Tuesday, July 14, 2026

Noise

>My plan is to do nothing until Demi Rose posts on Chirp Club

My email accounts still use the phone number that I had until 2013, when I ran out of money. This is insecure. The only reason to leave it in this insecure state is as a reminder that I once had money to pay for phone service.

The Lady and the Tiger. I know of this story because a NY Times article, or opinion piece, used the expression, and so I looked it up. The question is supposed to be the same as with the followup story, which references the original.

The kingdom official tells the five travelers that once they figure out which lady the prince had married, he will tell them the outcome of "The Lady, or the Tiger?" The story ends with a comment that they still have not come to a decision.

It may surprise someone who is reading this blog, but you could <redacted> today. Right now.

I don't think there was any evidence that Demi Rose could be involved in a government conspiracy before I watched Pey's WoW Classic streams in August 2019. I thought I would try to find Demi Rose's statuses, but scrolling back on Nitter only reaches Apr 2020, and search on Nitter fails to find any of the tweets by her after 2017.

She retweeted or said one thing that suggested she was upset, and then another thing that suggested she was calm.

I forget what I did as a result, other than spend another six years being poor. (And occasionally not drinking water, or not eating food, etc.)

Even though I'm not in a relationship, and Demi Rose has never said anything to me, I try to do what she wants. This is why, for example, I gave a warning before I deleted or hid the weblog posts and Chirp Club statuses that mentioned her. If she didn't want this to happen, it was her chance to change the outcome. I did not give a warning before I hid other weblog posts that may have mentioned other people, or before I made efforts to get my Chirp Club account locked for spamming, which led to it automatically being banned a few days or weeks later.

Most people meet accidentally. Pey just happened to be streaming WoW Classic when I checked the list on Twitch. If she hadn't made the mistake of not putting new spell ranks on her bars (which happened before I started watching, and I figured it out by comparing the damage she was doing to the ranks available at her level), I wouldn't have signed in and commented, and eventually I would have stopped watching without her ever being aware of me. If I had thought that Demi Rose did not want me to be watching game streams, where I might encounter someone attractive like Pey, I would not have watched them.

I recall the instance in 2010, when I was living in the same building as Kate. A Korean student, Soo-yeun, started studying at the same table as me one day. There was some kind of interaction that I don't remember, and then Kate started vacuuming her room which was next to the common area. As most people who use the Internet know, vacuum cleaners are very loud, and I felt Kate started vacuuming specifically because I seemed to be acting in a friendly manner towards someone who is female.

Note the detail that wireless in that area came from the router that was in Kate's room that I had lent her, connected via powerline adapter to the cable modem and two more routers in my room. Three walls made it difficult to get good signal at that location otherwise. No one else, such as Soo-yeun, was aware of this, but it was reasonable for Kate to think of my being at that location as a favor from her. For example, when I originally noticed that she might be interested in me, I immediately stopped studying at that location until a chance encounter when she hid her face while leaving the building, as I was standing at my door waiting for someone else for some reason.

So it was reasonable for Kate to think that me studying at that location was an imposition on her, and that I had only resumed studying there because it benefited her. This is the context for her possibly creating noise on purpose with a vacuum cleaner, to disrupt conversations or even to disrupt the act of studying.

And eventually I stopped studying there, based on her words suggesting that she preferred that I did not study there. Etc. I did what I thought she wanted me to do.

So, a smile or a frown? I think a smile is more natural, and that people would only use negative emotions, like anger, when positive emotions don't work. The Chinese drama about zombies: the male lead was nice to his neighbors, but they had no interest in coming to save him from the bully. As Machiavelli said, "it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one of the two has to be wanting". So it is that in relationships, negative emotions are used when positive ones fail, because they are perceived as being more effective. This, in a culture where many people use bad words. (Note the rest of the paragraph that contains that quote, beginning with "I say that every prince must desire to be considered merciful and not cruel.")

This is a bit random, but Warcraft III video that linked, with a story that's a reference to the US's treatment of Native Americans that many people don't realize because they're uneducated. Why is it a clear reference? Because kings did not create things with names like "the Alliance Internment Act". They just gave orders. An 'act' is something that seems like it results from a conflicted government. Words that are written down become fixed, though Chinese dramas also contain orders from a sovereign converted into words, as imperial decrees.

So 'acts' are seen as fixed, with individual words being important and so giving importance to the overall law, because they are created through a process involving conflict. Two or more political entities with different priorities and goals bargain to create a result they can agree on. Following the law is about adhering to the promises that all parties have made, to stick to their agreement. Not following it would be dishonest at some level; either a promise to follow it, or a promise to enforce authority on other people who have agreed to follow orders given to them. (So if a low-ranked official receives bad orders, they are not being dishonest, but the person responsible for the bad orders is dishonest.)

A sovereign gives orders without a promise that they will not change those orders. Even in the drama I linked, the sovereign could have revoked the decree, but chooses not do so for reasons that I don't remember.

In short, an 'Act' is out of place for the setting, which has a king, not a legislative body that drafts laws. (Ok, England has both a king and a parliament since like the Magna Carta in 1215, for  but the story in Warcraft III makes no mention of limited monarchies.) Therefore, it is a reference to — apparently no specific law; a search for "native american Internment Act" gives as third result, Internment of Japanese Americans § Prior use of internment camps in the United States, which says,

During the 1830s, civilians who were members of the indigenous Cherokee nation were evicted from their homes and detained in "emigration depots" in Alabama and Tennessee prior to their deportation to Oklahoma following the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830. Similar internment policies were carried out by U.S. territorial authorities against the Dakota and Navajo peoples during the American Indian Wars in the 1860s.

But apparently, if the Dakota and Navajo peoples were interned because of a law, the law wasn't important enough to receive a link in this article. (I'm completely ignorant of whether native peoples were ever interned in Canada like they were in the US, but I assume they were and probably still are treated badly.)


I worry that Demi Rose's Like count on Chirp has decreased in a sharp jump because she caused it to do so. (This would be like a frown in the short story: an ambiguous action with no explanation, that suggests displeasure.) The alternative is that she Liked tweets from a lot fewer accounts than Yara did, whose Like count usually decreases by 0~10 every day.

More posts loaded for me from Nitter, back to Nov 2019 on Demi Rose's feed, which is still not yet at the launch of Classic WoW in Aug 2019.

I am assuming that Demi Rose is not intentionally unliking tweets to lower her Like count. Hopefully, this will stop me from making another post.

I'm sure I've said this before, but from around Feb 2009 (after Mei's birthday) to around Jul 2009, I didn't try to contact Mei. My intention was that if she didn't reply to an email at the end of my military deployment, I would <redacted even though it has nothing to do with money>. The painting was unplanned; actually I don't know if I had intended to send an email at all, before that. Ideally, if she still cared about me, she would reply to an email, so the actual outcome where she refused to reply to an email, but possibly just stayed online for an extended period of time after she received the email (she was online when I signed on to an instant messaging program, and I don't know how long she had been online), was sort of like the flight controls being broken in the 1982 Thunderbirds Indian Springs diamond crash. But in a conversation after that, she made me aware of the song Love is War by Hatsune Miku. I'm linking it because of the possibility that it's relevant.

The line at 2:17, "the megaphone I shouted into was broken." Is me assuming that Demi Rose is not sending hidden messages through her like count similar to the megaphone being broken? Also note line at 1:55, translated here as "ardent love is a sin".

"How often do we invent things to make ourselves unhappy?" "When benefit to the group is unclear, motives can become distorted", etc.


小苹果官方MV [Little Apple Official Music Video]

150508 蟲蟲 欣欣 蚊子 玩偶趣味版小蘋果 HD 北港媽祖-麻吉家族炮場 [Shake Baby雪克杯杯 - Little Apple] [0oleHTrsUlA].webm

Monday, July 13, 2026

To a person who has not said anything to me

Watched the video you didn't leave warcraft, warcraft left you... up to 3:01, at which point I paused. The creator is about to argue that ganking makes the game better.

The reader may recall that in Update 23 Jun 2026, 22:57, I copied a comment that ended with a paragraph about ganking, whether it was a problem that needed to be fixed, and what the solution might or might not look like.

So it seemed I would want to say something about the video, but my plan is not to say anything to anyone, so I wasn't sure if I should continue watching it. I'm explaining this to show why I have made this post, which is about Demi Rose. Pausing the video meant that my mind was not distracted, and this is why I have things to say that relate to Demi Rose.

I'm not afraid to say that ganking killed Aion, even though I didn't really do any PvE content in the game past around lvl 32, when I started to PvP. There was a dungeon that had a female boss at the end, meant for players around lvl 35, and I remember commenting on a thread that I had never "met her" (instead of saying that I had never killed her). Many people play games exclusively for PvP contents, even if it happens to be a game like Age of Empires II that also has over a dozen high-quality solo campaigns based in history. It's reasonable that people would quit Aion because the PvP was bad due to ganking, and then later because there was no PvP as the solution that the developers put in place to solve ganking.

But I wanted to copy a post that I made on the WoW forums, because of the opening quote. It turns out I wrote a lot of different PvP posts:

 find  ~/text/2006-2008/wow -type f -printf "%T@ a %8s  %Td %Tb %TY %TH:%TM  %p\n"|sort -n|cut -f 3- -d " "

    9948  16 Apr 2006 20:43  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP Rank~
    9948  16 Apr 2006 20:57  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP Rank
    6347  16 Apr 2006 21:57  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP Rank 2~
    6347  16 Apr 2006 23:32  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP Rank 2
     481  04 Jun 2006 20:43  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/thoughts on DKP system
    2730  10 Jun 2006 14:22  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Warrior concept.txt~
    2875  10 Jun 2006 14:53  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Warrior concept critique.txt
    6538  25 Jun 2006 11:01  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/lemme kite things to cities on beta.txt~
    6547  25 Jun 2006 11:03  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/lemme kite things to cities on beta.txt
     610  03 Jul 2006 19:58  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/emotes.txt~
     718  03 Jul 2006 20:20  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/emotes mage.txt~
    3777  07 Jul 2006 00:47  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/city raids.txt~
    3838  07 Jul 2006 00:59  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/city raids.txt
    5711  22 Jul 2006 18:41  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP changes 22 July.txt~
    5253  23 Jul 2006 09:28  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP changes 22 July.txt
      42  24 Jul 2006 16:34  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/competition.txt
     383  24 Jul 2006 17:14  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/DKP thoughts 1.txt~
     416  24 Jul 2006 17:14  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/DKP thoughts 1.txt
      27  25 Jul 2006 14:46  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/bounty system.txt~
      81  26 Jul 2006 03:14  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/quotes.txt~
     341  26 Jul 2006 21:42  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/pvp thoughts 26 Jul
    6620  27 Jul 2006 12:07  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Kazzak in SW.txt~
    6622  27 Jul 2006 15:05  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Kazzak in SW.txt
    3541  27 Jul 2006 15:15  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/token system.txt~
    3547  27 Jul 2006 15:27  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/token system.txt
     194  31 Jul 2006 13:36  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/compiled pvp changes.txt~
   11390  31 Jul 2006 14:43  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/compiled pvp changes.txt
     356  01 Aug 2006 19:48  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/forum notes 1 Aug.txt~
     638  02 Aug 2006 19:27  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/pvp thoughts 2 Aug.txt~
      80  02 Aug 2006 19:28  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/quotes.txt
    3410  02 Aug 2006 20:30  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/USE THIS ONE.txt~
    1557  04 Aug 2006 02:16  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/unstupid notes, changes 3 Aug.txt~
    1148  04 Aug 2006 19:03  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/wtf SN post gone.txt~
   15851  06 Aug 2006 23:08  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/unstupid version of USE THIS ONE.txt~
   15831  06 Aug 2006 23:19  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/unstupid version of USE THIS ONE.txt
   15861  07 Aug 2006 14:54  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP vers 7 Aug.txt~
   15870  07 Aug 2006 14:56  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP vers 7 Aug.txt
     747  07 Aug 2006 22:04  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/wtf SN post gone.txt
   16220  08 Aug 2006 18:13  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP vers 8 Aug.txt~
     656  08 Aug 2006 22:10  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/other suggestions 8 Aug.txt~
     692  08 Aug 2006 22:43  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/other suggestions 8 Aug.txt
     498  09 Aug 2006 23:59  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/emo PS 9 Aug PvP post.txt
   16219  10 Aug 2006 10:53  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP vers 8 Aug.txt
   13914  11 Aug 2006 18:35  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP vers 11 Aug.txt~
   14048  11 Aug 2006 22:49  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP vers 11 Aug.txt
   10722  12 Aug 2006 13:38  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/post BC ann 11 Aug.txt~
   10744  12 Aug 2006 20:35  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/post BC ann 11 Aug.txt
   10603  14 Aug 2006 23:36  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/post BC ann 14 Aug.txt~
   10646  15 Aug 2006 02:57  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/post BC ann 14 Aug.txt
    1248  15 Aug 2006 13:10  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/blood of innocents 15 Aug.txt~
    1612  15 Aug 2006 13:25  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/blood of innocents 15 Aug.txt
   11026  15 Aug 2006 21:15  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/post BC ann 15 Aug.txt~
   11025  15 Aug 2006 21:29  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/post BC ann 15 Aug.txt
      93  18 Aug 2006 05:35  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/friends.txt
      34  18 Aug 2006 05:44  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Chinese lessons 18 Aug.txt~
      56  18 Aug 2006 21:09  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Chinese lessons 18 Aug.txt
       0  22 Aug 2006 11:46  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/frostbite bug 22 Aug.txt~
     364  22 Aug 2006 11:49  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/frostbite bug 22 Aug.txt
    3238  22 Aug 2006 17:40  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/ranks skill 19 Aug.txt~
    3236  22 Aug 2006 17:41  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/ranks skill 19 Aug.txt
    4708  24 Aug 2006 02:14  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/pvp suggestion 23 Aug.txt~
    4980  24 Aug 2006 03:16  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/pvp suggestion 23 Aug.txt
    5171  25 Aug 2006 14:06  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/pvp suggestion 25 Aug.txt~
    5169  25 Aug 2006 14:16  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/pvp suggestion 25 Aug.txt
      71  27 Aug 2006 01:59  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Demonic.txt
      41  27 Aug 2006 20:55  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/new servers.txt
     605  28 Aug 2006 15:47  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/invisible.txt
    2803  29 Aug 2006 00:54  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Divinity II dishonor.txt~
    2804  29 Aug 2006 01:04  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Divinity II dishonor.txt
    5500  16 Sep 2006 22:42  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Klinge.txt
     820  12 Oct 2006 00:19  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/healing.txt
  430080  28 Oct 2006 11:59  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Item Balancer 3.0.xls
    3729  10 Nov 2006 17:15  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Battlemasters.txt~
    3738  10 Nov 2006 17:44  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Battlemasters.txt
     925  17 Nov 2006 16:06  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PUG discussion.txt
    1664  21 Nov 2006 01:49  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Water Elemental.txt~
    1663  21 Nov 2006 01:51  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Water Elemental.txt
    2119  26 Nov 2006 04:53  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/healer gear.txt
     666  29 Nov 2006 20:25  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/honor system.txt~
     665  29 Nov 2006 20:25  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/honor system.txt
    3057  10 Dec 2006 20:24  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP rewards.txt~
    3144  10 Dec 2006 21:50  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP rewards.txt
    5559  13 Dec 2006 08:37  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Tae's Vision of PvP.txt~
    5551  14 Dec 2006 10:32  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Tae's Vision of PvP.txt
    3563  24 Dec 2006 09:16  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/hybrids.txt
   44420  25 Dec 2006 08:47  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/hybrid data.ods
    1841  25 Dec 2006 10:47  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/hybrid calcs.txt
    6909  27 Dec 2006 00:09  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/next honor system 26 Dec.txt
    2189  01 Jan 2007 01:32  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/BG reward quests 26 Dec.txt
    3019  10 Jan 2007 20:17  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/priests spec 10 Jan.txt
     836  12 Jan 2007 18:55  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/holy priest 41 pt.txt~
     980  12 Jan 2007 19:06  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/holy priest 41 pt 12 Jan.txt
     718  12 Jan 2007 21:21  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/emotes mage.txt
    1298  13 Jan 2007 01:34  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/honor system update 13 Jan.txt~
      65  13 Jan 2007 02:00  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Yashe III music.txt~
    1351  13 Jan 2007 11:48  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/honor system update 13 Jan.txt
    1787  15 Jan 2007 03:33  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/priest 41 pt holy 14 Jan.txt
   21009  20 Jan 2007 04:15  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/ranks 31 Dec.txt~
    2664  23 Jan 2007 12:26  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/online identities.txt
   21026  23 Jan 2007 20:25  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/ranks 31 Dec.txt
    9693  23 Jan 2007 20:36  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/hybrids 25 Dec.txt~
    9698  23 Jan 2007 20:40  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/hybrids 25 Dec.txt
    8602  24 Jan 2007 16:55  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/hybrid itemization 24 Jan.txt~
    8594  24 Jan 2007 16:56  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/hybrid itemization 24 Jan.txt
    7802  29 Jan 2007 22:12  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/ranks in chinese 29 Jan.txt
    1950  17 Feb 2007 13:43  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/dmg and healing algorithm 17 Feb.txt~
    1951  17 Feb 2007 13:45  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/dmg and healing algorithm 17 Feb.txt
    2180  18 Feb 2007 14:05  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/conflict in wow 18 Feb.txt
   35166  08 Apr 2007 04:58  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Scaling_Comparison.ods
    1114  21 Apr 2007 05:41  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/world of gearcraft 21 Apr.txt~
    1169  21 Apr 2007 05:42  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/world of gearcraft 21 Apr.txt
    5162  22 Apr 2007 19:19  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/plight of the shaman 22 Apr.txt~
    5162  22 Apr 2007 19:20  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/plight of the shaman 22 Apr.txt
    8582  02 May 2007 11:05  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/risk vs reward 25 Apr.txt~
    8702  04 May 2007 07:42  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/risk vs reward 25 Apr.txt
    5378  21 May 2007 09:58  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/TBC endgame analysis 21 May.txt~
    5604  21 May 2007 10:04  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/TBC endgame analysis 21 May.txt
   68608  30 May 2007 09:09  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Scaling_Comparison_2.xls
    5256  06 Jun 2007 13:52  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/to Paul Barnett 6 Jun.txt~
    5256  06 Jun 2007 13:52  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/to Paul Barnett 6 Jun.txt
    2643  10 Jun 2007 13:39  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/legend of the shaman ~12 May.txt
     765  10 Jul 2007 15:20  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Yashe III, Yukano, etc music.txt~
     793  21 Aug 2007 01:35  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Yashe III, Yukano, etc music.txt
   18944  16 Oct 2007 01:58  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Rating.xls
  133632  23 Feb 2008 17:55  /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Scaling_Comparison_2_rev_5.xls



The scaling comparison xls files at the end are by Muphrid, determining the spellpower needed to double various spells based on their coefficient and base damage or healing. The first files, from 16 Apr 2006, must have been just after I got my first laptop and saved documents that were stored in my email as drafts. I thought I'd copy the first one, 'PvP Rank':

[quote] [i]For Mei, who complained that PvP rank didn't do anything . . . ~.~[/i]


[i][b]HOW[/b][/i] do we rank up? For most of us, certainly those who manage to reach the highest ranks, it is by farming BGs—either solo and ungrouped for maximum honor per kill, or with a group of similarly determined and well-geared players for minimum time to finish a match. I don't know [i]anyone[/i] who reached HWL/GM by, say, playing BGs for fun, raiding towns and killing opposite faction city bosses, or hunting down griefers. That's the problem with the honor system, because things should be exactly the opposite.

So why aren't BGs fun? Already mentioned is the penalty for kills when grouped that discourages grouping and teamwork, and the ease with which practiced teams of epic-equipped hardcore PvPers roll PUG after PUG; both of these issues, as well as more obvious problems like the fishing exploit and win-trading, are addressed in the thread "PUG rolling and other common BG exploits" at [b]http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?ForumName=wow-pvp&ThreadID=464141[/b]. The lack of significant world PvP can be attributed to several factors
[li]too much honor from BGs, none from world PvP
[li]DHKs killed off town raids
[li]the emphasis on maximum honor per week, since the honor system only rewards you for [i]advancing[/i] in rank

BG honor farming and exploiting is, as stated, addressed in another thread. The fact that world PvP doesn't yield any honor is partly addressed by the "DR in raids" idea at same, and partly by the thread "Most Wanted List or, how to fix DHKs" at [b]http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?ForumName=wow-pvp&ThreadID=450331[/b] . . . which is about rewarding players who hunt down gankers with honor and, incidentally, how to fix DHKs and bring back town raids. The absense of benefits for simply maintaining your rank is the topic of the next section—


[i][b]WHY[/b][/i] PvP at all? This is a question many players are beginning to ask themselves for a couple different reasons. Hardcore players are complaining that with the new AQ loot, PvP epics just don't measure up. This will eventually be solved by upgrading the rewards at the expense of gear balance on future servers, but in the meantime, players who already hit GM/HWL have no reason to PvP at all and their rank is dropping in like freefall; they'll have to grind the ladder all over again with nothing to show that they've done it all before. Casual players, on the other hand, are complaining that the system offers absolutely no kind of progressive upgrades for those with limited playtime; and this is [i]not[/i] something likely to be solved by future reward upgrades.

These problems aren't new. Mass protests forced the devs, way back when the honor system was released, to remove the `rank maintenance' requirement for the use of PvP rewards; and the honor system has been broken ever since. Something needs to change.


[b]This is one way to do it:[/b]

Players would receive Honor Reward Points (ty Jacquelyn) based on their weekly PvP `rating' (the number that determines your rank) and their faction's PvP activity level. These HRP could, furthermore, be bought from and sold to the player's faction, but at a loss for the player. [i]([b]Example:[/b] 100 HRP could be exchanged for 70s could be exchanged for 30 HRP; the `70s' would be the stable price if the rate is varied so that net HRP flow is zero. This means that gold would be REMOVED from the economy, combating inflation!—But I digress...)[/i]


Each rank would grant access to [b]multiple tiers of PvP rewards[/b] which could be purchased with HRP (tangent: for the interface, could use a little icon that says, simply, `HRP', with mouseover of Honor Reward Points); players would, when compared to the current system, benefit from increased [i]vertical[/i], not [i]horizontal[/i], gear progression. So all this works against players with too much money being able to trivially buy epics on par with the best PvE drops in the game, because 1) gold to HRP exchanges would be heavily taxed 2) lazy players often suck at PvP and would never be able to rank up to gain access to these items in the first place. Which ties into the next section, but first there are some details that haven't been explored yet:
[li]newly introduced, high-end rewards would be listed as "in short supply" and would be marked up in price significantly until strategies for bosses that drop corresponding PvE gear are developed
[li]HRP could also be used to buy premium PvP consumables: potions, trinkets, and ammo that might only be usable in BGs, as well as noncombat `mascots' (for HWL/GM only?) and PvP-specific enchants
[li]won't be implemented by the time the expansion hits, so be ready for some major complaining then
[li][b]nominated for deletion:[/b] rewards would not be purchased like normal items, but would be awarded via questlines for each equipment slot. Upon reaching a certain rank, the player would be `inserted' into the corresponding reward questline such that the available quest is one that supplies them with the most powerful item they'd be able to use: a lvl 30 blue would hardly be appropriate for a player who's 60. So no pre-60 epics in this system (and a single path of advancement for 60-70), epics are really only for lvl 60+; for anyone under 60, epics are just twink gear. Rewards would still require HRP to purchase; the interface is just different. This achieves INFORMATION HIDING, that is, not spoiling the lvl 15 player's gameplay by showing her an item level 82 tier 3 PvP epic. It would also prevent players from [i]skipping[/i] the lower reward tiers, that is going directly to the tier-5 artifacts.

If the devs ever read this thread and agree with its ideas, our PvP gear situation should be good to go . . . but equipment isn't everything, and


[i][b]SO WHAT[/b][/i] if you find out this guy you've been tracking down is a HWL/GM? Right now, the answer is, really, Oh that guy must have no life. What it [i]should[/i] be is, omg Im dead ~_~. So this is pretty much a consequence of how difficult it is to rank up: the [i]variability of rank with skill[/i]. It's kind of hard to analyse right now how to do this because of the like emergent, synergistic effects of possible changes, but here's an attempt . . .

[b](emergent effect)[/b] One of the ideas in the thread "PvP issue: BGs are broken" is a weighting system. High-ranked players would have more weight; this means that their team would, on average, be understrength. Moreso if these players group together to form a like small, dense depleted uranium tank round. The point being, players with skill would still perform awesomely under these conditions; but players who suck would, well, would suck . . . and wouldn't rank up much further. The ones who made it to the top [i]would[/i] be the best.

[b](emergent effect)[/b] The bounty system from the MWL thread would reward skilled bounty hunters with large amounts of honor, propelling them to the higher ranks, although it is difficult to tell how significant this would be when compared to probably-greater-honor-flow from BGs.

[b](emergent effect)[/b] ...although not re  quite the same topic as the previous two emergent effects. Increased difficulty in ranking up is the same thing as saying it's harder to get CP (honor) at a higher rank, which is the same thing as saying that hardcore players would have to demonstrate [i]a higher level of skill to get their Honor Reward Points[/i], even if they're spending it on the same stuff as casuals. This is fair because they're getting [i]more[/i] HRP and have a greater selection of rewards to spend their HRP on.

[b](PvP rank idea! new! btw I think this post could benefit from some downsizing, it is not elegantly simple. Need to switch [i]voice registers[/i])[/b] Add a new variable to rank and HRP calculation: your faction's overall performance in BGs and world PvP! Let `Pf' equal this performance; Pf is calculated by combining your faction's win/loss stats in BGs that week with your faction's city boss death count when compared to the opposite faction. (This would give players an incentive to attack and defend cities, as well as give e.g. Horde a handicap in BGs (high ranked) if Horde is consistently winning.) Pf is used to calculate the total [i]honor rating point pool[/i] for your faction that week. So if your faction is doing well, you are more likely to rank up, regardless of how you did compared to other players from your faction. Your weekly `rating' score is calculated from this pool and averaged into your current rating (on the honor page, [b]http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/pvp/index.html[/b]) to get your [i]new[/i] rating. But before that is done, your HRP for that week is calculated by combining that weekly honor rating with a scaling factor for the competitiveness of your faction's honor rankings. So what this would mean is, 1) you'd get more HRP for PvPing harder 2) you'd rank up for PvPing harder 3) you wouldn't rank up, but you would get more HRP (and therefore more PvP rewards!) if [i]everyone[/i] is PvPing harder 4) you'd get more honor rating points, and therefore higher rank and more HRP, if your faction tends to win in BGs or is consistently razing the other faction's cities.

[b](world pvp idea that just happens to fit into the focus of this thread, with possible emergent effects)[/b] Drastically increase the honor yield from killing high-ranked players so that they are constantly being targeted. Report these same players on WorldDefense whenever they go raiding: "Crossroads is under attack by Grand Marshall Pallywinlol!" These players could start a war all by themselves! It's just a matter of escalation and friendly and opposing force expectations. Bring back world PvP! . . . although that's really the focus of [i]another[/i] thread, not this one =P
 
[b]Fix the honor system now!!

/sign[/b] [/quote]

I'm not reading this, but glancing at the last paragraph, I note that Aion had a much higher difference in rewards between ranks than WoW. In WoW, killing someone at the highest rank was worth about twice as much as killing someone at the lowest rank. In Aion, lowest rank was worth 120 points, while highest was worth over 9000 points. I PvPed up to Grade 4 Soldier, at which point I was worth 645 points, and then used some items to get Grade 3, where I was worth 903 points, but I didn't really PvP at that rank. I actually might never have died after getting to that rank. See the suggestions I posted on the forums for Aion, 관심 개발자 – Problems with solo PvP and PvE in Western Market.

It just shows how there was a game designer who thought that having a 10x+ disparity in point rewards between players was a reasonable idea. That my suggestion in 2006, to "Drastically increase the honor yield from killing high-ranked players so that they are constantly being targeted", wasn't crazy. And Aion also showed that, if rewards are high for killing high-ranked players, then they will in fact be targeted. I had a bit of an argument with a high-ranked player, when I was playing in 2010, due to them not participating in a fortress siege which had the potential to benefit all players from the faction. They didn't want to lose rank from being killed. (I appreciated this player taking the time to justify their actions to me, a random player who was too low to ever do the same content as this player, and this conversation and their name might be somewhere in my 4000 screenshots.)

The argument I had been thinking of, though, was 'ranks 31 Dec.txt'. I only remember the title, and am not reading any more of it:

Bringing the "WAR" back to Warcraft (revised 19 Jan)

[i]The simplest explanation for the death of world PvP in WoW is PvE raids...[/i]

It has always been the intention of the folks working at Blizzard to make this game as fun as possible, for as many people as possible. But there are certain realities that must be observed in the continual development of an MMO... one, if not the, most important problems is supplying content at the rate at which players can devour it. This has so far proved to be, and probably will always be a problem.

We agree that the game, as it came out, was fantastic. But this was the result of several years of development, coding, quest-writing. All too soon the majority of players were lvl 60, and bored, with nothing to do but grief lowbies and pick fights with each other... which for some people wasn't so bad =P But progress had been halted, and for an MMO, stagnation means death.

The first Ragnaros kill. Chaos reigned as casters QQ'd about the coming doom of all non-melee classes that would happen as melee got more and more powerful and casters, didn't.

Ragnaros was put on farm status, and with BWL nearing completion, the honor system and battlegrounds were released.

A quick examination of the honor rewards reveals something interesting: [i]the sole purpose of the honor system was to maintain gear parity between those who cared about raiding, and those who didn't[/i]. Just before the honor system was released, the R14 rewards were bumped up from run-of-the-mill iLvl 65 epics to being on par with drops from Rag (iLvl 78), the toughest boss to exist at the time. Perhaps Bliz realized then the grave mistake they had made with the jump in item quality from standard MC epics to Rag's loot (now on farm status)... after all it was their first raid instance with all sorts of incompleteness, even a legendary neck item that they'd forgotten to take out of the loot tables and were only reminded of when it dropped for someone. In any case it was too late; the only thing to do was press on and give BWL even [i]better[/i] epics so players would have a reason to even go there.

*cough* so PvP rewards only exist to balance PvE rewards, but the target item quality is inevitably going to change over time. [i]Unlike ranks, the arena system is specifically designed to scale with raid instances, giving better and better rewards as more difficult raid encounters are released.[/i] They are Blizzard's answer to gear inequality from PvE, and they are not going away.

The arenas aren't really our idea of PvP. But we see that they are necessary, from a gear standpoint (yuck). With a proper understanding of why things are the way they are, we can move on to what can be done within this framework.


============================================================

[i][b]The solution, part 1: easily implemented[/b][/i]

Players don't have enough reason to PvP outside of BGs. In TBC, that will just become, players don't have enough reason to PvP outside of BGs or away from a few, forlorn "world PvP objectives". This and several related problems, "players aren't able to have fun PvPing if they haven't got the best gear" and "players are not able to affect the gameworld enough", can be solved by a body of ideas and suggestions mostly revolving around BRINGING BACK RANKS and fixing BGs.

1) finish the matching system. Suggestion: instead of matching based on gear in the bank, just "lock" items that are equipable and banked so players can't take them out. This lets players PvP in less than their best for fun and competition. Can you say, nekkid bracket? =o

2) make killing a faction leader cause their city to ASPLODE into smoke and flames for an hour or two! NPCs are still functional, but maybe with different conversation texts. "Hallo, I am Kreeg the apple seller and OH GODS DID YOU SEE THAT GUY RUN PAST SCREAMING AND COVERED IN FLAMES!?" Also make it give your entire faction a buff for 24 hours that increases honor and contribution point gains by 10%.

3) convert BG rewards into a quest-based system. An example of how it might be done has been posted below. Advantages of the system are that it gives players a reason to win instead of just "losing quickly", forces them to participate to get the rewards instead of just going afk, doesn't compete with rank-based rewards and consumables (see below), makes getting the epic BG rewards truly difficult instead of just more of the same grind, and operates in the same way as PvE blue-reward quests so players don't get lured into the habit of thinking of PvP rewards as an easy, grindable, no-effort alternative to dungeon crawling and questing.

4) remove the ability to multi-queue for BGs. Alliance "pay" for queueing all BGs when they join any one of them, and this makes it difficult to justify queueing from the physical BG entrance where we can duel or even raid the other faction's BG zonein.

5) bring back ranks.

============================================================

[i][b]The solution, part 2: harder to implement[/b][/i]

What is power?
[ul][i]"Those who used the Nine Rings became mighty in their day, kings, sorcerers, and warriors of old. They obtained glory and great wealth, yet it turned to their undoing. They had, as it seemed, unending life, yet life became unendurable to them. They could walk, if they would, unseen by all eyes in this world beneath the sun, and they could see things in worlds invisible to mortal men; but too often they beheld only the phantoms and delusions of Sauron. And one by one, sooner or later, according to their native strength and to the good or evil of their wills in the beginning, they fell under the thralldom of the ring that they bore and of the domination of the One which was Sauron's. And they became forever invisible save to him that wore the Ruling Ring, and they entered into the realm of shadows. The Nazgûl were they, the Ringwraiths, the Enemy's most terrible servants; darkness went with them, and they cried with the voices of death."[/i][/ul]
In WoW, there are none with power such as this. We have overpowered... from the perspective of the less-well-geared. We have "normal" for raiders, for whom everyone else is a nub with "trash" gear. The problem is that [i]everyone is expected to compete on the same level[/i].

What we need is a way to categorize those with great power and ability, from those without...


A rank system may be the answer. However, while the old system was mostly a way of distributing rewards, this one would be the means to define and recognize the existence of power in this game, with PvP rewards no more than a cool extra for time and effort spent.

Key features of such a system:
[ul][li]non-decaying ranks
[li]rank determined by quality of PvP, not playtime
[li]not all opponents yield honor
[li]reduced number of titles to ease recognition
[li]not confined to BGs
[/ul]
First, battlegrounds and what can be got from them. As mentioned above, the matching system must be completed before this could work. But another change is needed... [i]some actions would affect rank, and some would only award honor tokens[/i]. Borrowing from the past, actions that affect rank could award "honor", while those that lead to tokens could award "contribution points". Fighting, both in and out of BGs, would award honor. Completing BG objectives and world PvP objectives would award CP. While it is necessary to reward the completion of BG objectives so games have any kind of point instead of just mindless killing, they're not the same thing as skill or power, which is what rank represents. Contribution points could be spent on a wide variety of consumables for players with little or no rank (or excess CP), or a SMALL selection of slotted items for players of higher rank. These rewards cannot intersect with arena rewards! This is because while arena rewards can be updated every season, PvP rewards cannot be regularly updated and must be of relatively static quality for any given rank and level, regardless of future raid instances which raise the level of "best" gear. If each title corresponded to several ranks, an item might require "<title> (Rank X)"... but this is just a suggestion.

Second, the determination of ranks. This is really complicated. The mechanics must ensure a reasonable rank distribution, correlate well with gear and skill, not be exploitable or plain broken, and must encourage instead of discourage world PvP and general enjoyment of the game. Tho the most important thing to remember is: [i][b]all competition is with the other faction, not your own[/b][/i]. IF YOU DON'T LIKE MATH, STOP READING NOW.

[b]**************************************
******* WARNING WARNING *******
*****MATHY STUFF FOLLOWS*****
**************************************[/b]

Killing someone of equal or [i]higher[/i] rank awards honor.

Dying to someone of equal or [i]lower[/i] rank awards dishonor, or just causes you to "lose honor".

Both of these effects are SHARED IN GROUPS (please read that again) yes SHARED IN GROUPS which means that warriors won't get unfairly penalized for always charging in and dying from lack of heals, mages won't get unfairly penalized because they're so squishy and die all the time, healers won't get unfairly penalized because they're always the first ones to get targeted, support classes won't get penalized because their dps is low, hunters won't unfairly benefit from their range (those last two concerns actually not being silly), etc etc. There is also a mechanism to modify dishonor based on unfair odds, see below.


The details of how much honor and dishonor to award in 1v1 situations is the key to balancing the rank distribution and stuffs like that (as well as confidence in the rank system in defining who you can be "expected" to kill, but so much is obvious enough that I won't get into it; this post is already long enough >.<). So! The tuning variables are as follows:
[ul][li]the maximum rank difference that players can be expected to compete at. Ignoring for now SOCIAL implications, the higher the allowable difference is the more the rank distribution can expand. This effect also works to reduce or prevent gaps in the rank distribution.
[li]gear inequality, the difference between "average" gear and raid gear. As well as skill inequality (which however isn't configurable...), the higher this is the more the rank distribution can expand.
[li]the difference between honor for a kill and dishonor for dying at a certain rank. This is positive for the lowest ranks (less penalty for dying) and negative for the higher ranks. The bigger the difference the more the rank distribution contracts, but it also has the much more important effect of defining how fast the rank distribution as a whole can evolve...
[/ul]
If the amount of honor for killing a same-ranked opponent is a linear function [i]ax + b[/i] with [i]a[/i] and [i]b[/i] greater than 0, then defining the amount of dishonor for dying to a same-ranked opponent as [i](a + c)x + b - d[/i] with [i]c[/i] greater than 0 and 0 < [i]d[/i] < [i]b[/i] causes the rank distribution as a whole to move upwards when ranks are generally low, and stabilizes the rank distribution once players start reaching the highest ranks. If this isn't done it would be very difficult for players to get past the lowest ranks. o.0

More math! And another copy/paste from previous posts hehe...

[i]The only problem with this is it would require a lot of calculations... from what I understand, the reason diminishing returns on HKs can't be done in real-time is that it involves large numbers of lists or other data types and the number of procedures required scales up too quickly; the number of calculations implied by this solution may or may not present difficulties of the same magnitude. Any programming types have an answer? [/i][*NOTE: if the load is too great, a simplified system could be used tho at the cost of purity of the meaing of ranks :/][i] Anyway here is the system, in messy form:[/i]

***system of dishonor modification based on threat lists***
"attention" is how much an opponent could reasonably be focusing on you and/or contributing to your death. player-based threat lists were referenced by Blizzard when describing how rep-based tagging worked in BGs; the exact mechanics of these threat lists are unknown, such as how they relate to going out of combat and how they relate to the idea used by Blizzard when describing the honor system of HKs basing honor off proportional damage done by everything "in the past minute" or so. I never did learn whether vanishing cleared a rogue's contribution to damage... yeah. so when a player dies, their threat list is checked. Every player (NOT mob; mobs including guards soak up part of an HK based on damage done without awarding dishonor for their share of damage) on the list is then checked to see how much "attention" they were paying to the killed player:

1/(sum of threats on checked player's threat list, modded for level/rank) = attention
total attention = sum of individual attentions over the killed player's threat list = 1 if 1v1 situation
dishonor = 1/attention * (total honor awarded to others for that death) * (dishonor for a "standard death" vs a same-ranked opponent)/(honor awarded for a "standard kill" vs a same-ranked opponent)

Maybe (1/attention)^0.5 or similar. Changing less...

"Total honor awarded to others on death" accounts for the fact that some of the players who contributed to the killed player's death may not have gotten any honor because their rank was too high, as well as Diminishing Returns.

This dishonor is then shared with teammates. Everyone shares equally in dishonor... hmm, I guess this means that honor must be shared equally too (before DR) to avoid penalizing higher-ranked players in a mixed group... which means that if you're PvPing with a high-ranked player and killing low-ranked opponents, you'll get half the honor as if you were PvPing with a similarly low-ranked friend against the same opponent. (So for dishonor, it's not that "some players aren't getting any honor for killing you" so much that "everyone is getting reduced honor because of the group composition".) Gratz programming all that, Bliz. o.0


============================================================

[i]Update 19 Jan[/i]:

Ranks and titles could be awarded by third-party vigilante organizations for both factions. Old PvP titles would be retained as a selectable option. Old rewards would be bought the same way they are now, with honor tokens (from Contribution Points) obtained by running BGs, with no restriction on who can buy what. It might thus be best to rename the old PvP sets to be more in line with the fact that they are no longer exclusive; the idea is that the sets are for a "standard line unit" in that faction's armies. Grunt's leggings, Wizard's Chestpiece, etc... not tied to the old titles anymore.

This might mean removing the old epic rewards... it doesn't make sense for them to exist when similar-quality rewards are not available at lvls 70, 80, etc.

The new "rank" rewards, in contrast, would be dependent on titles or ranks earned from the third-party organizations, and would probably be purchased with gold, not honor tokens.

[b][i]Effects of the rank system[/i][/b]
[ul][li]The idea that "it is always better to have gear, than to not have gear" would NO LONGER BE VALID. With gear quality as a transparent attribute, the prestige of any particular rank would be inversely proportional to the quality of your gear. Achieving a high rank with bad gear is much more impressive than achieving the same title with excellent gear, because it implies a high level of skill to compensate for the gear disadvantage. That, and the greater responsibilities of high-ranked players in grouped PvP, both outside and in BGs. Using the above model of honor and dishonor sharing in groups, having more high-ranked players on your team decreases the honor per kill for [i]everyone[/i] in the vicinity; these players also award more dishonor to your team when killed by high-ranked opponents. A low-ranked player, otoh, penalizes the team much less when killed, and thus has more freedom to e.g. suicide bomb in AV.
[li]similar attitude change towards being high level. Since rank is a relative thing, it would be just as possible to gain rank and prestige at low levels as at high levels. This is twinking, except that non-twinks would not feel the intense pressure to compete that they do with the current system, because with this ranks system [i]non-twinks would not be penalized for being killed by a twink team[/i].
[li]more world PvP, obviously, since it would be as easy or easier for someone to gain honor via world PvP than by BGs where honor is shared, assuming that they have high skill and haven't yet "stabilized" at the appropriate rank. Even if they have, while there would be no reliable [i]net[/i] movement of rank, it's always fun to be able to interact with and affect other players. Anyone whom you could affect would be of similar or higher rank and therefore a respectable opponent, not some lowbie or "bluebie" that you could two-shot, so this kind of world PvP conflict would have gain potential and risk for ALL involved. So this is related to the idea of being able to affect the gameworld; the gameworld, in this case, being other players who are interested in PvP. (on a PvE server, flagging is not automatic so griefing would not be possible.)
[li]the lack of broad rewards for rank, with most PvP rewards coming from alternative venues like the arena system, BG rewards, and the token-based part of the honor system, would actually be an advantage. It would mean that for once, something in this game is mostly about social rewards instead of material rewards. It would mean that carebear PvPers won't feel bad for killing someone, because the only thing they are depriving their victim of is a title, not gear. Titles are for fun, not anything to cry about when you can't get... unlike gear, for some people. So by only offering a few minor reward slots for rank, players would actually be able to have more fun when the system penalizes you for dying. Odd that, eh?
[li]summarizing all the above: more opportunity and potential for fun for all players in the game, regardless of whether or not they've progressed to the latest raid instance and/or have been on a good enough arena team with good enough gear to win for long enough to buy a full set of epics. Decreased barriers to entry for having fun. This is good no matter which way you look at it. Blizzard, if you are reading this, you are almost certainly aware that the PvP potential of the current game is lackluster and uninspiring; if you don't do something to change that, and soon, your PvP playerbase will abandon you for Darkfall or a similar game.
[/ul]

[b][i]Example BG rewards quest system[/i][/b]

Eliminate Marks of Honor. Replace them with Victory Tokens, which are only awarded when you win a BG and only when you have a BG reward quest for a blue item. The preform bracket (this is assuming the matching system has been completed) rewards Victory [i]Medallions[/i], which are used for [i]epic[/i] BG reward quests like The Unstoppable Force. Quests also require a certain number of insignias dropped by other players as a quest item, to prevent players from getting rewards for just sitting in the starting area the whole game.

[u]Example#1[/u]

[b]Armaments of the Silverwing[/b] (requires lvl 18) (PvP quest) -- [i]cannot be done in a non-BGs raid aka preform[/i]
[ul][li]0/30 Outrider Insignia
[li]0/5 Warsong Gulch Victory Token
[/ul]Rewards:

You will be able to choose one of these rewards:
[Lorekeeper's Staff][Outrunner's Bow]
[Protector's Sword][Sentinel's Blade]

Gain:
[ul][li]1750 experience
[li]275 reputation with Silverwing Sentinels
[li]275 reputation with Darnassus
[/ul][u]Example#2[/u]

[b]Adornments of the Silverwing[/b] -- same as above quest but requires only 20 insignias and 3 victory tokens, and gives choice of caster ring/melee ring/agil neck/healer cloak.

[u]Example#3[/u]

[b]Stormpike Sage's Implements[/b] (requires lvl 60) (PvP RAID quest) -- [i]to be done in the AV "preform bracket" vs other preforms[/i]
[ul][li]0/100 Frostwolf Grunt's Insignia
[li]0/12 Alterac Valley Victory Medallion
[/ul]Rewards:

You will be able to choose one of these rewards:
[Lei of the Lifegiver][Therazane's Touch]
[Tome of Arcane Domination][Tome of Fiery Arcana]
[Tome of Shadow Force][Tome of the Ice Lord]

Gain:
[ul][li]8700 experience
[li]525 reputation with Stormpike
[li]525 reputation with Ironforge
[/ul]This means there should be THREE methods of joining a BG: the two that already exist, and a third one to go into the "preform" bracket which avoids all PUGers and awards the better kind of victory medallion when you win. This preform bracket is only necessary because of epic rewards, which are a legacy of the old honor system. Sorry. :/


(I saw and recognized the warning about complicated math, and I think the math is a bit better in one of the posts I made on Reddit about the topic.)

Anyway. In my first message to Demi Rose, I said that a photo was nice and linked to <redacted>.

I don't think it's true to say that I tried to get her to <redacted>. Although I did later on email her and say that she should <redacted>, I think this was mostly because I expected that I wouldn't be saying anything about her for a while.

Demi Rose was, at that point, the person who would be classified as the most attractive who <redacted>, based on her social media profiles. Although I would like to be able to say that Kate is attractive, and I might have published a screenshot of my desktop sometime in the past 14 years that showed the thumbnail of the photo of Kate's face that is there, she doesn't have a large social media following. She has or had an Instagram page, but she probably only had a few hundred followers there at most. I said to Sherine that she's pretty, but Sherine also never got a lot of followers based on her looks. Yoko Ono had a lot of followers, but she has said before that she is not exceptional in her appearance, and there is no reason to think that her followers result from her appearance.

To me, one of the important questions at that point in time, which might have been around 2015, was whether Sherine wanted me to die. I had said that she should <redacted> unless she wanted me to die, and I didn't know if she <redacted>. There was the danger that someone could think that I would think, "Demi Rose is more attractive than Sherine, so I will ignore what Sherine wants."

So, was me not actively trying to get Demi Rose to <redacted> a good reason for not to do so? I would say, of course it wasn't a good reason. But this is about, like, behavior that seems selfish. Demi Rose has stated that she likes the popular series, Love Island. As with many reality TV shows, this is about people developing attraction towards each other based on being forced to be in close proximity and so on. I believe it stands in contrast to Asian-style dramas which have a plot closely focused on the development of a relationship. In Japanese, 恋愛ドラマ. Like the 2007 drama Proposal Daisakusen, that won many awards. (Not actually listed in Category:日本の恋愛ドラマ, unlike the popular Hana yori Dango.)

So it seems possible that Demi Rose thought it would have been 'selfish' if she <redacted>. Like, I was definitely not trying to act in the way that I expect contestants on Love Island act. I said to Imane that I had never "rizzed" anyone up and I was not trying to "rizz" her up. I think it's accurate to say that I have also never flirted with anyone. Possibly the closest I have come to acting like I wanted someone to be interested in me was being silent.

Suppose that Sherine did want me to die, at the point in time when I first sent a message on Chirp Club to Demi Rose. Even if Sherine <redacted>, it didn't mean that she didn't want me to die. It could have just meant that she wanted to keep open the option of not wanting me to die. As anyone who understands logic knows, "If A, then B" is not the same as "If not A, then not B". If Sherine wanted me to die, did it mean that Demi Rose should not have <redacted>?

 

I was thinking of a question yesterday which seems it has some relevance here. As a purely hypothetical situation, I will excuse the fact that it's about money.

"There is $10 million sitting in the open, not owned by anyone. A thousand starving orphans ignore it, when they could take it and use it to buy food. How many years pass before you are comfortable with taking the money yourself?"

Money is just used as a shorthand here for 'something of value'. The question would be the same if it did not involve money, like if it was "a magic lamp that gave three wishes". It's just hard to imply that taking the valuable thing is bad unless the thing could help people who are suffering, and still hard unless it's many people who are suffering, and many valuable things are difficult to split between a large number of people. If it was a magic lamp, who would get the first wish out of three? If it's food, who would eat 5-year-old food, other than me?


Maybe a few weeks after I first sent a public message to Demi Rose, she commented about a photo she posted saying that it was as if she was going to the beach, as she was wearing swimwear. This suggested an awareness of possible dishonesty: the reason that she had put on swimwear. This post is about the possibility of perceived dishonesty: whether I thought it would have been best if Demi Rose had immediately <redacted>.

I have only been in one relationship, with Mei, and it might have ended before I told her that I was male. If I have another relationship in my life, I would like to be able to say that I helped that person. One of the reasons I was sad that the developers of World of Warcraft and Aion did not use my suggestions (other than maybe the minor suggestion I made in ~2007, to add an invisibility effect to WoW similar to the one in Lord of the Rings, which they did) was that it meant I had not helped Mei. She didn't let me send her any gifts, like the earrings for her sister, or the painting. Even in games, she didn't tell me her character in Aion, and in WoW I was never high enough level to help her. I was responsible once for her flying to Booty Bay where I was PvPing, even though she knew that she would get killed by guards and lose durability, which she would have to spend money to repair. (She also didn't equip cheaper gear to make the repair costs lower, at the expense of lower combat effectiveness.)

When it comes to judging other people's behavior, I think a lot of the time it's about whether that person has acted in a way that others feel should be emulated. In the US, this means whether someone acts in a way that benefits themselves: judging a female for being with a male who <redacted>, or judging a male for being with a female who does not seem attractive. Some judgements are made based on patterns of behavior where it's expected that a person does not benefit, but whether this is true may depend on information that only this person has.

I would say that anyone, no matter who they are, has only a low chance of benefiting from trying to be in a relationship with me, but time is valuable for everyone, and at least I want other people to be happy.

Sunday, July 12, 2026

Disregard this post

Should the English language return to referring to countries with the pronouns she and her instead of 'it', for the explicit purpose of discouraging fighting between countries?

Yes
No, fighting is fine
No, sexist reasoning
No, assumes gender

References:
...began launching additional strikes against Iran to continue degrading its ability to attack civilian mariners and commercial ships...
https://www.rt.com/news/642926-us-fourth-wave-strikes/

Many English style guides discourage the use of she for countries or inanimate objects; such use may be considered dated or sexist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/She_(pronoun)

"She" is used for ships in formal documents such as Royal Navy news headlines, official US Navy documents, ADF news, and Forbes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_English

Saturday, July 11, 2026

Zombie

Yay music มีตติ้งทีมงานสายตื๊ด-HD

(Remix edit of Zombie, originally by The Cranberries)

That's just a coincidence: a song about fighting, and by extension about seeking peace, which happens to have the same name as the topic of this post. Which is just zombies.

This is probably the first short-form vertical drama that I clicked on, and the first that I bookmarked. It's now private:

[315k views, 20.8k subs, 01 Jul 2026][drama]Forced to Be the Simp Villain Again—But the Heroines Read My Mind and Went Off-Script - YouTube 

(I watched several episodes of this series two years ago, until I realized that a song had been removed, leaving only the distorted voice audio: [7:57 music missing from 5:20]ENGSUB【美人攻略 Beauty Strategy EP04】亡族公主逆袭变一代皇后 | 古装 爱情 | 关畅 / 张景昀 | YOUKU COSTUME - YouTube It has short episodes but is not in a vertical format.)

The uploader of that video, Wuxia Legends Theater, only has 1050k views. Out of what YouTube says is 50 videos (48 are visible), the most-viewed has 116k views. They made private the video that has 3x as many views as their second-most-popular video. The channel description says, "All series on this channel are provided by licensed partners or rights holders and are fully protected by copyright." but that's presumably true for big channels like Youku as well and they suffer from muted audio on many videos.

I'm assuming that if there is a government conspiracy, this video was made private because of that conspiracy. If there is no such conspiracy, then it's an unrelated reason.

Anyway, zombies. This short drama, by the same channel, has a very Chinese storyline:

[FULL]Zombies got me outside, one second from death… system saves everything🔥#cdrama #shortdrama

I wasn't intending to watch the whole thing. I was going to watch 1 or 2 minutes, then I decided 10 minutes was fine, but I didn't want to stop so I told myself 12 minutes, and then finally stopped at 17 minutes.

The channel doesn't publish the Chinese name of the short drama. It is most certainly published on one or more Chinese video sites, but without knowing the name, if it gets made private it might not be possible to find and watch it. I have to accept that, having stopped where I did.

The story opens with a group of people intending to eat the male lead. His ex-girlfriend was requesting that they save his hand for her to eat. 15 minutes later, he is about to agree to give his ex-girlfriend food.

Wanting to eat someone is terrible. And many or most Chinese stories have someone who acts badly. Even in Three Body, the crew of the ship that was targeted for destruction was described as the worst criminals in the world. In contrast, the Netflix production, 3 Body Problem, filled the ship with innocent young people. Despite this, China is a country with one of the highest rates of saying that 'other people can be trusted' in the world.

It's like warning people to look both ways before crossing the road. People may be warned constantly, but despite the warnings they may still consider the risk to be low.

That's why to a Chinese audience, the logic "well, she did just say she wanted to eat him, but he has food and she's hungry so he should be nice" is seen as completely reasonable, to explain the actions of a character in a story.

I was thinking that in the US, it's seen as bad to be selfish, and the stories which attract most people are ones where people are not being selfish; instead, they do things that don't benefit them. Like arguing and fighting with people they know. Whereas in Chinese stories, doing 'selfish' things like trying to find someone to be in a relationship with, or just trying to earn more money, is seen as completely fine, and so there are many stories about it. There's no need for the 'excuse' of, like, a reality TV show in which people are forced to be in close proximity to each other, although China doubtless has those and similar shows as well.

But this sort of implies a prediction that with the poll about being generous or nice, a lower percentage of people in the US would answer 'selfish' than in China. If that prediction is accurate, more people answering 'generous' in the US does not mean more people are actually generous; it could be that people think that being generous would be better for society, but do not think that they, or most people they know, act in the way which is best for society.

Zombie movies and shows that I've seen: Train to Busan (Korean), most of World War Z (US), #Alive (Korean), All of Us Are Dead (Korean), the Key and Peele skit about racist zombies, and the first season of Sweet Home (Korean), which seems like a show about zombies for the first episode. This is my basis for saying this Chinese drama about zombies is unlike stories from other countries.

Because of the short drama that was made private, I intend to not watch any more short dramas based on the same condition as not watching other dramas.

To ???, pt 8

I said to Sherine way back in 2013, when anyone who's 20 years old now was only 7 years old, that I wanted people to either use <redacted> in a short amount of time, or in a long amount of time. Not in a medium amount of time. This is one of those things that I said that I'm not entirely sure afterwards why I said it, like when I said, "Therefore, change is necessary."

I can speculate why I said I didn't want it to take a medium amount of time, but I won't bother. It should have been obvious that I preferred a short story, but presumably at some point a medium amount of time had passed, and at that point I preferred that it take longer than it already had. Perhaps this was around the time that I hid all of the posts after 2012. (Other than  the ones that mentioned Demi Rose, which I might have deleted, as I said I would if she didn't share it.) So I can't exactly complain if takes "a longer time + 1 day", repeated an arbitrary number of times.

"If information is hidden or obscured, is the intention the same?" Someone's thoughts are usually hidden. What if they weren't?

[short drama][163k views, 18.5k subs, 10 Jul 2026]Reborn to cut ties with the LADY CEO who KILLED me! But she can READ MY MIND... - YouTube 

Someone who values honesty should prefer outcomes where information being temporarily hidden leads to the same results as when information is known immediately.

And so, the question: is sadness negative happiness? If someone experiences sadness, is it like the total amount of happiness in their life being lower? If someone experiences 1000 days of minor happiness, experiencing 1 Happiness per day, and then learns something that causes them to experience 1000 Sadness, does it cancel out all the happiness?

This is about goals. Is the goal to experience the most Happiness? Or is the goal to maximize Happiness minus Sadness? When helping other people, which of these goals is better? This is not a situation where one expects to have both of these goals and they conflict, as with the explanation given in <redacted>.

The first goal, where one accounts only for Happiness, encourages people to live a long life. It also encourages deception. People often consider it difficult it feel more than one emotional state at a time; either they are happy, or they are sad, rarely both. So hiding a thing that could cause someone sadness can allow them to feel happy, even if they later learn the thing and are sad.

(Unrelated: I misheard the lyrics to Stratovarius - Millennium as "two hundred days, forevermore".)


Confidence: sometimes the benefit of confidence (and who would intentionally act in a way without a reason) is that being confident, and wrong, leads to others having a worse opinion of you.

It's possible that even when trying one's hardest, one cannot help a specific person. If the goal is, in fact, to help this person, then a switch from a projection of providing a small help to this person, to providing a small harm (close outcomes within the total possibility space, which ranges from "large help" to "large harm"), leads to a large change in behavior.

It can be difficult someone else to realize this is the explanation for a course of action. Some people think that if they truly try to help someone else, then of course they will be able to do it; that interactions where someone does not appear to try to help someone else are simply because they do not want to help that person. Along with helping others, a common motivation is to help the self (although the book, The Selfish Gene argues otherwise), and from this perspective, changes in behavior result instead from a switch in projection from a small help to the self, to a small harm to the self, rather than it being about helping or harming someone else. Someone who does not think it's possible for someone to be unable to help someone else may fail to understand some interactions.

I watched the drama I linked above, even though I said I wouldn't watch any dramas unless Imane <redacted>. As a vertical-form drama, it isn't something that seems intended to be watched together by multiple people. Someone who watches it is watching it by themselves. In several instances, the female lead acts in a way which might be confusing to someone who expects others to always act selfishly.

I don't expect that Demi Rose will <redacted>. I'm not emailing her, because it seems apparent that it would be better if I had high confidence in my evaluation of whether or not there is a government conspiracy. Right now I am, obviously, trying to avoid any actions that could seem helpful. Like when the admiral left the bridge and went to the front of the ship, after giving bad instructions. (I don't have any ability to give instructions, but if I would, then I not try to give bad instructions; I would just say <redacted>.) This is like how it seems clear that it would be better if I had high confidence in whether anyone is interested in me.

So, even if <redacted>, if nothing interesting happens then I can be confident that there's no government conspiracy. If, for example, Demi Rose's Like count on Chirp Club suddenly rose to above 18,430, or she said something even if it's not related to <redacted>, then a government conspiracy would also seem to likely. But if I emailed her, and then this happened (she said something on Chirp Club), then it would be unclear whether a government conspiracy exists.

Ok, I edited this, but now the edit isn't showing up. First time this has happened. If I hadn't gone in to edit this again, I wouldn't have noticed. Test.

First edit:

Mi Mi Mi - โคโยตี้สาวสวย

'Mi Mi Mi - โคโยตี้สาวสวย 2015 South Pro Caraudio Show[All I Ever Wanted, ?] [tanMWQs9yEw]-audio edit.txt'

Beats don't match chord at 575, 424

End before ~397.6

Maybe skip from 397.3 to 588.4, otherwise to 616
 ffmpeg -seek_timestamp 1 -ss 395 -i "$in" -seek_timestamp 1 -ss 586 -i "$in" -vn -filter_complex "[0]atrim=end=2.3[t],[1]atrim=2.3,[t]acrossfade=d=0.1:c1=qsin:c2=qsin" -t 10 audio.WAV; ffplay audio.WAV

or 0.2 dur, or

 ffmpeg -seek_timestamp 1 -ss 395 -i "$in" -seek_timestamp 1 -ss 586 -i "$in" -vn -filter_complex "[0]atrim=end=2.6[t],[1]atrim=2.3,[t]acrossfade=d=0.4:c1=qsin:c2=qsin" -t 10 audio.WAV; ffplay audio.WAV


Full, some volume adjustment
 ffmpeg -seek_timestamp 1 -i "$in" -seek_timestamp 1 -ss 586 -i "$in" -vn -filter_complex "[0]atrim=end=397.6,volume=-1.6dB[t],[1]atrim=2.3,[t]acrossfade=d=0.4:c1=qsin:c2=qsin,volume=-0.5dB,astats" -b:a 120k audio.webm

Wrong, gives peak dB of 18:
 ffmpeg -seek_timestamp 1 -i "$in" -seek_timestamp 1 -ss 586 -i "$in" -vn -filter_complex "[0]atrim=end=397.6,volume=-1.5dB[t],[1]atrim=2.3,volume='lerp(-2.2dB,-0.4dB,clip(t,30,31)):eval=frame',[t]acrossfade=d=0.4:c1=qsin:c2=qsin,astats" -b:a 120k audio.webm

Fixed:
 ffmpeg -seek_timestamp 1 -i "$in" -seek_timestamp 1 -ss 586 -i "$in" -vn -filter_complex "[0]atrim=end=397.6,volume=-1.5dB[t],[1]atrim=2.3,volume='lerp(-2.2dB,-0.4dB,clip(max(t,0)-30,0,1)):eval=frame',[t]acrossfade=d=0.4:c1=qsin:c2=qsin,astats" -b:a 120k audio.webm


Second edit:

Xaryu Reacts to Warcraft III Cutscene - YouTube

Why did Jesus ask the Father to “let this cup pass from me”? | GotQuestions.org

WC3: https://youtu.be/IpKFsGiutZ0?t=876 story inspired by Native Americans

I said I couldn't complain since I preferred that <redacted> happen in a long length of time rather than a medium length of time, but am I complaining. I have several tabs open of YouTube videos (loaded without Javascript) that are, basically, about problems with World of Warcraft as it currently exists in various forms. I wasn't expecting to watch them since, if I didn't make this edit, they would just cause me to be unhappy as problems I can do nothing about because <redacted>. I'll just briefly link them:

Why Tanks Stop Tanking - YouTube (recent video, but probably similar to e.g. Why No One Wants to Tank in TBC Classic - YouTube while this is probably a comedy video, maybe very old: World of Warcraft: Who's the Tank? - YouTube)

You Can't Be Selfish in Classic WoW - YouTube (seems like it could be similar to these videos that I didn't watch: Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft - YouTube and Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft LIVE | PAX West 2024 - YouTube)

Everything Wrong With Classic WoW Comes Down To ONE Thing - YouTube 

"My Vision For Classic Plus" -Xaryu - YouTube

Naxxramas Broke WoW Itemization FOREVER - YouTube 

THE MOST HILARIOUS WORLD OF WARCRAFT ELECTION I'VE EVER WITNESSED - YouTube 

I will briefly comment about the second-to-last video. Part of the intent was so that players could use the tier sets for raiding. The creator of the video has a helpful thumbnail (displayed when loading the page without Javascript, which is something that YouTube didn't do when it first switched to the new design ~10 years ago: no Javascript just meant a blank page) which clearly states his views, even if people don't help him by contributing watchtime. This creator is known for playing paladins in World of Warcraft. The Tier 2.5 set had 'hybrid' stats, which meant it was pretty good for PvP ­­— though it didn't really support builds that relied on offensive abilities that scaled with spellpower, instead of physical damage stats — but paladins were not brought to raids for their offensive potential.

I actually remember a video from around 2006 where a paladin showed off their dps on the boss Patchwerk, but both an analysis of abilities and mechanics, and real data from raid logs makes it clear that paladins don't have the dps of warriors in Classic. The point is, some players were fine with being 'pidgeonholed' into a certain role, which for paladins was healing, just like it was for all hybrids except maybe feral druids. And they viewed itemization which allowed them to use the tier sets they got from raiding, to progress in raiding, rather than being forced to use non-set items, to be better. (607 characters, not as brief as a 140-character Tweet when Chirp Club launched.)

I'm fine with disregarding those videos. The video that I did try to watch was this one:

[107k views, at 15:35, 01 Jul 2026]WoW is too famous for its own good. - YouTube

I stopped when it seemed I would probably get too upset from continuing to watch it (I don't even remember exactly why at this point), as a problem I couldn't do anything about because <redacted>.

So it's reasonable to say that, if I were to die in my sleep today, the total amount of happiness I have experienced would be greater than if I had died in my sleep yesterday. I am not trying to make myself unhappy, and I largely succeed at this.


Third edit, which is different from an update in that it doesn't have a date: so I had a dream that Demi Rose shared <redacted>, and it had about 200 replies. But there was a spelling mistake in a word in the text that she copied. In the dream, I was about to make a post here saying that I had noticed the spelling mistake at some point, but then forgotten about it.

It was something really obvious: like it was misspelled as "agait" or something, which supposed to be missing an "n" or something in weird dream logic where words aren't words.

Look, a mistake. I corrected a mistake in the first paragraph before posting edit, but I'm leaving this second mistake. Look, another mistake. I just woke up.

 

Fourth edit: I was thinking about the difficult maths problem that was solved around 2009. How some Chinese mathematicians wrote about an area in the published proof which they felt was incomplete, so they did more maths to prove the thing. The original mathematician commented that the maths world was 'corrupt' or something, because of the controversy that the Chinese mathematicians attracted by claiming the original proof was incomplete. It may seem like something analogous to a spelling mistake, but the relevance is in their identities: a Russian mathematician, and Chinese mathematicians. The speculation in the previous post about Chinese people thinking it's best for society if most people are 'selfish' in business, while the Soviet attitude was that people should be 'generous'.

I think it should be obvious that if someone <redacted>, I would want them to say things that are most effective. There is no reason to copy mistakes.

Saturday, July 4, 2026

To Yoko Ono, pt 2

I'm not sure if your Chirp Club post is really about Vietnam, or even about peace. But I'm talking about Vietnam.

Tangent:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War hyphen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_War the two recent wars use hyphens. The two wars fought in the 600s use en dashes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish–American_War en dash
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS:ENBETWEEN recommends en dash.

Sino-Vietnamese_War § Background, begins with this paragraph:

>Just as the First Indochina War—which emerged from the complex situation following World War II—and the Vietnam War arose from the indecisive aftermath of political relations, the Third Indochina War again followed the unresolved problems of the earlier wars.

I'm speculating.

>In February 1976, Vietnam implemented registration programs in the south.  Ethnic Chinese in Vietnam were required to adopt Vietnamese citizenship or leave the country.

Was this like in Malaysia or maybe Indonesia? There, Chinese people were attacked, because Chinese people were seen as rich (the landlords). But China supported the government in Cambodia, which was killing rich people. But those rich people were probably not Chinese.

If the conflict was, at least in part, because of Chinese people having attitudes which lead to them becoming rich, then the last poll in the previous post seems relevant.

Is this what "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" is about? Is the difference that in Soviet-style socialism, and by inference in Vietnamese-style socialism, people are expected to act like they are being generous? While in Chinese-style socialism, the expectation is that everyone is being selfish in their business relationships?

Speculation: in Chinese history, people becoming powerful, which generally was the same as rich, was good for the country. Just the basic idea that the unification of China was good, because it meant less war. But for nations surrounding China, this was not necessarily true. War occurs around borders. Language divides people into nations, creating borders. And war means instability, which encourages rulers to act in a harsh way. This could make the common people view the ruler, and rich people in general, more negatively in a country like Vietnam which borders China.

Like, the fact that a large proportion of people in Vietnam have the same surname, because of all the wars in which the defeated faction wanted to hide their identity.

___

Update 04 Jul 2026, 17:29

Polls are useful because they let people who expect that most people think the same way as they do see that they're wrong.

Soviet factories making the wrong types of goods, because it's more profitable for the factory even though it's worse for the nation: this is not being generous.

Poll: Would you choose to receive $1, or for another person chosen at random to receive $2?

Poll: Would you choose for yourself, all of your relatives, all of their friends, and everyone who lives in the same town as you to each receive $1, or for an equal number of people who live elsewhere to each receive $2?

 

Other effects, like individual farm plots being much more productive than the collective farm plots: this is probably more about 'following the rules'. When you suspect everyone of wanting to act differently than how you want them to act, you create lots of rules to ensure everyone acts a certain way, but these rules may not give a good result even if they are followed. That question, from like 2011 2010: "who is most aware of the importance of a task or able to understand the quality of its execution (not the same)". Example of a rule not being followed: "accurately report how much food has been produced in your area. You will be rewarded if the number is high, and punished if the number is low." (Holodomor.) Counterexample, of rules being followed: "Only give help to people who are so poor that they own almost nothing." (Irish famine.)

Edit: If the CEO of a large company were to hold a press conference and announce, "We are hereby insulting our customers. That is all", how many customers would they lose?

I won't say anything more about anything involving real-life money or economics until the amount of money I have increases by $0.01.

___

Update 05 Jul 2026, 15:11

I don't know if this counts as doing nothing, and the intent might violate what I said above, but I thought of this open-ended question:

Is there any group of people, other than criminals, that it's widely considered acceptable to hate?


Vietnamese people who have talked to me in my life, so excluding Clara Dao since she hasn't talked to me: my male friend who was one grade lower in high school, whom I communicated with by email a bit afterwards and who might have become an engineer. Daphne Ngo, whom I met at the COSMOS program at the University of California, Irvine in the summer after my 10th grade of school. My landlady from whom I rented a room in her house after I finished my military training, and her daughter who had advertised the room (my emails regarding the topic of this weblog included her). And Hime, the friend that I met in World of Warcraft, who once sent me a photo of herself on vacation with her relatives, and to whom I sent a heart-shaped gold necklace while I wasn't talking to her when I was in Iraq, as well as the painting of a river by an Iraqi artist that Mei wouldn't accept.

The AoE2 player (and engineer) Hoang replied to at least one comment from me, if that also counts.

___

Update 06 Jul 2026, 22:22

The following doesn't concern a prohibited topic.

I overheard a TV ad. At some company, "we believe everyone deserves" high-quality products or something. A company saying they are generous! And who wants to believe, or tell others, that the world is filled with people who are not generous?

智商稅

A comment, probably spam from a bot, on this video (or dedicated page for video, which doesn't show some information like collaborators on videos with multiple creators):

我想看国际局势,地理知识,全国地理科技,人情世故懂得怎么和上级打交道,改变大势、财富管理零基础、未来科技风口,我想学能安身立命真正有用的生存知识,只想搞明白钱到底往哪里流动,财富底层逻辑是什么,我想学会人情世故,懂得怎么跟上下级打交道,稳步提升自己的情商和格局,学会看透人性,识别人心,懂得提防身边的恶意与算计一点点拉高自己的认知层次我还想搞懂AI,到底在替代哪些行业又在创造哪些机会知道怎样租房怎样入职懂得拟定婚前协议,好好保护自己的权益,这个好看,我喜欢。不要营销号,要有专业性 请推荐:中医药、针灸、心理学、健身、太极、练剑、六爻、道德经、王阳明、史记、资治通鉴、民法常识、商业思维、理财方法、经济周期、股市逻辑、地缘政治、科技趋势、识人术、读心术、心理学效应、人情世故、上下级沟通、提升认知格局情商财商的干货内容;少推鸡汤、娱乐、消费类、短剧类内容

At the end it says, "recommend less chicken soup, entertainment, consumption, short drama content".


I remembered that a few days after I first emailed Imane, around Dec 2023, she said on a stream that she had several people 'lined up', implying that they were interested in her and that she was not currently in a relationship at that time.

I was thinking about the drama, The Double. The foreign princess, who is being held 'captive' to prevent war — similarly to the main male character in Till the End of the Moon, or the main female character in The Princess's Gambit (桃花映江山, 2025), or the situation of the main male character in Lost You Forever when he first appears as an adult — becomes interested in an official who is already married. There is a scene where she first sees him, and thinks that he was waiting to greet her, but he was actually about to greet his wife and so the princess's sincere smile disappears. But the reason for her actions may involve a conspiracy that is not fully explained in the episodes available for free on YouTube.

What we do see is that she is fully or partly responsible for framing the wife of that official and forcing him to kill her. So I was thinking, maybe I'm like this? I could be interested in someone who was already in a relationship if they act in a way that shows that they completely reject that person and no longer care about them. Also, the princess did not complain when the official held her throat like he was about to strangle her to death. Of course, if he had, he would have been executed along with his mother and sister and all of his relatives, but it suggested that she was willing to act in a way that made others unhappy because she was unhappy as well, to the point that she didn't care about her own life.

I'm not trying to be ambiguous.

Based on the events in The Double, how could the official have avoided the sad outcome? By not looking in the direction of his wife when, by chance, he first encountered the princess. Letting her believe for a few moments longer that he was glad to have encountered her, a prisoner in a foreign land.

___

Update 07 Jul 2206, 03:06

To be honest I don't know if you were responsible for the dance club videos that I linked in early 2013 being made private or deleted.

I've said this before but I'll say it again: I have never been to a dance club. Possibly the most recent, or maybe the only, time I was at the scene of random people dancing freestyle was after my middle school graduation, where (as I've said) I just sat and read a book, and didn't dance. And I felt it should have been obvious that even if I had been to a dance club before, I was not going to be doing that in 2013, so the dance music you were making around that time would never be heard by me in that setting.

There were some things I wanted to talk about that I can't because they involve money. It was going to be the topic of (again, really) what makes someone attractive, which is often helping other people. And gender-based differences in what this looks like. Specifically, females helping females, vs females helping males.

There was also a related topic: people getting offended when an attribute is estimated to be higher than it is, vs getting offended when it's estimated as lower than it is. The attribute can be intelligence (like knowing the meaning of a word), or it can be things like attractiveness. It's common for people to think that females are attractive based on appearance, which can be evaluated without talking, while males are often considered to be attractive based on other things. This requires talking, and here is the connection to money.

It is for this reason that I cannot say "I do not find hypothetical person X to be attractive". I am not using apophasis here.


So what I can say is that videos of dance groups in Taiwan cannot compete with short-form video content. The most popular groups now are probably significantly less popular than 15 years ago, and probably less popular even than one year ago. Covid probably interrupted it, and short-form content has probably significantly reduced interest. Example: filters that change body proportions cannot be used in real life, so if evaluation of 2D video content is similar to evaluation of a live performance (contrast a photo of clouds at sunset vs the actual thing), the live performance will look worse than an edited, short-form video.

This means that someone who wants to make other people care about these dance groups, whether ones that currently perform or ones featured in videos from 15 years ago, cannot do so.

I wish you hadn't wasted time.

___

Update 08 Jul 2026, 15:43

This has nothing to do with Vietnam and I ought to make a new post. But I'm lazy, and this lets me blame you for saying something on Chirp Club.

Were you saying in your songs that people should be generous? I don't think so. But it may have been interpreted this way.

I tried using a modern browser for Douyin. It did actually have better performance. My usual browser, Firefox, can use around 40% of the maximum CPU just sitting on a video page, with nothing playing. I also wanted to see if I could use cookies from the modern browser with yt-dlp (I have been using Private Mode in Firefox for 13 years, and add-ons were disabled for old Firefox versions a year ago, so I can't use Firefox cookies). So I was playing random videos to seem like not a bot for the cookies, and ended up finding these videos:

(bookmark) 3231k likes https://v.douyin.com/8tTU60vtjbY 08 Jul 2026
(bookmark) 299k likes https://v.douyin.com/jdm4ssvR9qg
(bookmark) 2315k likes https://v.douyin.com/j8RPrAqF9XQ
(bookmark, dl) 112k likes https://v.douyin.com/2IhMJPOX8CY Gangnam Style
(bookmark) 941k likes https://v.douyin.com/HBh9FQJ_KqI AI gen disaster movie with random scenes

The song Gangnam Style is sort of about money.

"If people would just be happy, there wouldn't be war." Why do people try to get more points in video games? Why, in World of Warcraft, do they try to kill raid bosses before anyone else? Tangent as I link the last raid progression races I care about, from 15+ years ago:

H: The Lich King (10) Finnish guild, unlike the typical guild that used English and accepted diverse applicants. Players got a 5% buff to damage and health each week, as an alternative to scheduled nerfs to bosses, so two weeks later meant +10% health and damage.

H: The Lich King (25) Same boss, harder difficulty. Two-week lead over second place.

Alone in the Darkness (H) Chinese guild playing on Taiwanese servers, having a late start (including gear disadvantage) but still ending up first.

H: Madness of Deathwing Korean guild first, Chinese guild second. (But the progression race involved using alts to feed gear to mains using split raids. The website originally recorded the item level of players at the time of a kill, with higher item level meaning easier difficulty.)

It's difficult for someone who's extremely poor who has almost nothing to be happy. If I had gotten cancer eight years ago and died due to not having health care, would this have been a happy end to the story of my life, or a sad end?

So: people are always trying to challenge themselves. If a behavior seems harmful, there are two general solutions: stop the behavior, or change other things so that the behavior is not harmful. You could also, I guess, just ignore the harmful behavior. This may seem like a bad solution or not a solution, but if there are 20 bad behaviors, a person can only focus on a few of them at a time. I am saying that some behaviors cannot be stopped, but people don't agree with this so they still consider "stopping the behavior" as a solution and think that others may have a similar view.

Did I say something about money?