I sort of implied maybe that even though I don't want Greta to share the idea, I want you to share it. I think I said that the best outcome would be if you and her shared it, maybe after talking, but I can't remember if I said I wanted that.
Imagine that someone I know died a terrible death. Then you ask, what would it take for me to be happy? I am just a normal human, and many people with my characteristics are happy. My age doesn't matter. The situation is basically the same as when Sherine said that she loved me, 12 years ago, and though I didn't really ignore what she said, I didn't really see how it affected me.
So that's how to think of it. If someone I know died a terrible death, I would want to address the reasons that this happened.
I don't know whether to think that something as bad as this has happened. Does Mei still remember me? Does Kate still remember me? Does other Kate or Katy still remember me? Would my oldest sister have had a different life if people had used the idea, or if I had never thought of it, or if I had never met Mei? In general, has people not using the idea since I thought of it in 2011 led to outcomes that anyone who might care about me would consider very bad, like their own death?
I thought of the circumstances surrounding the second time that I cried so hard my fingers and nose and cheeks went numb. This was all about what Mei did or didn't do or what I expected would happen. I think it's fair to say that leading up to it, I wanted Mei to act in a way that would have prevented me from thinking that the future would be sad. I try to avoid saying exactly what it was that I wanted Mei to do that she didn't do because it could seem like a criticism — the line, 「でもね 少しくらい叱ってくれたっていいのよ？」 (basically all memory on my computer was used up and it started lagging from having this single web page open: https://vocaloid.fandom.com/wiki/ワールドイズマイン_(World_is_Mine)) from Hatsune Miku's World is Mine, which Mei linked to me, notwithstanding.
Although I did not correctly estimate the exact probability that it could occur, one of the possible sad things that could happen was someone else liking me.
So: pretend that someone I know died a terrible death. What do you do?
There are four posts that I will publish if the most recent post records 20 views. One of them is addressed to you, pt 60. When I wrote it, the most recent post was "To ???, pt 5", published 31 Mar, but I am just following what I said.
There's a different upload of the same video with eight times as many views, in 1080p, but stretched sideways. It seems that a large number of people, enough to boost it in the algorithm, do not realize that a 16/9 aspect ratio does not mean a video's quality is higher. But I'm in a bit of an unusual situation, with a 8/5 aspect ratio, so when I watch 16/9 videos there's black bars on top and bottom, and a 4/3 aspect ratio video is taller than the same video stretched to 16/9. So I have a reason to care.
Like, when I watched The Fellowship of the Ring a month ago with my sister and her daughters, the wrong display aspect ratio made it stretched sideways, but they didn't want to change it. Maybe the fact that they were sitting to one side made the stretched ratio better. But by the end, I had completely stopped noticing that it was stretched; I only noticed it in the beginning and am only assuming that it remained so for the entire viewing, as it stopped registering in my consciousness.
The editing at 2:53, with like a light bloom that makes part of the screen hard to see, is why I watched the video. I watched until 7:33 when the second song ended.
I wonder it would be interesting for someone with very little experience with WoW to watch this video, knowing that it shows a rogue, and then pick a class to play based off of what they see in the video. But all I really know is that I think it's a good video that's enjoyable to watch, and I played WoW enough to understand what's going on; and that one or two Aion PvP videos that I watched did not make the game look fun, and I also played Aion, though not the classes that would have been featured in those PvP videos. (And I considered the +20% runspeed boots in Aion to be a big part of the reason why PvP was broken, and PvP videos would certainly have featured characters with those boots, and they probably had a small character which meant a correspondingly faster running animation which looked bad, i.e. prioritizing combat results over appearance which I obviously disagreed with, etc.)
So it's possible that the reason I like this WoW video is not just because I have played WoW, but I really have no idea whether it makes WoW look interesting, or whether it's even possible for a video showing combat from an MMO to look interesting to someone who hasn't played the game and doesn't know what's going on. (I also don't know whether people who play retail WoW have any understanding of what's going on, like being able to identify every single ability that's being used and why it was used in that situation, when they watch someone else's gameplay, or whether not knowing this detracts from their enjoyment.)
The "i has a shuvel" still made me smile.
I was just listening to the music without watching it until 2:50, but I watched after that, and it made me think about the responses regarding using a PvP system to identify skilled players. Notable: the footage is from a PvE realm. 5:53 shows a duel, with the loser not dying, which isn't possible in that zone on a PvP server. But the fights at 1:51 and 4:21 take place in Horde starting zones, where even on PvP servers, Horde players become unflagged for PvP. The players he fights were already flagged for some reason, and being on a PvP server would not have meant a higher chance to encounter players in those locations who were flagged.
At 4:21: Niar is at 32% health, attacking a player at full health who is wearing the Tier1 robe and the Tier2 helm. (These are epic items that are better than what my lvl 60 mage had, but worse than the PvP epics that Niar was using.) Did it require skill for Niar to win in this situation? An argument that players seem to use is "player X is not skilled, their opponents are just unskilled." The ability use at 7:15: first frame with the first ability, Ambush, highlighted is 436.27 (using Stats for Nerds and ",." to go frame-by-frame). It fails to be used because not behind the target, but before this message appears (due to latency) it cannot be attempted again due to 1-sec global cooldown (1.5 sec for non-rogues) triggering before being cleared by the error message from the server. It starts again at 436.72. Stealth drops at 437.52, and the damage number appears at 437.65 simultaneously with the mage's health dropping. (Note that some of the delay might have been from 400 ms spell batching.)
I was watching some WoW-related thing recently, and an action registered one frame after the button was pressed. If I ping Google, it's just 13 ms; battle.net, associated with Blizzard, is only 4 ms. So one frame, 33 ms, is plenty of time for a packet to reach the server and return, if the server is processing actions immediately.
My latency from my ISP when I was playing WoW in 2006 was about 1 second (I think it was round-trip time). Eventually I was able to use Ethernet from the modem to my computer, which eliminated most disconnections due to bad local Wifi, but I was still playing with high latency.
For a rogue, there was an additional consideration beyond just actions registering later. At the upper-left is an energy tick meter: a rogue would ideally open just before it finished, which would give 20 energy immediately after. He tries to use Backstab immediately after Ambush, but because Ambush happened after the energy tick, he doesn't have the 60 energy required for Backstab, until a packet arrives indicating that Ambush apparently did trigger before the server tick, giving him enough energy.
So: a player could be skilled, and still have bad performance in PvP due to high latency. I remember Mei saying that it was easy for frost mages to kill mages, and the difficulty that I (as a frost mage) had fighting a well-geared Tauren warrior near the furbolg village in eastern Winterspring. I don't think I managed to kill him even once. My reaction time tests as worse than average, but the difficulty I had using Blink to avoid getting hit after an Intercept was mostly due to my connection latency.
Fast-forward 20 years, and latency isn't an issue for most players. So they are more likely to think that "bad performance in PvP means unskilled". Put simply, this leads to more stupid people trying to demonstrate that they are good at PvP, by learning to PvP well. PvP inherently involves affecting other people.
This probably affects the feedback about PvP ranks. It makes sense for a game to let players show that they're skilled, and yet some people believe this would be a bad thing, because (although no one did me the favor of making the following argument, so that I could more easily understand why they had this belief) it would encourage players who seek to show that they're skilled to act in a worse way. When encountering any given opponent, a player might go to greater lengths to defeat that opponent than they otherwise would, which could lead to an arms race in the use of consumables for example, or they might attack a weak player because of a slight reward for doing so.
Or, for example, they might seek to optimize their character to win PvP fights, leading to more imbalance in a typical fight due to their character being stronger, when they otherwise would not bother.
But my point is how the removal of latency, as a reason a skilled player might perform poorly in PvP, makes players view performance to be a more accurate signal of skill, which makes them more afraid to be grouped with 'low performance' players (or to desire more to be grouped with 'high performance' players), even though I just named several non-skill factors that would still affect the measurement, PvP rank, which could be used as an indicator of skill.
To put it another way: my awareness of latency, as one factor among many, made me think "of course there's never going to be a completely accurate measure of skill". Whereas other people saw the proposal and thought, "how would other players act if the developers of a game tried to introduce a completely accurate measure of skill."
There honestly might be some element of how players identify. If they imagine splitting players into two groups, "tries to be seen as skilled" and "does not try to be seen as skilled", they would probably label the first group as 'try-hards' and put themselves in the second group. Retail WoW certainly has goals, like getting a good standing in arenas, raid progress, or mythic dungeons, which only a small percentage of players try to accomplish. So an argument might get more support if it explicitly defines the groups, by forming a larger middle group into which most players would fit, rather than allowing people to implicitly group everyone who isn't at the very top into one large group with the same goals and outcomes.
I don't know if I've described these events before, but I'm treating it as though I have not.
Was thinking about my passivity. My excuse being a lack of information, and no way to obtain it. "If I ask questions, I won't get answers." But do you have an excuse? If you asked a question, you would get an answer, right?
So I thought about the time when Kate asked me a question, and I didn't give an answer. It's 16 years ago and I can only conclude that her question was, "why don't you study in your room", and not "why do you study out here", because my response was "good idea" and to immediately pick up my computer and leave.
But I felt this was an acceptable action because the implied answer was what I had said when she had asked the same or a similar question before, almost a year earlier. I had said "the light is better", and also gestured towards the windows.
Facts: in my room, I studied on my bed. The window was to the right of the bed, looking from the center of the room, so daylight on the bed wasn't very good, especially when sitting close to the wall which reduced the visible area of the window. There was a desk next to the window, but for some reason I think I never used it, other than as a place to put a glass of water.
The second time Kate asked me this question, it was late at night, probably between 10 PM and 1 AM. I might be able to identify the exact time if I checked my chat logs, with sign-in times. The illumination from the indoor lights at that moment was, in fact, very bad, for reasons I don't remember. Maybe I didn't bother to turn on any more lights when I went there to study. I think the reason I started studying there at that moment might have been because Kate left the wireless router in her room off that day, which I interpreted as a signal that she didn't want me to be there, and I only went to study there after she turned it back on after she returned home, but I don't remember.
So: under what circumstances would the implied answer of "the light is better" not be a lie? Was that why I studied in that area, up to that point when I stopped, until the day she left due to other events etc. etc.?
So maybe I don't always answer questions, and maybe I lied about why I was studying there.
I thought I would say this and not worry too much about the consequences. If you don't share the idea, it means you don't care about whether everyone has a place to live.
Can happen by accident, not knowing a player is blocked, and this lets you know to unblock them.
As with many suggestions, I thought of this because I did it by
accident. Blocked someone for trade chat spam, and then later whispered
them to invite them to a dungeon. Their friend had to let me know I had
the player blocked.
So once upon a time, I did easily block people. Not because they were annoying me specifically in conversation, but just because they were being annoying in general.
Maybe I wouldn't do it now only because of this singular experience, in which I found that doing so was bad for me (because it led to an embarrassing situation). If Ellie's observation is true, do I act more like a left-wing or a right-wing person?
I looked this up to see more details. 'Epistemic' is one of those words that I don't really use myself, though my oldest brother used it. I decided I don't like the term, 'epistemic trespass'.
People often said that Greta doesn't know what she's talking about, even when all she did was retweet quotes by people who presumably do know what they're talking about. It seems to be a word that people use to attack someone without thinking through what they've said: a word that people use to avoid thinking critically. Like a more elite version of the word, "troll".
For every example where someone made a statement outside of their field that was wrong (like Elon Musk misinterpreting these graphs, which I skipped over a few weeks ago in my post about the Chinese/Taiwanese player Supreme:
), there is someone who makes a judgement outside of their field that is correct, or someone who makes a judgement within their field that is wrong (like when a doctor almost killed Elon Musk by misdiagnosing his symptoms). So the observation that "people who take risks sometimes fail" is not, in itself, a particularly useful one.
(The topic of experts venturing outside their field is one that was featured in a video I watched yesterday at 2x speed: summary, streamers can be seen as having the job of professional opinion givers, and often those opinions are wrong, and people often put too much importance in the opinions of people who are not experts in the thing they're talking about. 4:32 "Don't hold celebrities or entertainers to the kind of standards that you would expect to hold experts, scientists, or politicians to. Don't expect entertainers to be able to answer all of your questions or be the arbiters of moral values." 4:58 "I mean ask the entertainer questions but do understand that there is a level of scope that they have. For some reason I always see this in both engineers and surgeons. People believe that just because they're really good thing at one thing it makes them naturally really good at something else and it just doesn't.")
"Creating new thoughts is work." I might have used this in an explanation about declining human intelligence.
I'm vaguely aware that Feynman diagrams help with understanding a complex thing, but they are not something I understand myself. Just that they allow other people to understand something about quantum mechanics. Maybe there is an explanation or representation that would explain the 'signal accuracy' problem better than my previous explanations of it.
Some people are sources of information with a higher accuracy than average; one might say rare levels of accuracy. But no one is right about everything. At which point (what level of discrepancies or distance from knowledge specialties/competences) does one disregard a familiar and accurate source of information, in favor of one with unproven accuracy (but a reasonable-sounding argument or consistent data)?
I think a lot of it is people being unwilling to communicate their uncertainties, and from there possibly not being able to admit them at all to themselves: dishonest thinking. Might be more than a little bit related to, or the consequence of, the "are you happy if other people think you are" question. But as it relates to other people: someone not wanting to criticize a source of knowledge, either explicitly, or implicitly by prioritizing other sources of knowledge, because they think it would be too much of a shock to other people for that criticism to happen.
Compare to my last mass email about this idea, which I think was the one where I said "if you don't share it you're stupid", and "don't be afraid of making other people look stupid by sharing it, because they would be surprised if you act in a way that criticizes the current state of affairs".
So in this analogy, expectations get 'locked' into a certain configuration? And some tiny changes, which with sand is from the grains rotating or something (maybe this is explained in [4.57M views, 22 Jun 2025]Why Are Beach Holes So Deadly? - YouTube), can result in significant changes in the macroscopic properties: the strength of the material, or in the case of expectations about signals, how easy it is to for knowledge to change from one configuration to another configuration: ideally because the second configuration is more accurate, so there is 'pressure', however slight, to move in that direction.
In some cases, however, whether something is a lie at all depends on other people, and this may mean it is the responsibility of someone else to ensure the above situation with regards to purity, even when the implications of this are an unwanted result.
Greta posted stories about support for transgender people.
When I was on Guildcafe (site started by people who played Guild Wars, but intended for people from all MMOs and maybe other game types), there was a female person who posted on the forums about how, in her work, she encountered many people who physically or genetically did not fit into traditional gender classifications. Out of the small pool of people who visited the site, and the even smaller pool of people who used a photo of themselves as their profile picture, she was the most attractive person.
The second story Greta posted, from @transgender_together, says,
Transgender people are increasingly targeted.
The number of anti-trans bills proposed around the world has steadily increased in recent years.
Trans people, particularly transgender women of color, continue to be targeted with violence and killed.
I'm not linking the original post by @transgender_together because it's a multi-image post, and Instagram has decided that since my browser hasn't been updated in four years, it doesn't need to serve a webpage that allows me to view more than the first image. But I will link this:
I didn't bother watching to the end, and Instagram doesn't let me see its full duration so I don't know how much I didn't watch. This is honestly something that has been lost in the discussions by people like J.K. Rowling. I have no idea what she thinks about this, because I have never seen it come up in the Chirp Club posts she has responded to or in replies to her there.
I mentioned in the only 2013 post that's currently published (which of course, I republished after having hidden it, in order to show Greta that I had mentioned climate change that early on) that a male player had protected my female paladin Jinsuu in World of Warcraft after I acted like I was AFK after losing an item roll. We had earlier done the Verigan's Fist quest chain together, going to places like Blackfathom Deeps and killing the elite mobs outside of the dungeon, although we probably needed to recruit additional players for the Shadowfang Keep portion of it. And I think he was part of a PvP raid I organized on Sun Rock Retreat in the Stonetalon Mountains, which would have consisted mainly of me and him killing guards, as no other players in the raid were high enough level to do so. (We would have been in mid-40s, I think the guards would have been lvl 40, so it was not at all easy to kill more than one guard at once, and the flight master and his enraged wyverns were too high-level for us to threaten.)
Would he have protected my character if she was not female? He asked me at least once if I was female in real life, and I did not give a clear answer. I sent him mining ores and stuff, without ever asking or expecting him to give me any items. So if I was dishonest by not telling him my real-life gender, I did not benefit from my interactions with him.
In Aion, there was a male player who sort of made an 'advance' on me. It was brief; I don't recall the details. I think he asked if I was female in real life, and I said no. The next day, he claimed not to remember anything that had happened. I sent him an in-game mail with an apple (worth almost nothing) and a million kinah, the in-game currency: a healing potion was worth 1k~3k kinah. I vaguely remember that I referenced the apple at some later point, like maybe with a letter with the subject 'apple'; I just remember that he got higher level and so started grouping with higher-level players, and maybe wasn't having too much fun, while I had basically stopped leveling except through the unwanted experience that I got from crafting items. (My in-game status was, "I am a turtle desu", referencing my lack of leveling.) He might have voted in at least one of the polls I made on the forums, about fixing PvP and making the game more fun (so that it wouldn't die, but it did). Once again, if I deceived someone by playing a female character, I made sure that I did not benefit.
Noting that the person who had a female character in Aion named Caelasa knew that I had a female character (necessary to mention, because our characters were in different physical locations most of the time we talked) and still 'made a move' on me. My response to this was to say that I was 'taken', which is passive language that would more typically be used by a female, and it turned out that this was false: I was not 'taken', shown by Mei's refusal to meet me about six months later. So I could be said to have made an implied lie here, that I was female, and also the unintentional lie that I was 'taken' when I was not. I sent this person Caelasa a thousand health potions with the subject 'For the war effort', but I still don't consider the matter resolved, even though my character has been renamed due to activity, I don't know if friend lists would still be active even if this person's character still exists, and in general it would be difficult — but not impossible — for Caelasa and I to communicate again. So I have done my best to ensure that if I lied to Caelasa, by possibly suggesting that I was female and by saying that I was 'taken', that I did not benefit.
A lot of the violence that transgender people receive is because they benefit financially from acting as the gender which they say they are. They do not always benefit from acting as that gender: for example, Justine Tunney, who created the website occupywallst.org, in 2012 or 2013 posted a photo of herself holding up a sign, but also posted credit to the person who had taken the photo. If a photographer takes photos for free, without receiving publicity in return, it is a favor to the subject of the photos, but giving the photographer credit makes it more transactional: the photos for publicity. If Justine Tunney had received a favor in an unbalanced transaction, there could have been the possibility it was because of her gender.
Transgender people have to consider the possibility that people will think they are lying. This is just their situation.
I think a bigger problem is the 'love makes you evil' meme. Is it bad to want to have children? Is it bad to prefer that someone you fall in l*ve with is not transgender, which could preclude the possibility of later having children?
This is like how when Israel accuses groups in Gaza or Lebanon of using human shields, and putting military assets close to civilians. Storing arms in civilian buildings instead of on military bases away from any civilians.
These groups do this because they are weak. (Whereas when Israel obliterated entire families because they stood on the roof of their home to prevent Israel from bombing it, only to get bombed anyway, it did not mean that Hamas was using them as human shields, just that people did not want to lose their home.)
What was the law that Hamas used when it reportedly executed people after the truce, a few months ago? People who had cooperated with Israel or whatever.
Israel has not executed anyone because of the new law, and it's unclear if they ever will. The images mention a German who was executed after being illegally abducted and then put to trial; if Israel executed someone under the new law, then it would no longer be possible to mention that German as the last person to be executed. Why call for nations to break ties with Israel because of this law, but not call for them to stop supporting Palestine due to Hamas's (purported, I did not look into it) executions of traitors?
Calling it "based on ethnicity": Hamas, or whatever group is in charge if the agreement that Hamas would no longer be in charge was followed, cannot execute Israelis for trying to destroy Gaza because Palestine is weak. Although it captured many Israelis, it was more beneficial to keep them alive. Israel can easily capture more Palestinians and so they hold no value as captives for the political equivalent of ransom. If Palestine was strong, it might be just as willing to execute Israelis captured under circumstances which would not qualify them as prisoners of war (for example, commandos who don't wear military uniforms are generally recognized as not being afforded the status of prisoners of war). And so, because of weakness, Palestine does not do one bad thing (threaten to execute prisoners) but does another bad thing (hide military among civilians).
Killing 50k or whatever civilians is certainly worse than threatening to possibly execute prisoners who have been convicted (fairly or not) of particularly bad offenses. People just move on to the latest problem, which is exactly why Israel thought that it could get away with taking over a bunch of land, 80 years ago.
"How do I keep on living and putting effort into every day knowing I will probably not live in a couple of years because of a looming invasion the inability to change the situation all while the environment [becomes worse]"?
— the fact that I edited that reminds me of when Greta promised not to use bad words. It might have been her willingness to use bad words that brought attention to her. So it could have been interpreted as saying she was not trying as hard to get influence that could be used to fix problems.
Anyway. There is a long discussion, like I disagreed when at 23:02 he said,
"You will not be punished for not actively trying to solve all the world's ills. Solve what you can, but don't beat yourself up if it's not everything."
But then he says at 24:43,
"If you want to do that heroic thing, go for it. If you want to take on the world's ills, go for it. The world is not — we are not hurting for people that want to help. We are hurting for people that can. [...] We are short on people who actively actually do things that do change the world."
Well. Would Imane have shared the idea before I stopped emailing her, if she had known I would write almost 60 weblog posts addressed to her? Perhaps me saying "you shall be rid of me" was deceptive if she thought that I would not start writing these posts. But I stopped watching dramas as a consequence of her not sharing the idea: a consequence I imposed on myself, not one that she asked for, but if she did read my emails then I consider it fair to blame this slightly harmful outcome for me on her. If she had demonstrated that she cared about me being able to continue watching dramas, she would not have had to deal with the consequence of possibly being unsure of whether I want her to receive these messages, since I'm not emailing them to her.
