To Pokimane, pt 30

Based on your latest TikTok video, I am no longer checking your accounts. I will still check your Twitch and YouTube accounts one more time, because it's possible that some activity there would change what a reasonable person would think, but I think that either you don't read this (I actually don't think this is likely, but I've been wrong before), or you're fine with a reasonable person thinking you don't read it.

I don't think there's anything that I try to make a reasonable person of average intelligence think, that isn't true. For example: on the post about the first petition, when I said that problems are due to our assumptions and prejudices. My oldest brother apparently thought that I was saying that prejudices and assumptions are bad. There were some comments or discussions that I don't really remember, but I think he thought I wanted to deny that people with different skin colors in the US get different test scores. I remember looking up whether the 'racial' gap in test scores was smaller in the UK than in the US, to support my belief that environmental factors (both physical, and social like the "controversial" Pygmalion effect) play a significant role in the gap observed in the US.

It wasn't until the car ride in which I left the Seattle area that I think my brother understood my views. We travelled with a younger cousin, who mentioned a play in which a person from a cultural minority is — perhaps unfairly — accused of a crime and either lynched or executed, and my lack of unreserved criticism of prejudices led to my brother remarking that I had a like complex or nuanced view.

For example: the question of whether females would prefer to encounter a bear, or a human male stranger, in the woods. Is it misandry, or in general a prejudice which deserves criticism, if a female says she would prefer to encounter the bear?

The fact is that people make decisions based on limited information. A recent video:

[71m views, 2.3m likes, 8.1k com, 18 Feb 2026]GIRL Got STRANDED On The Bridge… - YouTube 

A male might have been more reluctant to help the female stranger, and she might have been more reluctant to accept help from a male. Scene from a TV series I know nothing about, other than knowing this scene:

Black-ish Little Girl in Elevator Scene

Of course, it's these same prejudices that sometimes cause people to fall victim to scams, when someone who seems trustworthy turns out to be dishonest. (Like in the Black Mirror episode, Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too, or the drama Ryuusei no Kizuna, or many of the surprises in the drama Liar Game, or in Squid Game.)

The point is, I wasn't trying to make people think that prejudices were bad. I said that people's assumptions and prejudices caused problems; it wasn't my intention, or my fault, if people did not realize they had prejudices about prejudices.

Anyway, I was just going to say some things about giving stuff away. Suppose you had a normal job, but also streamed and made videos, and the amount of money you made from videos was less than the value of the gifts that you gave away to people.

The video from your birthday party last year was very popular. I didn't and couldn't look at the comments, but I assume they were very positive. I assume your friends appreciated the gifts and that people on TikTok thought they were great gifts and it was a nice thing for you to do.

In your previous TikTok video, you were giving away a purse, to someone in the comments. Who comments on TikTok videos? People with lots of time, who might be poor, but almost certainly have a smartphone. They also know English, which in many poor countries is a big help, due to jobs that require it.

There was a comment on the 'Luxury Beliefs' video that I forgot to include in the previous post:

"Luxury" is right. I work with unemployed people, people with psychological and addiction issues, et c. None of them are interested in DEI; they're too busy trying to survive. Equally, the DEI activists at the local university never come to get their hands dirty helping us.

From Why economists are wrong, which I probably linked to you before, I pointed out that "charities are not in the business of giving people jobs". In other words, you are helping people who do not really need help. You are giving happiness to people who already have a lot of happiness. Perhaps you think that this is all that you can do, as you are not Samsung with $200 billion in revenue per year (it claims $200 million per year in corporate social responsibility spending, like charity).

It's hard for me to criticize people's goals (as opposed to pointing out mistakes in achieving a goal, like in gameplay). Ok, that quote:

>Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.

The original proverb is "Give a man a fish and he can eat for a day, teach him to fish and he can eat for the rest of his life."

Disappointly, not everyone finds Pratchett to be funny. My oldest brother is one of these. Why is this funny? The ocean is running out of fish. "gaza fish scarcity":

In January, Israel declared Gaza's waters a “no-go zone”, banning fishing, swimming, and any access to the sea. The result has been devastating: Gaza has lost 94 percent of its catch, cutting off one of its last remaining sources of food.
Nov 6, 2025
For Gaza's fishermen, the sea is their last lifeline after Israel's war
www.aljazeera.com › News › Israel-Palestine conflict

(Not actually what I was thinking of, which was a comment by a fisherman from Gaza saying that boats had to go further and further out to find fish.)

They know how to fish, and yet they are hungry. The original saying is wrong! If they were just given fish, they would not be hungry.

Quotes often get corrupted. If you forget that the original saying was about fish, and substitute in "fire", how does the second part go? If someone knows how to make fire, they'll be warm for the rest of their life? That only makes sense if they stay close to fires, and you can't stay close to a fire while you're out gathering wood for more fires. If you're going to modify a saying you can't remember in order to complete it, it makes sense to use words that make what you say true.

I've no idea what the original context of this quote is, who said it and whether it had a significant meaning in that context. But the fact is, people do not go out of their way to care about how long the lives are of strangers across the world, especially male strangers. I was reading the comments on a video (that I didn't watch) about the performance of the M1 Abrams tank in the Ukraine conflict, and while people argued about that point, no one disputed that thousands of tanks have been destroyed there, with thousands of dead crewmembers.

People dying is sad. Is people knowing, but not really caring, that people are dying sad? Is it bad to think that it's a little funny that people would not care about someone dying (as with the quote from Pratchett's Jingo)? Things are not supposed to be funny if they are too important; is it important that people don't care about the Ukraine conflict? Do YOU care about it?

I don't think you're worse than other people, but I don't think that you choosing to use some of your money to buy gifts for other people, or getting people to meet up in order to be happy, makes you better than other people either.

A few posts back, I mentioned the person (maybe female) whom I know as Sam Sam. I remember that this person said, maybe in the context of Christmas, that they didn't really put much importance on the giving of gifts, or do much of it themselves.

Ellum said, maybe in the screenshots of his conversations with Cara, that he was very grateful for the gifts she gave him and the money she spent on him. There was a quote I thought about earlier in this post, something about unwanted gifts not resulting in gratitude. I know I used it to comment on the 'gift' of me linking to this idea, in 2011 or 2012. I think that everyone you give gifts to is appreciative, partly because of the self-selection like commenting on TikTok videos. But some people would just be ungrateful, and moreover would not care if their lack of gratitude stops someone from giving a gift, because they don't want gifts.

In the drama The Prisoner of Beauty: the wedding gifts, including the ferret. In Hogfather: the old male who doesn't want the food from the king. In Hana Yori Dango: the female lead's reaction to being given clothing and jewelry worth $1 million.

To Pokimane, pt 29

I was going to wait until 24 Feb, which is two weeks after Pey's birthday though not two weeks after I said I would wait two weeks, and then probably start checking your Twitch channel and YouTube channels again, but it seems like such a waste of time to wait another two days.

Today's award winners for "videos that I would actually want to watch now", after clicking on a few dozen videos, deciding that about two dozen of them were interesting enough to bookmark and then never return to, and leaving these open as tabs:

How Modern Schools Make Terrible Writers (Deliberately)

Luxury Beliefs: The New Status Symbol That’s Ruining Entertainment

A Selfish Argument for Making the World a Better Place – Egoistic Altruism

The 7 Deadly Sins of Millennial Writing

Selected comments:

This is so valid. I'll never forget asking for additional children's books from the school library in grade 1 and being told by the teacher "you can't have more books because we can't have you getting ahead of the other children with your reading."

Let's goo luxury beliefs - a beautiful phrase coined by Rob Henderson (who was a foster kid adopted and raised by incredibly poor parents and ultimately went to Yale where he found himself bewildered by his privileged colleagues ability to make themselves seem like victims)

Great video, Greg!  My favorite example of luxury beliefs was Leonardo DiCaprio flying on his private jet across the world to conferences where he would preach that we (the common people) should walk to work instead of drive in order to save the environment. Not only can we (the common people) not always afford to work within walking distance (or in cities where public transpo is nearly non-existent), but there's the joyful hypocrisy of it too, where WE should walk while YOU fly.

Millennials love trying out the ‘new and creative’ idea of saying “what if the bad guys were actually the good guys” while completely failing to understand the source material that showed exactly why they were bad guys

I have had to unlearn my generation’s overly ironic manner of speech and presentation when I wanted genuine relationships. The full suite of millennialism ultimately boils down to a way to shield yourself from being scrutinized/ as a way to hide being talentless and uninteresting.

Deadly sin No1: The assumption that the audience is stupid.
I'm often reminded of a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln.
You can fool all of the people some of time, you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.

I'm still stuck on "1 of 4 American adults read at a kindergarten level." Those people have the right to vote. Ponder that for a moment.

On the topic of comments, I also bookmarked these comments yesterday (the reason I was recommended more videos from the same channel today, although I watched little or none of these videos):

[comment, reading comprehension][458k views, 21 Feb 2026]This is Why We Never Got Another Lord of the Rings - YouTube

(Excerpt from long comment) [...] They said they were discussing that topic with a coworker who told them that the kids nowadays only want to read fully illustrated books because they struggle to mentally visualize what they are reading so they just want to be shown what it is. This, to me, relates to kids being raised on YouTube and TikTok who are used to everything they consume being visual media so they don't have to leave anything to their imagination.

[comment, people don't change][134k views, 21 Feb 2026]why romance doesn’t let men change anymore - YouTube 

I understand character arc but I dont actually believe it. The idea that people change is a farce. People are the same, they just lie about who they are because they have to operate in society. If they dont conform, if they do not perform, they cannot get what they want or need.


People dont change, they get better at lying.

And the whole ' people said horrid things at 15 but they have made strides to blah blah blah.' No. Teens know right from wrong. What they said then, they meant it and are only covering up so they dont get in trouble.  we were all 15 once but not all of us were spewing the  n word or using other slurs

Obviously I had no intention of sharing this comment when I bookmarked it, and had no idea what it was before I just visited it right now with the intention of copying it no matter what it said. It just shows how some people think. Looking at this comment now, the first part of it makes me think of the ending of Person of Interest S01 Ep04, Cura Te Ipsum. Though that article, with its summary of the final scene, misses an important detail: the character Reese begins with his eyes closed, perhaps half asleep after a long wait. The audience does not know whether it was a test, or whether the gun was loaded and functional. Reese's behavior suggests that the gun is loaded; that Reese was giving Benton an opportunity to kill Reese, if Benton was the type of person who would kill another person. Because just as Reese does not know if Benton can change from a 'bad' person to a 'good' person, Reese does not know if he himself can be a 'good' person, after killing many people, some of whom might have been 'good', during his previous employment.

That article says,

But much like the Sixth Sense that only became the classic that it did because of its ending, Cura Te Ipsum became one of the penultimate episodes of POI because of its powerful conclusion…or lack of conclusion.

(penultimate: 4. (proscribed) pre-eminent, ultimate, best; par excellence, top-quality)

This is wrong. It only has the conclusion that it does because people cannot agree on whether 'bad' people can become 'good' people. Just like a politician avoiding a question about a sensitive issue, the show avoids giving an answer to this question, because of people who would misinterpret or misapply that answer.

The YouTube comment shows how some people — not necessarily this specific commenter — would think that the correct thing for Reese to do in this situation would be to murder Benton and dispose of his body.

Also while looking up that comment, I saw this video: Dance Central | Maneater (Hard - Gold Stars - 100%)

More so than the body tracking (15+ years old and used in games like BeatSaber and BeatSaber), what's interesting is the standardization of moves, by giving them names. It's a lot different than a game just scoring a player based on whether they step on floor panels at the right time, which could look like a dance but doesn't have to. I mention it because I was thinking of listening to this song earlier today, but decided it would send the wrong message. (Do I have to mention that this song was used in Polzie - The True Story?)

Also I just clicked on Why I fear for the future of mankind, which has a climate change info panel but based on comments is not just about climate change.

This is a lot of videos which I might want to watch, but have not watched. And I can't ask anyone to watch a video I haven't watched. But don't they look like interesting videos?

If I was trying to get you to share this idea, maybe I could justify waiting. But, like, your recent TikTok video was filmed in China, and maybe within the past day or two. Either you are flying around excessively, or I am bad at guessing where you are in the world based on the videos you post. It doesn't seem like you would mind if I stopped paying attention to you. So if you do anything that would make a reasonable person, of average intelligence, think that you don't read this and don't care about the idea, on any platform excluding Facebook, then I will stop checking your accounts (but might still visit them in the future if people link to content on them or an algorithm recommends them, etc.).

I am not currently checking your Twitch and YouTube accounts, but I intend to do so as soon as I check all the moments on Pey's videos that I meant to check.

I was thinking of switching to the goal of 'trying to get you to advocate for certain changes in WoW', which might start with me editing the thoughts I previously had about stats and so on into a long explanation, but honestly that would be a goal with zero chance of success and it would just be delaying the inevitable. And I think I need to make a few polls first.

Did I already say this? From 06 Feb 2026:

answering the question, 'why do people hurt people they care about?'

Poll: Which would you rather live in? A world in which falling in love with someone increases the chance you will hurt them; a world in which falling in love with someone decreases the chance you will hurt them

This, from 02 Feb 2026?

Poll: "Would it be bad if everyone who can only do tasks that 3 billion other people can also do made enough money to support themselves and another person?"

From the really long thoughts I had on 14 Jan 2026:

Poll: if you were designing WoW 1 to 80 all in one go, with pauses for ~2 years at the 60 and 70 level caps, how much health and damage would a fresh lvl 80 character have compared to a fresh lvl 40 character? From 2x to 20x as much.

Which is better: an MMO in which most characters at the level cap are less than 30% stronger than a character one level below the level cap, or one in which the average character at level cap is three times stronger (200% stronger) than characters one level below?

If power inflation is limited, then need for big changes that limit mana-pool inflation might go away.

I can't answer these questions without asking other people.

To Pokimane, pt 28

Greta reposted a post (?) on Instagram that features a lot of text. I sort of think that most of the 500k people who Liked that post did not read all the text, and that they made the decision to Like it based on whether it supported a cause that they had previously decided to support, but I'm interpreting it as meaning that she is ok if you decide that Chirp Club is trash.

I was watching a set featuring the best female player in Age of Empires II, and the topic of color blindness came up. There are eight player colors in AoE2, and due to colorblind viewers, the caster (and occasional player, with over $3k in tournament prize winnings) who made that video only uses two of them when casting games.

I commented about this on Chirp Club like 10 years ago. Someone complained about a chart that used colors, instead of different styles of dotted lines, and I replied pointing out that they could switch screen colors to distinguish between lines.

It's a little bit harder with a game, but still possible. Games display things like water and grass, and changing those to red would look weird. But almost no color matchups would both be natural environment colors that also look the same to colorblind people.

But why care? If color is so important, I could change it myself, right? It's about doing things in a worse way to accommodate people. Not all accommodations make things worse: having a ramp for people with wheelchairs does not mean there cannot also be stairs for a more direct path. When checking your TikTok profile on Claptik a few minutes ago, I somehow got a mouseover tooltip on the Cloudflare verification checkbox, saying the purpose of the window (I can't get this tooltip to appear now), which is a reminder of the alt text or whatever that helps blind people understand what images show and now also helps AI to classify images. These things don't worsen the experience of normal people.

But other things do. Not keeping players as purple or orange in AoE2. Dumbing down schools due to some students learning slower, with long-term effects on the knowledge of individual students and on the overall knowledge and competence of entire countries. I could spend more time here thinking of more than just this one example.

People differ in many attributes. Some people are uglier (I feel comfortable saying this because I might be ugly, so ugly people have no reason to view me as an enemy for acknowledging physical differences). Should it be illegal to discriminate based on appearance when hiring for customer-facing jobs, in order to help ugly people?

Maybe there are things that would be better for a tiny minority of people if things were done in a way that would be inconvenient for most people. Like, maybe stairs would be better for very tall people if each step was taller. This doesn't happen because it's almost always the majority who 'bullies' minorities, not the other way around. This is why it's safe to say that 'things should be designed to work well for normal people', as the definition of 'normal' is 'similar to the majority of people'.

I was also going to say the following, and I can't remember if I had connected it at all to the general topic of 'not making things worse for normal people':

Poll: how much food in terms of total calories per day should people with a BMI lower than the normal range eat, compared to someone with normal BMI? (I previously suggested that Clara Dao could benefit from this poll, I think)

- I strongly feel they should eat more

- More

- About the same

- Less

- I strongly feel they should eat less

AND THEN, the same poll but for people with a BMI higher than the normal range.

Crucially, if normal people choose to worsen the experience of everyone in order to help people who are lacking in an attribute, then those who are lacking have no incentive to improve. Color blindness cannot be fixed. But the negative effects of color blindness when viewing content on a screen can be fixed.

I also wanted to say something about schools here. Doing so requires acknowledging that economic factors can be a reason for someone's poor academic performance. (This includes poor health outcomes due to being poor, including ones that affect cognitive development.) However, this does not mean I am trying to get you to share the idea.

To Pokimane, pt 27

I hope that when you didn't share the idea after I said that at a certain point in time I would stop expecting you to share it or trying to get you to share it, that you were fine with the outcome of me not doing these things.

If I wasn't trying to get you to share the idea with my previous post, what was I trying to do?

I thought that if I said nothing, then I could determine (based on your actions) whether you had, in fact, watched this drama series after I recommended it after you said on stream that you were looking for a new Kdrama to watch.

I will just assume that you did watch it.

Someone who is my age spent part of their life without the Internet, but was of an appropriate age to become proficient at things related to computers. When I was in high school, there was no Chirp Club. If I had decided that I wanted to try to fix problems before I sought a romantic relationship, there would have been fewer avenues to cause change than there are now.

Maybe this is a bit of a tangent, but it's what I was thinking about (and I didn't take notes so I nearly forgot what I was going to say, after mentioning the drama). In 10th grade I learned that the person I had liked in middle school was in a relationship, apparently (based on her accepting an invitation to a dance; she said, "I guess that means we're official"). It was only a few months later that I found someone else that I liked. She was a grade above me, but that didn't matter. What did matter was that she was already in a relationship.

You've probably heard the saying before: "all the good guys are taken", or something to that effect. You think someone's perfect for you, but they're taken. You might be able to completely give up on the hope of being in a relationship with them, such as by never talking to them again, but what if you never find someone else that you like, because you compare everyone to the other person you knew? The "Sensibility" in "Sense and Sensibility", I think referenced this film a couple weeks ago?

Twenty years ago, Chirp Club did not exist. Now it does. I don't know if Chirp Club actually makes the world better, or if Chirp Club has gotten better in the past 10 years. I tried to get the CEO of Chirp Club at the time, Dick Costolo, to share this idea, and implied that it was possible he could have known of it, and maybe that the next CEO 'part-timing' as the CEO of Chirp Club suggested an awareness of this idea. But all I really know is that no CEO of Chirp Club has shared this idea.

In fact one of the things that I said was that if Dick Costolo did not share the idea, I would delete all my tweets on Chirp Club that were posted after a certain point in time. I got around that by having my account banned, which has a similar effect to me deleting those tweets, as they are not visible.

(I will mention that I remember when Dick Costolo mentioned the Three Body series of books, and so it was nice when they were made into a TV series and I could have a little better of an understanding of why he might recommend reading them. But maybe this is a false memory, because no search results.)

So, like, I'm investigating what you think about Chirp Club. Do you consider it a viable way of causing real change in the world?

Or would you say that it's trash?

Edit: also, the timeline in my recollections might be incorrect. I think I actually learned that the person I liked in middle school was in a relationship when I was in 11th grade. So, like, the causative relationship implied by "It was only a few months later" wouldn't exist. But this post is about what you think of Chirp Club.

To Pokimane, pt 26

Lines 8217 to 8241 of 'online tasks2, 16 Sep 2022.txt':

16 Feb 2026
a female character in a dream: "I deride the whole notion that the forces of good and the forces of evil must engage in constant battle to avert some great calamity" the ending was changed from "evil" before the sentence finished, in order for it to make sense

it lacks a bit of flavor, because the character had been pretending to be ignorant or stupid before she said that, but the prior conversation was very brief and I had already forgotten it and the context as soon as I woke up (search led to: https://richarddawkins.net/2014/08/a-hundred-walked-out-of-my-lecture/)

but the male character she was talking to was sort of an undead rogue, who probably appeared in the dream a minute earlier to demonstrate the stupidity of the rogue by stealthing at the hint of enemy rogues, and then stupidly unstealthing because he thought the danger had passed. So he was supposed to be part of the 'forces of evil', or something like it

sort of like how in Villains by Necessity, the rogue Sam (Samalander) was part of the forces of evil

*the assassin, Sam (Samalander)

Poll: "Is it bad for law enforcement to engage in law enforcement?"

AoE2: mouse position on edge of map wrong? https://youtu.be/clnh8JV6qws?t=328 *probably, "uses a default elevation to translate mouse position to XY coordinate, instead of the same elevation as adjacent map"


18 Feb 2026
AoE2: 'limited unit coop' mode could be combined with limited APM. Maybe best way to do a tournament, as it allows top players to control the empire without putting all the focus on them. APM limit set per player, similar to handicap. 20 APM (as actual commands, or eAPM) for the empire players, no limit for the 'limited unit coop' players.

Better for a tournament with a high prize pool, as instead of 'a random player', or 'a player selected from a pool with an arbitrary limit on ladder rating', can select the best player possible, just with limited APM.

sort of news:
Blizzard doing something https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1igXyFi8pE

You're the ruler of the world. You thought it would be easy, but majority of people hate you. Most cities you visit, huge protests by people who blame you for every single problem in their lives, including crime, police brutality, inflation, taxes, Covid-19, and vaccines. They also believe horrible lies about things you've secretly done. How can you use your unlimited power to become less hated?

Share the idea if you watched Cang Lan Jue drama (Love Between Fairy and Devil).

To Pokimane, pt 25

I'm criticizing your latest TikTok video, on Arabian makeup, for having correct lip sync or audio sync at the end. The evidence, including comments by creators who are trying to get correct audio sync, strongly suggests that audio on the TikTok app is delayed by about 0.13 sec on a typical smartphone. I would recommend that any creator use multiple smartphones to view a simple test video and see if they differ in sync, and then repeat the test after restarting the devices.

Examples, all using the same song (viewed using Claptik):

Video by @frenchfuse

Video by @gordeewa__13

Video by @latina_rusin_ (dc @rayvlo)

A short clip looped many times, with gradual drift in audio sync by slowing video, would be the easiest way to measure a device's audio delay.

Your previous TikTok video, introducing your close friends, also had several instances of the start of words being cut off during editing.

The description of your video mentions Ramadan, a month which is given special significance. (Also, it's crazy that "Arabs of Tihamah, Hejaz, and Najd distinguished between two types of months, permitted (ḥalāl) and forbidden (ḥarām) months. The forbidden months were four months during which fighting is forbidden".) On the topic of religion, an exercise for the reader:

A hundred walked out of my lecture | Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science

This article has good detail. The author did not understand the events that happened, but said enough for a reader to guess (unlike a description like, "I came home and misplaced my keys. Can you tell me where they might be?"). Why did this speaker say the things that she did, and why did her audience react as they did, instead of as she expected them to?

To Pokimane, pt 24

"Remember when" is sort of like an inside joke, used in cases where someone might not actually remember the thing, like when Sherine said "Remember when my crush favorited my tweet" a few hours after it happened, in case anyone had not noticed.

Remember when I said to Sherine, "there is no reason to be sad"? (Apparently this was before I started documenting my messages to her, so if Tumblr doesn't keep messages there might be no record that I said this to her.) I'm mentioning this because I'm mentioning Demi Rose Mawby, and there is the possibility that she could be sad, if she is not in a relationship. But why would she be sad that she is not in a relationship, if it's because she didn't share the idea? Did she choose not to share the idea and be sad, or was not sharing it the choice that would make her less sad?

I'm mentioning Demi Rose Mawby because of the emotion that I felt she was experiencing at a certain point of time. It was, I think, after I linked the video for 'vanished the life -notreborn' from the album Closed System, which features a cat that disappears and then reappears. I felt there was a definite possibility that Demi Rose misinterpreted why I linked it, because she seemed inappropriately happy and (I think) got a cat soon after, but I wasn't trying to say that "a cat will make you happy". I was the cat.

I wasn't going to say anything more here, after Greta posted on Instagram again. I am doing so because it I think your Valentine's Day videos were filmed at home, which would mean you were back from China and the video you posted today was filmed several days ago (with the intention of later editing and posting it).

Honestly, I disliked this video, introducing two of your best friends, until the very end, where you joked about moving to Shanghai. And I confused your friend with your neighbor, until now.

Most videos on social media are about being happy (or angry). I remember an exception: a Chinese influencer, who regularly got like 500k~1m likes per video, posted a video in which she explained that she was being harassed IRL. It's natural for anyone who is featured in a video to think that they should appear to be happy for the audience.

I searched the file with my messages to Sherine for 'unhappy', in case I said that instead of 'sad', and I still don't see that message, but I do see this:

If you aren't going to support the idea I'm only concerned with making sure you're not unhappy

I think that a smart person would find it obvious that a person who wants other people to be happy might not want others to know this, even if that person is smart enough not to be taken advantage of (anticipating 'defections' in prisoner's dilemma games, and applying 'pre-emptive justice'). Like, on 13 Feb 2026, I thought of this,

Poll for females: Would you prefer to be in a relationship with someone who would reject someone for being ugly, or someone who wouldn't?

(As well as making a note to look up "distance to Erendil star?", which is 28 billion light-years.)

Or, as a character in Love Game in Eastern Fantasy told another character in a scene which I linked before to someone, maybe Giggly aka Madison, males shouldn't be too nice to females other than the one they're most interested in.

I'm copying some thoughts I had about MMOs, which have nothing to do with any of the above.

14 Feb 2026

[...]

Note that even if rogues could use bucklers, bucklers would be useless against casters (without a 'shield bash' ability) and also useless when target is stunned. Again, depends on having a penalty for switching weapons.


WoW: note problem, that when low-level world PvP is nonexistent, people don't think of it when evaluating potential design changes. Effects of power inflation from raiding, or from super-fast flying mounts.

"Option to view damage and health numbers as though future stat squishes have already been applied." A joke because stat squish makes different item qualities more similar, so mobs would die with a similar number of casts, but the 'visual-only version' does not have this consequence, so better gear = same dps but mobs appear to have lower health, which is inconsistent with the stat squish.


15 Feb 2026
top comment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM5kLkO8ehk&lc=Ugym635I0XHA0UmDA8N4AaABAg GDKP, gold buying. Just part of the problem of 'game is not fun if you have low progression'. Botting or powerleveling part of the same problem, which is the same problem as 'activities at low levels are not fun when there are high-level players who interfere'. People see the effect (gold buying), and complain about it, but don't understand the cause and support changes to fix it.

bugged VOD: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2696279315 https://youtu.be/swof8BcSjxQ?t=22 but downloads fine with yt-dlp

WoW: perspective: if the game changes to make low levels more relevant and fun, but playerbase doesn't change, then it represents a change in power and importance, away from 'players with a high playtime' and towards 'players with a low playtime'. Most types of content creation are biased towards creators with a high investment in a topic, so many streamers would be disadvantaged by this change, might not feel interested in pushing for it.

Noting that with some games, 'players who have invested enough time to become very skilled' get attention, while in MMOs it's often 'players who have invested enough time to be high level with good gear'. Rarely do players with low playtime do things that interest other people. If they do, game is often 'casual' and not worth 1000 hours of playtime. Riot trying to make LoL more friendly to new players: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/moba/a-major-overhaul-of-league-of-legends-is-reportedly-coming-in-2027-once-were-done-it-should-be-the-best-time-ever-to-get-your-friends-into-league/

Making game more interesting for new players may mean making it less interesting for those with 2k+ hours.

"It's pretty hard to click on someone and then click to move and then click back on someone at super high speeds. This is a skill current players have put a lot of time into so if that skill were obsoleted a lot of players would quit" https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1ql5yi8/comment/o1bw3v0/ (compare https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1pdqick/couldnt_be_happier_wasd_genuinely_sucks_for_high/, and via https://www.pcgamer.com/games/moba/league-of-legends-just-got-wasd-controls-after-16-years-and-you-can-probably-guess-how-smoothly-the-rollouts-going/)

aka, auto everything

comment https://www.pcgamer.com/games/mmo/league-of-legends-mmo-shows-signs-of-life-as-riot-adds-a-former-world-of-warcraft-lead-producer-to-its-roster/#vf-068b2af5-001b-4c53-bc64-dd0cb29dac29

"Of course, anyone paying attention could've told you Ashes of Creation was DOA before it even came out because PVP-oriented MMOs are guaranteed failures."

Players with more playtime get more attention, and have higher status. PvE MMO: they can do PvE things that new players cannot. But PvP MMO: they can do PvP things that new players cannot, which means winning. And MMO means lack of restrictions between experienced players fighting new players, that a ladder system has. So, the tension between "good for new players, or experienced players feel unrewarded" is a bit more zero-sum in the actual play experiences, as opposed to just in content creation surrounding a game or whether friends care what you do.

Note difficulty in not rewarding high playtime: players like to think that they and their friends are high status. If a particular activity (like a game) does not give them this, they may feel it doesn't reflect their reality of being 'better than average'.

"on live server people will just ask "which faction should i join" (like they always ask "which class is the best") and it results in over/underrepresentation because naturally most people want to join the strongest one and it tends to snowball from there" https://old.reddit.com/r/AshesofCreation/comments/wdy4xd/comment/iiljs51/

similar to 'aggressor' mechanics for determining whether there are penalties for killing a low-level player: https://web.archive.org/web/20230528023143/https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Player_flagging

Example of issue: killing bots. "you have the potential of losing your gear. Your combat efficacy decreases based on the amount of corruption you accrue." And if higher level means more powerful, then high level players can still interfere in fights between low-level players with no consequences.

contact: "Intrepid are investigating a potential bidding system, which allows players to bid on items instead of rolling for them." https://web.archive.org/web/20230107192424/https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Hunting_certificates

also suggest 'open loot' model based on damage threshold, re: loot tagging on same page

couldn't access: https://ashesofcreation.wiki/PvP_background does it only contain this section? "While Ashes of Creation took inspiration from Lineage II (and other games) it has also"

around https://youtu.be/9WpG270yUMk?t=400 'affinity score' for encountering friends, compare to intention with layers in WoW Classic, specifically how players are apparently on a layer at the account level, not a character level, so a player who wants to log into a character in a dangerous location, like 'next to enemy guards after using website unstuck feature near Arathi Highlands', can get their alt invited to the party that is helping them on a particular layer.

Ends up failing because after leaving a layer, any association with it is broken, and players randomly change layers from joining new groups etc., so long-term potential to be on the same layer as "players encountered in the world" is completely random. And players naturally accumulate to same layer from process of random invites.

*Ashes of Creation is closing I guess: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miMemOWBNpw

watch: folder Riot MMO, 15 Feb 2026

 

I was probably going to say more to you. Ah, yes: when Sherine said, "remember X", where X was a word which means attraction to people with criminal tendencies, which I forget. Basically, she was implying that some people thought that anyone who supported Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was stupid or mentally ill, and I think she was suggesting that this could be a reason that people might not share this idea, if they had learned of it from a group of people who supported Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ("#FreeJahar" and "#JusticeForJahar").

For example, one think I said to Sherine, apparently on Chirp Club as it's not in the comment file, was after she said the only things she cared about were money and another thing that I forget, like her friends or family. I said that taking risks can be less profitable if other people are willing to accept risk.

In the broader sense, this can be seen in finance: if no one in the world was willing to use any leverage when investing except for one person, that one person would easily become incredibly rich. But when many people are taking risks, like through the use of leverage, then it increases price volatility, which decreases the expected profit from a given amount of risk, or changes the optimal amount of leverage downwards.

In the specific sense, I was saying that people are dumb, and even though this idea would solve problems, many people are convinced that problems (like mass shootings, a risk of dying) are not important. They accept these risks, and it makes the risk of trying to fix problems less profitable.

So, while it might not be strictly accurate to say I was trying to discourage her from sharing the idea, I was pointing out information which she might not have been aware of and that could act as a reason not to share the idea due to the possibility of wasting time by doing so.

Or to put it another way, if someone had a 1% chance to win a Nobel prize with a $1 million reward by sharing the idea, and a 100% chance to get a job that pays $150k per year by instead getting a college degree, the job gives a better expected payout.