A few days ago, there was an ant problem. First I thought, "they will stop going where they shouldn't, if they find food before they reach there." Then I thought to lure them outside with food.
A cool thing about ants is that they turn a lot. This is an exhaustive search pattern. The probability of covering the same ground twice is high, so it's less efficient, but it finds food closer to the origin. A food source close to the colony is more valuable than one farther away. Their social existence influences the way they move.
I am not fundamentally that different from an ant. I accidentally visited the page for a video from 饱饱兔 (uploaded [2026-06-30](https://www.douyin.com/video/7657350264705263995), before I first downloaded a video from her on 2026-07-13), and like an ant running into a wall, I end up moving in a different direction.
Since it seems unlikely I'll ever be in a relationship, it's hard for me to feel sad. But I was really sad, upset, etc. in 2007, when I had the thought that based on Mei's behavior, she might think that it didn't benefit her for me to like her.
Xiaoyu seems to have hidden or deleted all of her old videos. But if 饱饱兔 did this, I would know, because I would see that her video count decreased. (Although her video count was only at 11 a month or so ago, and is now at 30, so if it went down to 15 or so I wouldn't know which videos were affected.)
It completely makes sense for me to try to avoid interacting with the account of someone who knows about this idea but hasn't shared it. Word count is getting too high.
Demi Rose, the song 'vanished the life -notreborn', cat, etc. Mione blocking and then unblocking me.
Ariana's political question last year was phrased as a genuine question: "have you gotten the results you hoped for?" In a way, it had faulty assumptions. Maybe prices have gone up. Maybe people who prefer English to be the language spoken in the US have encountered a greater proportion of people who don't know English in the past two years. But these things can happen despite actions by the US president; for people who dislike the actual outcomes, those outcomes could have been worse with a different president.
I have to say that one of the questions on [The Ultimate Data Manipulation Survey](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfrkNQ0zym9LQWmBufAeTDo-zZ7ks3UEtbqdfBv2XEQ5swR0A/viewform) was,
>Do you expect the next elections in your country to have a big effect on the amount of fossil fuels used by your country over the next few years?
I would have answered no. (Also, I thought of this question when I saw that the person who almost shot President Trump had also looked up Biden's campaign rallies.) But Ariana did not ask people about climate change (in Trump's [recent speech to the UN](https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/tech/ai/ai-elections-voters-information/), he noted that 'global warming' had been rebranded to 'climate change' due to what he viewed as incorrect predictions, although the [data](https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/) for the past few years seems [pretty convincing](https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/) that there is a warming trend).
The point is not the specific issues she mentioned. But that she was open to the possibility that people had, in fact, voted in a way that gave them the things they wanted.
In the same way, whenever someone didn't share this idea, there was the possibility that they were acting in a way that was in their best interests.
The argument that I shared on Chirp Club was pretty much the worst argument for getting people to actually publicly share this idea. Also: I call it Chirp Club because that was the translation of what the Literary Chinese Wikipedia article about the platform called it. I did not make it up. The reason for not calling it X is that X is already used to denote an unknown value, such as when I say 'Person X'. In this case, the unknown value, X, stands for Chirp Club.
It said, <persons known for committing violent crimes> knew about this idea and didn't share it. Four interpretations:
1) If you share this, it will cause people to commit violent crimes.
2) If you don't share this, it will lead to you committing violent crimes.
3) Not sharing this idea (keeping it secret) is important, for an unknown reason.
4) People who don't share this idea should be viewed negatively.
I felt that Sherine should have been sharing this idea. But I couldn't meaningfully talk to her, because she had blocked me.
Maybe Sherine thought that it was in the best interests of a Person X if she blocked me. Person X could have been Mei or Kate. She could even have imagined it to be me. Now, 13 years have passed. Is it likely that Sherine's prediction of the outcome of her blocking me will come true?
Similarly, if Ariana learned about this idea ~10 years ago, what did she expect to happen if she did not share it? Did that come true, or is it likely to come true?
Asking questions is easy. Answering questions is hard. She wasn't thinking about how to immediately convince people to use this idea. She was thinking about secrets, maybe.
Who thinks at age ~23 that they have a chance to change the world? There have been such people throughout history. Alexander the Great died young.
Sometimes books or films are like, 'a sad thing happened'. Most people do not remember that and try to figure out how to stop the sad thing from happening. If there is one sad thing per two stories, someone who reads or watches 200 stories could remember 100 sad things, or they could forget all of them and just go on with their life, and then be surprised when a sad thing happens that they didn't expect.
I am not trying to make Ariana sad.
Saturday, September 26, 2026
Is Ariana Grande sad?
Friday, September 25, 2026
Human traffickers
"In three days I will check whether the female scientist the IS wanted to be released is still in prison, and if she is I will check Ariana's Wikipedia page to see if she's in a relationship" (25 Sep 2026 at 21:07)
When I did this search, the first result was about a male scientist, with Chinese ethnicity but residing in the US, who has been imprisoned in China for almost two years. Even though I'm supposed to be not checking the news, since last year probably, I eventually came to this article:
Meatpacking groups say ICE arrests could lead to higher prices and revenue loss
(I had to open it with Javascript off to prevent the single web page from using all my computer's memory)
Ariana's political question last year touched on the topic of immigration enforcement raids.
It's poor people pushing the button that allows them to be happy.
I tend to be on the side of enforcing laws. Even though I am not Japanese, I still have a Japanese mindset about some things. In the drama series Ikebukuro West Gate Park: episode 4, a foreigner (personal detail: my youngest sister's name is Alejandra, which got shortened to Ali, which is the same name as this character) is befriended by a main character, but the foreigner still gets deported at the end of the episode for breaking immigration laws. This happens at a party. The immigration officer carrying out the action moves slowly, but the foreigner does not run and complies with the law.
Squid Game: there is a similar character, also named Ali.
In 2015, there were articles about the poor labor conditions of the workers on Thai fishing boats. I searched my bookmarks for 'shrimp', and there are only two results, but the second one has a lot of related articles. It might be a mistake to link any of this, as too much information.
Folder 'Inequality, 02 Jan 2016' (last article is the one related to shrimp, none of these were bookmarked with a title):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/30/google-got-it-wrong-the-open-office-trend-is-destroying-the-workplace/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/31/the-surprising-thing-ancient-mummies-tell-us-about-what-to-eat/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/what-its-like-to-house-hunt-in-silicon-valley-the-nations-priciest-market/2015/12/31/920c5b02-9dcf-11e5-bce4-708fe33e3288_story.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/14/the-rich-kids-of-instagram-are-a-product-of-extreme-inequality-and-theyre-not-afraid-to-show-it/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rich-see-different-internet-than-the-poor/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/16/these-powerful-photos-of-people-living-with-debt-will-make-you-feel-not-alone/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/15/the-shocking-truth-about-shrimp-today/
Folder 'slaves, 23 Sep 2018':
Desperate Rohingya Flee Myanmar on Trail of Suffering: ‘It Is All Gone’ - The New York Times
Thai Fishing Industry Trafficking, Enslaving Rohingya | Burma Task Force
Seafood Slaves | slavery | Al Jazeera
AP Explore: Seafood from slaves | Associated Press
US lets in Thai fish caught by slaves despite law | Associated Press
Myanmar fisherman goes home after 22 years as a slave | Associated Press
AP tracks slave boats to Papua New Guinea | Associated Press
AP Investigation: Slaves may have caught the fish you bought | Associated Press
Second-to-last has a URL that indicates it is from 20 Jul 2015.
Also, bonus article, the bookmark that follows this folder:
Erawan Shrine bombing was on 17 Aug 2015, about a month after the first articles describing the workers on the Thai fishing boats as "slaves" were written. From the Wikipedia article:
The Thai government has at times suggested the bombers acted to avenge a crackdown on their human trafficking network
Should poor people be encouraged to break laws by illegally traveling to other countries to find work? This is a different question than whether they should be punished by the country they travel to for breaking immigration law.
The US isn't special in being a country that people want to illegally reside in to work. It's a problem caused by global economic inequality. So: does Ariana think that Thailand should continue to allow fishing boats to employ illegal immigrants, just as meatpacking plants in the US do? Or should people only be allowed to work if they have official permission to be in a country, such that employers cannot threaten to turn them in to the authorities if they don't accept poor working conditions?
Short version of this post:
<quote>
<link to article>
Squid Game.
Thai fishing boats, shrine bombing.
First search result for thai fishing ship: Revealed: how the Thai fishing industry trafficks, imprisons and enslaves | Thailand | The Guardian (20 Jul 2015, same article linked above)
First search result for thai fishing ships: 'Such brutality': tricked into slavery in the Thai fishing industry | Movies | The Guardian (21 Sep 2019)
First search result for thai fishing boats: Forced to fish: Slavery on Thailand's trawlers - BBC News (23 Jan 2014)
So the topic of the article that I saw in Jul 2015 and posted about on Chirp Club was not new. It was just a new round of articles, that alerted me to a topic I had not known about.
The logic is that it was relevant to the question of whether people are, by nature, good or evil. Are the people who facilitate illegal entry into Thailand by taking people through jungles, which is by definition human trafficking, helping those people or harming them? Are they good or bad? Would taking away the button that lets poor people be happy — with a 1% chance of dying — be good or bad?
If you were the ruler of Thailand, what would you do?
___
Update 26 Sep 2026, 04:54
You are a participant in a YouTube video by a certain creator. Each time you push a button, $200 is split between you and a Soulless Mega-Corporation, but you get $1 less than the last button push: $100, $99, $98, etc. Do you keep pushing all the way down to $1? Each button press takes 0.2 sec.
Clovergirle
There are over a thousand other songs that I'm familiar with, which I would say that I like more than any song by Ariana Grande that I'm hearing for the first time just due to the mere exposure effect. Like, I was seeing if I could find the remix of Dragostea Din Tei in a video I linked recently, and even though all the remixes I found would receive similar ratings in a fair comparison, I didn't like any of them because they weren't the one I was familiar with. Just now, my computer was playing 삐리뽐 빼리뽐 Bbiribbom Bbaeribom, a song from 16 years ago (that I first heard ~9 years ago).
I could say something like, if something that was expected to happen before I said these words happens (Ariana Grande's Instagram account posting anything after the end of this month) then <interpretation>.
This already seems too long and I was thinking I might delete the previous paragraph.
Why post here at all? Why not just do Google searches or post longer text with paragraphs into Google Translate, where I assume a government conspiracy is recording it? "Stories for smart people", pretty sure I linked this recently. But what if the reason for the story's outcome was the attempt to record it? If the purpose of showing a story is to help people who are interested in understanding it (people in the future), this is basically a third party. What if no one will help me because I want to help a third party, instead of just the person I'm focusing on?
If I did send a message to Ariana Grande on Chirp Club, it would have been a public message. If it had been possible to send a private message, I would have chosen the public one. Two reasons: to avoid implying that people were secretly learning of this idea (even if that was true, since I have contacted some people via email). And to avoid implying that I was secretly contacting anyone female. My Chirp Club account is currently banned, so it does not help with 'telling a story'.
I was going to say in a recent post, but forgot: COVID-19 pandemic was unpredictable. But the general class of 'large events' is predictable, just like earthquakes. If someone had thought of this idea halfway through one of the world wars, no one would have been interested in using it at that time (except maybe the countries that weren't fighting, like South America).
I say 'share this idea' because it's a simple and unambiguous action. If I could order someone to do things, I would first make them create all the polls. I would probably have made these polls myself if Reddit hadn't discontinued polls with the web client (desktop); if I'd made them, they would have gotten up to a few hundred votes each. They would not have affected discussions in society about any problems that the polls are relevant to, and it's also a biased sample. Older people don't use Reddit, for example.
Many of these polls also test the assumptions that people make. If people used this idea, many of the assumptions that people would make would change. As a large class of assumptions, "It's not possible to fix problems, so we should do X to avoid being affected by problems and to avoid wasting effort on fixing problems." Even a superintelligent AI in the future could not reliably predict how people would answer these questions now; it might give a response, but people would have no confidence in that response, even if it gets other things right that can be confirmed.
People who think a certain thing X often erroneously think that people have always thought X. "It's normal to use a bunch of plastic and throw it away." It can be helpful to learn that what society agreed was the truth was different in the past, because it suggests that people could be making similar mistakes in the present.
It doesn't make sense for me to think that I'll ever be in a relationship. What I can do is make people think that I would want to be in a relationship with them.
If Ariana Grande doesn't share this idea, it means she doesn't think I would be good enough to be in a relationship with her.
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
Active shooter Washington Navy Yard. : r/washingtondc
[59 views, 23 Sep 2026]Guild wars party dance - YouTube
[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.
Thursday, September 24, 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.
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:
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?"