To Imane, pt 91

"A button creates a house for anyone in your country and also gives them free food, but nothing else is provided (no Internet or electricity). Poor people stay poor after pushing the button. Other countries don't have the button. Five years after the button becomes available, is your country getting worse or better?"

"If you had to choose one country to receive this magic button that creates houses and food for people, would you choose your own country or another country?"

___

Update 01 Jun 2026, 00:39

Topic: criticism.

For some reason, I was thinking of the fight at the end of Fist of Legend, and criticism was the only way I could think of to make it relevant. The sign that said "Sick man of Asia". (I've mentioned this before, but based on a search, it wasn't in a weblog post.) Wikipedia says that,

The Chinese characters are commonly translated to "Sick men of the East" and is used as a famous reference to Fist of Fury.

Which apparently showed the sign in multiple scenes including this one which I watched the first few minutes of. I haven't seen either of these two movies, and yet I am claiming that I understand the use of the "東亞病夫" phrase well enough to say that it was a criticism of China, and that the fight with the Japanese general was supposed to be a like allegory for Japan's war with China.

If Japan didn't intend to take all of China's resources and territory, why should Japan have cared if China was weak and being exploited by Western countries? Well, Japan is also an Asian country, and China being weak also made Japan look bad.

I had to find this angle, of criticism, because I don't think you're interested in scenes of martial arts fighting. (Note the Wikipedia article's mention of the line that was left out of the US version of Fist of Legend: "The best way to defeat your enemy is to use a gun. Martial arts is about personal development.")

It would be nice if there was no fighting in the real world. But there is, and so the question of why Japan fought with China is relevant. (It's also fair to point out that Japan participated in the eight-nation alliance that invaded China in 1900, so it wasn't just Western countries oppressing Asian countries.)

Second point about criticism: When gang members start being logical

It's presented as a comedy video. But I think it's real criticism. The comedy angle is just so people don't view the creator as deviating from the group strategy of blaming other people for their problems (in the video, the CIA or the Matrix).

But it's not just criticism of actual gang members. It's also criticism of rich people, which according to the video is 'white' people (which is supported by data like this, "nearly 96.1 percent of the 1.2 million households in the top one percent by income were white", with wealth being even less equal than income). The video suggests that things would be better if property in the neighborhoods which gang members come from were owned by the people who lived there, rather than by "white people".

The questions at the start of this post are relevant: if everyone owned the properties where they lived, poor people would still be poor. They might not be as poor: rent is one of the ways in which money is transferred from poor people to rich people.

Poll: "Should we have policies that encourage people to come to and stay in our country illegally?" I thought of this on 30 May, but it's really just a political question. No reasonable person should answer yes to it, although some people might. I didn't include it in the original post, because it would suggest that those two questions are also political, when they are not. This video about gang members shows how the questions are broader than just immigration. Someone who ignores immigration could easily decide that the answer is that the country with the button would be getting better, despite that people generally always say that things are getting worse on some issues like morality.

Third point about criticism: when you denied a ban appeal on Twitch for someone who said they truly thought that you were cute.

Would I consider myself similar to that person? Not at all. If I get banned on a Twitch channel, I view it as a positive thing: one more person whose happiness I don't have to worry about.

Would that person criticize you, if they saw the video that showed that it was you that denied the appeal, and not one of your mods? I suspect that you made it into a YouTube short because of that specific ban appeal denial, so you were sort of treating them as special. I don't think that's something they should complain about.

I do think it's important to act in a way that reduces criticism, when that criticism is valid. It's sometimes subjective whether criticism is valid: the slave revolts against the Roman Republic, in which Spartacus was a leader although that's really all I know. Since they revolted, it's clear that the slaves criticized the society that had enslaved them. If they hadn't revolted, maybe people would be saying today that the people who were enslaved at that time didn't criticize the dominant society, or that only a few slaves had such criticism so their criticism wasn't valid.

So I am implying that people who viewed China as being unusually weak were valid, even if it was only weak because it didn't spend as much money on military as some other countries were doing, and if all countries had spent less on military there would not have been 20 million deaths in World War I from all the new technologies like machine guns. (When looking it up, I saw this: "The presence of British and Russian troops led to blockades of food distribution, which culminated into the Persian famine of 1917–1919, which under most modern estimates caused two million deaths.")

I am implying that criticism of rich people is valid. Even criticism of "white people" might be valid. And if the video about gang members was presenting a criticism of 'black' people, instead of merely being a comedy skit, then that criticism might also be valid.

Also this doesn't fit with the theme of criticism, but I liked this game from Hoang: Defense Against A Hoang Rush

If you don't share this idea, can you give him some money kthx

>AoE2: post regarding learning stream being titled "Suffering"

___

Update 01 Jun 2026, 03:10

Poll: "You are a rich person, and the percentage of society's total wealth that you own has been going up and up even though you do nothing. Society seems uninterested in enacting policies that would reverse this. Do you share an idea that would reduce economic inequality or continue to do nothing?"

___

Update 01 Jun 2026, 17:39

Greta posted something on Instagram, so according to this from 30 May,

"I will keep waiting for Imane to share the idea until I see that Greta has posted something on Instagram after this point in time, and after that I will be waiting only for Greta to share this idea"

I'm not waiting for you to share this idea anymore and should probably unpublish this post, but this is what I was going to say: the situation in the US where 'black' people blame others could be seen as a local optimum. Of course, 'black' people in countries like Nigeria don't blame others, so there is no pressure for them to think or act like they have fewer opportunities than other people, and so the culture is quite different. I thought of a poll which would help people understand this:

"If all people who are receiving welfare money but are technically able to work were to try as hard as they could to find and apply for jobs and earn money, would the unemployment rate, as the percentage of people who are looking for work who can't get a job, go up or down?"

A lot of people are dumb, and some of those dumb people would say that the unemployment rate would go down. But people with some understanding of economics would probably say that the unemployment rate would go up as a result.

So, to the extent that people think that the unemployment rate being low is good, they can see a benefit from not criticizing people who get welfare, which is usually only possible if one is poor. It becomes a situation that involves deception, and any situation with deception has a risk of being exposed. So people become careful with what they say, and avoid talking about things when they are not completely sure of the effects of talking about it: not to help themselves, but to help other people.

Regarding the question at the start of this post: this isn't too different from what the US did in the 1800s; a search for "us homesteader act buy land" gives Homestead Act (1862) on archive.gov as the featured snippet. Wikipedia says,

Also involved in the acts were Buffalo soldiers, African-American soldiers who were key in building the American frontier in the West. They often engaged in wars with Native Americans, led by the government, to take over Indigenous land.

A poor person who works can provide more value to their country than they consume, even if they pay less in taxes than they receive in direct benefits (not even counting indirect benefits like spending on roads and other infrastructure). But a poor person who doesn't work, or do any unpaid thing like contribute to open source software or volunteer for charities, doesn't provide any direct benefit to other people. They might still make the economy better, just as with the classic "bury bottles filled with bank notes" thought experiment. But since people value fairness (7 out of 8 people answered Yes on the last question) and giving people money for doing nothing tends to lead to more people doing nothing, it doesn't make a country better, even if GDP goes up. (Greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels would also go up.)

So it's not even a question of "are policies that attract poor people to a country better than policies that attract rich people". Poor people can help a country. But poor people who can't find jobs aren't really contributing anything, because society won't let them contribute (the situation signals that people would prefer that the poor people receive free money than for the poor people to be doing work).

This weblog is about this idea, and I'm no longer trying to get you to share it, so this is my last post addressed to you.

___

Update 01 Jun 2026, 23:43

你们一句想看 我虽迟但到 #开灯关灯丝滑变装 by 赛博子, 2024-09-24 with 862k likes

"You gain the ability to perfectly copy any dance, but you cannot make any meaningful variations or changes. Every hand gesture, every head and eye movement is the same. How many followers do you end up with?"

I'm cheating because I said it was the last post, but I didn't say it was the last update. It was implied to be the last update, so as a penalty, if Greta posts again on Instagram without any indication that she's shared this idea, I'm unpublishing this post.

shake that a** girl transition:
    '长晴呀 @wcqmmd #这转场我也会画逐渐离谱 服了 shake that a** girl transition [douyin 7418531609332288804].mp4'
    '小仙儿 @32101019 退后点 天才画家要出手了#这转场我也会画#反差 shake that a** girl transition [douyin 7417014426328501541].mp4'
    '空哥 @wzkk6666 “这一脚 你拿什么抵抗”#这转场我也会画 #变装 #撕画变装挑战 shake that a** girl transition [douyin 7418526398509255955].mp4', 7416299702204779815
    '赛博子 @SyBer0318 天才画家 #这转场我也会画 shake that a** girl transition [douyin 7414831934481681674].mp4' 3.4M likes
    ... (others downloaded, bookmarked 10 Oct 2024)

Microwave transition challenge 微波炉转场, spinning:
    '赛博子 @SyBer0318 360度的我 #微波炉转场挑战 [douyin 7422291690838347058][a +0.14s].mp4' 580K likes
    '尾尾 @85199094586 微波炉转场 yc@Kukombo #换头了换头了 #妆前妆后 #变装 [douyin 7420029620092718375].mp4' 3M likes
    '菜菜 @SIVA52020 微波炉转场 YC@Kukombo #今天长这样 #微波炉转场 #变装 [douyin 7421769390204456243].mp4' 340K likes, joke cameo
    'Yz玛丽 @itsyzml 快四十了 状态还可以 #微波炉转场挑战 [douyin 7423344061358148904].mp4'
    '是joli琦 @351294414 晕了晕了 #微波炉转场挑战 [douyin 7423695785209957673].mp4'
    '雅娜yana @yana826 是我卡了吗#微波炉转场挑战 [douyin 7423046832361590055].mp4

Turn on and off the lights, silky transition 开灯关灯丝滑变装, Battle forte · Lollipop, nan bo (costume change):
    '赛博子 @SyBer0318 你们一句想看 我虽迟但到 #开灯关灯丝滑变装 Battle forte · Lollipop, nan bo, costume change [douyin 7418175819761110299][+a +0.14s].mp4'
    '남다른 The unique @namdareun__ 불이 꺼지면 변하는 상어🦈 #어둠챌린지 #dancechallenge #dancetrend #onepickent Battle forte · Lollipop, nan bo [mnkRqT6ZoxQ].webm'
    '@쏘야SOYA 주말엔 늦잠인데~😆 #dancevideo #소울케이브 #soulcave Battle forte · Lollipop, nan bo [gX-bgzlhy-Q][sync tuning, audio c5H9stym9f4].webm'
    '이퍼플 @_purple_lee 조명을 끄면...💡⁉️#반전어둠챌린지#실루엣챌린지#원픽이엔티 #dancechallenge Battle forte · Lollipop, nan bo [RNBfp8HKzqk].webm'
    '유나몽 @yunamong_ 잠탱이 🔥#반전 #댄스챌린지 #dancechallenge Battle forte · Lollipop, nan bo [c5H9stym9f4][a +0.07s].webm'

 

online tasks2, 16 Sep 2022.txt:

08 Nov 2024
dates, trend progression: 7418175819761110299, mnkRqT6ZoxQ, translate "你们一句想看" and second line

gX-bgzlhy-Q, MQR6R7snIVQ, c5H9stym9f4 missed username in filename, 'NA'

RNBfp8HKzqk hashtags not separated by spaces?

source for NN9fxy9cgUc from 树懒潼 @990420_t

upload dates, views for 3PY2j22d3Ds and slvcbzTRjG4 (kept slvcbzTRjG4)

upload dates for Da Da Da, lG80vlXBtaQ influential?

The\ story\ behind\ the\ dance\ \[izLxF32Bc-k\] same dance as Lz_WEtHKzD0? translate 원조

Sync tuning for gX-bgzlhy-Q, from ~three days ago:

 in='/media/misaki/Nao/storage/short/unsorted/쏘야SOYA NA 주말엔 늦잠인데~😆 #쏘야 #dancevideo #소울케이브 #soulcave Battle forte · Lollipop, nan bo [gX-bgzlhy-Q].webm'

audio cut off at start, use
 a='/media/misaki/Nao/storage/short/unsorted/yunamong_ @유나몽 잠탱이 🔥#반전 #댄스챌린지 #dancechallenge Battle forte · Lollipop, nan bo [c5H9stym9f4][a +0.07s].webm'

 ffmpeg -seek_timestamp 1 -i "$in" -vf "drawtext=fontcolor=white:fontsize=10+H/50:x=W-200*(10+H/50)/24:y=50:shadowx=2:shadowy=2:text='%{pict_type} %{pts}':fontfile=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf" -g 30 -an -preset veryfast output.mp4

 fd='-framedrop -vf drawtext=fontcolor=white:fontsize=10+H/50:x=W-200*(10+H/50)/24:y=10:shadowx=2:shadowy=2:text='%{pict_type} %{pts}':fontfile=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf -vf copy -af asetpts=PTS-0/TB -v quiet -seek_interval 2.5'

 extra="" exp="TS+0.15/TB*clip((TS*TB-0.38)/0.7,0,1)+0.15/TB*clip((TS*TB-0.43)/0.7,0,1)+0.1/TB*clip((TS*TB-0.48)/1.3,0,1)+0.05/TB*clip((TS*TB-3.28)/0.01,0,1)+0.05/TB*clip((TS*TB-3.3)/0.18,0,1)-0.04/TB*clip((TS*TB-5.05)/0.07,0,1)-0.04/TB*clip((TS*TB-5.12)/0.25,0,1)+0.07/TB*clip((TS*TB-6.3)/0.78,0,1)+0.1/TB*clip((TS*TB-7.11)/0.4,0,1)-0.07/TB*clip((TS*TB-12.54)/0.16,0,1)-0.05/TB*clip((TS*TB-12.7)/0.6,0,1)" end="${in##*]}" out=${in/$end/[sync tuning, audio c5H9stym9f4]$end} out=${out/ [/$extra [} d=/dev/shm ext=${end##*.} ext=mkv; ffmpeg -seek_timestamp 1 -i output.mp4 -seek_timestamp 1 -ss 0.58 -seek2any 1 -i "$a" -c copy -map 0:v -map 1:a -time_base 1/30k -bsf:v "setts='pts=$exp:dts=$exp'" $d/temp.$ext; ffplay $d/temp.$ext $fd

 ext=${end##*.}; ffmpeg -seek_timestamp 1 -i "$in" -seek_timestamp 1 -ss 0.58 -seek2any 1 -i "$a" -c copy -map 0:v -map 1:a -time_base 1/30k -bsf:v "setts='pts=$exp:dts=$exp'" $d/temp.$ext; ffplay $d/temp.$ext $fd

 ffmpeg -i $d/temp.$ext -i $d/temp.$ext -c copy -copyts -map 0:v -map 1:a -max_interleave_delta 0 $d/copy.$ext && touch -r "$in" $d/copy.$ext && mv -iv $d/copy.$ext "$out.temp" && sync "$out.temp" && mv -iv "$out.temp" "$out" && rm -iv "$in"

Lighting examples in MikuMikuDance:

【MMDホラー】黒 百 合-ｸﾛﾕﾘ- 　【後編】

-GODZILLA-　【G覚醒編】

Much worse than the output of better programs, like this series:

Astartes full movie (5 mini series in one) by Siama Pedersen

Am I calling you bad? No. But if you want to stream games, and you think there aren't any good games right now, what are you doing to fix this?

To Imane, pt 72

>AI writing avoids rhetorical questions? Ask for an argument that includes them.

I updated the previous two posts, with "added <date>" to mark the additions. Although these posts each have only one recorded view, which could have been a bot, if anyone already read these posts, they might not notice the additions.

Why does the logic that leads to me not checking your accounts not also lead to me not checking Greta's Instagram account?

I got distracted because I added a link to a robots.txt file, to the word 'bot' used above. First to Blogger, then Google, then I checked the file for Chirp Club.

Google's robot.txt is mostly for Yandex, the Russian search engine that I use for image search (since Google Images reverse search no longer works with my old browser) and for OCR of Chinese and other languages. It uses "User-agent: Yandex" twice, which seems like a mistake that could potentially lead to the first block of instructions being ignored, but I assume that if this was the case, someone at Google would have noticed Yandex's indexing and fixed the file.

https://www.x.com/robots.txt redirects to https://twitter.com/robots.txt, rather than to https://x.com/robots.txt. It has this section:

# Every bot that might possibly read and respect this file
# ========================================================
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

A guide says that this is supposed to block the entire server from being accessed by bots. Apparently, the Internet Archive is among the bots that no longer respect this file, although I think it used to and not archive sites that blocked it in this file.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230501154709/https://twitter.com/robots.txt

# Every bot that might possibly read and respect this file
(allows some stuff)

https://web.archive.org/web/20200501154716/https://www.twitter.com/robots.txt

The entire file is just,

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Also, this file has 4.4 million captures. I thought it might be a record, but Google's robot.txt has 5.1 million captures. google.com has 19 million captures, youtube.com has 15 million.

But captures before 2020 have the same text, all the way back to 2007:

https://web.archive.org/web/20071212224542/http://twitter.com/robots.txt

# Every bot that might possibly read and respect this file.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?

So the sentence was written way before companies started to mass-copy human-written text to train AI, and before Elon Musk bought the platform.

Greta posts about problems. This makes people think she's unhappy. You don't post about problems. This makes people think you're happy. If in fact, you are unhappy, then you are being dishonest. If you are happy, then I have no interest in looking at your accounts, because I don't think me doing so benefits you.

Now I can begin to explain random stuff that I didn't want to say at the start of this post. I was watching 4v4 RF Arambai & Throwing Axemen !, until at 16:03, I got the dropped vp9 segment bug. This was just after the game state calmed down, with the expectation of transitioning to a 'boom' with no fighting for a while.

I react unpredictably to this bug, which lends credibility to the supposition that I am doing what I want, instead of that I am trying always to guess what someone else with incomplete information thinks I want. Sometimes, I continue watching, flipping the Stable Volume option to force a reload of the missing video or audio segments. Sometimes, I just bookmark the video with the timestamp and stop watching it. This is like when I started watching Chinese dramas, but intended to watch only a few episodes from each of them (initially like four episodes at most). If there is a government conspiracy, and my actions cause one or more people to watch certain content, then I am trying to get them invested in that content and want to continue watching it. If they watched it when I didn't watch it, they would have a harder time understanding my mental state, so it becomes an incentive for people to share this idea so that they can continue watching those series. (Regarding dramas, this plan only made sense after interruptions to TV-based streaming services, like episodes failing to load, introduced the possibility that my viewing activity on a TV was receiving attention, even though other people could use the device.)

With several of the AoE2 videos I have watched, the vp9 bug didn't happen until near the end of the video. People often like to complete something they are almost finished with; if they get back to it later, they'll have forgotten what happened earlier, so the motivation is wanting to optimize. Finishing it immediately means saved time, compared to watching it later and having to rewatch the earlier parts to understand what's happening.

This timing was different, not anywhere close to the end of the video. It was after a lot of villager fighting, then something happened that I won't link due to language, then at 15:17 the blue player nearly succeeded at preventing disaster. Put simply, one could predict that I enjoyed watching that segment.

I'm doing a search of my logs with Mei, but before I did, I checked the access times of these files, which will be changed by the search: other than four that I accessed on 26 Jan of this year, these logs (341 files) have not been accessed since 06 Sep 2021.

So: my memory was wrong. I thought Mei had mentioned a certain object type in relation to this link, but it was for something else.

I thought of pasting the entire chat logs, but I would want to comment and it's a distraction. I will just say that Mei linked Watashi no Reimu ga Warawanai | My Reimu Won't Smile! (Touhou Project), which she described as

>It's not pron~

>It's just a random touhou manga ^^;

Which I will hide from AI content detection by obfuscating the URL with rot13, r-uragnv.bet/t/289009/os3po8r85n/

And seven hours later, 2010-09-26,

Conversation with l<redacted>@hotmail.com at Sun 26 Sep 2010 11:08:50 AM PDT on r<redacted>@yahoo.com (msn)
(11:30:59 AM) Misaki: -yawns a little- ~
(11:32:33 AM) Lillium~: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJCzfsV61d0  What has been seen ._. cannot be unseen!
(01:18:46 PM) Lillium~ has signed off.

I didn't remember this video at all, and I didn't reply about it, but now after all the sad things have happened, I can joke about it: my family also has a female human head. My younger female relative braided the head's hair several months ago. In the past, my youngest sister sometimes put the head in the linen closet (for blankets and towels) to surprise people, with success. (I'm sure I did not remember the head in 2010, if I even watched the video then.)

Without rereading the manga, even though it's only 27 pages, the story is as the title suggests: "My Reimu Won't Smile". Certain characters fail to get Reimu to smile, until Reimu laughs for a different character, to the consternation of the characters that had failed.

It's already been two hours since I started this post. Some details that might not be important: after I paused the AoE2 video due to the vp9 bug, eventually I decided that my response would be to watch Vurtne's 60~66 WoW video, but when I checked my bookmarks a different video popped up so I watched that instead. I got the vp9 bug around 9:20, after I had stopped and checked the comments due to misidentification of the Cold Snap spell.

If there is some sort of weird government conspiracy going on, I don't know what kind of communication you might have. I must say that if a government developed the capability to understand what parts of a YouTube video someone is watching by looking at their decrypted web traffic, that is an impressive technical accomplishment (even though YouTube already tracks this data for all users). I cannot actually think of another case where this capability would be useful for a government: the US government might treat Iran as an enemy, but does anyone care whether high-ranking Iranian official X watches certain moments in a YouTube video? So there is no reason to expect it would be part of standard surveillance capabilities.

So in this scenario where my YouTube issues are due to interference and not just buggy software, and we imagine someone has a button that interferes with the data YouTube sends to my computer, and we suppose that someone decides to press this button because they think I'm sad, or because think they think that watching part of a video made me happy, and that makes them sad because I don't know that they guessed that I was happy: it's questionable that they would tell you what they did, or why. Put simply, you might not be acting in a way that helps that person.

 

Not everyone has any interest in trying to change the world. I think that even people who might have the capability to do so are afraid of the consequences of failure; more precisely, they might be afraid that they would be unwilling to admit that they failed. I say this because I think I'm this way: on what is currently the last post on my main weblog, I felt the word "diamond" contributed meaningfully to the post. Diamond is a very hard material, but it is not a very strong material. My understanding is that diamond can shatter, though I'm not sure how easily. Would diamond windows, which lent their name to the title of the book The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, actually be useful, if they could be manufactured? Or would they be worse than the windows we already have?

I once emailed my friend Hime with a reference to like diamond shattering, meant to be a reference to my failure to be in a relationship with Mei, or more accurately my failure to make it so Mei was in a relationship, whether with me or anyone else. (Also about the possibility of Mei being a strong person, like diamond, who had failed at learning Japanese quickly enough to feel at home in Japan.)

Note that the author of the song, "Uso to Diamond" may or may not have thought about this aspect of diamonds.

But that's a general explanation: if this idea would fix many problems, most people who might feel they have a chance at changing the world are still not aware of this idea. Knowing about this idea makes changing the world much easier.

I'm sort of trying to connect this all to you somehow, but I think it's really about some hypothetical person pushing a button, who may or may not be someone I have previously sent messages to (I'm not sure if it's accurate to say that Sherine and I ever talked; maybe the closest was her reply to Autumn's tweet about Yara, if three or four messages in a chain are enough to constitute a conversation). So about that, I will say more: I am not secretly trying to make anyone happy by watching videos etc. It's more accurate to say that I do things that I would not be doing if people had already shared the idea. Age of Empires II supposedly has a 99% male playerbase, and it's reasonable to say that a typical female would not be interested in AoE2 — unlike, say, World of Warcraft, which I think had ... well, I was going to guess 40% female, but

"studies of mmo player demographics wow 2005" > https://nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001365.php

From the survey data, the average age of the WoW player is 28.3 (SD = 8.4). 84% of players are male. 16% are female. Female players are significantly older (M = 32.5, SD = 10.0) than male players (M = 28.0, SD = 8.4). On average, they spend 22.7 (SD = 14.1) hours per week playing WoW. There are no gender differences in hours played per week.

The dilemma of whether to say more. Over The Hills And Far Away: some people are willing to wait to be in a relationship. Some people are reluctant to say that they want someone to wait for them, but the fact that they do secretly want the person to wait for them is seen as a significant part of the story. I don't feel sad and never felt sad from watching this scene, but many people in the comments say they did. I think it's terrible to have to wait years to be in a relationship with someone. Of course, it's also terrible if you wait, and then while you're waiting they die, and so you're never in a real relationship with them.

So, probably the only movie I think about watching, other than like a certain Chinese live-action sci-fi movie that was probably meant for a young audience, is The Mummy (2017), because the first few minutes looked interesting, it's an "action-adventure horror film", and Autumn once said that she liked horror films or something. But of course, I have also enjoyed the Chinese dramas that I have watched, and a quick search says 62% of the viewership for Chinese dramas are female. So, when I do things like watch AoE2 videos, it's an activity where I won't feel bad that I'm alone, because I expect that no one would want to watch them with me anyway. It doesn't mean that it's the thing I most want to be doing at that moment.

I have no sympathy for someone who reaches wrong conclusions because they aren't willing to take action to learn more information, out of a fear of appearing to be bad. As I said on Chirp Club: Don't be bad and you won't look bad.

 

Finished 04 May 2026 at 05:00. I will delay publishing this until Greta makes a post on Instagram, not a Story, that has a description that begins with the letter mentions Lebanon or is clearly about people in or from Lebanon. At that point, I will also unpublish the post that I said I would unpublish if Greta posted on Instagram.

Not convinced Ellie will read this

Unless one is SUPER obnoxious, RW people rarely block. Blocking is mostly leftist behavior.

https://nitter.net/EllieAsksWhy/status/2040146138687533343

 

Don't allow whispering to someone you have blocked

Can happen by accident, not knowing a player is blocked, and this lets you know to unblock them.

As with many suggestions, I thought of this because I did it by accident. Blocked someone for trade chat spam, and then later whispered them to invite them to a dungeon. Their friend had to let me know I had the player blocked.

 

So once upon a time, I did easily block people. Not because they were annoying me specifically in conversation, but just because they were being annoying in general.

Maybe I wouldn't do it now only because of this singular experience, in which I found that doing so was bad for me (because it led to an embarrassing situation). If Ellie's observation is true, do I act more like a left-wing or a right-wing person?

https://nitter.net/EllieAsksWhy/status/2040141667890782331

"epistemic trespass"

I looked this up to see more details. 'Epistemic' is one of those words that I don't really use myself, though my oldest brother used it. I decided I don't like the term, 'epistemic trespass'.

People often said that Greta doesn't know what she's talking about, even when all she did was retweet quotes by people who presumably do know what they're talking about. It seems to be a word that people use to attack someone without thinking through what they've said: a word that people use to avoid thinking critically. Like a more elite version of the word, "troll".

For every example where someone made a statement outside of their field that was wrong (like Elon Musk misinterpreting these graphs, which I skipped over a few weeks ago in my post about the Chinese/Taiwanese player Supreme:

), there is someone who makes a judgement outside of their field that is correct, or someone who makes a judgement within their field that is wrong (like when a doctor almost killed Elon Musk by misdiagnosing his symptoms). So the observation that "people who take risks sometimes fail" is not, in itself, a particularly useful one.

(The topic of experts venturing outside their field is one that was featured in a video I watched yesterday at 2x speed: summary, streamers can be seen as having the job of professional opinion givers, and often those opinions are wrong, and people often put too much importance in the opinions of people who are not experts in the thing they're talking about. 4:32 "Don't hold celebrities or entertainers to the kind of standards that you would expect to hold experts, scientists, or politicians to. Don't expect entertainers to be able to answer all of your questions or be the arbiters of moral values." 4:58 "I mean ask the entertainer questions but do understand that there is a level of scope that they have. For some reason I always see this in both engineers and surgeons. People believe that just because they're really good thing at one thing it makes them naturally really good at something else and it just doesn't.")

To ???, pt 5

A lie is justified if it does not benefit you.

In some cases, however, whether something is a lie at all depends on other people, and this may mean it is the responsibility of someone else to ensure the above situation with regards to purity, even when the implications of this are an unwanted result. 

https://daughterofankh.blogspot.com/2009/06/phase.html

https://daughterofankh.blogspot.com/2009/11/greatest-adventure.html

Greta posted stories about support for transgender people.

When I was on Guildcafe (site started by people who played Guild Wars, but intended for people from all MMOs and maybe other game types), there was a female person who posted on the forums about how, in her work, she encountered many people who physically or genetically did not fit into traditional gender classifications. Out of the small pool of people who visited the site, and the even smaller pool of people who used a photo of themselves as their profile picture, she was the most attractive person.

The second story Greta posted, from @transgender_together, says,

Transgender people are increasingly targeted.

The number of anti-trans bills proposed around the world has steadily increased in recent years.

Trans people, particularly transgender women of color, continue to be targeted with violence and killed.

I'm not linking the original post by @transgender_together because it's a multi-image post, and Instagram has decided that since my browser hasn't been updated in four years, it doesn't need to serve a webpage that allows me to view more than the first image. But I will link this:

https://www.instagram.com/transgender_together/reel/DWFR-Rfje9o/

I didn't bother watching to the end, and Instagram doesn't let me see its full duration so I don't know how much I didn't watch. This is honestly something that has been lost in the discussions by people like J.K. Rowling. I have no idea what she thinks about this, because I have never seen it come up in the Chirp Club posts she has responded to or in replies to her there.

I mentioned in the only 2013 post that's currently published (which of course, I republished after having hidden it, in order to show Greta that I had mentioned climate change that early on) that a male player had protected my female paladin Jinsuu in World of Warcraft after I acted like I was AFK after losing an item roll. We had earlier done the Verigan's Fist quest chain together, going to places like Blackfathom Deeps and killing the elite mobs outside of the dungeon, although we probably needed to recruit additional players for the Shadowfang Keep portion of it. And I think he was part of a PvP raid I organized on Sun Rock Retreat in the Stonetalon Mountains, which would have consisted mainly of me and him killing guards, as no other players in the raid were high enough level to do so. (We would have been in mid-40s, I think the guards would have been lvl 40, so it was not at all easy to kill more than one guard at once, and the flight master and his enraged wyverns were too high-level for us to threaten.)

Would he have protected my character if she was not female? He asked me at least once if I was female in real life, and I did not give a clear answer. I sent him mining ores and stuff, without ever asking or expecting him to give me any items. So if I was dishonest by not telling him my real-life gender, I did not benefit from my interactions with him.

In Aion, there was a male player who sort of made an 'advance' on me. It was brief; I don't recall the details. I think he asked if I was female in real life, and I said no. The next day, he claimed not to remember anything that had happened. I sent him an in-game mail with an apple (worth almost nothing) and a million kinah, the in-game currency: a healing potion was worth 1k~3k kinah. I vaguely remember that I referenced the apple at some later point, like maybe with a letter with the subject 'apple'; I just remember that he got higher level and so started grouping with higher-level players, and maybe wasn't having too much fun, while I had basically stopped leveling except through the unwanted experience that I got from crafting items. (My in-game status was, "I am a turtle desu", referencing my lack of leveling.) He might have voted in at least one of the polls I made on the forums, about fixing PvP and making the game more fun (so that it wouldn't die, but it did). Once again, if I deceived someone by playing a female character, I made sure that I did not benefit.

Noting that the person who had a female character in Aion named Caelasa knew that I had a female character (necessary to mention, because our characters were in different physical locations most of the time we talked) and still 'made a move' on me. My response to this was to say that I was 'taken', which is passive language that would more typically be used by a female, and it turned out that this was false: I was not 'taken', shown by Mei's refusal to meet me about six months later. So I could be said to have made an implied lie here, that I was female, and also the unintentional lie that I was 'taken' when I was not. I sent this person Caelasa a thousand health potions with the subject 'For the war effort', but I still don't consider the matter resolved, even though my character has been renamed due to activity, I don't know if friend lists would still be active even if this person's character still exists, and in general it would be difficult — but not impossible — for Caelasa and I to communicate again. So I have done my best to ensure that if I lied to Caelasa, by possibly suggesting that I was female and by saying that I was 'taken', that I did not benefit.

A lot of the violence that transgender people receive is because they benefit financially from acting as the gender which they say they are. They do not always benefit from acting as that gender: for example, Justine Tunney, who created the website occupywallst.org, in 2012 or 2013 posted a photo of herself holding up a sign, but also posted credit to the person who had taken the photo. If a photographer takes photos for free, without receiving publicity in return, it is a favor to the subject of the photos, but giving the photographer credit makes it more transactional: the photos for publicity. If Justine Tunney had received a favor in an unbalanced transaction, there could have been the possibility it was because of her gender.

Transgender people have to consider the possibility that people will think they are lying. This is just their situation.

I think a bigger problem is the 'love makes you evil' meme. Is it bad to want to have children? Is it bad to prefer that someone you fall in l*ve with is not transgender, which could preclude the possibility of later having children?

To ???, pt 4

Greta's latest posts on Instagram.

This is like how when Israel accuses groups in Gaza or Lebanon of using human shields, and putting military assets close to civilians. Storing arms in civilian buildings instead of on military bases away from any civilians.

These groups do this because they are weak. (Whereas when Israel obliterated entire families because they stood on the roof of their home to prevent Israel from bombing it, only to get bombed anyway, it did not mean that Hamas was using them as human shields, just that people did not want to lose their home.)

What was the law that Hamas used when it reportedly executed people after the truce, a few months ago? People who had cooperated with Israel or whatever.

Israel has not executed anyone because of the new law, and it's unclear if they ever will. The images mention a German who was executed after being illegally abducted and then put to trial; if Israel executed someone under the new law, then it would no longer be possible to mention that German as the last person to be executed. Why call for nations to break ties with Israel because of this law, but not call for them to stop supporting Palestine due to Hamas's (purported, I did not look into it) executions of traitors?

Calling it "based on ethnicity": Hamas, or whatever group is in charge if the agreement that Hamas would no longer be in charge was followed, cannot execute Israelis for trying to destroy Gaza because Palestine is weak. Although it captured many Israelis, it was more beneficial to keep them alive. Israel can easily capture more Palestinians and so they hold no value as captives for the political equivalent of ransom. If Palestine was strong, it might be just as willing to execute Israelis captured under circumstances which would not qualify them as prisoners of war (for example, commandos who don't wear military uniforms are generally recognized as not being afforded the status of prisoners of war). And so, because of weakness, Palestine does not do one bad thing (threaten to execute prisoners) but does another bad thing (hide military among civilians).

Killing 50k or whatever civilians is certainly worse than threatening to possibly execute prisoners who have been convicted (fairly or not) of particularly bad offenses. People just move on to the latest problem, which is exactly why Israel thought that it could get away with taking over a bunch of land, 80 years ago.

Discussion here: https://youtu.be/aI7J2wJw3u8?t=1184 (19:44)

"How do I keep on living and putting effort into every day knowing I will probably not live in a couple of years because of a looming invasion the inability to change the situation all while the environment [becomes worse]"?

— the fact that I edited that reminds me of when Greta promised not to use bad words. It might have been her willingness to use bad words that brought attention to her. So it could have been interpreted as saying she was not trying as hard to get influence that could be used to fix problems.

Anyway. There is a long discussion, like I disagreed when at 23:02 he said,

"You will not be punished for not actively trying to solve all the world's ills. Solve what you can, but don't beat yourself up if it's not everything."

But then he says at 24:43,

"If you want to do that heroic thing, go for it. If you want to take on the world's ills, go for it. The world is not — we are not hurting for people that want to help. We are hurting for people that can. [...] We are short on people who actively actually do things that do change the world."

Well. Would Imane have shared the idea before I stopped emailing her, if she had known I would write almost 60 weblog posts addressed to her? Perhaps me saying "you shall be rid of me" was deceptive if she thought that I would not start writing these posts. But I stopped watching dramas as a consequence of her not sharing the idea: a consequence I imposed on myself, not one that she asked for, but if she did read my emails then I consider it fair to blame this slightly harmful outcome for me on her. If she had demonstrated that she cared about me being able to continue watching dramas, she would not have had to deal with the consequence of possibly being unsure of whether I want her to receive these messages, since I'm not emailing them to her.

To Imane, pt 59

30 Mar 2026
"I checked Imane's Chirp Club account by accident since the tab reloaded because the process associated with it was gone, and I won't check her account again unless I think that Ellie thinks that Imane reads the weblog for the idea"


31 Mar 2026
"in three days for real, if nothing interested has happened, I will check if the person on Reddit replied to me and post about WoW there, and probably also say something to Camille Cooke" 01:23

post Token DKP on classic plus, how to fix leveling in retail

story coherence

Pey hasn't streamed WoW in 25 days. I'm not too worried, looking at the stream she did a week later. But suppose she reads this site, and posting here was a valid way of communicating with her, and suppose she shared this idea. I think she would fail to get people to use it.

Result: people would look stupid for not sharing it. A result that would not have occurred, or at least not to the same degree, if someone more famous had shared it. Every day that passes that someone famous doesn't share it, it gives people with less influence this dilemma: share it and risk making everyone look stupid, or don't share it and have a 100% chance of more people being killed in Ukraine, Iran, Lebanon, Sudan, Myanmar etc.?

So I was even thinking of trying once again to get Ghostcrawler aka Greg Street to share it. His MMO shut down:

Ghostcrawlers' studio, Fantastic Pixel Castle, loses funding from NetEase. Studios risks being shut down unless they can find another investor.

Fantastic Pixel Castle (Project Ghost) will be shutting down as of November 17

I had just posted this on wowclassic.plus, and like a lot of the suggestions I've posted (without saving them locally) I think it's broad enough to be relevant to other games:

Turn the PvP system into a way of identifying skilled players

Classic is lacking this at the moment. 80% of players in the survey want arenas, 66% want rated BGs, 66% want Heroic dungeons, 50% want Mythic dungeons, and 40% want multiple raid difficulties, but the problem is that these are all instanced content. You are not really helping other players, and interacting with other random players is — for many players — what Classic is all about. Helping those on your faction, and fighting with those on the opposite faction, which creates a problem for players on that faction which they then can solve by helping each other.

So all of the above systems, that are present in retail, could give a way to identify skilled players, but it would be measuring players doing activities that don't help random players on the same faction the way that participating in world PvP helps them.

Players want to be seen as skilled. If the way to do this is to queue up for instanced content, then retail has shown that players will do it. But why not make the way to do it to find and defeat difficult opponents in world PvP?

Players are used to thinking of the honor system as just a way to get gear. This is certainly what it becomes when everyone can eventually get to Rank 14 by doing battlegrounds for 2 hours per day. But what if we remove gear as the main reward from getting a high rank, and make the rank itself the reward? Gear could still be earned from PvP, just don't associate it with PvP ranks.

The most obvious problem is that the PvP in the Classic phase before BGs turned into roaming death squads. This is because the honor calculation doesn't care about numerical imbalances in fights. It's hard to penalize people for grouping: people already complain about XP from mobs being split in groups, even though there's a bonus, so a group of 5 players that kill a mob worth 100 XP each get 28 XP (140 XP total). If a 5v1 kill of a player worth 100 honor is split with no bonus, it's 20 honor, and having a penalty would make it seem even worse.

But if the honor system is like a ratings system, where points decrease for losing or dying, then grouping can have a penalty of more points lost on death (and fewer points lost if outumbered). It's just too complex to describe in this already-long post.

What with him temporarily renaming his Chirp Club username to @occupygstreet, a clear reference to Occupy Wall Street, it felt he wanted this idea to be used if it would, in fact, reduce inequality, but he was presented with the dilemma mentioned above, as well as maybe the complication of Sherine's involvement. Considering that Sherine deleted her Chirp Club account, I think it's safe to say, 13 years later, that Sherine is not going to publicly share this idea.

He talked about AI in Oct 2025:

AI may one day accelerate game development. But it’s not happening today. All of these layoffs are just to cut opex and make the stock prices go up. It will lead to empty portfolios for the next few years. https://nitter.net/Ghostcrawler/status/1983346428983554501

I mean layoffs happen for lots of reasons. But if a company is claiming they don’t need workers because AI is going to make their games or movies or books today, that’s a little premature. (It’s better at music.) https://nitter.net/Ghostcrawler/status/1983351116097359965

I’m sorry for my friends at Amazon who were trying to keep the MMO dream alive https://nitter.net/Ghostcrawler/status/1983351685784518744

He says 'the' MMO dream, not 'their' MMO dream; compare all the videos I've been watching about modern MMOs being bad.

I do think it's remarkable how 'AI' has gone from inventing fake court cases in a lawyer's thing that they submitted in court without checking the references, to being used by software engineers to call functions from libraries that the programmer doesn't know about, due to the vast number of available libraries.

https://nitter.net/yokoono/status/2020589254208827400

I understand the purpose of the game mode.

I wanted to create a new chess game, making a fundamental rather than decorative change.

You've heard the story of Napoleon playing against the mechanical Turk?

Shortly thereafter, Napoleon attempted an illegal move. The Turk returned the piece to its original place and continued the game. Napoleon attempted the illegal move a second time, and the Turk responded by removing the piece from the board entirely and taking its turn. Napoleon then attempted the move a third time, the Turk responding with a sweep of its arm, knocking all the pieces off the board.

You wrote in 1966,

There comes a moment when you feel like maybe you want to cheat, or you want to convince your opponent which pieces were yours.

Who invented the rule that you can't move white pieces that start on the other side of the board? Is this rule listed somewhere that players can see it? Just because the setup looks like the setup in a traditional chess game, why should players assume that rules, or even goals, are similar?

It immediately dispenses with the idea of war and a battle, because if you are the same, you don’t have a war. Who are we fighting? And why?

You start to really understand that it doesn’t matter. We’re together. We’re on the same side. You realize that it’s not important to win.

I just think of the scene from Neon Genesis Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance that begins with this, and ends with an explosion:

Mari Singing Scene in English & Japanese 

The video description links to an upload of the full scene in English. It's a stark contrast to the attitude of the main male character leading up to his first battle, best described as 'unwilling'. This is, of course, partly an intentional subversion of expectations: people expect males to want to fight, and males expect females to shun fighting.

Rather than linking a video of monkeys fighting in Thailand after tourism decreased during Covid lockdowns (they look the same but still fight as two big teams), I will just say that I have written (in emails, not necessarily here) about how war is related to the 'hidden problem', causing people to fight when they otherwise wouldn't want to.

But most people already understand it to some degree. Just like they would agree that it would be better for an economy, and it would create more jobs etc., for someone to distribute $1 billion to 100 million poor people, giving them $10 each, than for them to give it all to Elon Musk, who apparently now has $840 billion.

Another video that I didn't watch, but a comment:

Oh no!! The generation will be too small for the workforce!! Does that mean the kids who ARE being born will have jobs? Because people right now can’t find any jobs. And it sucks. And I’ll be HAPPY for those kids when there’s jobs desperate for new hires. (831 upvotes)

To Imane, pt 58

Random videos that I clicked on:

Gen Z's Baby Bust — I watched about a minute, until it showed the survey with 60% focusing on improving their financial situation.

Have not watched:

Gen Z men want babies. Gen Z women don’t. | The Gray Area

Why Black Teen Takeovers Keep Happening Everywhere

Note similarity of players in WoW not being able to get groups if their predicted performance is 5% lower than some threshold, to people in real life not being able to get jobs. Each person sending hundreds of job applications or maybe dozens of college applications, and job openings receiving thousands of applications per posting. In both cases there is some limit on the number of openings, and there has been an increase in the ability to filter for 'ideal' candidates, according to an imperfect measurement process. Maybe good candidates now spend less time finding a new job after they leave one, precisely because other people (perhaps those without 5+ years of experience) are less likely to succeed in their search.

If someone gave me your phone number, I wouldn't call you. (I don't even have phone service, but supposing I did.) If someone called you on a phone and then handed that phone to me, with the ringing tone interrupting to suggest you had answered, I wouldn't say anything. If you said "hello", I would say it back and then fully expect you to hang up. If it was a video call, I would immediately try to cover or hide from the camera.

Just kind of funny when this is the 58th post addressed to you.