocean is running out of fish. "gaza fish scarcity":
In January, Israel declared Gaza's waters a “no-go zone”, banning fishing, swimming, and any access to the sea. The result has been devastating: Gaza has lost 94 percent of its catch, cutting off one of its last remaining sources of food. Nov 6, 2025 For Gaza's fishermen, the sea is their last lifeline after Israel's war www.aljazeera.com › News › Israel-Palestine conflict
(Not actually what I was thinking of, which was a comment by a fisherman from Gaza saying that boats had to go further and further out to find fish.)
They know how to fish, and yet they are hungry. The original saying is wrong! If they were just given fish, they would not be hungry.
Quotes often get corrupted. If you forget that the original saying was about fish, and substitute in "fire", how does the second part go? If someone knows how to make fire, they'll be warm for the rest of their life? That only makes sense if they stay close to fires, and you can't stay close to a fire while you're out gathering wood for more fires. If you're going to modify a saying you can't remember in order to complete it, it makes sense to use words that make what you say true.
I've no idea what the original context of this quote is, who said it and whether it had a significant meaning in that context. But the fact is, people do not go out of their way to care about how long the lives are of strangers across the world, especially male strangers. I was reading the comments on a video (that I didn't watch) about the performance of the M1 Abrams tank in the Ukraine conflict, and while people argued about that point, no one disputed that thousands of tanks have been destroyed there, with thousands of dead crewmembers.
People dying is sad. Is people knowing, but not really caring, that people are dying sad? Is it bad to think that it's a little funny that people would not care about someone dying (as with the quote from Pratchett's Jingo)? Things are not supposed to be funny if they are too important; is it important that people don't care about the Ukraine conflict? Do YOU care about it?
I don't think you're worse than other people, but I don't think that you choosing to use some of your money to buy gifts for other people, or getting people to meet up in order to be happy, makes you better than other people either.
A few posts back, I mentioned the person (maybe female) whom I know as Sam Sam. I remember that this person said, maybe in the context of Christmas, that they didn't really put much importance on the giving of gifts, or do much of it themselves.
Ellum said, maybe in the screenshots of his conversations with Cara, that he was very grateful for the gifts she gave him and the money she spent on him. There was a quote I thought about earlier in this post, something about unwanted gifts not resulting in gratitude. I know I used it to comment on the 'gift' of me linking to this idea, in 2011 or 2012. I think that everyone you give gifts to is appreciative, partly because of the self-selection like commenting on TikTok videos. But some people would just be ungrateful, and moreover would not care if their lack of gratitude stops someone from giving a gift, because they don't want gifts.
In the drama The Prisoner of Beauty: the wedding gifts, including the ferret. In Hogfather: the old male who doesn't want the food from the king. In Hana Yori Dango: the female lead's reaction to being given clothing and jewelry worth $1 million.
I was going to wait until 24 Feb, which is two weeks after Pey's birthday though not two weeks after I said I would wait two weeks, and then probably start checking your Twitch channel and YouTube channels again, but it seems like such a waste of time to wait another two days.
Today's award winners for "videos that I would actually want to watch now", after clicking on a few dozen videos, deciding that about two dozen of them were interesting enough to bookmark and then never return to, and leaving these open as tabs:
This is so valid. I'll never forget asking for additional children's books from the school library in grade 1 and being told by the teacher "you can't have more books because we can't have you getting ahead of the other children with your reading."
Let's goo luxury beliefs - a beautiful phrase coined by Rob Henderson (who was a foster kid adopted and raised by incredibly poor parents and ultimately went to Yale where he found himself bewildered by his privileged colleagues ability to make themselves seem like victims)
Great video, Greg! My favorite example of luxury beliefs was Leonardo DiCaprio flying on his private jet across the world to conferences where he would preach that we (the common people) should walk to work instead of drive in order to save the environment. Not only can we (the common people) not always afford to work within walking distance (or in cities where public transpo is nearly non-existent), but there's the joyful hypocrisy of it too, where WE should walk while YOU fly.
Millennials love trying out the ‘new and creative’ idea of saying “what if the bad guys were actually the good guys” while completely failing to understand the source material that showed exactly why they were bad guys
I have had to unlearn my generation’s overly ironic manner of speech and presentation when I wanted genuine relationships. The full suite of millennialism ultimately boils down to a way to shield yourself from being scrutinized/ as a way to hide being talentless and uninteresting.
Deadly sin No1: The assumption that the audience is stupid. I'm often reminded of a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln. You can fool all of the people some of time, you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
I'm still stuck on "1 of 4 American adults read at a kindergarten level." Those people have the right to vote. Ponder that for a moment.
On the topic of comments, I also bookmarked these comments yesterday (the reason I was recommended more videos from the same channel today, although I watched little or none of these videos):
(Excerpt from long comment) [...] They said they were discussing that topic with a coworker who told them that the kids nowadays only want to read fully illustrated books because they struggle to mentally visualize what they are reading so they just want to be shown what it is. This, to me, relates to kids being raised on YouTube and TikTok who are used to everything they consume being visual media so they don't have to leave anything to their imagination.
I understand character arc but I dont actually believe it. The idea that people change is a farce. People are the same, they just lie about who they are because they have to operate in society. If they dont conform, if they do not perform, they cannot get what they want or need.
People dont change, they get better at lying.
And the whole ' people said horrid things at 15 but they have made strides to blah blah blah.' No. Teens know right from wrong. What they said then, they meant it and are only covering up so they dont get in trouble. we were all 15 once but not all of us were spewing the n word or using other slurs
Obviously I had no intention of sharing this comment when I bookmarked it, and had no idea what it was before I just visited it right now with the intention of copying it no matter what it said. It just shows how some people think. Looking at this comment now, the first part of it makes me think of the ending of Person of Interest S01 Ep04, Cura Te Ipsum. Though that article, with its summary of the final scene, misses an important detail: the character Reese begins with his eyes closed, perhaps half asleep after a long wait. The audience does not know whether it was a test, or whether the gun was loaded and functional. Reese's behavior suggests that the gun is loaded; that Reese was giving Benton an opportunity to kill Reese, if Benton was the type of person who would kill another person. Because just as Reese does not know if Benton can change from a 'bad' person to a 'good' person, Reese does not know if he himself can be a 'good' person, after killing many people, some of whom might have been 'good', during his previous employment.
That article says,
But much like the Sixth Sense that only became the classic that it did because of its ending, Cura Te Ipsum became one of the penultimate episodes of POI because of its powerful conclusion…or lack of conclusion.
(penultimate: 4. (proscribed) pre-eminent, ultimate, best; par excellence, top-quality)
This is wrong. It only has the conclusion that it does because people cannot agree on whether 'bad' people can become 'good' people. Just like a politician avoiding a question about a sensitive issue, the show avoids giving an answer to this question, because of people who would misinterpret or misapply that answer.
The YouTube comment shows how some people — not necessarily this specific commenter — would think that the correct thing for Reese to do in this situation would be to murder Benton and dispose of his body.
More so than the body tracking (15+ years old and used in games like BeatSaber and BeatSaber), what's interesting is the standardization of moves, by giving them names. It's a lot different than a game just scoring a player based on whether they step on floor panels at the right time, which could look like a dance but doesn't have to. I mention it because I was thinking of listening to this song earlier today, but decided it would send the wrong message. (Do I have to mention that this song was used in Polzie - The True Story?)
Also I just clicked on Why I fear for the future of mankind, which has a climate change info panel but based on comments is not just about climate change.
This is a lot of videos which I might want to watch, but have not watched. And I can't ask anyone to watch a video I haven't watched. But don't they look like interesting videos?
If I was trying to get you to share this idea, maybe I could justify waiting. But, like, your recent TikTok video was filmed in China, and maybe within the past day or two. Either you are flying around excessively, or I am bad at guessing where you are in the world based on the videos you post. It doesn't seem like you would mind if I stopped paying attention to you. So if you do anything that would make a reasonable person, of average intelligence, think that you don't read this and don't care about the idea, on any platform excluding Facebook, then I will stop checking your accounts (but might still visit them in the future if people link to content on them or an algorithm recommends them, etc.).
I am not currently checking your Twitch and YouTube accounts, but I intend to do so as soon as I check all the moments on Pey's videos that I meant to check.
I was thinking of switching to the goal of 'trying to get you to advocate for certain changes in WoW', which might start with me editing the thoughts I previously had about stats and so on into a long explanation, but honestly that would be a goal with zero chance of success and it would just be delaying the inevitable. And I think I need to make a few polls first.
Did I already say this? From 06 Feb 2026:
answering the question, 'why do people hurt people they care about?'
Poll: Which would you rather live in? A world in which falling in love with someone increases the chance you will hurt them; a world in which falling in love with someone decreases the chance you will hurt them
This, from 02 Feb 2026?
Poll: "Would it be bad if everyone who can only do tasks that 3 billion other people can also do made enough money to support themselves and another person?"
From the really long thoughts I had on 14 Jan 2026:
Poll: if you were designing WoW 1 to 80 all in one go, with pauses for ~2 years at the 60 and 70 level caps, how much health and damage would a fresh lvl 80 character have compared to a fresh lvl 40 character? From 2x to 20x as much.
Which is better: an MMO in which most characters at the level cap are less than 30% stronger than a character one level below the level cap, or one in which the average character at level cap is three times stronger (200% stronger) than characters one level below?
If power inflation is limited, then need for big changes that limit mana-pool inflation might go away.
I can't answer these questions without asking other people.
Greta reposted a post (?) on Instagram that features a lot of text. I sort of think that most of the 500k people who Liked that post did not read all the text, and that they made the decision to Like it based on whether it supported a cause that they had previously decided to support, but I'm interpreting it as meaning that she is ok if you decide that Chirp Club is trash.
I was watching a set featuring the best female player in Age of Empires II, and the topic of color blindness came up. There are eight player colors in AoE2, and due to colorblind viewers, the caster (and occasional player, with over $3k in tournament prize winnings) who made that video only uses two of them when casting games.
I commented about this on Chirp Club like 10 years ago. Someone complained about a chart that used colors, instead of different styles of dotted lines, and I replied pointing out that they could switch screen colors to distinguish between lines.
It's a little bit harder with a game, but still possible. Games display things like water and grass, and changing those to red would look weird. But almost no color matchups would both be natural environment colors that also look the same to colorblind people.
But why care? If color is so important, I could change it myself, right? It's about doing things in a worse way to accommodate people. Not all accommodations make things worse: having a ramp for people with wheelchairs does not mean there cannot also be stairs for a more direct path. When checking your TikTok profile on Claptik a few minutes ago, I somehow got a mouseover tooltip on the Cloudflare verification checkbox, saying the purpose of the window (I can't get this tooltip to appear now), which is a reminder of the alt text or whatever that helps blind people understand what images show and now also helps AI to classify images. These things don't worsen the experience of normal people.
But other things do. Not keeping players as purple or orange in AoE2. Dumbing down schools due to some students learning slower, with long-term effects on the knowledge of individual students and on the overall knowledge and competence of entire countries. I could spend more time here thinking of more than just this one example.
People differ in many attributes. Some people are uglier (I feel comfortable saying this because I might be ugly, so ugly people have no reason to view me as an enemy for acknowledging physical differences). Should it be illegal to discriminate based on appearance when hiring for customer-facing jobs, in order to help ugly people?
Maybe there are things that would be better for a tiny minority of people if things were done in a way that would be inconvenient for most people. Like, maybe stairs would be better for very tall people if each step was taller. This doesn't happen because it's almost always the majority who 'bullies' minorities, not the other way around. This is why it's safe to say that 'things should be designed to work well for normal people', as the definition of 'normal' is 'similar to the majority of people'.
I was also going to say the following, and I can't remember if I had connected it at all to the general topic of 'not making things worse for normal people':
Poll: how much food in terms of total calories per day should people with a BMI lower than the normal range eat, compared to someone with normal BMI? (I previously suggested that Clara Dao could benefit from this poll, I think)
- I strongly feel they should eat more
- More
- About the same
- Less
- I strongly feel they should eat less
AND THEN, the same poll but for people with a BMI higher than the normal range.
Crucially, if normal people choose to worsen the experience of everyone in order to help people who are lacking in an attribute, then those who are lacking have no incentive to improve. Color blindness cannot be fixed. But the negative effects of color blindness when viewing content on a screen can be fixed.
I also wanted to say something about schools here. Doing so requires acknowledging that economic factors can be a reason for someone's poor academic performance. (This includes poor health outcomes due to being poor, including ones that affect cognitive development.) However, this does not mean I am trying to get you to share the idea.
I hope that when you didn't share the idea after I said that at a certain point in time I would stop expecting you to share it or trying to get you to share it, that you were fine with the outcome of me not doing these things.
If I wasn't trying to get you to share the idea with my previous post, what was I trying to do?
I thought that if I said nothing, then I could determine (based on your actions) whether you had, in fact, watched this drama series after I recommended it after you said on stream that you were looking for a new Kdrama to watch.
I will just assume that you did watch it.
Someone who is my age spent part of their life without the Internet, but was of an appropriate age to become proficient at things related to computers. When I was in high school, there was no Chirp Club. If I had decided that I wanted to try to fix problems before I sought a romantic relationship, there would have been fewer avenues to cause change than there are now.
Maybe this is a bit of a tangent, but it's what I was thinking about (and I didn't take notes so I nearly forgot what I was going to say, after mentioning the drama). In 10th grade I learned that the person I had liked in middle school was in a relationship, apparently (based on her accepting an invitation to a dance; she said, "I guess that means we're official"). It was only a few months later that I found someone else that I liked. She was a grade above me, but that didn't matter. What did matter was that she was already in a relationship.
You've probably heard the saying before: "all the good guys are taken", or something to that effect. You think someone's perfect for you, but they're taken. You might be able to completely give up on the hope of being in a relationship with them, such as by never talking to them again, but what if you never find someone else that you like, because you compare everyone to the other person you knew? The "Sensibility" in "Sense and Sensibility", I think referenced this film a couple weeks ago?
Twenty years ago, Chirp Club did not exist. Now it does. I don't know if Chirp Club actually makes the world better, or if Chirp Club has gotten better in the past 10 years. I tried to get the CEO of Chirp Club at the time, Dick Costolo, to share this idea, and implied that it was possible he could have known of it, and maybe that the next CEO 'part-timing' as the CEO of Chirp Club suggested an awareness of this idea. But all I really know is that no CEO of Chirp Club has shared this idea.
In fact one of the things that I said was that if Dick Costolo did not share the idea, I would delete all my tweets on Chirp Club that were posted after a certain point in time. I got around that by having my account banned, which has a similar effect to me deleting those tweets, as they are not visible.
(I will mention that I remember when Dick Costolo mentioned the Three Body series of books, and so it was nice when they were made into a TV series and I could have a little better of an understanding of why he might recommend reading them. But maybe this is a false memory, because no search results.)
So, like, I'm investigating what you think about Chirp Club. Do you consider it a viable way of causing real change in the world?
Or would you say that it's trash?
Edit: also, the timeline in my recollections might be incorrect. I think I actually learned that the person I liked in middle school was in a relationship when I was in 11th grade. So, like, the causative relationship implied by "It was only a few months later" wouldn't exist. But this post is about what you think of Chirp Club.
Lines 8217 to 8241 of 'online tasks2, 16 Sep 2022.txt':
16 Feb 2026 a female character in a dream: "I deride the whole notion that the forces of good and the forces of evil must engage in constant battle to avert some great calamity" the ending was changed from "evil" before the sentence finished, in order for it to make sense
it lacks a bit of flavor, because the character had been pretending to be ignorant or stupid before she said that, but the prior conversation was very brief and I had already forgotten it and the context as soon as I woke up (search led to: https://richarddawkins.net/2014/08/a-hundred-walked-out-of-my-lecture/)
but the male character she was talking to was sort of an undead rogue, who probably appeared in the dream a minute earlier to demonstrate the stupidity of the rogue by stealthing at the hint of enemy rogues, and then stupidly unstealthing because he thought the danger had passed. So he was supposed to be part of the 'forces of evil', or something like it
sort of like how in Villains by Necessity, the rogue Sam (Samalander) was part of the forces of evil
*the assassin, Sam (Samalander)
Poll: "Is it bad for law enforcement to engage in law enforcement?"
AoE2: mouse position on edge of map wrong? https://youtu.be/clnh8JV6qws?t=328 *probably, "uses a default elevation to translate mouse position to XY coordinate, instead of the same elevation as adjacent map"
18 Feb 2026 AoE2: 'limited unit coop' mode could be combined with limited APM. Maybe best way to do a tournament, as it allows top players to control the empire without putting all the focus on them. APM limit set per player, similar to handicap. 20 APM (as actual commands, or eAPM) for the empire players, no limit for the 'limited unit coop' players.
Better for a tournament with a high prize pool, as instead of 'a random player', or 'a player selected from a pool with an arbitrary limit on ladder rating', can select the best player possible, just with limited APM.
sort of news: Blizzard doing something https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1igXyFi8pE
You're the ruler of the world. You thought it would be easy, but majority of people hate you. Most cities you visit, huge protests by people who blame you for every single problem in their lives, including crime, police brutality, inflation, taxes, Covid-19, and vaccines. They also believe horrible lies about things you've secretly done. How can you use your unlimited power to become less hated?
Share the idea if you watched Cang Lan Jue drama (Love Between Fairy and Devil).
I'm criticizing your latest TikTok video, on Arabian makeup, for having correct lip sync or audio sync at the end. The evidence, including comments by creators who are trying to get correct audio sync, strongly suggests that audio on the TikTok app is delayed by about 0.13 sec on a typical smartphone. I would recommend that any creator use multiple smartphones to view a simple test video and see if they differ in sync, and then repeat the test after restarting the devices.
Examples, all using the same song (viewed using Claptik):
A short clip looped many times, with gradual drift in audio sync by slowing video, would be the easiest way to measure a device's audio delay.
Your previous TikTok video, introducing your close friends, also had several instances of the start of words being cut off during editing.
The description of your video mentions Ramadan, a month which is given special significance. (Also, it's crazy that "Arabs of Tihamah, Hejaz, and Najd distinguished between two types of months, permitted (ḥalāl) and forbidden (ḥarām) months. The forbidden months were four months during which fighting is forbidden".) On the topic of religion, an exercise for the reader:
This article has good detail. The author did not understand the events that happened, but said enough for a reader to guess (unlike a description like, "I came home and misplaced my keys. Can you tell me where they might be?"). Why did this speaker say the things that she did, and why did her audience react as they did, instead of as she expected them to?
"Remember when" is sort of like an inside joke, used in cases where someone might not actually remember the thing, like when Sherine said "Remember when my crush favorited my tweet" a few hours after it happened, in case anyone had not noticed.
Remember when I said to Sherine, "there is no reason to be sad"? (Apparently this was before I started documenting my messages to her, so if Tumblr doesn't keep messages there might be no record that I said this to her.) I'm mentioning this because I'm mentioning Demi Rose Mawby, and there is the possibility that she could be sad, if she is not in a relationship. But why would she be sad that she is not in a relationship, if it's because she didn't share the idea? Did she choose not to share the idea and be sad, or was not sharing it the choice that would make her less sad?
I'm mentioning Demi Rose Mawby because of the emotion that I felt she was experiencing at a certain point of time. It was, I think, after I linked the video for 'vanished the life -notreborn' from the album Closed System, which features a cat that disappears and then reappears. I felt there was a definite possibility that Demi Rose misinterpreted why I linked it, because she seemed inappropriately happy and (I think) got a cat soon after, but I wasn't trying to say that "a cat will make you happy". I was the cat.
I wasn't going to say anything more here, after Greta posted on Instagram again. I am doing so because it I think your Valentine's Day videos were filmed at home, which would mean you were back from China and the video you posted today was filmed several days ago (with the intention of later editing and posting it).
Honestly, I disliked this video, introducing two of your best friends, until the very end, where you joked about moving to Shanghai. And I confused your friend with your neighbor, until now.
Most videos on social media are about being happy (or angry). I remember an exception: a Chinese influencer, who regularly got like 500k~1m likes per video, posted a video in which she explained that she was being harassed IRL. It's natural for anyone who is featured in a video to think that they should appear to be happy for the audience.
I searched the file with my messages to Sherine for 'unhappy', in case I said that instead of 'sad', and I still don't see that message, but I do see this:
If you aren't going to support the idea I'm only concerned with making sure you're not unhappy
I think that a smart person would find it obvious that a person who wants other people to be happy might not want others to know this, even if that person is smart enough not to be taken advantage of (anticipating 'defections' in prisoner's dilemma games, and applying 'pre-emptive justice'). Like, on 13 Feb 2026, I thought of this,
Poll for females: Would you prefer to be in a relationship with someone who would reject someone for being ugly, or someone who wouldn't?
(As well as making a note to look up "distance to Erendil star?", which is 28 billion light-years.)
Or, as a character in Love Game in Eastern Fantasy told another character in a scene which I linked before to someone, maybe Giggly aka Madison, males shouldn't be too nice to females other than the one they're most interested in.
I'm copying some thoughts I had about MMOs, which have nothing to do with any of the above.
14 Feb 2026
[...]
Note that even if rogues could use bucklers, bucklers would be useless against casters (without a 'shield bash' ability) and also useless when target is stunned. Again, depends on having a penalty for switching weapons.
WoW: note problem, that when low-level world PvP is nonexistent, people don't think of it when evaluating potential design changes. Effects of power inflation from raiding, or from super-fast flying mounts.
"Option to view damage and health numbers as though future stat squishes have already been applied." A joke because stat squish makes different item qualities more similar, so mobs would die with a similar number of casts, but the 'visual-only version' does not have this consequence, so better gear = same dps but mobs appear to have lower health, which is inconsistent with the stat squish.
15 Feb 2026 top comment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM5kLkO8ehk&lc=Ugym635I0XHA0UmDA8N4AaABAg GDKP, gold buying. Just part of the problem of 'game is not fun if you have low progression'. Botting or powerleveling part of the same problem, which is the same problem as 'activities at low levels are not fun when there are high-level players who interfere'. People see the effect (gold buying), and complain about it, but don't understand the cause and support changes to fix it.
bugged VOD: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2696279315 https://youtu.be/swof8BcSjxQ?t=22 but downloads fine with yt-dlp
WoW: perspective: if the game changes to make low levels more relevant and fun, but playerbase doesn't change, then it represents a change in power and importance, away from 'players with a high playtime' and towards 'players with a low playtime'. Most types of content creation are biased towards creators with a high investment in a topic, so many streamers would be disadvantaged by this change, might not feel interested in pushing for it.
Noting that with some games, 'players who have invested enough time to become very skilled' get attention, while in MMOs it's often 'players who have invested enough time to be high level with good gear'. Rarely do players with low playtime do things that interest other people. If they do, game is often 'casual' and not worth 1000 hours of playtime. Riot trying to make LoL more friendly to new players: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/moba/a-major-overhaul-of-league-of-legends-is-reportedly-coming-in-2027-once-were-done-it-should-be-the-best-time-ever-to-get-your-friends-into-league/
Making game more interesting for new players may mean making it less interesting for those with 2k+ hours.
"It's pretty hard to click on someone and then click to move and then click back on someone at super high speeds. This is a skill current players have put a lot of time into so if that skill were obsoleted a lot of players would quit" https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1ql5yi8/comment/o1bw3v0/ (compare https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1pdqick/couldnt_be_happier_wasd_genuinely_sucks_for_high/, and via https://www.pcgamer.com/games/moba/league-of-legends-just-got-wasd-controls-after-16-years-and-you-can-probably-guess-how-smoothly-the-rollouts-going/)
"Of course, anyone paying attention could've told you Ashes of Creation was DOA before it even came out because PVP-oriented MMOs are guaranteed failures."
Players with more playtime get more attention, and have higher status. PvE MMO: they can do PvE things that new players cannot. But PvP MMO: they can do PvP things that new players cannot, which means winning. And MMO means lack of restrictions between experienced players fighting new players, that a ladder system has. So, the tension between "good for new players, or experienced players feel unrewarded" is a bit more zero-sum in the actual play experiences, as opposed to just in content creation surrounding a game or whether friends care what you do.
Note difficulty in not rewarding high playtime: players like to think that they and their friends are high status. If a particular activity (like a game) does not give them this, they may feel it doesn't reflect their reality of being 'better than average'.
"on live server people will just ask "which faction should i join" (like they always ask "which class is the best") and it results in over/underrepresentation because naturally most people want to join the strongest one and it tends to snowball from there" https://old.reddit.com/r/AshesofCreation/comments/wdy4xd/comment/iiljs51/
similar to 'aggressor' mechanics for determining whether there are penalties for killing a low-level player: https://web.archive.org/web/20230528023143/https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Player_flagging
Example of issue: killing bots. "you have the potential of losing your gear. Your combat efficacy decreases based on the amount of corruption you accrue." And if higher level means more powerful, then high level players can still interfere in fights between low-level players with no consequences.
contact: "Intrepid are investigating a potential bidding system, which allows players to bid on items instead of rolling for them." https://web.archive.org/web/20230107192424/https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Hunting_certificates
also suggest 'open loot' model based on damage threshold, re: loot tagging on same page
couldn't access: https://ashesofcreation.wiki/PvP_background does it only contain this section? "While Ashes of Creation took inspiration from Lineage II (and other games) it has also"
around https://youtu.be/9WpG270yUMk?t=400 'affinity score' for encountering friends, compare to intention with layers in WoW Classic, specifically how players are apparently on a layer at the account level, not a character level, so a player who wants to log into a character in a dangerous location, like 'next to enemy guards after using website unstuck feature near Arathi Highlands', can get their alt invited to the party that is helping them on a particular layer.
Ends up failing because after leaving a layer, any association with it is broken, and players randomly change layers from joining new groups etc., so long-term potential to be on the same layer as "players encountered in the world" is completely random. And players naturally accumulate to same layer from process of random invites.
*Ashes of Creation is closing I guess: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miMemOWBNpw
watch: folder Riot MMO, 15 Feb 2026
I was probably going to say more to you. Ah, yes: when Sherine said, "remember X", where X was a word which means attraction to people with criminal tendencies, which I forget. Basically, she was implying that some people thought that anyone who supported Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was stupid or mentally ill, and I think she was suggesting that this could be a reason that people might not share this idea, if they had learned of it from a group of people who supported Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ("#FreeJahar" and "#JusticeForJahar").
For example, one think I said to Sherine, apparently on Chirp Club as it's not in the comment file, was after she said the only things she cared about were money and another thing that I forget, like her friends or family. I said that taking risks can be less profitable if other people are willing to accept risk.
In the broader sense, this can be seen in finance: if no one in the world was willing to use any leverage when investing except for one person, that one person would easily become incredibly rich. But when many people are taking risks, like through the use of leverage, then it increases price volatility, which decreases the expected profit from a given amount of risk, or changes the optimal amount of leverage downwards.
In the specific sense, I was saying that people are dumb, and even though this idea would solve problems, many people are convinced that problems (like mass shootings, a risk of dying) are not important. They accept these risks, and it makes the risk of trying to fix problems less profitable.
So, while it might not be strictly accurate to say I was trying to discourage her from sharing the idea, I was pointing out information which she might not have been aware of and that could act as a reason not to share the idea due to the possibility of wasting time by doing so.
Or to put it another way, if someone had a 1% chance to win a Nobel prize with a $1 million reward by sharing the idea, and a 100% chance to get a job that pays $150k per year by instead getting a college degree, the job gives a better expected payout.
I'd been thinking of making a post earlier today, and maybe only stopped myself by procrastinating until the feeling passed. I thought about how after Mei's cat was killed by a dog, I didn't really say much except to maybe ask about animal control — I had no idea what is the proper reaction to a dog that is attacking people, possibly in a rural area, or what should be done if one's pet cat suffers a violent death — and a bit after that, she suggested she might start playing a game.
Like, obviously I thought it was very serious that her cat was dead, especially since it was probably the cat that was named after me, but despite sort of knowing me for seven years with long gaps of not talking, she didn't initially realize that I cared that this had happened. She thought that what she should do was something that made her happy and which conveyed to me that she was happy, even if her cat was dead and brought in to lie on the floor or something.
So it's nice to be able to have dinner (on Valentine's Day) with someone I guess (again, I have never done so), but it seemed unlikely you were in a relationship with your date, and so you might feel sad afterwards.
I'm just reacting to your TikTok video, which is set in a restaurant, and so my mind makes random associations to things that are related to restaurants.
A short video:
The top comment says, "the off time screaming is perfect". It really makes it feel more authentic, like it was done in one take. A great idea for a video, without spending too much effort on it. Like, another video that features the same creator has her saying, "hey! Stop scrolling. Do your homework!"
Which honestly has a crazy amount of comments: 31k comments with 2.8m views, while the restaurant video has 5.6k comments with 60m views.
Tangent, restaurant video was at 1.2m likes, 27.5m views on 2025-06-09 (view source, search for "views"). It more than doubled in views, but only got 25% 33% more likes. But comments did go up significantly. So is it a genuine audience that comments more than they give likes, compared to the core audience, or is it bot/AI comments becoming more common in the past year?
And just the fact that it's getting more views, after more than a year. (It's a bit sad that YouTube no longer lets creators make video statistics, like views over time and viewer demographics, public; if it did, I wouldn't need to have the habit of bookmarking videos with their current view count.) It seems like Douyin videos drop off completely in views, and here I am once again gratuitously providing examples:
None of these videos are about restaurants and the only point I was making was that YouTube's algorithm might promote certain older videos more than Douyin or TikTok does. I can't even say that this fact is 'interesting'.
The second thing about restaurants is a scene from the Chinese (Taiwanese) short TV series Futmalls (預支未來, 2020). It's just an 'influencer' doing a mukbang, with her camera set up in front of her at a restaurant.
I can't really say exactly why I mention it. I never really go anywhere, and it's possible I've never seen anyone filming themselves in 'real life', like to stream or make a video, so whether or not it's common now, this fictional portrayal of it might have been the first time I really saw how it looks, to an outsider who comes across it (not an audience member who sees the camera viewpoint). Sort of like how the film The Post-Truth World (罪後真相, 2022) — "intriguing, if somewhat narratively flawed", or "a sharp critique of today’s sensationalist media" — has a scene where a security guard is shown to enjoy watching a female anchor show (example), and then after he is lured away from his post and murdered, there is a brief shot of the show continuing on his computer's screen, unaffected by his death.
In Futmalls, the 'influencer' is negatively affected by events (I forget the details), with her audience unaware and unable to help her. In The Post-Truth World, it's a viewer who suffers harm, without anyone else knowing. But they both could be said to encourage people not to care too much about online interactions.
2. (by extension) the true self, without embellishment
And of course I'm going to link the WoW PvP video where I heard this song, Orangemarmalade's first PvP video that he deleted because someone said they had suffered emotional damage from being mind controlled and drowned.
Before I looked up that word, I heard it as "sunao" which means "honest" and it's possible I'm biased towards forcing that incorrect meaning of the lyrics.
“I want to see you”, the true nature hidden behind these words Did you think I won’t notice it? The mark of a ring on your left hand There’s no lie sufficient to cover that
If you’re just lonely, any other girl will do, right?
I’m sick of meeting men like you
Some people are honest (see what I meant about forcing misheard lyrics). Some people are less honest. Often, people are rewarded for not being honest, even if they are openly not honest, like doing it on a livestream, or publishing a video that shows exactly what they did. People often see it as a game, or a prank, and that being able to lie well is good, at least if it's not about things that are important or that are known to be false. For example, "I am someone you will find attractive": this is something that many people try to convey with their words and actions, without knowing whether it's true.
My belief is that I have always been honest. I would like for other people to be happy, and I think I don't try to hide that.
Anyway, your TikTok video. A Valentine's dinner. Aka, I look crazy again by talking about this. I have never been on a date. After I ran out of money for the second time, in 2012, I called and met my oldest sister, who lived in the same city (even though I hadn't talked to her like seven years). She took me to a nearby restaurant for breakfast, and I asked if it would be considered a date, and she confirmed that it was not. Literally the only time I have gone with someone to get food, if you disregard the fact that in the military, going anywhere alone was not allowed so any visit to the cafeteria (dining facility) was with another person.
Point: I often have a negative opinion of characters in Korean dramas when they go to an expensive restaurant. Like, how China has apparently banned storylines about "ordinary female meets rich, powerful male", and 'influencers' are not allowed to flaunt their wealth on social media. You probably have more money than whomever you went to dinner with, who I assume was male, but who has more money is not the point. I've probably mentioned the Japanese drama Hana Yori Dango to you before; in the movie, which takes place after all the events of the TV seasons, like the female lead going to the US to find her boyfriend because he isn't responding to phone calls or text messages, the female lead worries that they are incompatible because they have different values. The male lead is fine with just abandoning a car because their journey is taking them somewhere else, and acts like he expects a night of them alone in a hotel room together to escalate into certain activities, while she is concerned about recovering the expensive object they are chasing.
In viral clips, you have claimed that you aren't rich. But do you really have the attitudes of someone who isn't rich? I don't know.
(7) Chen Changfeng was Mao Zedong's orderly. He wrote an account of Mao Zedong and the Long March in 1973.
Commissar Mao's life was very simple and I soon got to know his habits. His personal possessions included only two blankets, one cotton sheet, two grey uniforms, just as we privates wore, a worn overcoat, and one grey woollen sweater. Then he had a broken umbrella, a bowl for eating and a knapsack with nine compartments for his maps, documents and books. When we were campaigning or on the march, he carried the knapsack and umbrella himself. I would carry the rest. When we came to our camp site, I would find two wooden boards, put them together and spread the blankets and sheet on them, folding up his uniforms to make a pillow. This was his bed.
I have read an account from someone who was in the USSR's gulags, where they also had wooden beds, and the author said there was only one sleeping position that would work with those beds.
But anyway, maybe you went to an inexpensive restaurant.
About clothes, and appearance: there are people who have watched a lot more TikTok videos than me, but also people who have watched a lot less than me. Hopefully I do not demonstrate ignorance. In China, on Douyin (aka Chinese TikTok, sharing the same icon and using the same pool of consecutive numbers for the video ID), females are more comfortable with being 'sexy'. Showing too much exposed skin is banned, close cases require concealment like a blur or overlay, and so basically anything that makes it through is considered to be socially acceptable. On Chirp Club it seems to be an established thing for males to call females w****s for showing any skin, while in China that does not seem to happen.
So a lot of people in China publish videos that people in the US would not feel comfortable posting, due to the harassment that they would get in the US.
There is the pattern where someone posts themselves in baggy clothes, which in countries that aren't Islamic are seen as less attractive than clothes that reveal a narrow waist, and then does a transition to clothes that are sexier. One reason these videos are popular is that it shows that many people who don't look very attractive at one moment in time, could change to look more attractive. In other words, don't discriminate based on appearance.
I had intended to say this in a previous post, but forgot, and after I remembered I didn't edit the post to add it in. There was no reason for me not to say it before, and there is no reason not to say it now. I think the ideal outcome would be if you and Greta Thunberg shared the idea together. That way, I could watch dramas again (because you shared it), and I could check Greta's Chirp Club account again (because she shared it).
I think we're at our most honest after waking up. One of my sleeping-waking-dream thoughts was that I don't even want you to share the idea. But I said I wouldn't watch any more dramas if you didn't, and I would like to be able to do that. It's hard to want something to happen if you don't think it will happen. With relationships, this is called moving on after a breakup.
The reason for this post is just WoW. I just wrote this to myself, after waking up:
WoW: role of layers in driving micro-faction imbalance. Layer away when ratio is unfavourable, positive feedback. Even if server is balanced, it makes layers unbalanced. Even if layer is balanced overall, it makes specific locations unbalanced.
Game gives players a reason to be in a specific area, like quests. Layers allow them to be in the area without being outnumbered.
Solution has to involve taking away the easy escape. Some players will enjoy challenge, but who enjoys 10v1? Could call for help, but not justified when layering away is always possible.
Can't remember all details of previous layering solutions, but shouldn't always go to party leader's layer.
(Thoughts about the lack of low-level players raiding towns, compared to first few months of WoW in 2004.)
One thing I said on the WoW forums, sometime between 2010 and 2012, was that the biggest threat to WoW was players zooming out really far with their cameras in raids. I didn't explain why it was a threat. It made players take the game less seriously, and at the very least not taking the game seriously implies they might not care to play it anymore. A few years later, WoW limited the ability for players to zoom out so far, comparing the size of the player's character to the size on the screen of a Marine in Starcraft. Of course, players who were used to doing this complained.
I never like to say that I was wrong, or even that I might have been wrong. Looking at the WoW of today, one might question whether camera distance was really WoW's biggest threat.
There was a game cinematic that I can't find, from a game whose name I can't remember; the notable part was when it had giant, 20m+ humanoid monsters, who moved very slowly. I contrasted it with WoW, thought of how bad the (extremely tall, like 40m+ mob with Thaddius model in WotLK, who was soloed by a paladin in a WotLK beta paladin PvP video that was pretty cool but which I deleted, by someone with a name like Sabrina who might have been involved in a controversy involving TBC arenas, which opened with a PvP scene and nearly one-shotting a priest due to a bug with PWS that existed at the time) looked, both the shading and the way that the mob moved. My thought was that, even if WoW's artists don't understand that larger beings move slower, there are still people who know this and are able to create good cinematics and games.
Then I watched a trailer for a film that featured King Kong, in which he was moving very fast despite being very large, and I reflected on how there are many people who don't understand that larger = slower and it makes an unrealistic representation still profitable.
But, camera distances are tied to this. If the player's character seems tiny, and raid 20m tall bosses are 'normal', then the player will accept those bosses moving quickly, like swinging an arm across their body in 0.2 seconds. (~50 m/s, or ~100 mph, or much faster than the speed that requires a lengthy stopping distance to avoid injury in a car crash.)
And representations that only make sense if people are stupid drive away smart players. It's the health insurance death spiral all over again, except that games can be profitable when only stupid people play them; they're just not fun for other people to play, which would include the people making the games since software and art does take some intelligence.
So this is all context. I'm pasting more of what I wrote about games being fun at low levels, but in the past I pointed to camera distance as the biggest threat to WoW.
Based on another bookmark, it seems that I watched the game cinematic from the game I forgot around 03 Feb, and the following is from 03 Feb. It's not really useful to you, but I'm afraid that I might never have a reason to look at what I wrote again, in this 'online tasks2, 16 Sep 2022.txt' document that is now 355 KB:
Poll: Is there a widely-known method that developing countries can use to prevent wealth from accumulating to a small number of people, without heavy taxes on capitalists or making capitalism illegal?
show relatives: don't fall for Alpha Male
WoW discussion topic: What would Classic Plus be like if it committed to a design where questing greens at lvl 63 were the same quality as lvl 58 blues, just like lvl 53 greens are the same as lvl 48 blues?
observation: almost all popular videos, especially PvP videos, in original WoW were at the level cap. Maybe didn't need to be lvl 60 to have fun, but needed to be lvl 60 to impress others, which for many people is part of having fun.
And at the level cap, most PvP videos were from people in good gear.
(sub-60 PvP: Alexis priest PvP, not the best gear: Vurtne)
Several reasons. Videos from a single player are usually to showcase the player's skill. For many people, skill is whether fights are won. Winning is easier with better gear, or when opponents have bad gear or are unskilled. Low-level players are more likely both to have bad gear and to be unskilled, and hard for viewers to know whether this is the case. PvP videos at low levels also risk encouraging bad behavior: bullying weaker players, fighting players who have zero interest in PvP and just want to level (including players with lots of spirit gear), and sending money and items from a high-level 'main' to a low-level player which makes good BoE items less accessible for other players.
So it's a bit circular: many low-level players don't want to PvP because they know that other low-level players don't want to PvP.
With max-level PvP, gear is easier to recognize on both the player who makes a video and their opponents. The fact of an opponent being an appropriate level to present a challenge is also evident from the location of fights. Tier sets in Classic are iconic, and a shorthand for player power. With low-level items, too many to recognize, as well as items that look the same. Also harder to know the appropriate level of players in a leveling zone; a zone like Ashenvale looks the same in many places, but quests in an area differ by 10+ levels. Lvl 21 player fighting lvl 21 is totally different from lvl 21 vs lvl 31. Level difference is in addition to gear difference: a player in Ashenvale could be a lvl 20 with whites and greens, or a lvl 33 with superb (i.e. blue, or even epic) gear.
So it seems like lack of information about difficulty of fights would be solved by a performance-based rank system.
But it's not the only potential problem. Gathering professions: easier to farm ores or herbs at a high level, both to avoid mobs (or PvP) and due to having a mount. If financial incentives to reach max level are too high, it deters activities like PvP at low levels that may be fun, but slow leveling.
And bullying: if max-level players are immune to low-level players, due to 'resists' or just raw stats from level cap power inflation, then trying to enjoy low-level PvP is asking for bullies to come and ruin the fun. So, disincentives to bully, like 'most wanted' board and aggression-based PvP flagging penalty.
What percentage of people would recognize a reference to Mandelbrot fractal or curve? (poll) (re: map being procedurally-generated, but predictably, not randomly)
I stopped watching Pey's stream today after her group ganked a player who was soloing an elite mob, around 2:56:00. She said she felt bad, but she didn't emote to the player to communicate that she was sorry! It's an expansion that I didn't really play; I think I reached lvl 66 on a public test realm, playing by myself (no one but me, and the person whom I know as Sam Sam, would bother to level on a server where all progress will eventually be wiped), and disliked how easy the mobs in that zone were to kill despite their size. But I know there were many players who did like the expansion.
I scarcely need to point out that if you had not said something on Chirp Club, then I would have watched more of Pey's streams even if she was streaming modern WoW, which I would enjoy even less than The Burning Crusade.
Most people would just go to the website and check the results directly, instead of pausing a video that shows results for half a second. Humans being the most popular race is not a surprise; they always were, with the WoW census website. I wonder if warriors being the popular class is because of their broken scaling, though, and people having more awareness of how warriors perform in groups as a result.
I had said that "World of Warcraft is mostly played by old people". To a certain degree, the data shows that this is true. The reason it's so funny is the dropoff above a certain age. A "Classic+" version would most likely be based on the lvl 60 game version, which differs in important ways from even the 1~60 leveling experience during the Wrath of the Lich King expansion (level cap 80). For example, many players get a 31-point talent at lvl 40 and then start putting talent points in another tree, but in TBC and WotLK, there are additional talents that require 40 or 50 talent points in the same tree.
So original WoW ended in ~2006, with TBC launching in January 2007. This survey's largest age group is 31~36 (which overlaps with 36~40, badly designed survey); someone who is 36 now was 16 in 2006.
This really seems like, "someone who saw older people playing WoW, but was not able to play themselves as much as they would like". College students were much more likely to have the freedom to play WoW (and ruin their grades; the email address I made at the time was "wowaddict", but maybe you're familiar based on your story of how you got into LoL) as much as they wanted.
So why is it that those college students, now ~42 years old, have a much smaller representation in this survey? I think it's because they enjoyed WoW and had a pretty good understanding of why it was fun, saw it become worse with TBC, and took that as a general lesson about games and life. The people who are most excited about Classic+ are those too young to have played much before TBC.
The guild Death and Taxes was pretty famous in original WoW. It got a bunch of world first raid boss kills in original WoW and early TBC, and also featured in the Alliance Most Wanted video, filmed on 21 April 2005, two days after the honor system was released on 19 April. They were responsible for a forum or website post about bugs in the Ahn'Qiraj raid instance, which was an obvious and deliberate mockery or parody of an extremely similar post by one of WoW's most important designers at the time when he was playing and raiding in Everquest. (Also Mei joined it towards the end of 2006, though I didn't know that was the server she had transferred to until much later, as she didn't tell me — she just said she wanted to be in a family-style guild, rather than a guild that treated her poorly.)
After getting several world-first kills in the early 25-man raids in TBC, a few months later Death and Taxes announced they were, basically, quitting. I'm sure the post could be found, but along with the image of a nuclear fireball in the shape of a rude hand gesture, what was notable was their references to "people coming back to try and save the guild". It showed that many people stopped playing during the six months of TBC before that post; players from original WoW, with lots of time to dedicate to the game, i.e. the college student demographic at the time, who are poorly represented in these Classic Plus survey results.
It's possible that the idea won't be used for another year, or won't ever be used, and if I don't try to influence WoW Classic Plus now I won't be able to improve its direction and it will be permanently worse than it could have been. I'm fine with people giving zero importance to this outcome, though wasted time is still wasted time. I remember my ~2011 blog comment, to the (I think) NCSoft US executive who was worried that the failure of Tabula Rasa would lead to decreased funding for MMOs in the future and a decline of the genre, that people who enjoyed MMOs when they were young would grow up and get important jobs and wonder why the genre was bad, then doing something to try to fix it. "Sorry to say this to you now", was what I said. But it's true. Even if WoW might never again be fun to the players who enjoyed it the most in 2004~2006, if there is a profit motive there will always be an opportunity to make something just as good, even if it takes 10 years to get the funding and five years to make.
"Something is funny when there is a large group of people who will be wrong about it, and it doesn't matter that they're wrong." If I had guessed, I might have said that the 41~46 group would be larger than the 36~40 group. So I expect many other people might make the same mistake, and they would be wrong, and it is funny.
My friend Hime would fall in the 51~56 age group, which is only 0.7% in these survey results (which could change with more responses). Around 2008 I think (2010), she mentioned a gryphon plushie which she bought or was considering buying.
This is definitely one of those times when I think it's crazy to think that you read these or care what I say.
I should make it clear that the viewer I was using for TikTok was delayed, with posts sometimes not showing up for several hours. I'm using a second one now, which might be delayed as well. So, I am responding to the TikTok post that introduced your neighbor. If you have posted anything else in the past few hours, I'm unaware of it.
What would it take for me to have a good opinion of someone I met? I basically don't think it's possible unless it was someone who was as smart as me, who had the same mindset (or at least what I believe to be my mindset): a willingness to solve problems. With most people, I simply have nothing to discuss because I am poor, I might die due to being poor, and I find it completely reasonable to say at this point that most people are just wasting time. This includes almost all of my siblings. My oldest brother might have an excuse due to being in prison. I honestly sort of want to give my two oldest siblings the "evil instead of stupid" pass.
I'm not talking to any of my existing friends because I am poor. It would be an insult to my existing friends for me to try to become friends with anyone else who would not have the goal of trying to solve the problem that makes me poor.
And, as I said, some random person that I meet is not likely to try to do that unless they are very smart, with the personality type of having difficulty avoiding challenges.
In the video you posted, your neighbor is cooking a fish. I don't really have an opinion on killing animals (like the male chicks that are thrown alive into grinders), but for fishing, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_northwest_cod_fishery on a global scale. I'm pretty sure that the world is experiencing overfishing, with fishing stocks being depleted below the level that would allow for the maximum number of fish to be eaten without reducing fish populations.
So, yes, cooking a fish does look good for social media. But if everyone ate fish, there would be no more fish. (Also, how much is the fish?)
Side note, why is it that Blogger is 20+ years old and owned by a company worth $3.8 trillion (enough for 336,000 M1 Abrams battle tanks which is 33 times as many as have ever been built, or 108,000 Minuteman ICBMs, each with a W87 warhead with a yield of 475,000 tons of TNT, with a combined destructive power of about half the energy of a 1.5 km asteroid, like 1862 Apollo, hitting the Earth at 15 km/s) and it still puts a non-breaking space in this form for a new post, instead of starting it out completely blank.
I guess I'm treating the number of likes on your Chirp Club account as important again, because I thought I wouldn't say anything until you did something after my previous post, and here I am saying something.
I planned to go to Japan. My friend Hime, whom I met in World of Warcraft (her real name is Anh), even suggested that we go there together, and when I said I couldn't go with her, she asked if there were any souvenirs I wanted her to buy for me. I had sent her two paintings by an Iraqi artist, including one that I had wanted to send to Mei, as well as extra Iraqi currency, which surprised Hime as she had never mentioned to me that she collected foreign currencies.
But for me, the only real reason for me to travel to Japan was language immersion, which is not a very good reason, and this is part of why I never ended up going. I have not seen anything to indicate you have the slightest interest in learning Japanese language, and I was going to say Japanese culture but then I remembered your username. But when you played Cobblemon a few weeks ago, you had forgotten basic mechanics of the Pokemon games like what determines the power of a move.
Being in one place vs being in another place: to me, it isn't that important. Maybe I am just rationalizing as I am too poor to go anywhere, but if poor people can be happy despite being poor, what's wrong with that? (Not saying that I'm happy.)
(Obviously, I am subtly implying that people who think that no one would want to work less, because everyone wants more money than they have except maybe people who give away their money, are stupid.)
Ok like so of course I remember that Sherine knows French, that she grew up in Canada just like you even though Sherine's childhood friend is Yara who is from New York so maybe Sherine lived in New York at some point, and that Sherine once posted a photo of her school textbook which was in French. And of course I remember that Mione, who made a video of her Death Knight soloing the 10-man raid Karazhan in 2008 and then went on to solo a bunch of other raid encounters that impressed people even more (like world first solo of the Lich King), is from Belgium and speaks French.
And France used to be considered the language of diplomacy, such as the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty being in French and English, with no Japanese version even though Japan was allocated more tonnage than France, or the 1901 Boxer Protocol being in Chinese and French even though France provided just 6% of the military strength for the eight-nation alliance.
I almost posted this as it is. But I remembered I was going to say some bad things about Japan. I want to reference a scene but it is from a Japanese drama, which means it would earn a copyright strike if posted on YouTube. From the original drama (2007), Ep 07: opens with the main character playing a game against the office's boss, and deliberately losing in a way that hides the fact that she deliberately lost. Then, in order to save a coworker from being fired, she challenges the boss in his kendou doujou and they fight with wooden swords in front of his young students (ages 5~10), and she once again deliberately loses.
Then I thought that the episode ended with the boss in the office late by himself, and remarking that the female main character was dangerous, but this was a false memory. The situation might have conveyed that he thought something like this, and was disturbed the events that occurred — his hand being forced, by someone who did not seem to mind if no one else realized what had happened — but he did not say anything about her.
Actual dialogue,
789 00:44:20,898 --> 00:44:22,846 [Haken Bentou Business Plan]
790 00:44:22,846 --> 00:44:24,387 Department Manager,
791 00:44:24,387 --> 00:44:29,379 I will improve this business plan and advance it to the final selection.
792 00:44:29,379 --> 00:44:30,679 Me and Satonaka.
793 00:44:30,679 --> 00:44:32,799 He's no good.
794 00:44:32,799 --> 00:44:35,610 He doesn't understand the company.
795 00:44:36,146 --> 00:44:38,603 This business plan...
796 00:44:38,603 --> 00:44:39,795 You do it.
797 00:44:44,469 --> 00:44:46,293 I understand.
I don't remember all the details of the episode after like 16 years, but basically, the section chief whom the boss disfavours is 'nice'. The one who is given more responsibility and power in this scene is a little bit more 'mean'. The overall attitude that the boss has is that a 'nice' person is not a good leader. For example, at the start of the series, the 'nice' character does not challenge the main character when she steals his seat (Ep 01 at 5:49):
Just as, for example, Japan provoked China in the 1930s by invading and fighting against it, not respecting China when it was weak. When leadership and dominance is determined, at least in part, by fighting and being 'mean' (like being dishonest to gain more business share by asserting that a full-time employee did something impressive, rather than a contractor who will soon leave the company), then it's natural for people to think that it's fine to ignore things that don't seem to be their advantage, even if they would help other people. Like a solution that might help everyone in the world by a tiny amount but would take any individual significant effort to verify.
