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.

To Pokimane, pt 23

I'd been thinking of making a post earlier today, and maybe only stopped myself by procrastinating until the feeling passed. I thought about how after Mei's cat was killed by a dog, I didn't really say much except to maybe ask about animal control — I had no idea what is the proper reaction to a dog that is attacking people, possibly in a rural area, or what should be done if one's pet cat suffers a violent death — and a bit after that, she suggested she might start playing a game.

Like, obviously I thought it was very serious that her cat was dead, especially since it was probably the cat that was named after me, but despite sort of knowing me for seven years with long gaps of not talking, she didn't initially realize that I cared that this had happened. She thought that what she should do was something that made her happy and which conveyed to me that she was happy, even if her cat was dead and brought in to lie on the floor or something.

So it's nice to be able to have dinner (on Valentine's Day) with someone I guess (again, I have never done so), but it seemed unlikely you were in a relationship with your date, and so you might feel sad afterwards.

I'm just reacting to your TikTok video, which is set in a restaurant, and so my mind makes random associations to things that are related to restaurants.

A short video:

The top comment says, "the off time screaming is perfect". It really makes it feel more authentic, like it was done in one take. A great idea for a video, without spending too much effort on it. Like, another video that features the same creator has her saying, "hey! Stop scrolling. Do your homework!"

Which honestly has a crazy amount of comments: 31k comments with 2.8m views, while the restaurant video has 5.6k comments with 60m views.

Tangent, restaurant video was at 1.2m likes, 27.5m views on 2025-06-09 (view source, search for "views"). It more than doubled in views, but only got 25% 33% more likes. But comments did go up significantly. So is it a genuine audience that comments more than they give likes, compared to the core audience, or is it bot/AI comments becoming more common in the past year?

And just the fact that it's getting more views, after more than a year. (It's a bit sad that YouTube no longer lets creators make video statistics, like views over time and viewer demographics, public; if it did, I wouldn't need to have the habit of bookmarking videos with their current view count.) It seems like Douyin videos drop off completely in views, and here I am once again gratuitously providing examples:

(Did I link this recently lol?) [1572k likes, 1863k subs, 05 Feb 2026][Spectre]#transition 年度最认真！@抖音小助手 - 抖音 Video is over seven years old, she gained 32k followers in 10 days, but the video is still only at 1571.9k likes.

[356K likes, 312K subs, 23 Oct 2025][killer whale]不是 哥们你投胎成虎鲸之前 是不是没喝孟婆汤#虎鲸 #上海海昌海洋公园 #显眼包都来海洋公园了 #全上海的显眼包都来了 #上海海昌海洋公园万秀节 - 抖音 —went up a lot more than I expected, is from 2025-09-27, now 503k likes.

[6014K likes, 28 Sep 2025]于是自由在我背后升起 #rockyourbody #旱地拔葱 #抖音潮流舞蹈大赛 #生命力#UK摇 - 抖音 —from 2025-07-21, now 6052k likes.

[488K likes, 23 Oct 2025]小手办木骨也太可爱了吧 #与小乔春游赤壁 #国风小聚#花絮 #木骨 - 抖音 —from 2024-04-17, now 489.4k likes.

[1.1M likes, 88K followers, 11 Oct 2024]在夜市吃地瓜球#街边 #好吃的 #日常碎片🧩 #甜妹 #男高 - 抖音 —from 2024-07-20, now 1207k likes, 122k subs.

[2.54M likes, 11 Oct 2024]#uchida1 - 抖音 —from 2024-09-16, now 2836k likes.

[1224K likes, 1256K likes total, 43.7K subs, 29 Aug 2025]本来就记不住动作。#卡点舞 #反差 #妈妈的小棉袄 - 抖音 —from 2025-08-25, now 2260k likes, 2320k total likes, 81k subs.

[2142K likes, 01 Sep 2025]好快啊 一个月已经变成了九斤多的胖宝宝 @小鱼丸（变冷白皮版 #萌宝宝 #骗你生女儿 #这是我的小baby啊#韩姬儿美瞳 #韩姬儿棉花娃娃黑 - 抖音 —from 2025-07-06, now 2196k likes.

[1861K likes, 31 Aug 2025]好羡慕她俩的感情，犯错了爸爸本想教育一下，妹妹护着姐姐，姐姐心疼妹妹，姐妹俩一条心！#双胞胎 #骗你生女儿 - 抖音 —from 2025-08-16, now 2174k likes.

[1861K likes, 01 Sep 2025]钵钵鸡～#骗你生女儿 #萌娃 #人类幼崽 #万物皆可钵钵鸡 #被你萌化了 - 抖音  —from 2023-12-28, now 1860.4k likes.

[1378K likes, 01 Sep 2025]又是父女情深的一天呀～ #人类幼崽 #骗你生女儿 #爸爸带娃 #父女日常 #爸爸的小棉袄 - 抖音 —from 2025-01-08, still 1378.0k likes.

[923K likes, 01 Sep 2025]谁能拒绝一个刚睡醒就笑着扑向妈妈的女儿呀！#大眼萌娃 #骗你生女儿 #小煤气罐罐宝宝 #人类幼崽 #治愈系笑容 - 抖音 —from 2023-07-22, now 926k likes.

[3804K likes, 01 Sep 2025]能坚持做一件事就很了不起#悬空俯卧撑挑战 - 抖音 —account maybe has videos hidden or requires login, by 王奶奶的孙女 @50388369427:

None of these videos are about restaurants and the only point I was making was that YouTube's algorithm might promote certain older videos more than Douyin or TikTok does. I can't even say that this fact is 'interesting'.

The second thing about restaurants is a scene from the Chinese (Taiwanese) short TV series Futmalls (預支未來, 2020). It's just an 'influencer' doing a mukbang, with her camera set up in front of her at a restaurant.

I can't really say exactly why I mention it. I never really go anywhere, and it's possible I've never seen anyone filming themselves in 'real life', like to stream or make a video, so whether or not it's common now, this fictional portrayal of it might have been the first time I really saw how it looks, to an outsider who comes across it (not an audience member who sees the camera viewpoint). Sort of like how the film The Post-Truth World (罪後真相, 2022) — "intriguing, if somewhat narratively flawed", or "a sharp critique of today’s sensationalist media" — has a scene where a security guard is shown to enjoy watching a female anchor show (example), and then after he is lured away from his post and murdered, there is a brief shot of the show continuing on his computer's screen, unaffected by his death.

In Futmalls, the 'influencer' is negatively affected by events (I forget the details), with her audience unaware and unable to help her. In The Post-Truth World, it's a viewer who suffers harm, without anyone else knowing. But they both could be said to encourage people not to care too much about online interactions.