Obvious post is obvious

My plan was, do nothing until the scheduled posts get published.

This plan was affected by @9玥、 causing her video counts to drop. It became, "don't check her account until all scheduled posts get published". This was supposed to be sending a different signal than if I just checked her account every day like she had done nothing.

Typical ways that people judge whether other people are worth listening to:
1) Are other people listening to that person?
2) Is that person rich or successful in something they've tried to do?

But everyone starts at zero. The point is, it would be surprising if anything happened.

I say that people should share this idea. What I cannot do is offer evidence that someone else other than me thinks that people should share this idea.

What can a bunny do? Say that, "It is not acceptable for someone not to share this idea." If someone said this, I would side with that person. Suppose that Person X knows of this idea and is also interested in me. Someone with no influence can still say, "Person X should share this idea." If it's just me being harmed, I will probably forgive Person X no matter what she does.

I could also say, "If someone influential does not share this idea publicly within <time limit>, I am not interested in anyone who has had contact with a government conspiracy."

The post titled Time limit suggested a scenario where 100% of people had to do a 'good' action for it to succeed, similar to the apples game in the Liar Game movie. In fact, this scenario is one where 100% of people have to be 'bad'.

Does this post say anything that isn't obvious?

Forgot a title

Notes:

'when people are being stupid, hard to write about what they're doing without making them look stupid'

video, deciding to stop being a good person, comments

swat team recalled

whether knowing of this idea convinces people that other people are bad; example, Las Vegas shooting

IS: willingness to die, test of this.

Crime and Punishment

songs

Quotes:

"I did not read all the People articles because of the display bug. I thought the BBC article by Mark something was better than the People article about the same event. I would do a search about why her co-star left the production if not for the display bug"

display bug after searching for "did Ariana Grande cancel a concert tour due to Covid-19?" (and after clicking on Hoang video with intention of letting it play for watchtime, after getting vp9 bug earlier today)

"This seems obvious but maybe it wasn't. The 2013 Navy Yard attack lasted long enough that Obama could have ordered people to do something different than what they actually did. Aaron Alexis might have hoped not to die"

Links:

Ariana Grande Tearfully Thanks Fans at Eternal Sunshine Tour Finale

Ariana Grande Says She’s Recovering from a ‘Deep Cut’ Before Last 2 London Shows

Ariana Grande Calls Eternal Sunshine Tour a ‘Corrective Experience’

Ariana Grande completes tour and steps back from public life

MPD Navy Yard After Action Report | mpdc

District of Columbia | U.S. Attorney’s Office Closes Investigation Involving Fatal Shooting Of Aaron Alexis No Charges To Be Filed Against Officers Who Responded To Mass Murders At Washington Navy Yard | United States Department of Justice

Active shooter Washington Navy Yard. : r/washingtondc

[59 views, 23 Sep 2026]Guild wars party dance - YouTube

Demonheart - Luca Turilli

[484k views, 19 Sep 2026]Letting Go of Being a Good Person - YouTube

"What action would be best for the world?"

There's that quote (by me), that I couldn't find when I referred to it a couple months ago: "It's hard to know how to help the world. So, it's more common to help a part of it you like."

My view is simple: if someone knows of this idea, the best thing for them to do would be to share it.

But someone might say, "what if I have objectionable characteristics?"

Sometimes, when someone has done something bad, they can convince other people that they should not be punished. In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), when the character Jen Yu (玉嬌龍, Yù Jiāolóng) returns to the place where she fought Shu Lien to prepare an antidote and convinces people not to attack her by holding up an item.

(Also, I did not know before that the character known as Jen has a name spelled like delicate dragon, and her love interest, Lo, has a name spelled like small tiger.)

Specific example: if the Islamic State knew of this idea, was it better for the world if they shared it? What if everyone in the IS who knew of it is now dead, and sharing it is no longer an option?

If someone thinks, "expecting to die is unusual. If someone experiences a change of circumstances that makes them expect to die, maybe they will act in an unexpected way." And so, four nuclear weapon states bombed the Islamic State, using warplanes that dropped conventional bombs.

(A fifth state that is widely suspected of possessing nuclear weapons did not bomb the Islamic State, but instead provided medical aid to wounded fighters from some groups affiliated with the IS.)

But what if the Islamic State's fighters only joined up because it paid really well, compared to other groups or even the official militaries of Iraq or Syria, and those males wanted money because there was a girl that they liked?

The Islamic State fought against the Yazidi ethnic group in Iraq. They asked the Yazidi people to convert to Islam, and when they refused or were hesitant, they killed the males. Later, the IS threatened to capture a dam in northern Iraq on the same river that flows through Baghdad, where the US embassy is located, and so the US started a war against the IS.

Was it best for the world for the US to start bombing the IS? Would it have better if the US had done nothing?

Faced with a choice of doing something, or doing nothing, many people find the choice of doing nothing to be more attractive. But they can simultaneously feel that the choice of doing something would be more moral: they might choose to do nothing simply because they think that it could be illegal for them to do something, even if that action seems to help other people. Relevant videos:

Guy Who Doesn't Understand the Trolley Problem

oh rats it’s the trolley problem

the trolley problem is easy, actually

Suppose that the US had done nothing. Just like Russia did nothing about the situation in Ukraine, which I will not attempt to imply was a good or bad choice, from 2014 until 2022. If it was, instead, the US that avoided attacking the IS from 2014 until 2022, would that matter?

Special characteristics of the 2013 Washington Navy Yard shooting: the FBI released security camera footage of the perpetrator seeing people who were running past a distant corridor intersection to leave the building, but avoiding them rather than moving towards them to shoot them. The FBI did not say why it released this footage; I think it was to let me know of this unusual characteristic. And second, the messages that Aaron Alexis wrote on the shotgun he used in the attack. Out of the four messages, at the moment I remember "My ELF weapon", and "better off this way".

Driven to commit a suicidal attack? Or preferring the small chance that he would survive the events, over an even smaller chance that he would have a happy life if he did not do it? If he was concerned about whether other people thought he was acting in the way that would be best for him, is it consistent with an explanation that he thought that the people he shot deserved to die because they were evil?

The Las Vegas shooting: again, it seems possible that the perpetrator hoped to live. The team that breached the wall of his room did not make any attempts to communicate with him, during the long period (about an hour) when he was not firing at the people outside.

I guess we could circle back to the Islamic State. Any serious attempts to change what the IS did through conversation? Countries like the US were upset when the IS started executing their citizens. Did they ever try to apologize for their military strikes on the IS that prompted this retaliation?

Or did they just act like teams in a video game or something, that just kill each other without attempting to talk?

Douyin user 9玥、@199966a went from 39 to 17 videos, and her second account 睡够了嘛👿 @60926178257 went from 44 to 3 videos. Maybe this was all she could do. Maybe this is all I can do. I could say other words, but I don't know if they would change anything.

I'm not unpublishing the post that I said I would unpublish if I logged in again, because she might have made this action because of that post. If she tried something, even if it was useless, I can't ignore it and just do nothing.

Original scheduled to post at 00:01, 30 Sep 2026.

Bunny failed to roll over

うさぎのティナがゆっくり一回転 bunny rolliing over

一回転失敗 bunny missed to roll over

I favorited these videos on my first YouTube account. That was when favorites were public, which meant that Mei could have known about them. (I inferred from a related video on a video uploaded to my account that I linked to her that she had watched it: this was how recommended videos worked on early YouTube, they were the same recommendations for everyone who viewed a particular video.)

The bunny failing to roll over was supposed to be like me failing to pass the Japanese language proficiency test. Who thinks badly of the bunny for failing to roll over? The success has 3.3 likes per 1k views; the failure has 2.8 likes per 1k views. This level of difference is easily explained by other factors, like lighting or whether the bunny is facing the camera.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tortoise_and_the_Hare

Rabbit, bunny, and hare all refer to similar animals.

I don't excuse the hare for losing the race. I don't say that I don't excuse my failure, because it was really about Mei failing to learn Japanese fast enough to stay in Japan (so my failure made me similar to her). But the point is, whether being cute is an excuse for incompetence.

I don't think it is. When people think cuteness excuses incompetence, it makes other people assume that cute people will be incompetent. It leads to females hating other females, as seen in the office scene of Cutie Honey (2004) but also people thinking that someone is being treated badly only because they're cute, and so they favor them, etc.

Remember when people said I needed mental help because I implied that Greta Thunberg was aware of my existence? The consequence for things like my browser experiencing the vp9 bug on a game-related video after I listen to two Korean songs in a row is that I think that people I haven't talked to might have been informed that I exist. Actions have consequences.

I don't know if 饱饱兔 knows that I exist. The last character of this nickname (obviously not her real name) means 'bunny'. Note that the Chinese and literary Chinese Wikipedia articles both use this same character, instead of distinguishing between 'hare' and 'rabbit'. In her live stream which has been ongoing since I checked her account almost two hours ago at 20:00, there is a bunny doll in the background:

If she doesn't know I exist, I wish her the best and that I don't affect her life further, other than what would happen if people used this idea.

The variations in her video count, going from ~36 to ~30, then jumping to 48, then back to 28 before slowly rising again, make me wonder if she intends to communicate anything to me.

I first mentioned Xiaoyu because she had changed her Douyin name. She is not the only person who has made a big change to her name, and I don't know how common it is to do so. (Also, all of the videos from her that I downloaded in February and March are no longer available; this is a recent video from her.)

For example, the user with Douyin ID 79201612154 changed her display name from '@小羊人' to '@专门骗处男', and now '@小羊'. (Two very popular videos from her, with 1.5x as many likes as she has followers: 得逞, 好！)

And the user with Douyin ID nainaishen101 changed her display name from '@奈奈生' to '@特务兔', at some point between 08 Aug and 27 Aug. The first one matches her Douyin ID, so why would she change it? Google translates the second name to 'Agent Rabbit'.

If I wanted to be in a relationship with a Chinese person, I would have to learn Chinese. I won't try to learn Chinese unless someone with over 400k 1 million followers publicly shares this idea and starts a discussion about it (i.e. does not act in a way that causes people to ignore the message, which would mean I never learn they shared it), or people use this idea without that happening. Although I have watched or listened to several livestreams from 饱饱兔, I will not watch any more livestreams from anyone on Douyin unless people use this idea.

I have been checking the account of 饱饱兔 every day and I expect to continue to do that, as well as the account of 9玥、@199966a and her alt account 睡够了嘛👿 @60926178257, who has not had any activity after her video count decreased by ~10. I don't consider this to be an attempt to communicate: I am just doing the same thing. This is like NRZ-M signal encoding method: "a logical 1 is encoded as a transition, and a logical 0 is encoded as no transition." If I skipped a day, or stopped checking her account, it would be like a logical 1 in the signal. (A day or two ago, I went from checking people's accounts at midnight, to doing so at 20:00, but if this was supposed to signal that I am not doing anything, this post suggests that was a false or deceptive signal.)

So if I'm checking 饱饱兔's account every day, and I'm not checking someone else's, it's the same signal: a logical 0.

I have to mention that when I wrote the post titled Turtle and the rabbit in 2011, a month before I thought of this idea, I was also thinking of the enigmatic AI character from the novel, Rainbows End. Not all rabbits are cute and ineffective.

How to be effective? I just think of my own experience. Well, first, all my notes from 14 Sep 2026:

bookmarked comment, homeless [note: this]

Albis Rage of Angels, why deleted? Unskilled? Bad music? Elemental?

team-building exercise in basic training with planks. Poor social skills

"Remember when I was 22 years old and Mei wasn't replying to my emails"

Nessaja

"When you try to extrapolate from one data point"

"I shall resist the urge to post the question I just thought of, and am about to write:"
"Aliens or a supernatural entity (not specified due to community rules) cause all plastic diapers to vanish. As a parent or secondary caretaker of a young baby, how do you react?"

"Good job, substack"

night time nuclear test footage?

"It is night time and you are at home. Suddenly, through a closed window, it becomes as bright as day. How disturbed do you feel in the next two seconds?"

Substack stopped working for my browser in the space of a few minutes (on the same page), which I felt was due to a government conspiracy. I felt this was worth a compliment.

The note, "When you try to extrapolate from one data point" is from when 饱饱兔's video count jumped to 48. This was after I had watched and downloaded three of Xiaoyu's videos, after accidentally clicking on one of them and then checking all of her previous videos to learn that they weren't available. dropped down to ~28, from 48.

饱饱兔's livestream just ended, after three hours.

So: in my basic training in the US military, there was an exercise where teams were supposed to figure out how to travel over some ground by placing some planks, I think two of them, on short posts in the ground. Everyone had to get across an area, and the team had to restart if anyone touched the ground.

I felt the solution was obvious. The difficulty people encountered was that, after placing one plank on a post, the end of the other plank was placed on top of the first one, making it very difficult to reposition the first one.

I don't remember people observing other teams, or whether any teams completed it. I didn't think it would help the other members of my team if I yelled at them until they listened to me, so I just did nothing while they argued with each other and failed to achieve anything. For the instructors, it was a checkbox. (Sort of like the live-fire exercise, which was a checkbox that never got ticked for my training company.)

But there was another time when I did get what I wanted: sleep deprivation night. My understanding was that the instructors found some excuse to make it happen, since it was probably against the rules to stop people from sleeping and couldn't be formally scheduled. A large number of soldiers, maybe 1/3 of the total number, were supposed to be on 'fire guard' duty and rally outside of the building to be counted every hour. I insisted that I be on every shift, arguing with another recruit who acted as a leader, which even led to minor physical conflict, with my weapon — an M16 rifle with no ammunition — being wrestled out of my hands. I threatened to go to the instructor (drill sergeant) who was literally in an adjacent room (sharing the same wall) behind a closed door, and so I got my way.

It's a sort of "emperor has no clothes" situation. The bunny cannot be blamed for not being able to fly. But there are certain things even a bunny could do, if they chose to.

Finished 20 Sep 2026, 23:15, in case it matters.

Original scheduled to post at 00:00, 30 Sep 2026.

Deleted draft post

I am looking up Kim Yo-jong on Wikipedia. If she is married, I will delete this draft post.

. . . I didn't delete it. The reason to delete it would be to avoid implying that she did anything unethical. But she got married in late 2014. This is the same year that MH370 vanished and the Sewol ferry sank.

"Time limits are useful, but not for anything important."

If she wasn't married, I was going to say something like, "If someone important doesn't share this idea, it means they think it's fine if people think Kim Yo-jong is stupid for not having solved the Korean war before she married."

Park Geun-hye never married. Both of her parents were killed by assassins:

Park Geun-hye's parents were assassinated, how were they assassinated?

(Recommend using browser's Reader Mode due to laggy website.) I found this article (from 2026-09-16) from a search for "were both of park geun-hye's parents killed by assassins, yes or no?" I knew her mother was killed accidentally. I hadn't read about the circumstances of her father's death. I think it's worth reading. It reminds me of this video, which is currently private (not deleted) on YouTube but got 70m views in two months in 2023:

@TEAM_OK 국가별 총맞기🔫 [Get shot by country - Eunbi] [0JaMbJsgl5U].webm

Other members of @TEAM_OK also made versions of this video, and people on other platforms like TikTok, but this was the best. Unrelated video by a different member of @TEAM_OK:

@TEAM_OK 춤추라우🤨 [소정 sojung, 소정 sojung - Gomy Gomy] [D1LkmoE3eYY].webm

I didn't adjust audio sync for either. They both seem to have early audio, suggesting they were made on TikTok, where audio gets delayed during playback. But with a comedy video that uses acting, bad audio sync can sometimes make it seem funnier or more authentic. (Apparently I linked that video on 15 Feb 2026, since that's when I bookmarked it with 60m views and it still has just 60m; I downloaded it on the day it was published, 17 Sep 2024.)

That first video is supposed to be about getting shot in films and TV shows. But the emotions and motivations portrayed in fiction often reflect reality.

For example, Squid Game showed people who were willing to get slapped many times for a small amount of money. Is that like real life? What about when a female character in Squid Game caused a male character to die along with her, because he had betrayed her?

Park Geun-hye probably felt a desire to stay involved in politics because she had been personally affected by political problems. By getting married, Kim Yo-jong showed that she was taking a different path.

In maybe 2014, Catherine Rampell linked an image on Chirp Club showing the ages of the male leads in James Bond (agent 007) films and the ages of female leads. She commented on how the male lead gets older but the female leads stay the same age.

Kim Yo-jong is nearly the same age as me. If I had just deleted this draft post, it could have seemed to imply that I didn't consider Kim Yo-jong to be important just because of her age.

(Also, I can read hangul even though I don't know any Korean words except "thank you", and her name 김여정 could be spelled Kim Yeo-jeong, but these single vowels look like diphthongs to anyone not familiar with Korean vowels so it would not inform anyone how to pronounce her name. Whereas I can recognize some Chinese characters, but I don't know what vowels are used in Chinese.)

I don't want people to think that I have spent a lot of effort on this idea because they might think that it was only possible for me to do so because of my gender.

Published with the title "Deleted draft post" at 20:58 on 18 Sep 2026, then unpublished. The above doesn't accomplish anything. It's supposed to help Kim Yo-jong, but if it's not the last post, it doesn't help her.

Why say anything? I was trying to not say anything for week, since I published the other post early, and maybe if I had waited the full week something would have happened.

"Stories for smart people"

I was watching a gameplay video from a skilled Austrian player: I got challenged on a 1v4. In another browser tab, I was listening to the song, Archangel on loop. What I was doing was not interesting, in line with what I said on 14 May 2026:

"I shall not say or do anything interesting until Imane shares the idea"

Note that I said on 31 Aug,

I shall endeavor not to watch any videos on YouTube that are less than a year old that aren't about games I'm already familiar with or songs, unless people use the idea

Then I got an ad:

[53m views, 18 Sep 2026][ad]Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 | Campaign Trailer - YouTube 

It was playing in 144p, because after selecting 720p for the game-related video, I selected 144p for the song, and YouTube stores local data (in Firefox, in developer tools with Ctrl-Shift-E or -I, Storage tab, category Local Storage: entry "data":"quality") about selected resolution which can mean using less CPU on ads. Call of Duty is not a game series I'm familiar with, but the ad gave money (probably like $0.01) to the creator of the main video. I could have skipped it. But I let the entire ad play, in 144p. At the end of the video was the Korean characters for "sa".

This was a mystery.

None of the popular English comments are about this; they're just about the characters shown in the trailer. But this Korean wiki article explains it:

https://namu.wiki/w/콜 오브 듀티: 모던 워페어 4

외국인들도 '사' 발음에 'buy'라는 의미도 있다는 걸 알아내 관련 유머 소재로 사용하고 있다.

The 'sa', 사 character means both '4' and 'buy'. Wiktionary lists the meaning '4'; Google translates it as 'buy'. Wiktionary does not list 'buy' as a meaning, so I would have remained confused if I hadn't found the Namu Wiki article.

The Namu Wiki article also says that the voice acting for the Korean dialogue in the game was redone for the Korean localization because it was awful. But voice acting for the female officer who speaks in English was not changed.

Why have a Korean character speak in English? To impress players with her language proficiency.

So this was interesting, but I went back to watching the game-related video after this ad ended (that I had paused to look all this up). But I stopped playing the song Archangel on loop, and instead randomly selected some different songs, found in my music folder with 'ls -t|head -800|tail -20'.

First I listened to Dodgeball King Tongki by Seo Yeon(서연) once, then I listened to HyunA's Bubble Pop!. While listening to this, the game-related video had a buffering problem: no video was buffered, so the video stopped playing. I had to get it to reload the video segments by toggling 'Stable Volume' off and back on again. This happened like five times, each time only loading like 5 seconds of video. And then I got the vp9 bug, which I believe happens when the browser receives a video segment but it's 0-length, instead of having actual valid data.

Why would this happen? Because I had no excuse for listening to these Korean songs on YouTube. Yes, it's true that YouTube says that users are not allowed to download videos. If they do, then no ads can play when they watch the videos, and so rights holders, i.e. the companies that have the job of earning money for artists, are not happy.

But I had downloaded these songs already: my method of choosing songs to listen to on YouTube was to list songs I had already downloaded. Someone could easily suspect that the reason I did not just play my local copies was that I was intending to communicate some information, even though no one is talking to me and I said that I was not communicating with anyone who isn't talking to me.

For example: I had just watched an ad for a game set in Korea and looked up information written by Korean people about that game. Then I was listening to not one, but two Korean songs in a row. In fact, these are the files that the 'ls' command listed:

BURAPA Car Audio Show with Coyote Dancers 2012 File 01[02.10 DJ Teen Pattaya - DJ Got Us Fallin' In Love] [pR37SskWQec]-audio.webm
CK Plaza Rayong Car Audio Contest with Coyote Dancers File 02[2014.07.13 DJ Minh Anh - Only Girl in the World] [pAiC4Tu539M]-audio.webm
DJ Men Enjoy Car Audio Show with Coyote Dancers 2014 File 12a[06.07 DJ Madeaw Pattaya - Woori Doori, same dancer eIxNQ6ZQf9g] [khChGzsqz_E]-audio.webm
R.I.O. - Shine On (Official Video HD) [OhLOOdI23bE].webm
Bubble Pop! (BUBBLE POP!) [bX8t_fTzSLI].webm
2NE1 - FIRE (Color Coded Lyrics Han_Rom_Eng) [_ajt1Gvj0q8].webm
Moonlight Shadow[Groove Coverage] [yjHJp1izcmY].mkv
Moonlight Shadow (Radio Edit)[Missing Heart] [UE-oRI-ktQ0].mkv
INNA - Amazing (Official Video) [gKHe12T6GMY].webm
Interphace - Rhythm Of The Night 2005 [New Vocal Edit] [0CfLpR04v_o].webm
Toaru Kagaku no Railgun 『Only My Railgun』 Lyrics (Rom_Eng) [I6pchuE2nzg].webm
Rusty Nail (Cover)[GERMAN SUPLEX] [45I_VW_vH8g].webm
Dodgeball King Tongki (피구왕 통키)[Original][Seo Yeon(서연)] [TS25fP8HppE].webm
Dodgeball King Tongki (피구왕 통키)[REMIX][Seo Yeon(서연)] [ryOn4rGqoXY].webm
광(狂) Club Mix Version - SG Wannabe [ojMn3hmn-Ps].webm
[TJ노래방] 어머나 - 장윤정(Jang Yoon Jeong) _ TJ Karaoke [Gx5Gt9JgixA].webm
Jang Yoon Jung (장윤정) - Oh My (어머나) [ftRXG0qRqW0].webm
Lovey-Dovey - T-ara [Q52lkbNsVd4][167sec edit].webm
[loud at end]【美少女热舞女声翻唱版】《老男孩之猛龙过江》宣传曲《小苹果》[Little Apple] [baidu 8533185821337547302].mp4
[MMD] Little Apple 小苹果 [Neru, Rin] Model DL [A-_tNm3oNj4]-audio.webm

Many of them are Korean, but others are not.

How many coin flips are needed to detect a biased coin?

Furthermore, why did I not listen to Dodgeball King Tongki on loop, as I had done with Archangel?

Scientific method is often based on selecting a null hypothesis. In this case, the null hypothesis was "what I do does not matter, as long as I'm not breaking any rules." But the evidence contradicted this hypothesis.

I don't know where to go with this post. But, null hypothesis: in 2005, I sent an email to Elyse where I said something about the value of the null hypothesis.

This might have been with my old email account, chrestomanci@hotmail.com, that I had to abandon due to not being able to log into it during basic training (which meant it would automatically close: something that might seem incredible in the days of selling user data and assuming that a website account you last used five years ago still exists, but email providers still close accounts after a couple years of inactivity. In those days, it was a month or two of inactivity.). So maybe there's no record of this email, on either the account I sent it from or Elyse's account that I sent it to.

The meaning of that was supposed to be, "the null hypothesis is that it's fine to not try to fix problems, or that trying to fix problems is a goal that will be unrewarding even for someone who is among the smartest people at their school." And so it was fine for me to try to be in a relationship with Mei, even if it meant taking the risk of joining the military, which meant I could die and be unable to fix any problems.

Even though Kim Yo-jong is almost the same age as me, I feel the question of why Kim Yo-jong or her older brother did not share this idea is not as important as the question of why Park Geun-hye did not share it.

I had to check, but the Korean female who was living on the same floor as me and Kate in 2010 was a recipient for the emails I sent about this idea. If I search my email for "from:" and her email address, there's one result (from the thread, "A Story of Love, Good and Evil", with 42 messages), but I don't feel like checking to see if she actually replied.

I don't think she shared it with anyone, just like I don't think the Chinese male who had also been living on the same floor while studying to become a doctor shared it. But I could be wrong. If either of these people did share it, and it was the cause of a government learning of this idea, I would welcome this information becoming public.

In early 2012, this Korean female, whose name is Sooyeon, or another current resident (Lillian) contacted me. I had given Sooyeon a cable modem (value ~$100) when I left, so that she could buy Internet access without paying to rent a modem (since she had been using my wireless network until I left in Dec 2010), and they needed some information from me to use the modem. Checked my phone's text messages, this took place on 31 Jan 2012 and Lillian misspelled Sooyeon's name as "Sooyoung" (the "eo" makes the same sound as in "young", but the "ng" is wrong).

But I can't really speculate about this. "Due to random factors, someone learns about this idea." To me, there are two main possibilities: they think it's important, or they don't and they forget about it.

Why would someone think it's important but not share it?

Why have I acted like this idea isn't important? Two main reasons: 1) to convince someone else to share it, by implying I'm not going to do anything. 2) to avoid implying that males should spend a lot of time trying to fix problems, because that would be sexist. Minor reason, 3) so people don't do crazy things because they suspect that someone who should be sharing this idea isn't doing so.

If someone could immediately get other people to use this idea, the reasoning behind these two main reasons doesn't apply.

I was going to say earlier, "someone who was interested in me might feel like getting people to use this idea would be easier than the goal of being in a relationship with me."

When China took the risk of making MH370 vanish, instead of just sharing this idea, China was choosing a story where I was important. Again, Chinese people like stories with intelligent people. I try to say things that are useful, but it has been 12 years since MH370 vanished.

Even if I haven't acted in an immoral way, someone might think that I could be badly affected by people using this idea for reasons related to romantic relationships. I don't say "I would be badly affected", because I don't know myself if it's true.

I just ask, if people do use this idea, what will people think in a thousand years about a decision — even if it's a decision that comes from more than one person — to delay sharing this idea because of the possible consequences for one individual?

It's much better to take a risk to help a person

—"than to avoid taking a risk". Reply: "but not sharing the idea is the risk." If I use "words meant to convince someone to share this idea", it implies "that person did not already understand what I wanted or did not want to do what I wanted them to do, before I said those words".

So what if we say, "In early 2014, if someone shared the idea, it would mean Sherine would be in a relationship with me."

What if I didn't actually care about Sherine?

Then it would be my own fault. If I didn't want to be in a relationship with Sherine, then I should not have said to her that I l*ved her. Actions have consequences. Trying to deny this ruins stories. In the live-action version of Love Between Fairy and Devil, which again was a story that was completely different from the source material since shortly after the start of the second episode (where they switch bodies again), various characters make sacrifices. Often, these sacrifices are the result of their own actions or the actions of other people. The story is one where the sacrifices end up leading to a positive result — even at the very end, due to a random factor where a certain action led to an unexpected positive consequence, after much diligence and hard work — but would the story have been as meaningful if, at every point where a character is harmed, a powerful entity had intervened and said "well actually, let's just stop this from happening. Ok, now go on with what you intended to do without this harmful consequence"?

If you do that to the story in Love Between Fairy and Devil, and in every other story, then there aren't any stories worth watching. There are just comedies. That would leave people unprepared for when they do experience sadness in their life and don't know how to react, or when a friend does and they don't understand what their friend is going through.

The BBC show Red Dwarf is a comedy, but probably my favorite episode was Gunmen of the Apocalypse. A large fraction of this was probably just the music for the episode, not used for any other episode of the show, but the point is that the proportion of serious moments was higher than in most other episodes. Also, the scene where an antagonist experiences negative emotions and destroys their own ship is quite serious, and I remember it ~25 years since I last saw it. (No YouTube clip of the scene.)

I recently had reason to look up a quote from Terry Pratchett's Small Gods. It led me to another quote from the same book. Also, a search for 'small gods pqf' led to "Showing results for small gods pdf", for which the second result is the entire book but with the cool UK cover, rather than the boring US cover. (When I read this book and others from the library, they probably all had the boring covers, but I think I bought a few of the cool cover ones, maybe to give to other people.)

Via https://www.lspace.org/books/pqf/small-gods.html (note Annotations tab at top), the quote I recently looked up was,

There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.

Relevant to 'are people good or evil'. And the question of "are people who make the world slightly worse, in order to make one part of it slightly better, bad?"

Won't copy the other quote here since a word in it is considered bad.

Not despite, but rather because of all these words, I think I should not post this right now. I had the random thought, maybe while practicing piano (I was going to open this post by saying "I was playing this song, which is hard to play, but I can only play it with a bunch of mistakes", but it didn't fit with what was written when I first published this post), that "maybe I could say something that would help Kim Yo-jong", but I think what I have written would not.

 

Thought of this after I had already scheduled this post to be published at 00:00 on 25 Sep 2026:

"Hypothetical greenhouse gas X lasts for one year. Nation Y wants to release enough of it to cause 1°C higher temperatures worldwide for one year. If Nation Y pays all other countries for this, how much would you charge Nation Y?"

$100 billion

$1 trillion

$10 trillion

$100 trillion

___

Update 20 Sep 2026, 20:21

US President Trump posted a poll:

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117298413844042212

Unfortunately, the results are not yet available. I thought they would be, but it was set to two days, not one day.

Since posting that poll, he has made other posts, including a graph showing the lower poverty rate and the higher median income. For those who don't know, median income is a measure that does not increase if only top 1% experience an increase. The graph he posted is also inflation-adjusted, even though it doesn't say that: non-adjusted income was just $22k in 1985. Compare how lists of top-grossing movies are not inflation adjusted. Trump could have 'lied' by posting the non-inflation-adjusted chart.

I think it's quite possible that even if the overall poverty rate has gone down, the poverty rate for young people could have gone up. Anecdotal (probably) evidence, videos that I haven't watched:

[99k views, 10.5k subs, 19 Sep 2026]Everyone’s depressed, unemployed & living with their parents… - YouTube

Young Generations Are Now Poorer Than Their Parents And It's Changing Our Economies - YouTube (bookmarked 19 Feb 2025)

[647k views, 08 Mar 2026]How Your Parents Ruined Driving - YouTube

[1.6m views, 15 Dec 2025]Parents are Gaslighting Children Now - YouTube 

I believe, but don't really care to even skim the Wikipedia article, that the US's Great Society initiative was more about helping poor old people. The fact is, while older people can have more job experience, bodies break down, technology changes require new skills, and it's more likely that an old person cannot get a job than a young person.

I honestly don't know how much of the Social Security program came from those changes: I'm not even bothering to ask an AI to summarize it. The point is, old people could easily be more wealthy than they were 50 years ago. For example, paying for children is expensive: fertility rates have gone down, and if someone has few or no children, they will have more money. US poverty rate is entirely about income, not wealth: even if young people and old people have retained the same relative rates of income poverty, if old people have more money, it's worse for young people, because they have to compete for the same housing. That means fewer children, and thousands of YouTube videos about being poor, alone and unhappy at a young age (from people hoping to make a little money from YouTube ads).

The point is that even if the poll wasn't very serious, President Trump has said other things that suggest he isn't doing a bad job, in his job.

After I saw he posted this poll, specifically about six hours ago (I saw around 24 hours ago that he had posted it), I checked 'HEAD jobcreationplan.blogspot.com', which returned 'Last-Modified: Sat, 19 Sep 2026 07:38:52 GMT'.

So I think plausible that his poll explored the idea of "deriving a biased result from a poll because reasonable options were excluded from it". In the poll I suggested, there's no option below $100 billion (because Chirp Club only allows four options). I think that's completely reasonable. If people set the price at $100 billion, would it be ok to have a 10°C global temperature increase for $1 trillion? Turning 41°C days into 51°C days (124°F)? Even if humans could stand that (and it also turns 48°C days into 58°C (136°F) days), can crops stand it?

___

Update 21 Sep 2026, 15:22

Illustrating the principle of society's wealth distribution affecting housing prices:

Poll: "Imagine an infinitely wealthy person. Maybe they can create valuable items, like gold or potions of immortality. For fun, they play the game of seeing how much money they can earn from rent (playing Monopoly in real life). They buy all property and set rent prices 3x as high as they currently are. No matter how much new housing is built, they can afford to buy it, even if half of the units end up empty. Does this person's infinite wealth 'trickle down' and make everyone else's life better?"

Time limit

Just posted this on Reddit, where it may or may not get deleted by a bot:

Aliens run a social experiment for 100 years. Humanity is divided into rich and poor, 50% in each. Each year, there's a chance to push a button. 1% of the poor people who push the button die; everyone who survives is allowed to be happy: be in a relationship, etc. Do you push the button?

If you never push the button, you're not allowed to be happy.

But if no one — out of all 8 billion humans — pushes the button, then the experiment ends.

If only rich people push the button, no one dies, and everyone who pushed it is allowed to be happy.

If only poor people push it, then 1% of them die, and the rest can be happy.

You only need to push the button once, but you have a chance each year to push it if you haven't tried yet.

It isn't intended that people can wait until they're rich to push it safely, and then go back to being poor, but some people might do this. The aliens just ignore this behavior.

Note: "be happy" is somewhat vague: it's just a positive thing, that people want. The aliens are not trying to affect the human population, just running an experiment on what humans will do when presented with a choice. They are not giving special rewards to those who push the button (that would stop if the experiment ended); just limiting whether people can be happy if they haven't pushed the button.

The aliens don't care about whether young people are happy, so anyone under 18 is not affected. The first chance to push the button is when you are 18.

As a poor person, I would push the button.

I wrote it because of Adam Lanza: a rich person who chose . . . to try to help poor people. Anyway, his motivations could not be explained the same way as a soldier who wants to earn enough money to be in a relationship while they are still young.

Unless there's coordination, there will be some people who push the button. They might be poor people. Or they might be rich people. So what does it matter if more rich people push the button?

It looks like there are two choices, but there are really three.

1) Push the button

2) Don't push the button

3) Try to coordinate a year when people don't push the button

Why might coordination fail? Because there could be some people who say that it's good to have an incentive to try hard. I actually had that in the title, after "divided into rich and poor", before removing it due to the 300-char limit of titles on Reddit.

In the name 饱饱兔 @SuperSG15, I at least know what the characters mean, even though I've forgotten how to pronounce '饱'. I have no idea how to pronounce '@9玥、', a name that contains a comma, or what it means; same with her second account, '@睡够了嘛👿'.

I also don't know what to think of as the name of the person who had the Chirp Club account, @fancyfenty. After she deleted and then remade the account in 2013, she set the name to 'Mary Jane', but that seemed like a reference to the comic book character. In my bookmarks, her name on Chirp Club was '_' in 02 Jul 2013, and 'ℳeezus' on 08 Jul 2013.

I didn't check the account of @9玥、 today.

When Ariana Grande touched a donut in a shop with the tip of her tongue, ~10 years ago, news stories reported that the male she was with was her boyfriend. I have felt comfortable assuming that she was in a relationship with someone at some point.

Being in a relationship is the most common way of being happy. If someone chooses not to, it's like not pushing the button in the above hypothetical situation. (Also, I posted another hypothetical situation about an hour earlier, but I have already forgotten what it was about.)

In the unfinished update near the end of the post titled 'Results', what I was going to say was about dividing society in two groups of equal size. In that case, it was male and female. Here, it's rich and poor. If the scenario divided society such that only 10% of people would be considered rich, it create more conflict. With 50%, people say, "my chances of being in each group are about the same. I cannot consider myself to belong in group X and assume that other people I know will also be in that group."

I guess, even if it would be literally impossible to reduce the size of the group of rich people to zero in that scenario, people could still imagine a moral victory as the result of conflict. Or they could define a 'group of people who deserve help', such as if someone is being threatened by criminals and there is the option of doing something safe like calling the police (if the neighborhood is one that trusts the police).

If I say certain things, it affects whether I can publish this post immediately without publishing other posts that are scheduled to be published. I am writing this at 18:33, 24 Sep 2026.

If I suggest that someone is important, it's partly a test of the group to which they belong. Ariana Grande is like Hispanic or something, probably speaks Spanish. Although Demi Rose is half Colombian, I don't know if she speaks Spanish, so she sort of belongs to a different group: British.

I checked Ariana Grande's Instagram account yesterday, and the account had posted a picture of shoes four days earlier. This was after I first mentioned her on this site and is evidence that she doesn't know about this idea.

If I suggest that there could be any possibility that Ariana Grande might be interested in me, I also have to say that it could be possible that Angie Varona could be interested in me, although I don't think I've ever made any attempt to contact Angie Varona, who is also like Hispanic and probably speaks Spanish.

She is now a lawyer, which is a profession that's considered to require intelligence. Maybe eight years ago, I checked Google's cache for her Instagram page, and she had named herself after Princess Mononoke, from the Japanese animated film. Later, she had changed her name to something else.

Out of the three choices that I listed above, I think it's stupid to choose "2) Don't push the button". Sharing this idea would be like suggesting that people coordinate to not push the button. The interval of a year is arbitrary: it could be every day, and people just have to agree on one day where no one pushes it.

If humanity was split into equal groups of rich and poor, Ariana Grande would fall into the 'rich' half. She would have no risk from pushing the button. The only reason not to push it would be to help other people. But simply not pushing it doesn't help anyone without an effort to change what other people do.

@9玥、 acted in a way that is analogous to choosing not to push the button. If Ariana Grande knows of this idea, she is definitely the female with the most followers on social media who knows of this idea, far surpassing other people who might know of it like Imane, Greta, or Demi Rose. Hundreds of thousands of people paid to attend Ariana's recent concert tour.

Not sure if I will post this

I don't think I've seen any James Bond films, nor have I read any of the books. For 'modern action-type novels', I read The Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising; Nimitz Class and its first sequel, Kilo Class (don't remember the plot of either, other than a US aircraft carrier battle group being sunk by a nuclear torpedo); and Interface (1994).

So I'd say I think the Mission: Impossible film series is better. For example, in MI: Rogue Nation , when the character Benji is playing a computer game at work at the CIA and conceals this from a superior. This was an example of government dysfunction: he was employed, but did not have anything useful to do. Do the James Bond films ever criticize government institutions in this way?

The end of MI: Fallout, not adequately described on English Wikipedia, which limits film summaries to 700 words (except for Indian films). The character Ethan, aka Tom Cruise's character, is lying in a hospital bed after having been rescued by the Indian Army before he succumbed to exposure. There is a moment where Ethan struggles to sit up so he can observe the encounter between Julia, the person he was previously in a relationship with, and Ilsa, the person who appears to be his new romantic interest. Even though Julia is now married to someone else, it's still important to Ethan whether Julia views Ilsa as a rival.

I haven't seen MI: III, where Julia first appeared, or the MI films that came out in 2023 and 2025. I did see MI: 2 (2000), for the first time maybe 8 years ago, and I viewed it negatively that Ethan was romantically involved with the character Nyah (pronounced like Naya, I don't know what they were thinking with that spelling) but she did not appear in later films. Compare the Jason Bourne films (I have not seen the start of the first one), where romantic relationships do last until the next film but a character is killed off so exciting things can happen as part of the plot.

My reply when Hanna asked me if I was sad when I learned that Elyse had married someone: "I cried but I think I almost immediately forgot that I was sad." The words, "I was sad" are not the same as the feeling, "I am sad". I'm happy that she married someone. I hope that the baby that was implied by the items on her wedding wish list thing on a website was delivered safely and is doing well now.

I would say this even if Elyse getting married means that I will always be alone, even if I live for another 50 years.

So I think what someone has to ask themselves if they want to be in a relationship with me is, would Elyse consider that person to have harmed her?

Some things that might not be obvious about the game for dating sites. Logic behind measuring things: suppose that dating sites do not currently provide good signals of someone's attractiveness. Viva La Dirt League has a skit about this. The absolute worst dating experience: everyone is blindfolded in a big room. The first person of the opposite gender that you bump into, you spend two hours together with in a room. If you decide you're not interested in them after 10 seconds, you still have to stay there, and you can't use any portable electronic devices (or books!) while you wait.

If someone is willing to reject others who are not good enough, then they will reject people who fail the game. The game does not magically make unattractive people attractive. If the method for selecting people to start a conversation with is not good, then the rate of failures will not improve. It will just take less time: no need to go on multiple dates to find out someone is not compatible. (People often say the reason for a relationship failing was that their partner was a narcissist, and you could say this game helps identify someone with that personality characteristic.)

Second: the lack of a middle option, "I have the same attractiveness as the person in the photo", is important. If answer X is the truth, and the only other possible response is Y, then it's easy to criticize the response of Y. If there is a middle option, then someone can avoid criticism even if they don't select X (the truth).

There's actually a Discworld novel named The Truth. It's probably relevant here.

Also, the dialogue near the end of Carpe Jugulum, about grays. This is actually the bit that I screenshotted, on 04 Jan 2022 at 21:11:30. I'm sure I was sending it to someone, but don't remember who (—it was that I was sending it to, not 'whom'). Unreadable tiny text in image preview:

Carpe Jugulum.png

If you think of the correct thing to do as being either 'correct' or 'not correct', you don't excuse people who choose something other than 'correct'. If you create new categories, 'almost correct', 'somewhat correct', etc., you find it harder to punish people who don't choose 'correct'. Of course, when 'correct' is defined by rules in a book, you get the religion shown in Small Gods.

But this is about dating sites. This is sort of giving away the game, not supposed to talk about this, but: suppose someone (P2) has the intention of always telling the truth. To use the 'rating system', they think they are a 5.71 out of 10.

They are presented with a photo that they evaluate as 5.74 out of 10. They say they are less attractive than the person in the photo, and that their answer is honest.

The questioner (P1) doubts the first response, saying it's a lie. Based on P2's true answer, P1 is wrong, and P2 gets the point.

Did P2 lie? They could start to doubt themselves: "am I ruining my self-esteem by looking at Instagram too much?". And P1 has to consider the possibility that P2 is doubting themselves, as well as the possibility that P1 was lying and their true self-evaluation is that they are a 5.85 out of 10. If P2 is acting guilty, which could manifest as various emotions and actions, is it because they intended to lie, or because they intended to tell the truth?

I will unpublish this post if I log into this website again before people use this idea.

Game for dating sites

It's amazing how many opinions I have on people forming relationships, for someone who has never dated.

There is the comment I left as a reply to someone on YouTube, 'comment on males becoming mean, 19 Sep 2026.txt', and my reply to their reply. And there's the poll I suggested to Imane in an email about a week ago, which is relevant to the reply I left on YouTube.

I'm not copying those because the purpose of this post is basically, "what if I die of a heart attack tomorrow". Then, even if I had saved the text I just wrote to an (unencrypted) external SSD in case of my hard drive crashing, it would be lost. So that information is already on the Internet; this is not.

Some people might say, we don't need the world to have more people in relationships, because population growth is a problem. I just think of people being unhappy as inefficient. The question from the post Paris, what if all bullets fired in war were lethal? If I could cause that outcome to happen, I would, just to save bullets. (Well, also so people wouldn't have stupid arguments about whether people in war want to kill each other, or whether most of them are firing over the heads of their enemies.)

This is the game:

game for dating sites. Judging someone: doesn't work if there's just one answer that everyone can copy. General solution, making the test hard: education, or 'taking a good photo of yourself'. But depends on good, hard metrics existing. The other general solution: making the test vary. Person 1 (P1): Presents three photos of other people. Person 2 (P2): says whether they think each of these people is more or less attractive than P2. P1: says whether they believe P2.

Iteration: not just a test of appearance. Each photo also has fictional information. P1 can choose from several categories: occupation. Personal details that were beyond their control: "tragic backstory", "has many relatives", "war refugee", "only child", "grew up far from any big city". Degree of romantic experience: high, medium, low. Number of countries they have been to. Up to two categories can be selected for each photo.

If P1's game is to guess whether P2 has lied, then it must be explicitly ok for P2 to lie. P2 selects both true answer, and cover answer. They can differ or be the same. For each guess by P1 of whether P2 was lying, either P1 gets a point or P2 gets a point. Even if P2 lies about whether they lied, P1 can guess this and still get a point.

P1 controls the photos: they can choose photos where the answer is obvious, or try to choose photos where the answer is hard to guess.

Users could choose to allow their own photos to be used for the game by other people. It's made explicit that the populations of male and female are considered to have equal average attractiveness, with a quick graphical introduction to the game. So a player cannot just say, "everyone of the opposite gender is more attractive than me, by definition".

One reason not to post this was additional details that are not relevant to someone who chooses to implement this game.

After I did something I will not provide additional details about at this time, my browser had the display bug. That meant closing my browser, and if I wanted to reopen it, that would be a separate action. Instead, I synced some videos.

I hesitate to say any of this because the government conspiracy is acting a little crazy.

So, point: I'm arrogant enough to say that I think I'm smarter than most people. This is why I left a YouTube comment on people having relationship problems, when I haven't really had the opportunity to ever have relationship problems. (Since my only relationship was with Mei, and we never exchanged photos or talked on the phone, and if Mei saw me in real life while I was living outside in 2012, I'm unaware of it.)

But I would freely say that in the biased sample of videos which I'm exposed to, most people featured in them are more attractive than me. For example, in a video I recently linked, the camera pans away from the stage and the audience is visible. Maybe I could be more attractive than some members of the audience, but I think almost all members of the audience would say that the dancers on the stage were more attractive than the audience member being asked, and I would say this too.

That's also the case in this video, which I felt I had to upload because of the edit at 1:37:

Ttesports Show Girl@2011 TGS台北國際電玩展

Other performances are still on YouTube, like this one:

11.02.20-2011台北國際電玩展Tt舞者開場舞part3.MP4

This one has audio muted on YouTube. Uploaded with original audio and higher video bitrate from when YouTube thought it was a 1440p video, not a 720p video.

Dancer who is on the left and closest to the camera at the start of these three videos is 小姿, full name 黃姿菱 (1, 2). She is definitely more attractive than me. By not mentioning the other dancers I leave open the possibility that I match their level of attractiveness without lying.

In US culture, it's understood that males will often judge the looks of females on a 1-to-10 scale. This is often thought to be a way of insulting females, but here is a comedy skit with a different take.

If this game was to for P1 to ask P2 if the people in the photos were more attractive than P1, it would be bad.

Some people think you should always be honest, even when someone asks "does this clothing make me look fat". Others believe that it's ok to lie to benefit someone else. Anyway, I think this game works. It involves people making judgements based on information they should have good knowledge of: their own appearance. Instead of judgements based on the very basic information they have about someone else's appearance, that on a dating site comes from carefully selected photos etc.

Hopefully that's all that I wanted to say to explain this game before I got distracted and spent nearly two hours looking up videos. (Also, I got the vp9 bug while watching a video.) I was going to say that I thought of it because I was evaluating a video. These people are both more attractive than me:

@gioalbertsec Onda da Balinha (Remix) - Remix - Natralhinha [7136231465607646470][a +0.12s].mp4

@gioalbertoficial Onda da Balinha (Remix) - Remix - Natralhinha [7135822350896942341][a +0.12s].mp4

@diveludo Onda da Balinha (Remix) - Remix - Natralhinha [7136250843199819013][a +0.14s].mp4

But that doesn't make them special, because there are a lot of people who are more attractive than me.

I looked at the first video, and then checked for other videos with the same song because I recognized it. I don't think it's @gioalbertoficial's best videos; I think these ones make her look better: 7153703345285254406 (sync), 7153700589061344518. I actually made a note to myself to check the comments on the first one, if people ever use this idea and I can use the Internet freely without causing unintended consequences.

But no matter how good a real person looks, it's never going to be what a human brain natively thinks of as ideal. (Whereas with repeated exposure, a non-ideal thing can end up being seen as ideal: who thinks about whether the QWERTY keyboard is bad?) In the past, humans could create images that looked better than a real human; now, AI can do so easily.

There are many videos and discussions about how images of attractive people warp our expectations. Even if someone knows that "real people don't look like that", they can't be sure how 'real' a particular photo is. To fall back to the 'ratings system', if someone looks like a 7/10 in a photo, are they a 7/10 in real life or a 4/10? (To put it another way: maybe most people who look like 7/10 are really 4/10, but what if someone is actually 7/10 because they didn't bother to do the things that would make them look 9/10?)

People can end up assuming that other people are lying about or inflating their value, so their interactions — like on a dating site — could be about trying to detect the lie, instead of the conversation that would take place if both parties knew that the other wasn't lying.

Suppose that in the game, P2 wants to convince P1 that P2 is attractive. Do they do so by saying that the people shown in photos are less attractive than P2, or by saying that those people are more attractive?