To ???, pt 3

If people used this idea, people with high incomes would work less, which means smart people would work less. People might say, "there's always more you can do to help other people". This is me not helping other people. I'm not looking up the progress of the war between Israel and Iran, or whether any of Iran's conventional submarines have been destroyed.

Two observations from the video that I finally finished: the scene with boats moving through canals. It wasn't clear if the player was steering the boats, but it would be nice if they were. Second, someone commented on the original video,

"I'm a noob too" he answers to his group mate - by writing in General Chat, thus proving he is indeed a noob too @50:28

I'm sure there are people who have had this experience: playing for a long time without knowing how to properly communicate with other people. When I first played WoW, I didn't know how to move — I was expecting it to be like Warcraft III, in which you first selected a unit and then right-clicked a location to move to, even in a custom scenario where you could only control one unit — and I didn't know how to reply to Mei after she messaged me, so I was just jumping up and down in place using space bar until she told me how to reply. If not for her, who knows how long I might have played the game before I learned that?

(Actually, I wonder what percent of people whom I messaged for dungeons might not have replied because they didn't know how to)

Communication is very important for people to find the answers to problems that they have. In school, classrooms where students never ask questions probably have worse learning than other classrooms. (It's unlikely that all students fully understand the material.) If someone doesn't know how to communicate in a multiplayer game, or doesn't feel confident enough to ask questions, they might run into a bunch of problems which the game's designers didn't anticipate.

Then I watched a video about players avoiding flying. I wouldn't have said anything about it, but halfway through another video about quests in WoW, at 15:54, I got the vp9 dropped segment bug.

It would have been nice if I didn't make this post and the previous, because the one before that made a good point: that limitations on a character make them more interesting. Like with the point I made in a forum post that I won't link about AoE2, that a challenge for games that undergo continuous development is to help new players without harming long-time players. A lot of the issues discussed in the first video were the result of catering to long-time players, like with getting a mount at lvl 10 and a flying mount at lvl 20, or just the fact of the game not being challenging.

These videos I'm watching have all been 'react' videos by one streamer, so I want to mention a gameplay video, The Last Player on a Dead Server – And Why I Bought Him a PC, with 5m views.

So now I have two reasons to link my 2010 post about WoW. I occasionally think about the post I did in 2008, which I think is in one of the jpg-zip archives but maybe not even on a post that's still visible. Just the bit where I briefly said how the solution to the hardcore vs casual player tension was to keep differences between players but make it so those differences didn't matter, and that "you must study this", which was a reference to the Book of Five Rings. I did not expect anyone who read it to understand (I expected it to fail just like my earlier writings had failed). I think of the translator's note in that translation, "Who can understand Musashi's methods?"

Anyway, the first paragraph, that ended with,

the hopes and dreams of people provide a guiding force, which is not always apparent in the direction it will take the game.

The creator of the video about flying mentioned the 'trenches of 2014'. The great debates on the forums, second possibly only to the debates at some other point about whether the forums should switch to using real player names, about whether flying was good or bad for the game. The people who supported flying might not have been a clear majority, but they were numerous enough to change Blizzard's plans, showing that at least in the World of Warcraft, the future does, indeed, lie in the hands of the people.

And now, many years later, people who kept playing after the 'pro-flying' side got what they wanted are talking about how the game might be more fun if one avoids flying.

And the end of the post, where under "Other PvP issues" I suggested increasingly outlandish fixes to flying.

It never seemed realistic to remove flying, once it had been added. It made the game worse, but major content areas would literally become inaccessible if flying was removed, and there was just too much dissonance from trying to restrict flying in new areas, when it was still available in old areas (especially after Cataclysm, which added flying to the original world). No story justification, and from what players could see, no gameplay justification. Maybe if they had fixed world PvP, people would have seen benefits from keeping flying banned, but unsurprisingly, since they didn't implement my suggestions about PvP, world PvP was never fixed.

So all that could be done was make flying less convenient. I didn't mention Aion, but it is one of the links on my weblog, and the suggestion to use a flight timer was pulled directly from Aion. Aion's flight did have problems, which was basically that run speed boosts made gliding in non-flight zones useless in PvP, and flight potions that restored flight time eventually made the flight timer irrelevant. I might have also had suggestions about improving combat in flight zones, where the cool inertial aspect of gliding played no role. Aion had or has a system where traveling forward for a few seconds gives a 10% damage boost. Maybe my suggestion was to allow spellcasting while gliding?

WoW didn't make flying less convenient. It added inertia to flying, but also made flying extremely fast, so players are even more penalized in terms of time if they don't use it, with no gameplay penalty if they do choose to use it.

People in comments suggest an 'Iron Man'-type buff if one chooses not to fly, and that's kind of interesting to think about: if one could choose at character creation to make a 'heroic' character who would eventually have access to flying mounts, or a 'non-heroic' character who could not use flying mounts, how many would choose the latter?

If time spent walking on a low-level character has the opportunity cost of riding on a high-level character at a later (or even just different, if someone with a high-level main levels an alt) time, then the efficiency of economic activity is a concern, as I've probably said before. New players might enjoy walking, but if gathering iron ore on a max-level character with a flying mount is 5x faster than a low-level character who walks, then an experienced player will not enjoy the portion of leveling where they have no mount.

So mount speed is a problem, even without flying. When I leveled in TBC zones on the public test realm, the first thing I did was run through all of Outland at lvl 60, and with a +100% speed epic mount nothing really felt dangerous. There was a large aggro range, but nothing except a lvl 70 mob would have displayed as 'skull' level, which is the traditional indication of a zone being too high-level for a player in Classic WoW. And so while watching this video about flying, I had a few thoughts about how when everyone has a +100% speed mount, it shouldn't make the world feel so much less dangerous. The daze mechanic does knock a player off a mount, but that's only for melee attacks, and if every mob has to be fast enough to catch a player on a +100% mount, it makes normal combat less interesting. For example, a 50% snare like Hamstring would not make a mob slower than a player, so it would not have utility in allowing a player to gain distance from a mob.

It's basically a neglected problem because in the same expansion where everyone was able to afford an epic ground mount, they were also able to afford flying mounts which made avoiding mobs trivial.

(This was supposed to be a link to the 2010 post and maybe one or two sentences.)

So: the title for the third video is, "The Design Idea That Made WoW Massive", referring to quests. But now people don't read or care about the quests in retail WoW. Should new MMOs bother to make enough quests for players to level with?

I already knew the story of how Blizzard was surprised at how popular quests were in the early testing. I used it as an example of how Blizzard did not plan the things that made WoW popular, and people (or specifically Wolfshead Online) should not expect that Blizzard would be able to create a 'WoW killer' with Project Titan (back when it was just job openings and rumors). I didn't know that a lack of quests might have been one of the reasons for the failure of Ashes of Creation, since I still haven't watched any videos or read anything about its failure.

In the minute before I got the vp9 bug (and if the bug is from deliberate interference, segments are pre-loaded so any content-related decision to cause it would be delayed before I knew of it), the streamer is talking about the ability for people to WoW solo. Maybe a little ironic, when he played Runescape, which came before WoW, and the first video talked about the ability to experience all of the story in Runescape solo, unlike WoW. But at least players can reach the level cap solo in WoW. So: the faction split, solo leveling, and quests were all important features that led to WoW's success. PvP was probably also important, but that might fall under the faction split. But I assume that quests are what the video title refers to.

Almost every major raiding guild in original WoW was on a PvP server. Well: better without Javascript:

https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Gates_of_Ahn'Qiraj

https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Server:Medivh_US

PvE server. But,

In an effort to gain an advantage for their home server, players from Medivh and Mannoroth created alts on the opposing server to increase lag and queue times. Players also trolled the realm forums of the opposing server, trading insults like "carebear" and "Mannorofl".

Though Medivh emerged victorious, some Mannoroth players still claim they were the first "legitimate" server to complete the event, as Medivh's PvE mechanics prevented cross-faction interference and made organization between Horde and Alliance a natural course of action. By contrast, Mannoroth's war effort was hindered throughout the event by fierce competition between Horde and Alliance Scepter quest raids. Ganking in Silithus ignited a no-holds-barred war between the factions, causing constant server crashes due to zone overpopulation and ending in a battle at the Scarab Gong.

I was going with the argument, 'players who wanted to do hard achievements in PvE preferred to be on PvP servers.' An editor here made a good point that achieving anything on PvP servers was more difficult, including doing things related to raid progression or even getting inside a raid instance.

In Gegon's The Last Ovski, the players he attacks at 12:47 are gathered together to try to get the Songflower Serenade buff, quite possibly in preparation for a raid. Players on a PvE server could get the buff safely. So the achievements of guilds on PvE servers like Medivh might oversell their competence, compared to guilds on PvP servers.

And if more competent players did prefer PvP servers, it not only suggests that world PvP was an important part of WoW's overall success, but also that there is something about the interactions or dependencies that world PvP led to that competent players found appealing. To put it another way, players who were bad at PvP because they were bad at the game would not want to be on a server where they could be killed by other players.

I think that this is a bad post, but if it says anything useful, it might be a brief explanation of why the 9GAG post I did was titled, "War is Obsolete". Chess does not lead to any physical thrill. Perhaps physical sports do, but like, one thing I was thinking about regarding retail WoW is that for activities to be interesting, they not only have to be inherently relevant, they also have to convince enough people that they're relevant to be popular. What one lvl 10 character does in retail WoW is just as relevant to another lvl 10 character in retail, as a lvl 10 character in Classic is to another lvl 10 character in Classic. In fact, outside of hardcore, interest in leveling in Classic is low, so I'll just stick with hardcore. More people care about the lvl 10 hardcore character because players whose characters are lvl 10 are a larger percentage of the population.

So, almost everyone can safely do physical sports and benefit from a little bit of exercise. But interest is concentrated in professional athletes, aside from parents watching their children. And most people can't be professional athletes.

Whereas most people could be soldiers; it's why the US military sometimes describes people as "military-aged males", because anyone of a certain age is viewed as having the ability to participate in combat.

As I was saying, chess does not replace war, though in Chinese and Korean costume dramas the ability to play chess is often seen as a critical skill for a military commander. Normal work is often also not challenging, when people are forced to stay at work even when there is nothing to do. But computer games, and the option of working more efficiently and leaving work earlier (while getting paid slightly less), could replace war for competitively-minded people, who seek to challenge themselves.

To ???, pt 2

I have watched up to around 46:00 in the video I linked in the previous post, before I stopped again.

I thought about various things. Quests as puzzles, and how this is invalidated by the 'arrow' of the questing addon that is popular in Classic (other than with like the rogue quest with the parrot where not reading the quest text gets you killed). My suggestion to make only a subset of quests available to any particular player would not fix this; a guide could not tell the order in which to do quests, but it could give the answer to any 'puzzle' in a particular quest.

Mei talking about how she had done almost everything it was possible to do in World of Warcraft, in the context of her switching servers to play with a more casual guild (Death and Taxes) and like maybe trying to dissuade me from trying to follow her. The question of whether, at that point in time, she would have liked WoW to be a game that had more stuff for her to do, or if she was fine the way it was, considering it was affecting her school grades.

The MMO that Ghostcrawler is apparently working on; a lot of the things I've said should apply to any MMO, and it might be better if I tried to help that project than a Classic Plus version of WoW.

The way that I stopped at this point in the video because fundamentally, I saw a problem and looked for a solution or how to describe the solution, when I am really just trying to fill time and act in a boring way until someone shares the idea. When I quit WoW, i.e. cancelled my subscription that I might have (not sure) been paying for continuously since the game launched, despite not logging in to the game or even having a computer for over a year, it was in large part so I would not spend more of my life on something that was going to decline in quality, to the point that I could not recommend people play it. So that, at this moment in time 19 years later, I would not devote a lot of this post to talking about WoW.

The way that I probably spent a lot less time than Mei playing WoW (I might have played more at first, since after a short break around the time I met her she was supposed to start college soon), and took an opportunity to make her think that I might have quit playing a few months after WoW launched (partly so she wouldn't feel she would have to keep playing it), but she graduated from college despite the time she spent playing WoW while I did not.

The broader questions; beyond 'how to make WoW better', and 'whether it's good if WoW is better than other games if it only increases the parent company's profits', and 'what are the consequences if games are more enjoyable to play'.

The thing with 'the attitude of Jewish people is that it's better to be seen as smart, than to be seen as moral, while Muslim people would say the opposite'. So, if Israel's leaders know of this idea, and the war with Iran is related, then it was the attitude: 'being seen as dumb is undesirable'.

If this site is important, I didn't want to label Islam as dumb. I have tried to act in a way that extends the 'now' in my post. I have not done web searches for my current weight or my diet, because that was something I was trying to do every day. I have not had any multivitamin tablets since then, as it was something I was trying to do every 2~4 days, and to take one would be acknowledging the passing of time.

I am supposed to say something at this point that exploits the desire not to be seen as immoral, as contrasted with the desire not to be seen as dumb.

To ???, pt 1

Ellie, who commented on this site a year ago, said something on Chirp Club about the imperial exams.

She is much smarter than an average person. If she would think that Imane doesn't read this, then the average person would think that, as average people tend to dismiss possibilities that no one else expresses belief in that seem statistically unlikely, based on whether similar possibilities are true. No one else has indicated that they have read this site since the mysterious 'B' commented in 2017.

Just as I think the best way to learn a language (after learning its grammar) is to basically memorize movies, because the stories in them are inherently more interesting than, say, news articles and broadcasts in the target language, I find it more interesting to reference fiction on the topic of imperial exams.

But I will say that I think the second-to-last emperor of China, who was like killed by his mother-in-law or something around 1908, was trying to reform the imperial exams. Her resistance to reforms were linked to the Boxer Rebellion, ultimately leading to the end of imperial rule, and this is an example of the like energy accumulation in a system, the bullet vs sunlight thing again. People tried to protect a system that was flawed, leading to violent change.

The Legend of Anle begins with a case of cheating on the imperial exams.

The Double also touches on the topic of the exams. The idea of having males and females combine into teams for the exams is introduced, criticized by certain characters, and then indulged for the purpose of making an interesting story (like with the archery test).

I think that in The Prisoner of Beauty, the grandfather might mention the importance of the exams and selecting good officials in his final message to his granddaughter, but I did not watch the later episodes in which the importance of whatever he said might be revealed.

Ellie mentioned being a National Merit Scholar in the US. I never tried for any exclusive scholarships. I was disappointed that the US did not, in fact, have much of a merit-based system that did not depend on zero-sum competitions. For example, I went to high school in California, and for like one or two years there was a way of getting scholarship money through tests, then the funding for that was cut.

So, the imperial exams: objective being to get the best people possible for important positions. If being, say, in the top 0.573% is highly rewarded, but being in the top 0.574% has a low reward, then people will want to cheat. But, beyond that: if people's competence is measured, what should be done with the people who are measured to be the very worst? What jobs should they have? (Is it important to be able to say it was worth their time to do all that preparation, even if they were measured as the worst?)

China no longer executes people who cheat on the exams. But the issue of the exams covering irrelevant material still exists. Ideally, all exams (not just the ones used for college entrance in China) should be for knowledge which is useful to know, even if it were not being tested for. This is a very general statement which might seem useless in isolation; I am just rolling it all up in signal accuracy. If an exam tests useless knowledge, then people should not care what result someone gets on the exam, but they often do. So, like, the question about the sheep and goats on a boat ([8.8M views, 13 Oct 2025][ship captain's age China problem]The REAL Answer Explained - YouTube), and the official explanation for why the problem was on an exam.

The following has nothing to do with the idea. It just shows how I am restricting my potential to cause change with less important problems, as evidence that I care about this idea and the problems it would fix.

I did a test. I watched an AoE2 video, but I tried to avoid touching any keys while doing so. I got the 'vp9 dropped segments' bug twice shortly after it started, and then twice again after I had to touch a key to stop the screen from blanking from inactivity after an ad.

This behavior was consistent with someone deliberately and intentionally causing this bug by disrupting traffic from the server: if someone was trying to communicate that "they were deliberately causing the bug", this communication would lead to ambiguity and an increase in complexity if it occurred while I was not watching the screen. But I still don't know if it might just be a browser bug with like muxing the segments (combining audio and video), and the server is sending the data just fine.

While I was watching the video, So, I tried Retail WoW (as a new player...) | Xaryu Reacts, the bug happened again. This is my excuse to mention the video and treat the fact that I was watching it as important.

At 34:08, someone says in the stream chat,

Classic andies: this is the whole point of wow. Why would you wanna boost [past] this

I watched up to around this point. This video is probably one of the most favourable presentations of  'retail' WoW: it shows a storyline that the player had a reason to be interested in, and did not demonstrate the incoherence that can result from the mashup of storylines from different expansions, or basically from players missing the stories from most expansions when they level a single time to the level cap.

I think the difficulty tuning is bad. I think that it looks like the story being told might not be possible to experience while playing with someone else, which is bad, but people might not realize it's bad if they don't think about how MMOs are not supposed to be single-player games.

I also think, just like the creator, Gbay, who made the original video, that the story being told is not very good. I had always felt that books are a better medium for telling interesting stories than games; decline of literacy increases the audience for stories told in games, and people suggest that other games do stories better than WoW. But the opposition (Q41) that Classic WoW players have to boosting is not because the stories told within the game are good.

When a newly created gnome character is asked to slaughter eight ragged young wolves for their edible flesh (found via other database site), it's not intended to be a riveting story. The result is predictable. No one will care what the player did, other than the single non-player character (NPC) who benefits from the exchange. The player themselves won't care or remember that they did this particular quest.

It's more about building a world. A world where other characters in the game, whether player characters or NPCs, care about the existence of the player's own character, at least if the player bothers to read the quests that they're doing. Only a few quests in Classic have stories that a typical player cares much about; with Alliance players, it's the Defias questline, with a lot more quests that players won't remember or care about.

Based on this video, retail WoW apparently has stories in which the player's character matters to NPCs, reaching a pinnacle probably with the expansion in which players had artifact weapons (an item quality above legendary, which is above epic), but these stories were fundamentally incompatible with the fact of other players existing within the game, who had the same role in the story.

So the commenter who implied that the experience of playing through the game's story was why Classic players opposed boosting missed an important fact: the video creator did not interact with any other players while doing this in retail WoW.

If Classic WoW was a game where every player was solitary in their own personal shard until they hit the level cap (or solitary outside of dungeons), a lot more players would support a paid boost, if they didn't just quit.

Other players existing in the world is sometimes good, sometimes bad, and sometimes can seem irrelevant. Game streamers often play a game in a way where they interact more with their stream chat. In MMOs, they will often talk about other players within the game world, commenting on or asking questions about that player, without making any attempt to answer their questions by interacting with that player. Even for normal players, if they have a goal like 'leveling as fast as possible', then other players in the game are often nothing but a hindrance to this goal, like with competition for limited-drop items (language warning).

This post honestly took a turn I wasn't expecting. I didn't really think about the creator of the video not interacting with other players, maybe because so much of my own playtime in original WoW was by myself or in lightly populated areas. Like, when the game launched, I played in areas with other people. I still remember PvP involving multiple players of both factions near the shore of Desolace, in late 2004 or early 2005, where I encountered a shaman on my priest and had the experience of all my survival tools being countered by Purge and Earth Shock. There were raids on Astranaar by low-level Horde, and raids on Crossroads by low-level Alliance, with most participating players being unable to damage guards.

But later on, with my first character that reached lvl 60 in late 2006, a lot of areas I leveled through were relatively unpopulated. Players who were creating new characters preferred to play on new servers, which were periodically released, and many people who had been playing since the launch of my server were already at the level cap. When I leveled on the public test realm in TBC so that I could say that my character on live realms never traveled through the Dark Portal (and never even logged in after TBC launched), it was also in empty zones, other than the odd (rare) occasion like when I fought a lvl 70 blood elf paladin with a flying mount for control of the PvP objective in the first zone.

I linked the Russian comment listed below on 10 Mar. Other videos I didn't mention in that post:

Retail WoW vs Classic WoW comments https://www.youtube.com/shorts/e2WO6u8AUkg
Russian comment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdZ0D-L6yBI&lc=Ugz4YTc8W08feFI4Fld4AaABAg
updated models https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kHvb6pNkKhg
WoW Classic vs Retail: Quests (leveling speed) https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lO8iOxW4xng
retail WoW ad, giant mob dying to 'new and returning player' c9B1DlgIZ74

WoW: https://www.twitch.tv/pikabooirl/clip/PreciousPhilanthropicBaguettePJSalt-QtLvqbRHsCqc2PjV and https://youtu.be/M0DbD9TXAPg?t=1022
Classic has challenge that is more relevant.

Within the rules of a game, a long-time player will always be able to do more. From which follows, "it's better to be max level than to still be questing and leveling". I didn't view this to be true; I deleted my first character at lvl 50, partly in order to delay when I reached lvl 60 (possibly because then I might stop playing, and Mei had wanted me to be playing the same game as her). But every player who buys a boost thinks this.

It does not follow that a game is better if every player can quickly reach max level. A max-level character can do more, but what they can do is not necessarily relevant. It often is not relevant to new characters, and it is often not relevant to the much larger population of "real-life humans", who can hear about the game or the exploits of its characters (including fictional characters who don't actually exist in the game, like with comics or The Craft of War : BLIND by Percula) and make judgements as a result of their knowledge.

Low-level characters are able to do less within the game world. But it's the fact that they are restricted in what they can do that makes them interesting.

The mountain

Most people want to be seen as attractive, at least to someone. That someone does not necessarily even exist; it might be, "the version of you who is smart enough to understand what I'm doing and why". It might be, "someone who will know what I did, which is no one".

I could unpublish the last two posts. I had already thought I might unpublish the one titled 'Sand'. Really the title was about waves erasing things drawn in the sand, though it also became an allusion to the sorites paradox, because it uses sand (honestly until I just looked it up, I assumed sorites meant sand). I think I look bad, and unattractive, whether I leave them up or hide them.

I might have acted differently if I had fallen asleep two hours ago. But I remained awake, and I wanted to give an explanation for my actions, which might be unimportant, but if important may seem unusual.

I just thought of an event with my national guard unit, in mid-2008, before leaving to go to Iraq. I'm not even completely sure this event occurred, which is part of the reason it put me in a bad mood to think of it. It was at a place, maybe not a park, but an outdoors place away from the city. Since I have never had a car (I was the only member of my unit who took a bus to reach the training armory each month), someone else had to pick me up to drive me there, probably the NCO in charge of my section.

It was more for people with families to socialize. There was a sort of hill or tiny mountain next to where the people were, and I spent a lot of the event walking on the trails of the mountain, surrounded by trees. I had thoughts which I no longer remember, but I think some of those thoughts might have been about how no one else would know the thoughts I was having at that time. If I had that thought, then because I have forgotten what kinds of thoughts I had, that thought would have been true.

It just shows the passing of time.

Sort of like with me never having had the opportunity to watch fireworks with anyone, only by myself, and then forgetting the experience.

I think there was a sort of canal and path for walking and biking, next to the event area. If looking from the event area towards the canal, the mountain was to the left.

Maybe I didn't have cell phone coverage, and I thought, "what if Mei tried to call me then?" Even though she had never called me before.

To Imane, pt 45

Greta did post two Stories but I am disregarding that fact.

I said to Sherine that she should share the idea unless she wanted me to die. If this was a valid reason for her not to share the idea, then it's a valid reason for anyone else not to share the idea.

My efforts to get people to share this idea have been complicated by my name. I mentioned in my very long post to Yoko Ono that I had emailed, and received responses from Richard Stallman (also, I noticed that he is also one of the authors of the 'ls' command on my system, as seen with 'man ls'). Notably, this happened on the email account associated with this site, which has the name listed on my profile's About page, rather than on the email account I used to contact you.

A lot of the emails I have sent have been the address I used to contact you, or from my main email account back when the name was still listed as Misaki. I don't want to imply to any male person that I am a female who might potentially be interested in him, and this affects what I say to any males; it probably leads to a bit more of a confrontational tone. I probably avoid implying that I actively want any male to share, or even to respond to me, and a lot of people base their actions off of what people they interact with want.

The justification for this would be if, as suggested by the topic of the poll I recommended you create, females are indeed treated better in society, and this idea would remove that bias. Then it would be better if a female was responsible for sharing this idea, as it avoids implying that there was conflict.

However, people might take issue with an explanation gives me a reason to interact with female people and avoid interacting with male people.

Sand

You know my intention is to do nothing and say nothing.

I had a thought, maybe you feel guilty.

The video mentions the number 20k, which I assume is the number of young people killed in the recent fighting. Of course, young people were also killed in the last round of fighting in 2014, and I thought of the 2009 war, and that made me think of something else.

This was in the 'memories from the war' email that I sent to Hime.

It's basic: a civilian car, with an Iraqi family, hit a pressure-plate IED and was blown up. It was on a road on the western outskirts of Baghdad. I think it was marked as a minor, relatively unused route on US military maps. The people I will call "fighters" would try to put IEDs on roads that would be used by the US military. For example, I think it was roughly this location, on a road joining the main highway, that a civilian vehicle being used by private military contractors to escort diplomats or something hit a pressure-plate IED in the dust of the road, killing several or all occupants, around the first half of 2009. It was a road used by military convoys that were detouring around Fallujah, and so the PMCs must have chosen the route for the same reason. Normal Iraqis would have no reason to avoid Fallujah. (In the convoy briefings I gave that mentioned this incident, I contrasted the destroyed civilian vehicle with the tire damage that a military vehicle sustained from a similar IED in the same location.)

So this family was presumably on a road that didn't get a lot of traffic, so some fighters must have thought it was a good place to target US military vehicles. Again, I think it was labeled as a minor supply route for the US military. But instead the IED killed an Iraqi family.

I just remember the shoe. I think there was a photo of it, taken at night, in the incident report uploaded by the unit that investigated the scene. A young person's shoe had been blown off their foot by the explosion, ending up away from the rest of the scene.

With the young Palestinian female whose image has been used as a symbol of the victims of war, some people might say that Israel intended to kill her, or at least didn't care if she died. That wasn't the case for this young person who died when their family's car hit an IED in Iraq. Neither the US, nor the fighters who planted the IED, wanted civilians to die. (This is in contrast to events like a suicide bomb attack on a recruitment center near the so-called triangle of death that killed 50+ people; it was different people planting pressure-plate IEDs like this one.)

To Imane, pt 44

A funny thing happened today. I was watching a bunch of videos when my Internet stopped working. The wireless router was blinking red. I went to make cookies, and the router's light was still red whenever I checked it, but around the time I was done, this happened:

misaki@dawn:/dev/shm$  !pi
 ping google.com
ping: google.com: Name or service not known
misaki@dawn:/dev/shm$   !pi
  ping google.com
^C
misaki@dawn:/dev/shm$  !Pi
bash: !Pi: event not found
misaki@dawn:/dev/shm$  !pi
 ping google.com
^C
misaki@dawn:/dev/shm$  tracepath google.com
 1?: [LOCALHOST]                      pmtu 1500
 1:  _gateway                                              2.077ms
 1:  _gateway                                              1.595ms
 2:  ^C
misaki@dawn:/dev/shm$  tracepath 1.1.1.1
 1?: [LOCALHOST]                      pmtu 1500
 1:  _gateway                                              3.168ms
 1:  _gateway                                             99.120ms
 2:  <redacted>                                         3.230ms
 3:  10.4.20.1                                             3.614ms
 4:  no reply
 5:  100ge0-35.core1.las1.he.net                          14.382ms
 6:  206.71.8.11                                          15.338ms asymm  7
 7:  no reply
 8:  no reply
^C

It started working again. But I had neglected to check the router's light before doing this. I don't know if it started working immediately after I tried to ping google.com, or if it was already working at that point and just being slow for some reason.

This is like when Sherine sent me an angry message on Chirp Club, but her account was protected, so I didn't see the message until someone reminded her and she unprotected her account. Trying to communicate with someone by making their Internet stop working would be an unreliable form of communication, as it could be a random event from an unrelated cause.

In movies, people almost never have to repeat what they said because someone did not hear, or did not understand someone's meaning, even when the actual audience needs subtitles due to low voice volume or poor (aka natural, or non-trained) enunciation. In real life, it's natural to have communication problems.

Greta said that we need to talk about Cuba.

The first oil tanker that was seized was using a false flag. (via 2026 Cuban crisis, [...]#Summary of seizures of oil tankers) It seems that others were not: they were just "sanctioned". The US will probably release them, since other countries can act like the US isn't doing anything wrong as long as this happens, but in the meantime the vessels are not working, the crew still has to be paid, etc. and if it means taking on Venezuelan crude oil is 20% less profitable than other jobs, it could lead to a 100% reduction of exports from Venezuela to Cuba.

Similarly to the US threatening Mexico with tariffs if it helps Cuba: decrease the profitability of the route and it can be shut down completely.

So this is definitely bullying. I don't really care. This is like the bullet vs sunlight energy analogy: Cuba having to use less oil now is like every other country, in probably less than 100 years. ("estimates suggest that at current consumption rates, conventional oil reserves could last between 27 and 50 years": AI summarizing HowStuffWorks) I would ask what the streets of Cuba look like, whether they are filled with vehicles, but it doesn't really matter: the streets of the US are filled with vehicles. Cities like Los Angeles have a reputation for bad traffic, which by definition is a lot of vehicles. When it's freeways, a lot of it is people driving to work: habitual use of a lot of fuel.

I wrote a thing about this to Giggly aka Madison, like how if no one else has a car then having a car lets you do special things, but if everyone has one, then everything is basically as it was before cars, except that instead of walking for X minutes, you have to drive for X minutes which uses extra energy.

Northern Korea is probably the leader in "getting used to not having fossil fuels", since they actually turn off city lights at night (or maybe just don't have streetlights), something that probably no other country does.

A hashtag or description I've noticed on Douyin: "an old song but danced in a new way". Why can't people do old dances? (An exception, but it's part of a live full performance and most short-form dances don't have a long version.) Because people see that change is necessary. Purposeful changes to improve society, as with China's rise in purchasing power parity GDP per capita from $1k in 1990 to $27k in 2024 (compared to the world, which I clicked on by accident, rising from $5.6k to $26k in the same timeframe), and changes in adaption to influences like global warming, resource depletion, war, or a large decline in literacy due to technology, which people do not wish for but if ignored can be disastrous.

A reporter once asked someone if he created Bitcoin. His reply was that "I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it. It's been turned over to other people," though he later claimed this was a misunderstanding. "It" is Bitcoin being estimated to use 204 TWh per year in 2026 or 23 GW, or the mechanical power output of 122 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, or enough power to vaporize a cubic km of 10°C water in just 1228 days or raise a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier in 1 Earth gravity at a rate of 24 m/s, about equal to the rate of climb of the most-produced fighter aircraft models in WWII like the P-38 Lightning, Il-2, and Bf 109.

Greta says at 1:30 in her video, "When liberation movements were fighting for independence from colonial rule across Africa".

I don't know much specifics. Search for "cuba involvement in african war" gives the Cuban intervention in Angola on Wikipedia and a featured snippet from Cuba’s Role in Angola Changed the Course of African History.

People might have different opinions about that war. Maybe people in Angola really appreciate Cuba and think positively of it.

But people in Vietnam also think positively of the US, despite the US fighting on the losing side.

I honestly don't know much about Puerto Rico. The line from A Chorus Line's Nothing, that originally refers to San Juan, which Lea Salonga changed to Manila in this performance. But I do know they don't vote in US elections or pay income taxes despite being US citizens, and maybe it's like a colony that the US never lost. In an alternate history, maybe there was a bloody war for the independence of Puerto Rico that resulted in a million dead or injured, just like Angola.

You know the quote from Machiavelli, which I hope to prove wrong, but it begins,

It was the verdict of ancient writers that men afflict themselves in evil and weary themselves in the good, and that the same effects result from both of these passions. For whenever men are not obliged to fight from necessity, they fight from ambition; which is so powerful in human breasts, that it never leaves them no matter to what rank they rise.

I mention this also because of Greta reposting a video about the Balochistan conflict, which is also driven by a desire for independence.

Maybe I even created a survey about this, near the start of the Ukraine conflict. Basically, countries don't start out with everyone who wants to be in a new, different country all situated in the same area. There's at least some degree of mixing. In Iraq, the sectarian conflict led to people moving to different neighborhoods, I think; there was never any plan to actually make two countries (or three, with the Kurds) out of Iraq, but the conflict did create or exaggerate physical differences in clustering that weren't there before the invasion.

So, if Balochistan did become a new country, like South Sudan did through a referendum (one difference being that support for independence is much lower in Balochistan than it was in South Sudan, lower even than Quebec), what about all the people who currently live in that area who don't want to be a part of that country? At some point, people just have to get along with each other. This is why Russia avoided fighting with Ukraine for eight long years.

Greta ended by saying, "The people in power do not act unless we compel them to."

The poll that Greta did not make:

Poll: You, as one human, are X% of the population who has Y% of the income or wealth. How responsible are you for the problems you see in the world and society?
Less than X% and Y%
Between X% and Y%
More than X% and Y%

"unrelated to Greta posting on Instagram, the video "How Your Parents Ruined Driving" which I didn't watch made me think up a poll. If Reddit polls were working I think I would have posted it myself. Instead, I am trying to get someone else to make it as a poll, and I think Pokimane would not post it, but I don't want to make another weblog post. So I am suggesting that Greta make this poll, which came from thinking about how people don't want to acknowledge their responsibility for shared problems like the vehicle size arms race, and would tend to just blame rich people for all problems"

Another, unrelated poll:

Hypothetical situation or poll:
You wake up in a room with two doors. If you leave through the left door, everyone of your gender except you, age 10~50, becomes 20% uglier. Right door, they become 20% more attractive. The genie also gives you $1m because it heard that you're poor.

And more polls which I may or may not have posted here before:

Poll: Does a neutron star make mistakes?
(Being human = dealing with mistakes and trying to mitigate them)

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

Poll: Which of these statements is more accurate?
The Earth is huge
The Earth is tiny

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

Poll: Is there a widely-known method that developing countries can use to prevent wealth from accumulating to a small number of people, without heavy taxes on capitalists or making capitalism illegal?

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

Poll: "Is there proof that bad people go unpunished?"

Topic: https://old.reddit.com/r/SeriousConversation/comments/1j41a4e/how_do_atheists_accept_the_idea_that_bad_people/

"Why does it matter if bad people go unpunished if I am not one of those bad people and I don't know anyone who is?" Reasoning: "if bad people weren't punished, I would be bad." Basis for reasoning: lack of awareness of the knowledge or performance penalties for being bad, aka 'conscience'. Reason for lack of awareness: maybe never done something bad, and suffered the consequence of remembering the bad thing.

Example: forcefully taking my older sister's tricyle, and not feeling happy for having taken it and used it, when I was like 5 years old or something.

Secondary reasoning: "it is important not to be stupid, or not to make stupid choices. If being bad is rewarded, then being good is stupid. It is important for the choice of being good to be a smart choice, even if it relies on belief and it can't be proven to be the smart choice." What I said to my oldest sister in 2012, that religion allows people to think that they are being selfish.

Poll: "Do you think a typical person in your country benefits more from thinking that committing a crime is likely to lead to punishment, or thinking that it won't lead to punishment?"

Poll: "Do you think a typical person in your country benefits more from thinking that committing a serious crime is likely to lead to punishment, or thinking it won't?"

Poll: "How many people per year being scammed out of $30k would it take for scams to become a national conversation?" 1000, 20k, 100k, 500k, 2m, 10m, 50m

I had sort of also wanted to link this video, comparing the actions of these lions to the US's bullying of Venezuela and Cuba: [9.3m views, 10 Mar 2026, ending with cubs lined up]Older lion cubs teach "kids" not to bite Dad - YouTube

I like how all three of the young cubs line up, one behind the other, at one point in the video. For some reason, it was where the 2nd and 3rd cubs wanted to position themselves.

Greta's video is about an unimportant problem. It may seem like leaders like the US's president, or the leaders of the nuclear weapons states of western Europe which are friendly with the US, are doing a harmful thing, but it is not that harmful for people to be reminded of their unhealthy addiction to fossil fuels. On other important issues, leaders are neither being harmful nor helpful, because they don't know what to do. The responses to these polls would make that clear. Greta herself is a leader, and she is not doing anything to fix important problems, either.

At 00:00 GMT (coincidentally, as I didn't check the time before doing so), I did a Google search for, "Without criticizing the story Greta posted or reposted about Cuba, if Greta posts any Stories on Instagram in the next 72 hours, it means Imane doesn't like me". This was before my Internet stopped working for a while. I have, quite clearly, criticized the video that Greta made (which had not yet showed up on Picuki even though the 1-minute Story of the first minute of the video was visible), but this was sort of just as something to say along with the fact that I didn't check the status light on my router.