The reader may recall that in Update 23 Jun 2026, 22:57, I copied a comment that ended with a paragraph about ganking, whether it was a problem that needed to be fixed, and what the solution might or might not look like.
So it seemed I would want to say something about the video, but my plan is not to say anything to anyone, so I wasn't sure if I should continue watching it. I'm explaining this to show why I have made this post, which is about Demi Rose. Pausing the video meant that my mind was not distracted, and this is why I have things to say that relate to Demi Rose.
I'm not afraid to say that ganking killed Aion, even though I didn't really do any PvE content in the game past around lvl 32, when I started to PvP. There was a dungeon that had a female boss at the end, meant for players around lvl 35, and I remember commenting on a thread that I had never "met her" (instead of saying that I had never killed her). Many people play games exclusively for PvP contents, even if it happens to be a game like Age of Empires II that also has over a dozen high-quality solo campaigns based in history. It's reasonable that people would quit Aion because the PvP was bad due to ganking, and then later because there was no PvP as the solution that the developers put in place to solve ganking.
But I wanted to copy a post that I made on the WoW forums, because of the opening quote. It turns out I wrote a lot of different PvP posts:
find ~/text/2006-2008/wow -type f -printf "%T@ a %8s %Td %Tb %TY %TH:%TM %p\n"|sort -n|cut -f 3- -d " "
9948 16 Apr 2006 20:43 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP Rank~ 9948 16 Apr 2006 20:57 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP Rank 6347 16 Apr 2006 21:57 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP Rank 2~ 6347 16 Apr 2006 23:32 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP Rank 2 481 04 Jun 2006 20:43 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/thoughts on DKP system 2730 10 Jun 2006 14:22 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Warrior concept.txt~ 2875 10 Jun 2006 14:53 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Warrior concept critique.txt 6538 25 Jun 2006 11:01 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/lemme kite things to cities on beta.txt~ 6547 25 Jun 2006 11:03 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/lemme kite things to cities on beta.txt 610 03 Jul 2006 19:58 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/emotes.txt~ 718 03 Jul 2006 20:20 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/emotes mage.txt~ 3777 07 Jul 2006 00:47 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/city raids.txt~ 3838 07 Jul 2006 00:59 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/city raids.txt 5711 22 Jul 2006 18:41 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP changes 22 July.txt~ 5253 23 Jul 2006 09:28 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP changes 22 July.txt 42 24 Jul 2006 16:34 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/competition.txt 383 24 Jul 2006 17:14 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/DKP thoughts 1.txt~ 416 24 Jul 2006 17:14 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/DKP thoughts 1.txt 27 25 Jul 2006 14:46 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/bounty system.txt~ 81 26 Jul 2006 03:14 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/quotes.txt~ 341 26 Jul 2006 21:42 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/pvp thoughts 26 Jul 6620 27 Jul 2006 12:07 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Kazzak in SW.txt~ 6622 27 Jul 2006 15:05 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Kazzak in SW.txt 3541 27 Jul 2006 15:15 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/token system.txt~ 3547 27 Jul 2006 15:27 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/token system.txt 194 31 Jul 2006 13:36 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/compiled pvp changes.txt~ 11390 31 Jul 2006 14:43 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/compiled pvp changes.txt 356 01 Aug 2006 19:48 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/forum notes 1 Aug.txt~ 638 02 Aug 2006 19:27 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/pvp thoughts 2 Aug.txt~ 80 02 Aug 2006 19:28 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/quotes.txt 3410 02 Aug 2006 20:30 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/USE THIS ONE.txt~ 1557 04 Aug 2006 02:16 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/unstupid notes, changes 3 Aug.txt~ 1148 04 Aug 2006 19:03 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/wtf SN post gone.txt~ 15851 06 Aug 2006 23:08 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/unstupid version of USE THIS ONE.txt~ 15831 06 Aug 2006 23:19 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/unstupid version of USE THIS ONE.txt 15861 07 Aug 2006 14:54 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP vers 7 Aug.txt~ 15870 07 Aug 2006 14:56 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP vers 7 Aug.txt 747 07 Aug 2006 22:04 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/wtf SN post gone.txt 16220 08 Aug 2006 18:13 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP vers 8 Aug.txt~ 656 08 Aug 2006 22:10 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/other suggestions 8 Aug.txt~ 692 08 Aug 2006 22:43 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/other suggestions 8 Aug.txt 498 09 Aug 2006 23:59 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/emo PS 9 Aug PvP post.txt 16219 10 Aug 2006 10:53 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP vers 8 Aug.txt 13914 11 Aug 2006 18:35 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP vers 11 Aug.txt~ 14048 11 Aug 2006 22:49 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP vers 11 Aug.txt 10722 12 Aug 2006 13:38 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/post BC ann 11 Aug.txt~ 10744 12 Aug 2006 20:35 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/post BC ann 11 Aug.txt 10603 14 Aug 2006 23:36 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/post BC ann 14 Aug.txt~ 10646 15 Aug 2006 02:57 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/post BC ann 14 Aug.txt 1248 15 Aug 2006 13:10 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/blood of innocents 15 Aug.txt~ 1612 15 Aug 2006 13:25 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/blood of innocents 15 Aug.txt 11026 15 Aug 2006 21:15 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/post BC ann 15 Aug.txt~ 11025 15 Aug 2006 21:29 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/post BC ann 15 Aug.txt 93 18 Aug 2006 05:35 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/friends.txt 34 18 Aug 2006 05:44 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Chinese lessons 18 Aug.txt~ 56 18 Aug 2006 21:09 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Chinese lessons 18 Aug.txt 0 22 Aug 2006 11:46 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/frostbite bug 22 Aug.txt~ 364 22 Aug 2006 11:49 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/frostbite bug 22 Aug.txt 3238 22 Aug 2006 17:40 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/ranks skill 19 Aug.txt~ 3236 22 Aug 2006 17:41 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/ranks skill 19 Aug.txt 4708 24 Aug 2006 02:14 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/pvp suggestion 23 Aug.txt~ 4980 24 Aug 2006 03:16 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/pvp suggestion 23 Aug.txt 5171 25 Aug 2006 14:06 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/pvp suggestion 25 Aug.txt~ 5169 25 Aug 2006 14:16 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/pvp suggestion 25 Aug.txt 71 27 Aug 2006 01:59 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Demonic.txt 41 27 Aug 2006 20:55 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/new servers.txt 605 28 Aug 2006 15:47 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/invisible.txt 2803 29 Aug 2006 00:54 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Divinity II dishonor.txt~ 2804 29 Aug 2006 01:04 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Divinity II dishonor.txt 5500 16 Sep 2006 22:42 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Klinge.txt 820 12 Oct 2006 00:19 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/healing.txt 430080 28 Oct 2006 11:59 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Item Balancer 3.0.xls 3729 10 Nov 2006 17:15 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Battlemasters.txt~ 3738 10 Nov 2006 17:44 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Battlemasters.txt 925 17 Nov 2006 16:06 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PUG discussion.txt 1664 21 Nov 2006 01:49 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Water Elemental.txt~ 1663 21 Nov 2006 01:51 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Water Elemental.txt 2119 26 Nov 2006 04:53 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/healer gear.txt 666 29 Nov 2006 20:25 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/honor system.txt~ 665 29 Nov 2006 20:25 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/honor system.txt 3057 10 Dec 2006 20:24 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP rewards.txt~ 3144 10 Dec 2006 21:50 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/PvP rewards.txt 5559 13 Dec 2006 08:37 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Tae's Vision of PvP.txt~ 5551 14 Dec 2006 10:32 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Tae's Vision of PvP.txt 3563 24 Dec 2006 09:16 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/hybrids.txt 44420 25 Dec 2006 08:47 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/hybrid data.ods 1841 25 Dec 2006 10:47 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/hybrid calcs.txt 6909 27 Dec 2006 00:09 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/next honor system 26 Dec.txt 2189 01 Jan 2007 01:32 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/BG reward quests 26 Dec.txt 3019 10 Jan 2007 20:17 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/priests spec 10 Jan.txt 836 12 Jan 2007 18:55 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/holy priest 41 pt.txt~ 980 12 Jan 2007 19:06 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/holy priest 41 pt 12 Jan.txt 718 12 Jan 2007 21:21 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/emotes mage.txt 1298 13 Jan 2007 01:34 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/honor system update 13 Jan.txt~ 65 13 Jan 2007 02:00 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Yashe III music.txt~ 1351 13 Jan 2007 11:48 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/honor system update 13 Jan.txt 1787 15 Jan 2007 03:33 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/priest 41 pt holy 14 Jan.txt 21009 20 Jan 2007 04:15 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/ranks 31 Dec.txt~ 2664 23 Jan 2007 12:26 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/online identities.txt 21026 23 Jan 2007 20:25 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/ranks 31 Dec.txt 9693 23 Jan 2007 20:36 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/hybrids 25 Dec.txt~ 9698 23 Jan 2007 20:40 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/hybrids 25 Dec.txt 8602 24 Jan 2007 16:55 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/hybrid itemization 24 Jan.txt~ 8594 24 Jan 2007 16:56 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/hybrid itemization 24 Jan.txt 7802 29 Jan 2007 22:12 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/ranks in chinese 29 Jan.txt 1950 17 Feb 2007 13:43 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/dmg and healing algorithm 17 Feb.txt~ 1951 17 Feb 2007 13:45 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/dmg and healing algorithm 17 Feb.txt 2180 18 Feb 2007 14:05 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/conflict in wow 18 Feb.txt 35166 08 Apr 2007 04:58 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Scaling_Comparison.ods 1114 21 Apr 2007 05:41 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/world of gearcraft 21 Apr.txt~ 1169 21 Apr 2007 05:42 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/world of gearcraft 21 Apr.txt 5162 22 Apr 2007 19:19 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/plight of the shaman 22 Apr.txt~ 5162 22 Apr 2007 19:20 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/plight of the shaman 22 Apr.txt 8582 02 May 2007 11:05 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/risk vs reward 25 Apr.txt~ 8702 04 May 2007 07:42 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/risk vs reward 25 Apr.txt 5378 21 May 2007 09:58 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/TBC endgame analysis 21 May.txt~ 5604 21 May 2007 10:04 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/TBC endgame analysis 21 May.txt 68608 30 May 2007 09:09 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Scaling_Comparison_2.xls 5256 06 Jun 2007 13:52 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/to Paul Barnett 6 Jun.txt~ 5256 06 Jun 2007 13:52 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/to Paul Barnett 6 Jun.txt 2643 10 Jun 2007 13:39 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/legend of the shaman ~12 May.txt 765 10 Jul 2007 15:20 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Yashe III, Yukano, etc music.txt~ 793 21 Aug 2007 01:35 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Yashe III, Yukano, etc music.txt 18944 16 Oct 2007 01:58 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Rating.xls 133632 23 Feb 2008 17:55 /home/misaki/text/2006-2008/wow/Scaling_Comparison_2_rev_5.xls
The scaling comparison xls files at the end are by Muphrid, determining the spellpower needed to double various spells based on their coefficient and base damage or healing. The first files, from 16 Apr 2006, must have been just after I got my first laptop and saved documents that were stored in my email as drafts. I thought I'd copy the first one, 'PvP Rank':
[quote] [i]For Mei, who complained that PvP rank didn't do anything . . . ~.~[/i]
[i][b]HOW[/b][/i] do we rank up? For most of us, certainly those who manage to reach the highest ranks, it is by farming BGs—either solo and ungrouped for maximum honor per kill, or with a group of similarly determined and well-geared players for minimum time to finish a match. I don't know [i]anyone[/i] who reached HWL/GM by, say, playing BGs for fun, raiding towns and killing opposite faction city bosses, or hunting down griefers. That's the problem with the honor system, because things should be exactly the opposite.
So why aren't BGs fun? Already mentioned is the penalty for kills when grouped that discourages grouping and teamwork, and the ease with which practiced teams of epic-equipped hardcore PvPers roll PUG after PUG; both of these issues, as well as more obvious problems like the fishing exploit and win-trading, are addressed in the thread "PUG rolling and other common BG exploits" at [b]http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?ForumName=wow-pvp&ThreadID=464141[/b]. The lack of significant world PvP can be attributed to several factors [li]too much honor from BGs, none from world PvP [li]DHKs killed off town raids [li]the emphasis on maximum honor per week, since the honor system only rewards you for [i]advancing[/i] in rank
BG honor farming and exploiting is, as stated, addressed in another thread. The fact that world PvP doesn't yield any honor is partly addressed by the "DR in raids" idea at same, and partly by the thread "Most Wanted List or, how to fix DHKs" at [b]http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?ForumName=wow-pvp&ThreadID=450331[/b] . . . which is about rewarding players who hunt down gankers with honor and, incidentally, how to fix DHKs and bring back town raids. The absense of benefits for simply maintaining your rank is the topic of the next section—
[i][b]WHY[/b][/i] PvP at all? This is a question many players are beginning to ask themselves for a couple different reasons. Hardcore players are complaining that with the new AQ loot, PvP epics just don't measure up. This will eventually be solved by upgrading the rewards at the expense of gear balance on future servers, but in the meantime, players who already hit GM/HWL have no reason to PvP at all and their rank is dropping in like freefall; they'll have to grind the ladder all over again with nothing to show that they've done it all before. Casual players, on the other hand, are complaining that the system offers absolutely no kind of progressive upgrades for those with limited playtime; and this is [i]not[/i] something likely to be solved by future reward upgrades.
These problems aren't new. Mass protests forced the devs, way back when the honor system was released, to remove the `rank maintenance' requirement for the use of PvP rewards; and the honor system has been broken ever since. Something needs to change.
[b]This is one way to do it:[/b]
Players would receive Honor Reward Points (ty Jacquelyn) based on their weekly PvP `rating' (the number that determines your rank) and their faction's PvP activity level. These HRP could, furthermore, be bought from and sold to the player's faction, but at a loss for the player. [i]([b]Example:[/b] 100 HRP could be exchanged for 70s could be exchanged for 30 HRP; the `70s' would be the stable price if the rate is varied so that net HRP flow is zero. This means that gold would be REMOVED from the economy, combating inflation!—But I digress...)[/i]
Each rank would grant access to [b]multiple tiers of PvP rewards[/b] which could be purchased with HRP (tangent: for the interface, could use a little icon that says, simply, `HRP', with mouseover of Honor Reward Points); players would, when compared to the current system, benefit from increased [i]vertical[/i], not [i]horizontal[/i], gear progression. So all this works against players with too much money being able to trivially buy epics on par with the best PvE drops in the game, because 1) gold to HRP exchanges would be heavily taxed 2) lazy players often suck at PvP and would never be able to rank up to gain access to these items in the first place. Which ties into the next section, but first there are some details that haven't been explored yet: [li]newly introduced, high-end rewards would be listed as "in short supply" and would be marked up in price significantly until strategies for bosses that drop corresponding PvE gear are developed [li]HRP could also be used to buy premium PvP consumables: potions, trinkets, and ammo that might only be usable in BGs, as well as noncombat `mascots' (for HWL/GM only?) and PvP-specific enchants [li]won't be implemented by the time the expansion hits, so be ready for some major complaining then [li][b]nominated for deletion:[/b] rewards would not be purchased like normal items, but would be awarded via questlines for each equipment slot. Upon reaching a certain rank, the player would be `inserted' into the corresponding reward questline such that the available quest is one that supplies them with the most powerful item they'd be able to use: a lvl 30 blue would hardly be appropriate for a player who's 60. So no pre-60 epics in this system (and a single path of advancement for 60-70), epics are really only for lvl 60+; for anyone under 60, epics are just twink gear. Rewards would still require HRP to purchase; the interface is just different. This achieves INFORMATION HIDING, that is, not spoiling the lvl 15 player's gameplay by showing her an item level 82 tier 3 PvP epic. It would also prevent players from [i]skipping[/i] the lower reward tiers, that is going directly to the tier-5 artifacts.
If the devs ever read this thread and agree with its ideas, our PvP gear situation should be good to go . . . but equipment isn't everything, and
[i][b]SO WHAT[/b][/i] if you find out this guy you've been tracking down is a HWL/GM? Right now, the answer is, really, Oh that guy must have no life. What it [i]should[/i] be is, omg Im dead ~_~. So this is pretty much a consequence of how difficult it is to rank up: the [i]variability of rank with skill[/i]. It's kind of hard to analyse right now how to do this because of the like emergent, synergistic effects of possible changes, but here's an attempt . . .
[b](emergent effect)[/b] One of the ideas in the thread "PvP issue: BGs are broken" is a weighting system. High-ranked players would have more weight; this means that their team would, on average, be understrength. Moreso if these players group together to form a like small, dense depleted uranium tank round. The point being, players with skill would still perform awesomely under these conditions; but players who suck would, well, would suck . . . and wouldn't rank up much further. The ones who made it to the top [i]would[/i] be the best.
[b](emergent effect)[/b] The bounty system from the MWL thread would reward skilled bounty hunters with large amounts of honor, propelling them to the higher ranks, although it is difficult to tell how significant this would be when compared to probably-greater-honor-flow from BGs.
[b](emergent effect)[/b] ...although not re quite the same topic as the previous two emergent effects. Increased difficulty in ranking up is the same thing as saying it's harder to get CP (honor) at a higher rank, which is the same thing as saying that hardcore players would have to demonstrate [i]a higher level of skill to get their Honor Reward Points[/i], even if they're spending it on the same stuff as casuals. This is fair because they're getting [i]more[/i] HRP and have a greater selection of rewards to spend their HRP on.
[b](PvP rank idea! new! btw I think this post could benefit from some downsizing, it is not elegantly simple. Need to switch [i]voice registers[/i])[/b] Add a new variable to rank and HRP calculation: your faction's overall performance in BGs and world PvP! Let `Pf' equal this performance; Pf is calculated by combining your faction's win/loss stats in BGs that week with your faction's city boss death count when compared to the opposite faction. (This would give players an incentive to attack and defend cities, as well as give e.g. Horde a handicap in BGs (high ranked) if Horde is consistently winning.) Pf is used to calculate the total [i]honor rating point pool[/i] for your faction that week. So if your faction is doing well, you are more likely to rank up, regardless of how you did compared to other players from your faction. Your weekly `rating' score is calculated from this pool and averaged into your current rating (on the honor page, [b]http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/pvp/index.html[/b]) to get your [i]new[/i] rating. But before that is done, your HRP for that week is calculated by combining that weekly honor rating with a scaling factor for the competitiveness of your faction's honor rankings. So what this would mean is, 1) you'd get more HRP for PvPing harder 2) you'd rank up for PvPing harder 3) you wouldn't rank up, but you would get more HRP (and therefore more PvP rewards!) if [i]everyone[/i] is PvPing harder 4) you'd get more honor rating points, and therefore higher rank and more HRP, if your faction tends to win in BGs or is consistently razing the other faction's cities.
[b](world pvp idea that just happens to fit into the focus of this thread, with possible emergent effects)[/b] Drastically increase the honor yield from killing high-ranked players so that they are constantly being targeted. Report these same players on WorldDefense whenever they go raiding: "Crossroads is under attack by Grand Marshall Pallywinlol!" These players could start a war all by themselves! It's just a matter of escalation and friendly and opposing force expectations. Bring back world PvP! . . . although that's really the focus of [i]another[/i] thread, not this one =P
[b]Fix the honor system now!!
/sign[/b] [/quote]
I'm not reading this, but glancing at the last paragraph, I note that Aion had a much higher difference in rewards between ranks than WoW. In WoW, killing someone at the highest rank was worth about twice as much as killing someone at the lowest rank. In Aion, lowest rank was worth 120 points, while highest was worth over 9000 points. I PvPed up to Grade 4 Soldier, at which point I was worth 645 points, and then used some items to get Grade 3, where I was worth 903 points, but I didn't really PvP at that rank. I actually might never have died after getting to that rank. See the suggestions I posted on the forums for Aion, 관심 개발자 – Problems with solo PvP and PvE in Western Market.
It just shows how there was a game designer who thought that having a 10x+ disparity in point rewards between players was a reasonable idea. That my suggestion in 2006, to "Drastically increase the honor yield from killing high-ranked players so that they are constantly being targeted", wasn't crazy. And Aion also showed that, if rewards are high for killing high-ranked players, then they will in fact be targeted. I had a bit of an argument with a high-ranked player, when I was playing in 2010, due to them not participating in a fortress siege which had the potential to benefit all players from the faction. They didn't want to lose rank from being killed. (I appreciated this player taking the time to justify their actions to me, a random player who was too low to ever do the same content as this player, and this conversation and their name might be somewhere in my 4000 screenshots.)
The argument I had been thinking of, though, was 'ranks 31 Dec.txt'. I only remember the title, and am not reading any more of it:
Bringing the "WAR" back to Warcraft (revised 19 Jan)
[i]The simplest explanation for the death of world PvP in WoW is PvE raids...[/i]
It has always been the intention of the folks working at Blizzard to make this game as fun as possible, for as many people as possible. But there are certain realities that must be observed in the continual development of an MMO... one, if not the, most important problems is supplying content at the rate at which players can devour it. This has so far proved to be, and probably will always be a problem.
We agree that the game, as it came out, was fantastic. But this was the result of several years of development, coding, quest-writing. All too soon the majority of players were lvl 60, and bored, with nothing to do but grief lowbies and pick fights with each other... which for some people wasn't so bad =P But progress had been halted, and for an MMO, stagnation means death.
The first Ragnaros kill. Chaos reigned as casters QQ'd about the coming doom of all non-melee classes that would happen as melee got more and more powerful and casters, didn't.
Ragnaros was put on farm status, and with BWL nearing completion, the honor system and battlegrounds were released.
A quick examination of the honor rewards reveals something interesting: [i]the sole purpose of the honor system was to maintain gear parity between those who cared about raiding, and those who didn't[/i]. Just before the honor system was released, the R14 rewards were bumped up from run-of-the-mill iLvl 65 epics to being on par with drops from Rag (iLvl 78), the toughest boss to exist at the time. Perhaps Bliz realized then the grave mistake they had made with the jump in item quality from standard MC epics to Rag's loot (now on farm status)... after all it was their first raid instance with all sorts of incompleteness, even a legendary neck item that they'd forgotten to take out of the loot tables and were only reminded of when it dropped for someone. In any case it was too late; the only thing to do was press on and give BWL even [i]better[/i] epics so players would have a reason to even go there.
*cough* so PvP rewards only exist to balance PvE rewards, but the target item quality is inevitably going to change over time. [i]Unlike ranks, the arena system is specifically designed to scale with raid instances, giving better and better rewards as more difficult raid encounters are released.[/i] They are Blizzard's answer to gear inequality from PvE, and they are not going away.
The arenas aren't really our idea of PvP. But we see that they are necessary, from a gear standpoint (yuck). With a proper understanding of why things are the way they are, we can move on to what can be done within this framework.
[i][b]The solution, part 1: easily implemented[/b][/i]
Players don't have enough reason to PvP outside of BGs. In TBC, that will just become, players don't have enough reason to PvP outside of BGs or away from a few, forlorn "world PvP objectives". This and several related problems, "players aren't able to have fun PvPing if they haven't got the best gear" and "players are not able to affect the gameworld enough", can be solved by a body of ideas and suggestions mostly revolving around BRINGING BACK RANKS and fixing BGs.
1) finish the matching system. Suggestion: instead of matching based on gear in the bank, just "lock" items that are equipable and banked so players can't take them out. This lets players PvP in less than their best for fun and competition. Can you say, nekkid bracket? =o
2) make killing a faction leader cause their city to ASPLODE into smoke and flames for an hour or two! NPCs are still functional, but maybe with different conversation texts. "Hallo, I am Kreeg the apple seller and OH GODS DID YOU SEE THAT GUY RUN PAST SCREAMING AND COVERED IN FLAMES!?" Also make it give your entire faction a buff for 24 hours that increases honor and contribution point gains by 10%.
3) convert BG rewards into a quest-based system. An example of how it might be done has been posted below. Advantages of the system are that it gives players a reason to win instead of just "losing quickly", forces them to participate to get the rewards instead of just going afk, doesn't compete with rank-based rewards and consumables (see below), makes getting the epic BG rewards truly difficult instead of just more of the same grind, and operates in the same way as PvE blue-reward quests so players don't get lured into the habit of thinking of PvP rewards as an easy, grindable, no-effort alternative to dungeon crawling and questing.
4) remove the ability to multi-queue for BGs. Alliance "pay" for queueing all BGs when they join any one of them, and this makes it difficult to justify queueing from the physical BG entrance where we can duel or even raid the other faction's BG zonein.
[i][b]The solution, part 2: harder to implement[/b][/i]
What is power? [ul][i]"Those who used the Nine Rings became mighty in their day, kings, sorcerers, and warriors of old. They obtained glory and great wealth, yet it turned to their undoing. They had, as it seemed, unending life, yet life became unendurable to them. They could walk, if they would, unseen by all eyes in this world beneath the sun, and they could see things in worlds invisible to mortal men; but too often they beheld only the phantoms and delusions of Sauron. And one by one, sooner or later, according to their native strength and to the good or evil of their wills in the beginning, they fell under the thralldom of the ring that they bore and of the domination of the One which was Sauron's. And they became forever invisible save to him that wore the Ruling Ring, and they entered into the realm of shadows. The Nazgûl were they, the Ringwraiths, the Enemy's most terrible servants; darkness went with them, and they cried with the voices of death."[/i][/ul] In WoW, there are none with power such as this. We have overpowered... from the perspective of the less-well-geared. We have "normal" for raiders, for whom everyone else is a nub with "trash" gear. The problem is that [i]everyone is expected to compete on the same level[/i].
What we need is a way to categorize those with great power and ability, from those without...
A rank system may be the answer. However, while the old system was mostly a way of distributing rewards, this one would be the means to define and recognize the existence of power in this game, with PvP rewards no more than a cool extra for time and effort spent.
Key features of such a system: [ul][li]non-decaying ranks [li]rank determined by quality of PvP, not playtime [li]not all opponents yield honor [li]reduced number of titles to ease recognition [li]not confined to BGs [/ul] First, battlegrounds and what can be got from them. As mentioned above, the matching system must be completed before this could work. But another change is needed... [i]some actions would affect rank, and some would only award honor tokens[/i]. Borrowing from the past, actions that affect rank could award "honor", while those that lead to tokens could award "contribution points". Fighting, both in and out of BGs, would award honor. Completing BG objectives and world PvP objectives would award CP. While it is necessary to reward the completion of BG objectives so games have any kind of point instead of just mindless killing, they're not the same thing as skill or power, which is what rank represents. Contribution points could be spent on a wide variety of consumables for players with little or no rank (or excess CP), or a SMALL selection of slotted items for players of higher rank. These rewards cannot intersect with arena rewards! This is because while arena rewards can be updated every season, PvP rewards cannot be regularly updated and must be of relatively static quality for any given rank and level, regardless of future raid instances which raise the level of "best" gear. If each title corresponded to several ranks, an item might require "<title> (Rank X)"... but this is just a suggestion.
Second, the determination of ranks. This is really complicated. The mechanics must ensure a reasonable rank distribution, correlate well with gear and skill, not be exploitable or plain broken, and must encourage instead of discourage world PvP and general enjoyment of the game. Tho the most important thing to remember is: [i][b]all competition is with the other faction, not your own[/b][/i]. IF YOU DON'T LIKE MATH, STOP READING NOW.
Killing someone of equal or [i]higher[/i] rank awards honor.
Dying to someone of equal or [i]lower[/i] rank awards dishonor, or just causes you to "lose honor".
Both of these effects are SHARED IN GROUPS (please read that again) yes SHARED IN GROUPS which means that warriors won't get unfairly penalized for always charging in and dying from lack of heals, mages won't get unfairly penalized because they're so squishy and die all the time, healers won't get unfairly penalized because they're always the first ones to get targeted, support classes won't get penalized because their dps is low, hunters won't unfairly benefit from their range (those last two concerns actually not being silly), etc etc. There is also a mechanism to modify dishonor based on unfair odds, see below.
The details of how much honor and dishonor to award in 1v1 situations is the key to balancing the rank distribution and stuffs like that (as well as confidence in the rank system in defining who you can be "expected" to kill, but so much is obvious enough that I won't get into it; this post is already long enough >.<). So! The tuning variables are as follows: [ul][li]the maximum rank difference that players can be expected to compete at. Ignoring for now SOCIAL implications, the higher the allowable difference is the more the rank distribution can expand. This effect also works to reduce or prevent gaps in the rank distribution. [li]gear inequality, the difference between "average" gear and raid gear. As well as skill inequality (which however isn't configurable...), the higher this is the more the rank distribution can expand. [li]the difference between honor for a kill and dishonor for dying at a certain rank. This is positive for the lowest ranks (less penalty for dying) and negative for the higher ranks. The bigger the difference the more the rank distribution contracts, but it also has the much more important effect of defining how fast the rank distribution as a whole can evolve... [/ul] If the amount of honor for killing a same-ranked opponent is a linear function [i]ax + b[/i] with [i]a[/i] and [i]b[/i] greater than 0, then defining the amount of dishonor for dying to a same-ranked opponent as [i](a + c)x + b - d[/i] with [i]c[/i] greater than 0 and 0 < [i]d[/i] < [i]b[/i] causes the rank distribution as a whole to move upwards when ranks are generally low, and stabilizes the rank distribution once players start reaching the highest ranks. If this isn't done it would be very difficult for players to get past the lowest ranks. o.0
More math! And another copy/paste from previous posts hehe...
[i]The only problem with this is it would require a lot of calculations... from what I understand, the reason diminishing returns on HKs can't be done in real-time is that it involves large numbers of lists or other data types and the number of procedures required scales up too quickly; the number of calculations implied by this solution may or may not present difficulties of the same magnitude. Any programming types have an answer? [/i][*NOTE: if the load is too great, a simplified system could be used tho at the cost of purity of the meaing of ranks :/][i] Anyway here is the system, in messy form:[/i]
***system of dishonor modification based on threat lists*** "attention" is how much an opponent could reasonably be focusing on you and/or contributing to your death. player-based threat lists were referenced by Blizzard when describing how rep-based tagging worked in BGs; the exact mechanics of these threat lists are unknown, such as how they relate to going out of combat and how they relate to the idea used by Blizzard when describing the honor system of HKs basing honor off proportional damage done by everything "in the past minute" or so. I never did learn whether vanishing cleared a rogue's contribution to damage... yeah. so when a player dies, their threat list is checked. Every player (NOT mob; mobs including guards soak up part of an HK based on damage done without awarding dishonor for their share of damage) on the list is then checked to see how much "attention" they were paying to the killed player:
1/(sum of threats on checked player's threat list, modded for level/rank) = attention total attention = sum of individual attentions over the killed player's threat list = 1 if 1v1 situation dishonor = 1/attention * (total honor awarded to others for that death) * (dishonor for a "standard death" vs a same-ranked opponent)/(honor awarded for a "standard kill" vs a same-ranked opponent)
Maybe (1/attention)^0.5 or similar. Changing less...
"Total honor awarded to others on death" accounts for the fact that some of the players who contributed to the killed player's death may not have gotten any honor because their rank was too high, as well as Diminishing Returns.
This dishonor is then shared with teammates. Everyone shares equally in dishonor... hmm, I guess this means that honor must be shared equally too (before DR) to avoid penalizing higher-ranked players in a mixed group... which means that if you're PvPing with a high-ranked player and killing low-ranked opponents, you'll get half the honor as if you were PvPing with a similarly low-ranked friend against the same opponent. (So for dishonor, it's not that "some players aren't getting any honor for killing you" so much that "everyone is getting reduced honor because of the group composition".) Gratz programming all that, Bliz. o.0
Ranks and titles could be awarded by third-party vigilante organizations for both factions. Old PvP titles would be retained as a selectable option. Old rewards would be bought the same way they are now, with honor tokens (from Contribution Points) obtained by running BGs, with no restriction on who can buy what. It might thus be best to rename the old PvP sets to be more in line with the fact that they are no longer exclusive; the idea is that the sets are for a "standard line unit" in that faction's armies. Grunt's leggings, Wizard's Chestpiece, etc... not tied to the old titles anymore.
This might mean removing the old epic rewards... it doesn't make sense for them to exist when similar-quality rewards are not available at lvls 70, 80, etc.
The new "rank" rewards, in contrast, would be dependent on titles or ranks earned from the third-party organizations, and would probably be purchased with gold, not honor tokens.
[b][i]Effects of the rank system[/i][/b] [ul][li]The idea that "it is always better to have gear, than to not have gear" would NO LONGER BE VALID. With gear quality as a transparent attribute, the prestige of any particular rank would be inversely proportional to the quality of your gear. Achieving a high rank with bad gear is much more impressive than achieving the same title with excellent gear, because it implies a high level of skill to compensate for the gear disadvantage. That, and the greater responsibilities of high-ranked players in grouped PvP, both outside and in BGs. Using the above model of honor and dishonor sharing in groups, having more high-ranked players on your team decreases the honor per kill for [i]everyone[/i] in the vicinity; these players also award more dishonor to your team when killed by high-ranked opponents. A low-ranked player, otoh, penalizes the team much less when killed, and thus has more freedom to e.g. suicide bomb in AV. [li]similar attitude change towards being high level. Since rank is a relative thing, it would be just as possible to gain rank and prestige at low levels as at high levels. This is twinking, except that non-twinks would not feel the intense pressure to compete that they do with the current system, because with this ranks system [i]non-twinks would not be penalized for being killed by a twink team[/i]. [li]more world PvP, obviously, since it would be as easy or easier for someone to gain honor via world PvP than by BGs where honor is shared, assuming that they have high skill and haven't yet "stabilized" at the appropriate rank. Even if they have, while there would be no reliable [i]net[/i] movement of rank, it's always fun to be able to interact with and affect other players. Anyone whom you could affect would be of similar or higher rank and therefore a respectable opponent, not some lowbie or "bluebie" that you could two-shot, so this kind of world PvP conflict would have gain potential and risk for ALL involved. So this is related to the idea of being able to affect the gameworld; the gameworld, in this case, being other players who are interested in PvP. (on a PvE server, flagging is not automatic so griefing would not be possible.) [li]the lack of broad rewards for rank, with most PvP rewards coming from alternative venues like the arena system, BG rewards, and the token-based part of the honor system, would actually be an advantage. It would mean that for once, something in this game is mostly about social rewards instead of material rewards. It would mean that carebear PvPers won't feel bad for killing someone, because the only thing they are depriving their victim of is a title, not gear. Titles are for fun, not anything to cry about when you can't get... unlike gear, for some people. So by only offering a few minor reward slots for rank, players would actually be able to have more fun when the system penalizes you for dying. Odd that, eh? [li]summarizing all the above: more opportunity and potential for fun for all players in the game, regardless of whether or not they've progressed to the latest raid instance and/or have been on a good enough arena team with good enough gear to win for long enough to buy a full set of epics. Decreased barriers to entry for having fun. This is good no matter which way you look at it. Blizzard, if you are reading this, you are almost certainly aware that the PvP potential of the current game is lackluster and uninspiring; if you don't do something to change that, and soon, your PvP playerbase will abandon you for Darkfall or a similar game. [/ul]
[b][i]Example BG rewards quest system[/i][/b]
Eliminate Marks of Honor. Replace them with Victory Tokens, which are only awarded when you win a BG and only when you have a BG reward quest for a blue item. The preform bracket (this is assuming the matching system has been completed) rewards Victory [i]Medallions[/i], which are used for [i]epic[/i] BG reward quests like The Unstoppable Force. Quests also require a certain number of insignias dropped by other players as a quest item, to prevent players from getting rewards for just sitting in the starting area the whole game.
[u]Example#1[/u]
[b]Armaments of the Silverwing[/b] (requires lvl 18) (PvP quest) -- [i]cannot be done in a non-BGs raid aka preform[/i] [ul][li]0/30 Outrider Insignia [li]0/5 Warsong Gulch Victory Token [/ul]Rewards:
You will be able to choose one of these rewards: [Lorekeeper's Staff][Outrunner's Bow] [Protector's Sword][Sentinel's Blade]
Gain: [ul][li]1750 experience [li]275 reputation with Silverwing Sentinels [li]275 reputation with Darnassus [/ul][u]Example#2[/u]
[b]Adornments of the Silverwing[/b] -- same as above quest but requires only 20 insignias and 3 victory tokens, and gives choice of caster ring/melee ring/agil neck/healer cloak.
[u]Example#3[/u]
[b]Stormpike Sage's Implements[/b] (requires lvl 60) (PvP RAID quest) -- [i]to be done in the AV "preform bracket" vs other preforms[/i] [ul][li]0/100 Frostwolf Grunt's Insignia [li]0/12 Alterac Valley Victory Medallion [/ul]Rewards:
You will be able to choose one of these rewards: [Lei of the Lifegiver][Therazane's Touch] [Tome of Arcane Domination][Tome of Fiery Arcana] [Tome of Shadow Force][Tome of the Ice Lord]
Gain: [ul][li]8700 experience [li]525 reputation with Stormpike [li]525 reputation with Ironforge [/ul]This means there should be THREE methods of joining a BG: the two that already exist, and a third one to go into the "preform" bracket which avoids all PUGers and awards the better kind of victory medallion when you win. This preform bracket is only necessary because of epic rewards, which are a legacy of the old honor system. Sorry. :/
(I saw and recognized the warning about complicated math, and I think the math is a bit better in one of the posts I made on Reddit about the topic.)
Anyway. In my first message to Demi Rose, I said that a photo was nice and linked to <redacted>.
I don't think it's true to say that I tried to get her to <redacted>. Although I did later on email her and say that she should <redacted>, I think this was mostly because I expected that I wouldn't be saying anything about her for a while.
Demi Rose was, at that point, the person who would be classified as the most attractive who <redacted>, based on her social media profiles. Although I would like to be able to say that Kate is attractive, and I might have published a screenshot of my desktop sometime in the past 14 years that showed the thumbnail of the photo of Kate's face that is there, she doesn't have a large social media following. She has or had an Instagram page, but she probably only had a few hundred followers there at most. I said to Sherine that she's pretty, but Sherine also never got a lot of followers based on her looks. Yoko Ono had a lot of followers, but she has said before that she is not exceptional in her appearance, and there is no reason to think that her followers result from her appearance.
To me, one of the important questions at that point in time, which might have been around 2015, was whether Sherine wanted me to die. I had said that she should <redacted> unless she wanted me to die, and I didn't know if she <redacted>. There was the danger that someone could think that I would think, "Demi Rose is more attractive than Sherine, so I will ignore what Sherine wants."
So, was me not actively trying to get Demi Rose to <redacted> a good reason for not to do so? I would say, of course it wasn't a good reason. But this is about, like, behavior that seems selfish. Demi Rose has stated that she likes the popular series, Love Island. As with many reality TV shows, this is about people developing attraction towards each other based on being forced to be in close proximity and so on. I believe it stands in contrast to Asian-style dramas which have a plot closely focused on the development of a relationship. In Japanese, 恋愛ドラマ. Like the 2007 drama Proposal Daisakusen, that won many awards. (Not actually listed in Category:日本の恋愛ドラマ, unlike the popular Hana yori Dango.)
So it seems possible that Demi Rose thought it would have been 'selfish' if she <redacted>. Like, I was definitely not trying to act in the way that I expect contestants on Love Island act. I said to Imane that I had never "rizzed" anyone up and I was not trying to "rizz" her up. I think it's accurate to say that I have also never flirted with anyone. Possibly the closest I have come to acting like I wanted someone to be interested in me was being silent.
Suppose that Sherine did want me to die, at the point in time when I first sent a message on Chirp Club to Demi Rose. Even if Sherine <redacted>, it didn't mean that she didn't want me to die. It could have just meant that she wanted to keep open the option of not wanting me to die. As anyone who understands logic knows, "If A, then B" is not the same as "If not A, then not B". If Sherine wanted me to die, did it mean that Demi Rose should not have <redacted>?
I was thinking of a question yesterday which seems it has some relevance here. As a purely hypothetical situation, I will excuse the fact that it's about money.
"There is $10 million sitting in the open, not owned by anyone. A thousand starving orphans ignore it, when they could take it and use it to buy food. How many years pass before you are comfortable with taking the money yourself?"
Money is just used as a shorthand here for 'something of value'. The question would be the same if it did not involve money, like if it was "a magic lamp that gave three wishes". It's just hard to imply that taking the valuable thing is bad unless the thing could help people who are suffering, and still hard unless it's many people who are suffering, and many valuable things are difficult to split between a large number of people. If it was a magic lamp, who would get the first wish out of three? If it's food, who would eat 5-year-old food, other than me?
Maybe a few weeks after I first sent a public message to Demi Rose, she commented about a photo she posted saying that it was as if she was going to the beach, as she was wearing swimwear. This suggested an awareness of possible dishonesty: the reason that she had put on swimwear. This post is about the possibility of perceived dishonesty: whether I thought it would have been best if Demi Rose had immediately <redacted>.
I have only been in one relationship, with Mei, and it might have ended before I told her that I was male. If I have another relationship in my life, I would like to be able to say that I helped that person. One of the reasons I was sad that the developers of World of Warcraft and Aion did not use my suggestions (other than maybe the minor suggestion I made in ~2007, to add an invisibility effect to WoW similar to the one in Lord of the Rings, which they did) was that it meant I had not helped Mei. She didn't let me send her any gifts, like the earrings for her sister, or the painting. Even in games, she didn't tell me her character in Aion, and in WoW I was never high enough level to help her. I was responsible once for her flying to Booty Bay where I was PvPing, even though she knew that she would get killed by guards and lose durability, which she would have to spend money to repair. (She also didn't equip cheaper gear to make the repair costs lower, at the expense of lower combat effectiveness.)
When it comes to judging other people's behavior, I think a lot of the time it's about whether that person has acted in a way that others feel should be emulated. In the US, this means whether someone acts in a way that benefits themselves: judging a female for being with a male who <redacted>, or judging a male for being with a female who does not seem attractive. Some judgements are made based on patterns of behavior where it's expected that a person does not benefit, but whether this is true may depend on information that only this person has.
I would say that anyone, no matter who they are, has only a low chance of benefiting from trying to be in a relationship with me, but time is valuable for everyone, and at least I want other people to be happy.
Should the English language return to referring to countries with the pronouns she and her instead of 'it', for the explicit purpose of discouraging fighting between countries?
Yes No, fighting is fine No, sexist reasoning No, assumes gender
References: ...began launching additional strikes against Iran to continue degrading its ability to attack civilian mariners and commercial ships... https://www.rt.com/news/642926-us-fourth-wave-strikes/
Many English style guides discourage the use of she for countries or inanimate objects; such use may be considered dated or sexist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/She_(pronoun)
"She" is used for ships in formal documents such as Royal Navy news headlines, official US Navy documents, ADF news, and Forbes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_English
(Remix edit of Zombie, originally by The Cranberries)
That's just a coincidence: a song about fighting, and by extension about seeking peace, which happens to have the same name as the topic of this post. Which is just zombies.
This is probably the first short-form vertical drama that I clicked on, and the first that I bookmarked. It's now private:
The uploader of that video, Wuxia Legends Theater, only has 1050k views. Out of what YouTube says is 50 videos (48 are visible), the most-viewed has 116k views. They made private the video that has 3x as many views as their second-most-popular video. The channel description says, "All series on this channel are provided by licensed partners or rights holders and are fully protected by copyright." but that's presumably true for big channels like Youku as well and they suffer from muted audio on many videos.
I'm assuming that if there is a government conspiracy, this video was made private because of that conspiracy. If there is no such conspiracy, then it's an unrelated reason.
Anyway, zombies. This short drama, by the same channel, has a very Chinese storyline:
I wasn't intending to watch the whole thing. I was going to watch 1 or 2 minutes, then I decided 10 minutes was fine, but I didn't want to stop so I told myself 12 minutes, and then finally stopped at 17 minutes.
The channel doesn't publish the Chinese name of the short drama. It is most certainly published on one or more Chinese video sites, but without knowing the name, if it gets made private it might not be possible to find and watch it. I have to accept that, having stopped where I did.
The story opens with a group of people intending to eat the male lead. His ex-girlfriend was requesting that they save his hand for her to eat. 15 minutes later, he is about to agree to give his ex-girlfriend food.
Wanting to eat someone is terrible. And many or most Chinese stories have someone who acts badly. Even in Three Body, the crew of the ship that was targeted for destruction was described as the worst criminals in the world. In contrast, the Netflix production, 3 Body Problem, filled the ship with innocent young people. Despite this, China is a country with one of the highest rates of saying that 'other people can be trusted' in the world.
It's like warning people to look both ways before crossing the road. People may be warned constantly, but despite the warnings they may still consider the risk to be low.
That's why to a Chinese audience, the logic "well, she did just say she wanted to eat him, but he has food and she's hungry so he should be nice" is seen as completely reasonable, to explain the actions of a character in a story.
I was thinking that in the US, it's seen as bad to be selfish, and the stories which attract most people are ones where people are not being selfish; instead, they do things that don't benefit them. Like arguing and fighting with people they know. Whereas in Chinese stories, doing 'selfish' things like trying to find someone to be in a relationship with, or just trying to earn more money, is seen as completely fine, and so there are many stories about it. There's no need for the 'excuse' of, like, a reality TV show in which people are forced to be in close proximity to each other, although China doubtless has those and similar shows as well.
But this sort of implies a prediction that with the poll about being generous or nice, a lower percentage of people in the US would answer 'selfish' than in China. If that prediction is accurate, more people answering 'generous' in the US does not mean more people are actually generous; it could be that people think that being generous would be better for society, but do not think that they, or most people they know, act in the way which is best for society.
Zombie movies and shows that I've seen: Train to Busan (Korean), most of World War Z (US), #Alive (Korean), All of Us Are Dead (Korean), the Key and Peele skit about racist zombies, and the first season of Sweet Home (Korean), which seems like a show about zombies for the first episode. This is my basis for saying this Chinese drama about zombies is unlike stories from other countries.
Because of the short drama that was made private, I intend to not watch any more short dramas based on the same condition as not watching other dramas.
I said to Sherine way back in 2013, when anyone who's 20 years old now was only 7 years old, that I wanted people to either use <redacted> in a short amount of time, or in a long amount of time. Not in a medium amount of time. This is one of those things that I said that I'm not entirely sure afterwards why I said it, like when I said, "Therefore, change is necessary."
I can speculate why I said I didn't want it to take a medium amount of time, but I won't bother. It should have been obvious that I preferred a short story, but presumably at some point a medium amount of time had passed, and at that point I preferred that it take longer than it already had. Perhaps this was around the time that I hid all of the posts after 2012. (Other than the ones that mentioned Demi Rose, which I might have deleted, as I said I would if she didn't share it.) So I can't exactly complain if takes "a longer time + 1 day", repeated an arbitrary number of times.
"If information is hidden or obscured, is the intention the same?" Someone's thoughts are usually hidden. What if they weren't?
Someone who values honesty should prefer outcomes where information being temporarily hidden leads to the same results as when information is known immediately.
And so, the question: is sadness negative happiness? If someone experiences sadness, is it like the total amount of happiness in their life being lower? If someone experiences 1000 days of minor happiness, experiencing 1 Happiness per day, and then learns something that causes them to experience 1000 Sadness, does it cancel out all the happiness?
This is about goals. Is the goal to experience the most Happiness? Or is the goal to maximize Happiness minus Sadness? When helping other people, which of these goals is better? This is not a situation where one expects to have both of these goals and they conflict, as with the explanation given in <redacted>.
The first goal, where one accounts only for Happiness, encourages people to live a long life. It also encourages deception. People often consider it difficult it feel more than one emotional state at a time; either they are happy, or they are sad, rarely both. So hiding a thing that could cause someone sadness can allow them to feel happy, even if they later learn the thing and are sad.
Confidence: sometimes the benefit of confidence (and who would intentionally act in a way without a reason) is that being confident, and wrong, leads to others having a worse opinion of you.
It's possible that even when trying one's hardest, one cannot help a specific person. If the goal is, in fact, to help this person, then a switch from a projection of providing a small help to this person, to providing a small harm (close outcomes within the total possibility space, which ranges from "large help" to "large harm"), leads to a large change in behavior.
It can be difficult someone else to realize this is the explanation for a course of action. Some people think that if they truly try to help someone else, then of course they will be able to do it; that interactions where someone does not appear to try to help someone else are simply because they do not want to help that person. Along with helping others, a common motivation is to help the self (although the book, The Selfish Gene argues otherwise), and from this perspective, changes in behavior result instead from a switch in projection from a small help to the self, to a small harm to the self, rather than it being about helping or harming someone else. Someone who does not think it's possible for someone to be unable to help someone else may fail to understand some interactions.
I watched the drama I linked above, even though I said I wouldn't watch any dramas unless Imane <redacted>. As a vertical-form drama, it isn't something that seems intended to be watched together by multiple people. Someone who watches it is watching it by themselves. In several instances, the female lead acts in a way which might be confusing to someone who expects others to always act selfishly.
I don't expect that Demi Rose will <redacted>. I'm not emailing her, because it seems apparent that it would be better if I had high confidence in my evaluation of whether or not there is a government conspiracy. Right now I am, obviously, trying to avoid any actions that could seem helpful. Like when the admiral left the bridge and went to the front of the ship, after giving bad instructions. (I don't have any ability to give instructions, but if I would, then I not try to give bad instructions; I would just say <redacted>.) This is like how it seems clear that it would be better if I had high confidence in whether anyone is interested in me.
So, even if <redacted>, if nothing interesting happens then I can be confident that there's no government conspiracy. If, for example, Demi Rose's Like count on Chirp Club suddenly rose to above 18,430, or she said something even if it's not related to <redacted>, then a government conspiracy would also seem to likely. But if I emailed her, and then this happened (she said something on Chirp Club), then it would be unclear whether a government conspiracy exists.
Ok, I edited this, but now the edit isn't showing up. First time this has happened. If I hadn't gone in to edit this again, I wouldn't have noticed. Test.
I said I couldn't complain since I preferred that <redacted> happen in a long length of time rather than a medium length of time, but am I complaining. I have several tabs open of YouTube videos (loaded without Javascript) that are, basically, about problems with World of Warcraft as it currently exists in various forms. I wasn't expecting to watch them since, if I didn't make this edit, they would just cause me to be unhappy as problems I can do nothing about because <redacted>. I'll just briefly link them:
I will briefly comment about the second-to-last video. Part of the intent was so that players could use the tier sets for raiding. The creator of the video has a helpful thumbnail (displayed when loading the page without Javascript, which is something that YouTube didn't do when it first switched to the new design ~10 years ago: no Javascript just meant a blank page) which clearly states his views, even if people don't help him by contributing watchtime. This creator is known for playing paladins in World of Warcraft. The Tier 2.5 set had 'hybrid' stats, which meant it was pretty good for PvP — though it didn't really support builds that relied on offensive abilities that scaled with spellpower, instead of physical damage stats — but paladins were not brought to raids for their offensive potential.
I actually remember a video from around 2006 where a paladin showed off their dps on the boss Patchwerk, but both an analysis of abilities and mechanics, and real data from raid logs makes it clear that paladins don't have the dps of warriors in Classic. The point is, some players were fine with being 'pidgeonholed' into a certain role, which for paladins was healing, just like it was for all hybrids except maybe feral druids. And they viewed itemization which allowed them to use the tier sets they got from raiding, to progress in raiding, rather than being forced to use non-set items, to be better. (607 characters, not as brief as a 140-character Tweet when Chirp Club launched.)
I'm fine with disregarding those videos. The video that I did try to watch was this one:
I stopped when it seemed I would probably get too upset from continuing to watch it (I don't even remember exactly why at this point), as a problem I couldn't do anything about because <redacted>.
So it's reasonable to say that, if I were to die in my sleep today, the total amount of happiness I have experienced would be greater than if I had died in my sleep yesterday. I am not trying to make myself unhappy, and I largely succeed at this.
Third edit, which is different from an update in that it doesn't have a date: so I had a dream that Demi Rose shared <redacted>, and it had about 200 replies. But there was a spelling mistake in a word in the text that she copied. In the dream, I was about to make a post here saying that I had noticed the spelling mistake at some point, but then forgotten about it.
It was something really obvious: like it was misspelled as "agait" or something, which supposed to be missing an "n" or something in weird dream logic where words aren't words.
Look, a mistake. I corrected a mistake in the first paragraph before posting edit, but I'm leaving this second mistake. Look, another mistake. I just woke up.
Fourth edit: I was thinking about the difficult maths problem that was solved around 2009. How some Chinese mathematicians wrote about an area in the published proof which they felt was incomplete, so they did more maths to prove the thing. The original mathematician commented that the maths world was 'corrupt' or something, because of the controversy that the Chinese mathematicians attracted by claiming the original proof was incomplete. It may seem like something analogous to a spelling mistake, but the relevance is in their identities: a Russian mathematician, and Chinese mathematicians. The speculation in the previous post about Chinese people thinking it's best for society if most people are 'selfish' in business, while the Soviet attitude was that people should be 'generous'.
I think it should be obvious that if someone <redacted>, I would want them to say things that are most effective. There is no reason to copy mistakes.
I'm not sure if your Chirp Club post is really about Vietnam, or even about peace. But I'm talking about Vietnam.
Tangent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War hyphen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_War the two recent wars use hyphens. The two wars fought in the 600s use en dashes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish–American_War en dash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS:ENBETWEEN recommends en dash.
Sino-Vietnamese_War § Background, begins with this paragraph:
>Just as the First Indochina War—which emerged from the complex situation following World War II—and the Vietnam War arose from the indecisive aftermath of political relations, the Third Indochina War again followed the unresolved problems of the earlier wars.
I'm speculating.
>In February 1976, Vietnam implemented registration programs in the south. Ethnic Chinese in Vietnam were required to adopt Vietnamese citizenship or leave the country.
Was this like in Malaysia or maybe Indonesia? There, Chinese people were attacked, because Chinese people were seen as rich (the landlords). But China supported the government in Cambodia, which was killing rich people. But those rich people were probably not Chinese.
If the conflict was, at least in part, because of Chinese people having attitudes which lead to them becoming rich, then the last poll in the previous post seems relevant.
Is this what "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" is about? Is the difference that in Soviet-style socialism, and by inference in Vietnamese-style socialism, people are expected to act like they are being generous? While in Chinese-style socialism, the expectation is that everyone is being selfish in their business relationships?
Speculation: in Chinese history, people becoming powerful, which generally was the same as rich, was good for the country. Just the basic idea that the unification of China was good, because it meant less war. But for nations surrounding China, this was not necessarily true. War occurs around borders. Language divides people into nations, creating borders. And war means instability, which encourages rulers to act in a harsh way. This could make the common people view the ruler, and rich people in general, more negatively in a country like Vietnam which borders China.
Like, the fact that a large proportion of people in Vietnam have the same surname, because of all the wars in which the defeated faction wanted to hide their identity.
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Update 04 Jul 2026, 17:29
Polls are useful because they let people who expect that most people think the same way as they do see that they're wrong.
Soviet factories making the wrong types of goods, because it's more profitable for the factory even though it's worse for the nation: this is not being generous.
Poll: Would you choose to receive $1, or for another person chosen at random to receive $2?
Poll: Would you choose for yourself, all of your relatives, all of their friends, and everyone who lives in the same town as you to each receive $1, or for an equal number of people who live elsewhere to each receive $2?
Other effects, like individual farm plots being much more productive than the collective farm plots: this is probably more about 'following the rules'. When you suspect everyone of wanting to act differently than how you want them to act, you create lots of rules to ensure everyone acts a certain way, but these rules may not give a good result even if they are followed. That question, from like 20112010: "who is most aware of the importance of a task or able to understand the quality of its execution (not the same)". Example of a rule not being followed: "accurately report how much food has been produced in your area. You will be rewarded if the number is high, and punished if the number is low." (Holodomor.) Counterexample, of rules being followed: "Only give help to people who are so poor that they own almost nothing." (Irish famine.)
Edit: If the CEO of a large company were to hold a press conference and announce, "We are hereby insulting our customers. That is all", how many customers would they lose?
I won't say anything more about anything involving real-life money or economics until the amount of money I have increases by $0.01.
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Update 05 Jul 2026, 15:11
I don't know if this counts as doing nothing, and the intent might violate what I said above, but I thought of this open-ended question:
Is there any group of people, other than criminals, that it's widely considered acceptable to hate?
Vietnamese people who have talked to me in my life, so excluding Clara Dao since she hasn't talked to me: my male friend who was one grade lower in high school, whom I communicated with by email a bit afterwards and who might have become an engineer. Daphne Ngo, whom I met at the COSMOS program at the University of California, Irvine in the summer after my 10th grade of school. My landlady from whom I rented a room in her house after I finished my military training, and her daughter who had advertised the room (my emails regarding the topic of this weblog included her). And Hime, the friend that I met in World of Warcraft, who once sent me a photo of herself on vacation with her relatives, and to whom I sent a heart-shaped gold necklace while I wasn't talking to her when I was in Iraq, as well as the painting of a river by an Iraqi artist that Mei wouldn't accept.
The AoE2 player (and engineer) Hoang replied to at least one comment from me, if that also counts.
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Update 06 Jul 2026, 22:22
The following doesn't concern a prohibited topic.
I overheard a TV ad. At some company, "we believe everyone deserves" high-quality products or something. A company saying they are generous! And who wants to believe, or tell others, that the world is filled with people who are not generous?
A comment, probably spam from a bot, on this video (or dedicated page for video, which doesn't show some information like collaborators on videos with multiple creators):
At the end it says, "recommend less chicken soup, entertainment, consumption, short drama content".
I remembered that a few days after I first emailed Imane, around Dec 2023, she said on a stream that she had several people 'lined up', implying that they were interested in her and that she was not currently in a relationship at that time.
I was thinking about the drama, The Double. The foreign princess, who is being held 'captive' to prevent war — similarly to the main male character in Till the End of the Moon, or the main female character in The Princess's Gambit (桃花映江山, 2025), or the situation of the main male character in Lost You Forever when he first appears as an adult — becomes interested in an official who is already married. There is a scene where she first sees him, and thinks that he was waiting to greet her, but he was actually about to greet his wife and so the princess's sincere smile disappears. But the reason for her actions may involve a conspiracy that is not fully explained in the episodes available for free on YouTube.
What we do see is that she is fully or partly responsible for framing the wife of that official and forcing him to kill her. So I was thinking, maybe I'm like this? I could be interested in someone who was already in a relationship if they act in a way that shows that they completely reject that person and no longer care about them. Also, the princess did not complain when the official held her throat like he was about to strangle her to death. Of course, if he had, he would have been executed along with his mother and sister and all of his relatives, but it suggested that she was willing to act in a way that made others unhappy because she was unhappy as well, to the point that she didn't care about her own life.
I'm not trying to be ambiguous.
Based on the events in The Double, how could the official have avoided the sad outcome? By not looking in the direction of his wife when, by chance, he first encountered the princess. Letting her believe for a few moments longer that he was glad to have encountered her, a prisoner in a foreign land.
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Update 07 Jul 2206, 03:06
To be honest I don't know if you were responsible for the dance club videos that I linked in early 2013 being made private or deleted.
I've said this before but I'll say it again: I have never been to a dance club. Possibly the most recent, or maybe the only, time I was at the scene of random people dancing freestyle was after my middle school graduation, where (as I've said) I just sat and read a book, and didn't dance. And I felt it should have been obvious that even if I had been to a dance club before, I was not going to be doing that in 2013, so the dance music you were making around that time would never be heard by me in that setting.
There were some things I wanted to talk about that I can't because they involve money. It was going to be the topic of (again, really) what makes someone attractive, which is often helping other people. And gender-based differences in what this looks like. Specifically, females helping females, vs females helping males.
There was also a related topic: people getting offended when an attribute is estimated to be higher than it is, vs getting offended when it's estimated as lower than it is. The attribute can be intelligence (like knowing the meaning of a word), or it can be things like attractiveness. It's common for people to think that females are attractive based on appearance, which can be evaluated without talking, while males are often considered to be attractive based on other things. This requires talking, and here is the connection to money.
It is for this reason that I cannot say "I do not find hypothetical person X to be attractive". I am not using apophasis here.
So what I can say is that videos of dance groups in Taiwan cannot compete with short-form video content. The most popular groups now are probably significantly less popular than 15 years ago, and probably less popular even than one year ago. Covid probably interrupted it, and short-form content has probably significantly reduced interest. Example: filters that change body proportions cannot be used in real life, so if evaluation of 2D video content is similar to evaluation of a live performance (contrast a photo of clouds at sunset vs the actual thing), the live performance will look worse than an edited, short-form video.
This means that someone who wants to make other people care about these dance groups, whether ones that currently perform or ones featured in videos from 15 years ago, cannot do so.
I wish you hadn't wasted time.
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Update 08 Jul 2026, 15:43
This has nothing to do with Vietnam and I ought to make a new post. But I'm lazy, and this lets me blame you for saying something on Chirp Club.
Were you saying in your songs that people should be generous? I don't think so. But it may have been interpreted this way.
I tried using a modern browser for Douyin. It did actually have better performance. My usual browser, Firefox, can use around 40% of the maximum CPU just sitting on a video page, with nothing playing. I also wanted to see if I could use cookies from the modern browser with yt-dlp (I have been using Private Mode in Firefox for 13 years, and add-ons were disabled for old Firefox versions a year ago, so I can't use Firefox cookies). So I was playing random videos to seem like not a bot for the cookies, and ended up finding these videos:
(bookmark) 3231k likes https://v.douyin.com/8tTU60vtjbY 08 Jul 2026 (bookmark) 299k likes https://v.douyin.com/jdm4ssvR9qg (bookmark) 2315k likes https://v.douyin.com/j8RPrAqF9XQ (bookmark, dl) 112k likes https://v.douyin.com/2IhMJPOX8CY Gangnam Style (bookmark) 941k likes https://v.douyin.com/HBh9FQJ_KqI AI gen disaster movie with random scenes
The song Gangnam Style is sort of about money.
"If people would just be happy, there wouldn't be war." Why do people try to get more points in video games? Why, in World of Warcraft, do they try to kill raid bosses before anyone else? Tangent as I link the last raid progression races I care about, from 15+ years ago:
H: The Lich King (10) Finnish guild, unlike the typical guild that used English and accepted diverse applicants. Players got a 5% buff to damage and health each week, as an alternative to scheduled nerfs to bosses, so two weeks later meant +10% health and damage.
H: The Lich King (25) Same boss, harder difficulty. Two-week lead over second place.
Alone in the Darkness (H) Chinese guild playing on Taiwanese servers, having a late start (including gear disadvantage) but still ending up first.
H: Madness of Deathwing Korean guild first, Chinese guild second. (But the progression race involved using alts to feed gear to mains using split raids. The website originally recorded the item level of players at the time of a kill, with higher item level meaning easier difficulty.)
It's difficult for someone who's extremely poor who has almost nothing to be happy. If I had gotten cancer eight years ago and died due to not having health care, would this have been a happy end to the story of my life, or a sad end?
So: people are always trying to challenge themselves. If a behavior seems harmful, there are two general solutions: stop the behavior, or change other things so that the behavior is not harmful. You could also, I guess, just ignore the harmful behavior. This may seem like a bad solution or not a solution, but if there are 20 bad behaviors, a person can only focus on a few of them at a time. I am saying that some behaviors cannot be stopped, but people don't agree with this so they still consider "stopping the behavior" as a solution and think that others may have a similar view.
"A button creates a house for anyone in your country and also gives them free food, but nothing else is provided (no Internet or electricity). Poor people stay poor after pushing the button. Other countries don't have the button. Five years after the button becomes available, is your country getting worse or better?"
"If you had to choose one country to receive this magic button that creates houses and food for people, would you choose your own country or another country?"
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Update 01 Jun 2026, 00:39
Topic: criticism.
For some reason, I was thinking of the fight at the end of Fist of Legend, and criticism was the only way I could think of to make it relevant. The sign that said "Sick man of Asia". (I've mentioned this before, but based on a search, it wasn't in a weblog post.) Wikipedia says that,
The Chinese characters are commonly translated to "Sick men of the East" and is used as a famous reference to Fist of Fury.
Which apparently showed the sign in multiple scenes including this one which I watched the first few minutes of. I haven't seen either of these two movies, and yet I am claiming that I understand the use of the "東亞病夫" phrase well enough to say that it was a criticism of China, and that the fight with the Japanese general was supposed to be a like allegory for Japan's war with China.
If Japan didn't intend to take all of China's resources and territory, why should Japan have cared if China was weak and being exploited by Western countries? Well, Japan is also an Asian country, and China being weak also made Japan look bad.
I had to find this angle, of criticism, because I don't think you're interested in scenes of martial arts fighting. (Note the Wikipedia article's mention of the line that was left out of the US version of Fist of Legend: "The best way to defeat your enemy is to use a gun. Martial arts is about personal development.")
It would be nice if there was no fighting in the real world. But there is, and so the question of why Japan fought with China is relevant. (It's also fair to point out that Japan participated in the eight-nation alliance that invaded China in 1900, so it wasn't just Western countries oppressing Asian countries.)
It's presented as a comedy video. But I think it's real criticism. The comedy angle is just so people don't view the creator as deviating from the group strategy of blaming other people for their problems (in the video, the CIA or the Matrix).
But it's not just criticism of actual gang members. It's also criticism of rich people, which according to the video is 'white' people (which is supported by data like this, "nearly 96.1 percent of the 1.2 million households in the top one percent by income were white", with wealth being even less equal than income). The video suggests that things would be better if property in the neighborhoods which gang members come from were owned by the people who lived there, rather than by "white people".
The questions at the start of this post are relevant: if everyone owned the properties where they lived, poor people would still be poor. They might not be as poor: rent is one of the ways in which money is transferred from poor people to rich people.
Poll: "Should we have policies that encourage people to come to and stay in our country illegally?" I thought of this on 30 May, but it's really just a political question. No reasonable person should answer yes to it, although some people might. I didn't include it in the original post, because it would suggest that those two questions are also political, when they are not. This video about gang members shows how the questions are broader than just immigration. Someone who ignores immigration could easily decide that the answer is that the country with the button would be getting better, despite that people generally always say that things are getting worse on some issues like morality.
Third point about criticism: when you denied a ban appeal on Twitch for someone who said they truly thought that you were cute.
Would I consider myself similar to that person? Not at all. If I get banned on a Twitch channel, I view it as a positive thing: one more person whose happiness I don't have to worry about.
Would that person criticize you, if they saw the video that showed that it was you that denied the appeal, and not one of your mods? I suspect that you made it into a YouTube short because of that specific ban appeal denial, so you were sort of treating them as special. I don't think that's something they should complain about.
I do think it's important to act in a way that reduces criticism, when that criticism is valid. It's sometimes subjective whether criticism is valid: the slave revolts against the Roman Republic, in which Spartacus was a leader although that's really all I know. Since they revolted, it's clear that the slaves criticized the society that had enslaved them. If they hadn't revolted, maybe people would be saying today that the people who were enslaved at that time didn't criticize the dominant society, or that only a few slaves had such criticism so their criticism wasn't valid.
So I am implying that people who viewed China as being unusually weak were valid, even if it was only weak because it didn't spend as much money on military as some other countries were doing, and if all countries had spent less on military there would not have been 20 million deaths in World War I from all the new technologies like machine guns. (When looking it up, I saw this: "The presence of British and Russian troops led to blockades of food distribution, which culminated into the Persian famine of 1917–1919, which under most modern estimates caused two million deaths.")
I am implying that criticism of rich people is valid. Even criticism of "white people" might be valid. And if the video about gang members was presenting a criticism of 'black' people, instead of merely being a comedy skit, then that criticism might also be valid.
Also this doesn't fit with the theme of criticism, but I liked this game from Hoang: Defense Against A Hoang Rush
If you don't share this idea, can you give him some money kthx
>AoE2: post regarding learning stream being titled "Suffering"
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Update 01 Jun 2026, 03:10
Poll: "You are a rich person, and the percentage of society's total wealth that you own has been going up and up even though you do nothing. Society seems uninterested in enacting policies that would reverse this. Do you share an idea that would reduce economic inequality or continue to do nothing?"
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Update 01 Jun 2026, 17:39
Greta posted something on Instagram, so according to this from 30 May,
"I will keep waiting for Imane to share the idea until I see that Greta has posted something on Instagram after this point in time, and after that I will be waiting only for Greta to share this idea"
I'm not waiting for you to share this idea anymore and should probably unpublish this post, but this is what I was going to say: the situation in the US where 'black' people blame others could be seen as a local optimum. Of course, 'black' people in countries like Nigeria don't blame others, so there is no pressure for them to think or act like they have fewer opportunities than other people, and so the culture is quite different. I thought of a poll which would help people understand this:
"If all people who are receiving welfare money but are technically able to work were to try as hard as they could to find and apply for jobs and earn money, would the unemployment rate, as the percentage of people who are looking for work who can't get a job, go up or down?"
A lot of people are dumb, and some of those dumb people would say that the unemployment rate would go down. But people with some understanding of economics would probably say that the unemployment rate would go up as a result.
So, to the extent that people think that the unemployment rate being low is good, they can see a benefit from not criticizing people who get welfare, which is usually only possible if one is poor. It becomes a situation that involves deception, and any situation with deception has a risk of being exposed. So people become careful with what they say, and avoid talking about things when they are not completely sure of the effects of talking about it: not to help themselves, but to help other people.
Regarding the question at the start of this post: this isn't too different from what the US did in the 1800s; a search for "us homesteader act buy land" gives Homestead Act (1862) on archive.gov as the featured snippet. Wikipedia says,
Also involved in the acts were Buffalo soldiers, African-American soldiers who were key in building the American frontier in the West. They often engaged in wars with Native Americans, led by the government, to take over Indigenous land.
A poor person who works can provide more value to their country than they consume, even if they pay less in taxes than they receive in direct benefits (not even counting indirect benefits like spending on roads and other infrastructure). But a poor person who doesn't work, or do any unpaid thing like contribute to open source software or volunteer for charities, doesn't provide any direct benefit to other people. They might still make the economy better, just as with the classic "bury bottles filled with bank notes" thought experiment. But since people value fairness (7 out of 8 people answered Yes on the last question) and giving people money for doing nothing tends to lead to more people doing nothing, it doesn't make a country better, even if GDP goes up. (Greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels would also go up.)
So it's not even a question of "are policies that attract poor people to a country better than policies that attract rich people". Poor people can help a country. But poor people who can't find jobs aren't really contributing anything, because society won't let them contribute (the situation signals that people would prefer that the poor people receive free money than for the poor people to be doing work).
This weblog is about this idea, and I'm no longer trying to get you to share it, so this is my last post addressed to you.
"You gain the ability to perfectly copy any dance, but you cannot make any meaningful variations or changes. Every hand gesture, every head and eye movement is the same. How many followers do you end up with?"
I'm cheating because I said it was the last post, but I didn't say it was the last update. It was implied to be the last update, so as a penalty, if Greta posts again on Instagram without any indication that she's shared this idea, I'm unpublishing this post.
Turn on and off the lights, silky transition 开灯关灯丝滑变装, Battle forte · Lollipop, nan bo (costume change): '赛博子 @SyBer0318 你们一句想看 我虽迟但到 #开灯关灯丝滑变装 Battle forte · Lollipop, nan bo, costume change [douyin 7418175819761110299][+a +0.14s].mp4' '남다른 The unique @namdareun__ 불이 꺼지면 변하는 상어🦈 #어둠챌린지 #dancechallenge #dancetrend #onepickent Battle forte · Lollipop, nan bo [mnkRqT6ZoxQ].webm' '@쏘야SOYA 주말엔 늦잠인데~😆 #dancevideo #소울케이브 #soulcave Battle forte · Lollipop, nan bo [gX-bgzlhy-Q][sync tuning, audio c5H9stym9f4].webm' '이퍼플 @_purple_lee 조명을 끄면...💡⁉️#반전어둠챌린지#실루엣챌린지#원픽이엔티 #dancechallenge Battle forte · Lollipop, nan bo [RNBfp8HKzqk].webm' '유나몽 @yunamong_ 잠탱이 🔥#반전 #댄스챌린지 #dancechallenge Battle forte · Lollipop, nan bo [c5H9stym9f4][a +0.07s].webm'
online tasks2, 16 Sep 2022.txt:
08 Nov 2024 dates, trend progression: 7418175819761110299, mnkRqT6ZoxQ, translate "你们一句想看" and second line
gX-bgzlhy-Q, MQR6R7snIVQ, c5H9stym9f4 missed username in filename, 'NA'
RNBfp8HKzqk hashtags not separated by spaces?
source for NN9fxy9cgUc from 树懒潼 @990420_t
upload dates, views for 3PY2j22d3Ds and slvcbzTRjG4 (kept slvcbzTRjG4)
upload dates for Da Da Da, lG80vlXBtaQ influential?
The\ story\ behind\ the\ dance\ \[izLxF32Bc-k\] same dance as Lz_WEtHKzD0? translate 원조
Sync tuning for gX-bgzlhy-Q, from ~three days ago:
in='/media/misaki/Nao/storage/short/unsorted/쏘야SOYA NA 주말엔 늦잠인데~😆 #쏘야 #dancevideo #소울케이브 #soulcave Battle forte · Lollipop, nan bo [gX-bgzlhy-Q].webm'
audio cut off at start, use a='/media/misaki/Nao/storage/short/unsorted/yunamong_ @유나몽 잠탱이 🔥#반전 #댄스챌린지 #dancechallenge Battle forte · Lollipop, nan bo [c5H9stym9f4][a +0.07s].webm'
Am I calling you bad? No. But if you want to stream games, and you think there aren't any good games right now, what are you doing to fix this?
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Update 03 Jun 2026, 02:06
I just watched a game featuring the Korean civilization, so maybe it is time to talk about Korea. Koreans Tactics Vs Survivalist (Auto-dubbed from Korean to English)
Korean cavalry is among the worst in Age of Empires II. No final armor or attack upgrades and no Bloodlines. But in Castle age, they're fine. Cavalry don't even need armor upgrades for one of their most useful roles, dodging arrows. Arrows move at speed 7. Scout cavalry move at speed 1.55. If a skirmisher is 6 tiles from a scout cavalry, the scout can move 1.33 tiles in the time it takes the javelin to travel 6 tiles. In a 1-tile patrol, this is 1 tile forward, and 0.33 tiles back. Ballistics predicts 1.33 tiles forward, so there is a 0.66 tile gap between the expected and actual position, which is probably enough for it to miss. A javelin launched at any point other than just after a scout turns around will miss by a larger margin.
If the arrow hits: a scout cavalry with no upgrades loses 3 HP, or 1/15 of his health, worth 5.3 food. An elite skirmisher loses 4 HP, or 1/9 of his health, which for a Korean skirmisher is worth 2.8 food and 1.9 wood, with the food being more valuable. So it's better for the skirmisher to be hit. But if it's a light cavalry with first armor upgrade, he loses just 2 HP out of 60, worth 2.7 food. Cavalry is worse than more skirmishers if you try to engage and enemy kites back, so you take damage during the approach, but better if the cavalry is just dodging, or if there is a battle between skirmishers that are standing still so the cavalry doesn't have to chase.
Also, I have never once seen anyone do a tactic that makes sense, which is to attack a castle with a ram and wall in the ram so melee units can't attack it. In this matchup, Rathas would be the obvious counter to rams, so if there is a tactic that prevents Rathas from attacking the rams in melee, then extra rams become useful, and so committing to engagements in the vicinity of the castle makes more sense. Mangonels also kill rams, but rams can tank castle fire while light cavalry kills the mangonel. But if you don't make light cavalry, they can't kill the mangonel, and if you expect that rams are useless because they can't effectively attack a castle, then you won't have any that can tank the castle fire while light cavalry kill the mangonel.
What's the logic behind the possibility that the Sewol ferry was sunk by a bomb planted by the government of southern Korea? It is this: if MH370 was stolen by the Chinese government, it negatively affected the passengers. Most of the world thinks that they're dead, and they might really be dead.
At the time, I mentioned on Chirp Club the sinking of HMS Victoria in 1893. An admiral gave an order which did not make sense, and which had a high probability of leading to disaster if it was followed. The captains of the ships immediately understood this, and yet they followed the order.
This is in contrast to the Melbourne–Evans collision in 1969, which occurred because someone did not follow orders meant to prevent a collision.
The pilot of MH370 was not Chinese, but if China stole MH370, there were likely many Chinese people involved. So if someone gave orders that if followed, would lead to the events that we saw (MH370 disappearing), and Chinese people followed these orders, are Chinese people bad?
This is what the Sewol scenario would have been exploring. Would Korean people follow orders that involve secrets and so on? The film Silmido is about the Korean soldiers who secretly trained for a mission to kill the leader of northern Korea. Quoting Wikipedia,
Under circumstances which remain unclear, the members of the group mutinied and went to Seoul in 1971, where they were killed or committed suicide.
The Sewol ferry sank and many students died. But if it sank because of a bomb, did anyone who was involved with planting the bomb expect this to happen? The ferry stayed afloat for a long time after it first tilted. Students stayed in their cabins because of a repeated message that originated from the captain, who seemed to have had a logical reason for not ordering everyone to abandon ship: the water was cold and anyone who entered it would die within half an hour. If events had happened differently, the ship could have sunk without anyone dying.
So if it did sink because of a bomb, and if the people who followed orders to plant the bomb were bad, were the students bad for following the orders to stay in their cabins?
Another possible outcome: suppose that there was a bomb and that some people who were involved with the plot to plant the bomb knew of this idea. What if, instead of following the orders to plant a bomb, they had shared this idea?
What if MH370 was, indeed, stolen by China, and some of the Chinese people involved with that knew of this idea? Were they bad for following orders instead of sharing this idea? If Korean people are not bad for following orders, then Chinese people are not bad for following orders.
Poll: "Everyone from your country gains the ability to lie perfectly. They can fool any lie detector, and when it comes to predicting situations that would reveal their lies, their ability to fabricate lies that avoid contradictions is at or above the 90th percentile globally (they are better than 90% of liars). If someone stays outside of your country for over a year, they lose this ability. Does your country end up better off, or worse off?"
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Update 03 Jun 2026, 17:44
(When comparing the different scenes in the Douyin video I linked to understand the change in lighting in one shot, I noticed that the second scene is stretched downward.)
Group-based morality: "if one option saves many other people, and another option saves someone you care about, the moral thing to do is to choose the first option."
This does not mean that everyone, or even the majority, of people in a culture with group-based morality would choose the first option. Chinese dramas are full of people who choose the second option. But at least people in the dramas agree that the first choice is better, so the second option often has the penalty of needing to be done in secret.
Does this mean that in cultures with individual-based morality, people agree that the second option is the moral thing to do? No, it's just ambiguous.
I was thinking about how Greta might not have known if I wanted her to post on Instagram. Many people instinctively think that if they do something that other people would dislike, then they should try to hide that thing, and that if someone else does something other people wouldn't like, whoever did it would like for that thing to be kept secret. (Maybe it isn't instinctive and is more something that people learn from being punished for doing various things while they're growing up.)
I shouldn't need to point out that I don't know if Greta is even aware of a single thing I have said, but I think I do need to point it out, because some people might think that I don't consider the possibility that she isn't.
Some people assume that the chance that she reads this site is zero. For people who think that, when I act like there's a possibility that she does read it, it's implying that she's deceptive which has the potential for other people to act in a way that causes harm to her, since people generally agree that lying is bad. (This is why Sun Tzu felt it necessary to point out, after he had already said 17 other things, that "All warfare is based on deception." No military commander should think that the proper thing to do is to avoid misleading their enemy.)
So, first possibility: it's true that Greta doesn't know about this idea. In this case, I would prefer for her to act in a way which makes people think that she doesn't know about this idea.
If I say that "I will unpublish this post if Greta says anything", and she stops using Instagram for an anomalously long length of time, it could make people suspicious that she does know of this idea, even if that's false.
Second possibility is that she does know of this idea. I think answering "what I want" is a lot more complicated for this possibility.
___
Update 05 Jun 2026, 00:00
(In the previous update, the link to The Double was added a few minutes after the update was originally submitted. Even if I had thought of it while writing it, I wouldn't have wanted to get distracted looking it up.)
I think it generally makes sense for someone who can, to do what they want. I thought for a bit of cases where I did something that I didn't want to do, and there aren't many examples, except when the alternative to doing something that I didn't want was to die. I didn't want to spend a lot of time on this idea when no one was talking to me (meaning neither Mei nor Kate). So I only did it when I had run out of money, having exhausted both my funds (saved up while in Iraq) and credit.
This was as a person who had, at least for a while, achieved financial independence. For a young person, it's different. I can't say I remember the actual incident myself, but while growing up, one of my two oldest siblings — probably my oldest brother — threw up while eating some food, maybe pea soup, and my mum made him ate it. In the US one would probably say the "throw up", while the UK it might be called the sick.
. . . a hollow aluminium cow with a hole in its back.
"It's a jug," explained Caspar, who knew it well. "You hold it by its tail and it sort of sicks milk through its mouth."
Other things that I was forced to do that I didn't want to do: handwriting practice. Piano practice. I am sure I was reluctant to do kitchen chores as well, but it's at least something that does need to be done by someone, whereas it's harder to understand why food that does not taste good should be bought and eaten.
Things that I didn't want to do that I didn't have to do: eating mustard or pickles in hamburgers. Going to a family reunion which occurred shortly before my parents got divorced, even though the plane ticket for me had already been purchased. Continuing the advanced educational lessons at a different school in 4th or 5th grade which would have required me to do some kind of project towards the end of the year, which would have meant less time to read books. (Two things that I remember from those lessons: learning about colors, like the negative colors after looking away from color, and pulping paper to make new paper. I think maybe one other student from my normal class also went.)
So if someone doesn't want to share this idea, I am inclined to say "ok, they don't have to share it." But I couldn't say I understand why some people don't want to share it.
For someone in my position, it made sense not to want to share it. For various reasons etc. etc., sharing this idea has meant that I stay poor. If I were to stop trying, then instead of "all the world except for one person" acting like this idea isn't important, it would be "all the world", and that seems it could be dangerous. It might also have meant, for example, that Kate has not been in a serious relationship for all this time, or maybe she was in a relationship with the male who died in 2012. It seems likely that based on her Chirp Club activity, which includes her post earlier this year suggesting she's still in Seattle, that she hasn't had any children, and it might be too late. If I had not done anything with this idea in 2012 (after initially sharing it in 2011), I can only say that I think the probability she would have had children by now would have been higher.
But it's only logical to consider people to have various priorities in the things that they want. Poor people are sometimes simply trying to survive. It would make little sense for the typical poor person to spend effort on trying to get people to use this idea, when I have had so little success, and effort spent on that competes with effort that helps them survive (or would significantly improve their future).
But people who already have a lot of success? A poor person, at least, would have difficulty understanding why a rich person who understands this idea, which means that they don't assume that "problems cannot be solved because they result from people being inherently bad, which can never be fixed", would just ignore it.
To a degree, people can choose which things they want or don't want to do. They can also choose, out of the things they don't want to do, which of those things they still do, despite not wanting to do them. Like eating healthy foods that don't taste good.
So why would someone pick "sharing this idea" as a thing they don't want to do?
___
Update 05 Jun 2026, 02:15
Poll: "Suppose that a randomly-selected person out of everyone on Earth has a 50% chance of being evil, and a 50% chance of being good. What is the probability that 10 randomly-selected people are all good?"
1) 0.1% (10 coin flips being heads)
2) 50%
Like every other poll and poll-like question, I'm suggesting that you make this on Chirp Club.
___
Update 05 Jun 2026, 03:49
I just did a search for "My guess is that Imane hasn't said anything on her accounts since 25 May, but that it's unrelated to me or the idea", and it turned up a post that I'm linking with rel=nofollow. The unfortunate reality is that if one says "I think that person X, who you think is bad, is not bad", then one gets labeled as also being bad.
My mum has watched the TV series The Crown several times; just yesterday she was watching the episode that opens with the crash that killed Princess Diana, which has lots of Arabic talking. I've always criticized such series (basically, anything modern and without the "all characters are fictional" warning; compare Korean series Sisyphus: The Myth specifically highlighting that the governmental organization was a Bureau, having recently been changed from a different classification like a Department or something, so that viewers would not confuse it with the real governmental organization) for being inaccurate in ways which many viewers will not perceive.
I remember a fragment of an article, someone mentioning how we could spend time "debating the accuracy of The Crown". They did not make it clear whether they thought it was accurate or inaccurate, because the article was about something completely different and they didn't want to distract from whatever the main topic was, but it suggested that a significant number of people were concerned about its inaccuracies misleading people.
Especially for more modern shows, I don't like how 'artistic liberties taken for dramatic effect' have the potential to harm actual people alive today, but along with mistaken views about specific people, fiction can also mislead people into making wrong generalizations about how the world works.
The connection to the poll suggested in the previous update should be clear.
Reason not to say anything is that I was just talking about good and evil, and this seems like a less important topic. Someone might think I'm suggesting that fighting against evil isn't important. So let's just pretend that five months have passed since the previous update, and you did not create the suggested poll.
"Your job is to look at real photos and videos of beautiful people who are in situations that make them unhappy. What you do doesn't help them or anyone, it's just an experiment by a billionaire. You're paid normal wages, and your job is very easy. How long before you look for another job?"
The last time I tried to sign in to Reddit, a few days ago, the login fields never showed up, even on old Reddit. Most likely my browser is too old. I could use a different browser, but instead I'm not posting on Reddit. So there are communities where this question could be posted as-is, with free responses. If it's a poll, though, then a little inventiveness in the responses might be helpful. Or maybe polls, like on Chirp Club, are less interesting than a typical post. It's definitely true that most statuses there are not polls, and the fact that some polls get a large number of views might just be selection bias: I don't see the unpopular polls.
- I'm there for life and taking all the promotions and pay raises
- Less than a week
- I'll wait for the economy to get better/until I get my degree/another reason, then I'm out
- No billionaire can afford to pay what I would require for this job
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Update 05 Jun 2026, 21:23
About people wanting to help beautiful people and so on; also called pretty privilege.
When I said to Shia LaBeouf in 2014, "share this idea even though Sherine will be unhappy because she's stupid." And about a year later, when Sherine said "Shia LaBeouf is actually so beautiful", but then deleted the tweet soon after.
I'd been thinking of talking about the first event a few days ago. Compare when I said to Sherine that there was no reason to be unhappy.
But I'm taking a different approach here. Behavior is a big part of what makes someone beautiful. Look at videos documenting people's arrest for crimes like traffic accidents. If someone in the thumbnail looks attractive, it draws more views, but the comments make it clear that people are satisfied when justice is carried out, even if it means someone who looks attractive becomes unhappy because they have ruined their life due to their carelessness.
When looking at the Douyin video I linked on 01 Jun, I saw a video with around 5.5m likes. (Note that a part of the Tiktok algorithm seems to be recommending videos in a similar 'class' of reach, rather than always recommending the globally most popular videos. This is good for smaller creators, and balancing benefit to creators with benefit to viewers is important for keeping a platform with user-generated content healthy.) It was from a male creator, also featuring another male, and it opened with the creator blowing out a cloud of white vapor or smoke.
This is why I didn't mention it at the time. But a large number of people, most of them probably female, decided to press Like on the video. A search for "china percentage of males that smoke" leads to a Wikipedia article that mentions "widespread apathy and tacit acceptance toward smoking policy" (total article size is 45 KB which I'm not reading) as well as a featured snippet from Statista that records the percentage of smokers as being relatively constant for the past 10 years, at about 50% of males and 2% of females. This could be contrasted with the significant decrease in support for the death penalty from younger people in the US over the past 20 years (via article that looks at partisan split in views towards crime).
(I had considered modifying the suggested options for the poll in the update at 02:15 today, to include "and I am under 30" and "and I am over 30", since it seems like a question that would be correlated with views towards the death penalty, but it would be divisive. If someone actually made the poll, someone else could explore demographic differences in responses.)
But I don't really care if Chinese females approve of Chinese males smoking. The fact that Sherine mentioned Shia LaBeouf at all suggested that she thought he knows of the idea, and possibly that the reason he didn't share it was that he didn't want to do something that would make Sherine look stupid. In other words, "beautiful because of behavior meant to help other people."
I thought of this because I was thinking an hour ago that the behavior that would make a male look beautiful would be for him to share this idea. But does anyone think the same? Did Sherine think he should have shared it?
There was also the female person whom I contacted earlier in 2014, whose identity I have forgotten. She probably did not share this idea, but if I hadn't said anything to her, maybe I would not have said anything to Shia LaBeouf.
In the update about Korea two days ago, I didn't say anything about why China might have stolen MH370. The truth is, I think it was a stupid thing to do. The advantage: it was a very public thing, and anyone who knew of (and understood) this idea should have suspected a connection, so it sort of put pressure on the US government not to ignore this idea.
But this has not, to date, led to people using the idea. Suppose that it led to Chinese leadership learning that Chinese people are very good at lying (even to the point of making Douyin videos which feature obvious warping, that make people think that Chinese people are not good at lying). What can you do if you know that everyone supports a common goal and will lie if necessary? Not much, I think. It doesn't magically create more fossil fuels, or prevent global warming. It doesn't lead to breakthroughs in semiconductor manufacturing technology, and it didn't stop the US from imposing a bunch of tariffs on imports from China.
So, just as I think it would have been better if Korean people disobeyed orders, it would have been better if Chinese people disobeyed orders and instead acted in a way that caused people to use this idea. Even someone who didn't know of this idea could have potentially caused this: a Person 1 cannot force a Person 2 to reveal information that Person 1 does not know that Person 2 possesses, but they could express their disagreement with a course of action, and this could cause Person 2 to reveal the unknown information as an explanation for their actions.
The best explanation might be like the red and blue buttons questions (mentioned in the posts to you that are hidden at the time I'm writing this). One or more people acted in a risky way; Shia LaBeouf might have been one of these people, if he read my tweets to him. I have also suggested that Sherine started the trend of acting like this idea wasn't important, so she could possibly be counted among these people as well. The argument is that people should press the blue button because some other people are stupid enough to press it even when there's no reason to. (Note the modified scenario in which someone could be aware that no one else has yet pressed the blue button, but cannot be assured that no one will press it after they have already irrevocably pressed the red button.) So it might be like China was pressing the blue button because someone else already had. Or that the Chinese leadership was ordering people to press the blue button, with each individual able to make their own decision whether to follow the orders.
Even if I think a male would be more attractive if he shared this idea, I am — as I have previously said — not interested in males. So my opinion of what makes males attractive is sort of irrelevant. If a male is interested in females, and no females hold this opinion, then sharing this idea will not make him more attractive to the people that matter.
So, point: not sharing this idea because of the possibility that a single person would be harmed, or would be unhappy. This has, unfortunately, never been a viable argument. The Syrian civil war started in like 2011. Deaths in armed conflicts based on where they occurred: this tracks 79k people dying from conflict in Syria in 2014.
From my 'online tasks' file,
26 May 2026 BQ8oIfX79Cc dup of Yqf4NgRjAgY
date of train station knife attack?
ask Max if he knew neighbor
ask AI: define the word ___ without copying from or imitating any existing sources. Then, "did you copy or imitate any existing sources?"
which countries are referred to in Three Body? "M-country", for the US?
(Obviously, I am only copying the whole thing, instead of just the second line, because I think the videos are worthy of being shared, even though I sort of recognize that I already linked them.)
So I just did a search for "2014 china train station attack", then I was like "wait no" and searched for "2013 china train station attack wiki", and it turns out it was in 2014 after all. I made the note because I thought it might have been before the Boston marathon bombing, but it was a year later, which meant I also forgot the possibility that it was part of the reason China stole MH370: to justify acting in a way that corrected the problem that led to the attack. Anyway, the attack killed 31 people and wounded 143 others. 31 divided by 79000 (deaths in Syrian civil war in 2014) is a small number.
If you're in a room, and one exit says "make Sherine look stupid" and the other says "do nothing", then the first second (this was completely unintentional) exit might be the obvious choice. But if the second says "let 79000 die in a civil war", then it's no longer so clear. Of course, the whole world let those 79k people die, including Muslim countries, with some Muslim countries supporting one side in the war and others supporting the other side.
"Wouldn't it be funny if someone had to act in a way that people consider selfish in order to fix problems in the world?" No, it wouldn't. A quick search of Encyclopædia Dramatica turns up, just starting from the main page,
Article of the Now: Pokémon, "It was created at least 100 years ago"
"At least 100 years ago", after being featured on the Encyclopedia Dramatica, managed to lose all of its lulz within a very short month. It can currently be found on at least 100 articles, none of which are any funnier for the use of it. The meme has since been replaced by a slightly moar unfunny meme.
You can bet your life that every meme you know hasn't been funny since about 20 seconds after its inception, which was approximately one billion years ago for all memes.
The overall message of Encyclopædia Dramatica could be said to be that it's difficult for a stupid person to be funny, even if they have a helpful website that attempts to explain everything they might have questions about. Many people who think that something will be funny if they do it are wrong. And many people who think that someone else has done or said something funny are wrong.
It cloaks its criticism of stupidity in humor.
(Remember when I mentioned Encyclopædia Dramatica on Chirp Club, and an account which looked like the site's official account replied to me and I replied back, but in fact it was an account with a substituted character in the username and very few followers. I had posted on the site before it originally closed in ~2007, but I can't remember whether I had contacted the site's female owner, Sherrod DeGrippo, before then, or whether I might have said anything that might have influenced her decision to close it. This was four years before I thought of this idea.)
Back to what kind of behavior makes someone beautiful. Demi Rose's pinned tweet on Chirp Club:
Here for a good time not a long time
She has posted before about how she has an organ donor card, so that if she dies, other people can use her organs. Many people don't do this, which means that hospitals are not allowed to use their organs to help others. I don't have such a card. My easy excuse is that I don't know if I have any diseases. When I was Iraq, and habitually brushing my teeth with non-potable hot water from the faucet (I knew it was non-potable), at one point I got sort like bumps on my shoulder.
I am inclined to act like her behavior is objectionable even though this "acceptance of death" is the same as recommended in the Book of Five Rings, for a warrior who has the job of being prepared to kill other people. It's been over eight years since Demi Rose posted that pinned tweet, and longer than that since I first tried to contact her on Chirp Club.
One can lead a moral life and still end up unhappy, and a happy life is better than an unhappy one.
Videos of people who are attractive because of their behavior, who might not be attractive if encountered on a street (a non-performative setting) or even if they danced in a different way, because "acting in a way that is intended to make other people happy" is one way of being beautiful:
Age-restricted videos that I wasn't able to watch (or listen to while watching AoE2 videos) since I wasn't logged in to YouTube before I started writing this update:
This is only about the game, Age of Empires II. There's no indication you care about it. I will just say that I felt that it was because I had been playing Age of Empires II (back when my computer's fan still worked) that Demi Rose mentioned on Chirp Club that she used to play like Habbo Hotel, which honestly is a game I'm not familiar with except for (...decides not to link the Encyclopædia Dramatica article) Pool's Closed. This seems safe to link: https://habboxwiki.com/2006_Habbo_Raid
I also thought it was possible that Nastya Chernova, the fiancée of a young Russian soldier who volunteered to fight in Ukraine in 2014 and was killed in an artillery attack, was playing an isometric building game for the same reason.
顏如憶 Yan Ru Yi was posting about playing some type of game in 2012 as well, though I don't remember what it was and this was before I discovered that AoE2 still had an active multiplayer community.
The following is a bit obvious, but I sometimes feel that everything I say is obvious. Yesterday I challenged a younger relative to solve a puzzle randomly selected from a book (how do you form 4 chains with 3 links each into a circle by cutting and welding only three links), and he soon realized the answer, while two people older than him could not see the answer. Was it obvious?
There are barriers that make AoE2 not fun to play for someone who is new to it. Many players are very far from being new to it: I was looking up some player statistics a few days ago. There are many players with many thousands of multiplayer games played. Some of these players that I was looking up had around 1100 rating, slightly better than the average of 1000 for AoE2 (since it's the starting rating, and rating changes are zero-sum), while others had 2500+ rating. Along with games played, other statistics were shown, including the number of castles, the number of wonders, and the number of farms each player had built.
It was kind of funny to see a player who had built 450k farms, probably around 10k castles, but had never built a single wonder during all that time. But the point is, the players with around 1100 rating still had hundreds of thousands of farms built.
I later compared the amount of clicking with piano playing. Suppose a piano song is 5~10 notes per second. 10 minutes of piano playing would then be 3k+ notes. 100 days, each with 10 minutes spent playing, would be 300k+ notes. So 450k farms is not an unreasonable number of actions.
But it's a huge amount of practice over someone who is just placing their first few farms.
Someone could choose to play the game in a way that makes the learning process more fun. But if they recommend the same game to other people, would those other people play in the same fun way, or would their learning experience be unfun? It really depends on the game's design and presentation for players. What methods of play are players guided towards? So that's why I wouldn't really recommend a game that is fun unless the default method of playing it is also fun. It wouldn't be enough that I could suggest an unusual way of playing it that makes the learning process more fun.
It should also be obvious that the reason I'm trying not to do or say anything interesting is to avoid giving anyone an excuse not to share this idea.
So these are just meant to be examples, of changes that could be made to AoE2 to make it more fun for new players. First change, that would not affect a typical team game with two teams like 4v4, or 1v1 games, but would be relevant if the 'default' game type for new players was free-for-all or with more than two teams:
AoE2: 'limited diplomacy', three states for diplomacy checkbox instead of two. Different marker, like a dash, for limited diplomacy, where players cannot change to or from Allied, but can change between Enemy and Neutral.
If not already implemented: make attacking neutral military units have lower priority than attacking enemy military units. If attacked by neutral units, other units still defend and retaliate, without switching to enemy units if they get close. (Like a wolf continuing to attack an archer even if a villager approaches.)
This is something I have sort of already suggested, I just thought of a way to slightly simplify the user interface for it. Instead of a second checkbox or introducing a dropdown list with just three options, modify the checkbox.
Minor things that have slight relevance for new players:
AoE2: try to put players with same language settings on the same team in team games. If not already implemented: use team game rating, maybe solo rating as well, for random team placement in custom lobbies, like rage forest.
AoE2: improve follow PoV in recordings. Record camera position and zoom, so that targets of actions (mouse clicks) can be calculated as a screen position. If the player watching a recording has a closer zoom level, move the screen so that mouse movements have a similar position on the screen (like "near the top of the screen"). If the viewer has a more distant zoom, no need to move the screen.
For the second, I'm just blindly assuming it hasn't gotten any better in the past 10 years, since I last played AoE2, despite numerous game updates. And for the first, I also don't know if it's already been implemented. I basically just extrapolate from the poor matchmaking in the other game I'm familiar with, World of Warcraft's Battlegrounds. If it was fixed in any version of WoW, I assume that players who complained about problems would have been able to point to the existing solution and say "just do this". If World of Warcraft, the world's most successful MMORPG with apparently over half the lifetime revenue of PUBG, or nearly half the lifetime revenue of Candy Crush, cannot get it right, then it wouldn't be surprising if a game with fewer developmental resources also has not done everything perfectly.
Long:
AoE2: option to have an advantage, but this is accounted for in ratings change at end of game. So: players could choose to win more, without affecting their stable rating. Requires that the advantage or disadvantage is communicated to opponent, so all players have accurate expectations for the game and don't get upset if it doesn't go as they hope. High-rating players could choose a disadvantage, get matched against a weaker opponent (faster queue time), and not lose much rating if they lose.
Example of disadvantage! 'Choose one unit to train and upgrade in each age'. Probably too much of a penalty. But an example of an interesting challenge, rather than something boring like a handicap percentage.
Sort of a contradiction: if players get matched against a lower rating if they choose a disadvantage, why not get matched against higher rating if choosing an advantage? Maybe could happen for very low rating players; broaden acceptable rating of opponent, but still prefer same rating if immediately available.
Different from an option to deliberately face a weaker or a stronger opponent in terms of rating. If players could choose to always face an opponent 500 rating lower, maybe some players would choose it, but the natural conclusion for someone who watches the match is that a higher winrate is still an indication of more skill. More skill than a weaker opponent than normal, but many people only see the first part, "more skill". If higher chance to win is because of specific in-game advantage, then it's not because of "more skill".
Maybe some bad ideas: different cost of aging up. One or two extra villagers would work for all civs but Goths, who would research Loom instantly and have TC idle time. More or less HP on all buildings.
Requires penalty for quitting at start of game, so players don't just pick advantage for more rating loss. Disabled for tournament ladders in case of strategies that work better with advantage or disadvantage than predicted by rating change modifications.
Social dynamics: if it's an option after seeing challenge rating of opponent, option to receive disadvantage could be seen as disrespectful. As an advantage, could be available only when facing a stronger opponent, so both players don't use it.
I thought of that just three days ago. And the following is actually from the same day, 04 Jun:
https://youtu.be/3mNGUaYngNg?t=2455 "I'm so happy I stumbled upon this one" https://youtu.be/3mNGUaYngNg?t=3090 "This game could take another couple hours" https://youtu.be/3mNGUaYngNg "And this is certainly one of them" https://youtu.be/3mNGUaYngNg?t=10787 "We don't have that much food to sell though" https://youtu.be/3mNGUaYngNg?t=10921 "Just to give you the opposite end of the spectrum" https://youtu.be/3mNGUaYngNg?t=11205 didn't know that spies gives notification, no FFA forest nothing games https://youtu.be/3mNGUaYngNg?t=11303 "this game could go on for another hour" https://youtu.be/3mNGUaYngNg?t=11419 not knowing that town watch doesn't affect walls https://youtu.be/3mNGUaYngNg?t=11492 200/195 pop https://youtu.be/3mNGUaYngNg?t=11644 deleted stables https://youtu.be/3mNGUaYngNg?t=12523 "The definition of genius is"
AoE2: make wonders give vision to enemies even on Conquest victory conditions, give 'wonder completed!' message (but not 'started building a wonder!' message) https://youtu.be/3mNGUaYngNg
AoE2: poll about fixing ballistics dodging. Average unit vectors, previous and current, so it decays towards current vector.
Store for unit that is targeting another unit. Don't need to always compute for every unit's movement. Can also use varying parameters, so all units don't all miss in the same way.
"Lowers skill ceiling, but in practice, no one was reaching that skill ceiling anyway."
The linked game features a new player who questions what is the point of the Ballistics technology if arrows can just be dodged the way his opponent does. This has been part of AoE2 for a long time, and long-time players tend to not mind it as it's both a way for players to show their skill by doing it at appropriate times, and a way for them to show their lack of skill by doing it at inappropriate times instead of doing other things that demand their attention. But maybe new players dislike that arrows can still be dodged with high probability.
I think that strong walls, and ranged attacks that can miss, are two of the main features that distinguish AoE2 from other real-time strategy games. Hill advantage might be another feature. How would World of Warcraft combat be different if it had hill advantage? (Or the movement-based offensive and defensive modifiers that Aion had?)
Posting these here doesn't help anyone. So it's not a reason for someone not to share this idea even if there's a chance I could post something like it again.
Because I'm trying not to say anything interesting, I didn't comment on this video when I saw at 39:01,
that the player who made the video was using attack-ground between two trebuchets, to damage them both with the same attack. This used to be something that only one player seemed to do, who at the time was the best player in AoE2. So I wanted to bring attention to this small action with a positive comment. But maybe such comments from me deter someone from sharing this idea.
Watching videos like this is worse and less enjoyable than actually playing the game. At 0:49, what the player who made the video should have done is wall in both villagers, who did not have Loom (which increases the number of attacks needed to kill them from 9 to 20), with palisade walls on the four sides of both villagers. This would have given time for the Loom research to complete, if necessary. There would have been a gap through which the enemy villagers could have advanced. But if they travelled through it, they could get trapped.
It was fortuitous that the player who made the video ended up killing two villagers and losing only one in this game. But in another game, they were not so lucky. The timeline of that game shows how, by around minute 14 of the game before the armies of other players got involved, the blue player had ~12% of the world population of 236 (~28 pop) while the gray player (creator of video, and opposing flank) had only ~6.8% of the world population (~16 pop).
(Using this helpful command, with ImageMagick's command-line 'identify' utility and bash:
So basically, this update is to say that a player should be doing a thing that they never learned how to do because no one else does it, so the method has not had an opportunity to be copied and spread.
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Update 08 Jun 2026, 00:25
This might seem presumptuous when there's no proof you've ever read anything that I've said, including my emails to you. But suppose that you want to help me in some way. What if you share the idea and I just continue what I was doing, like watching AoE2 videos. You might dislike this scenario when you imagine it. Stories are often dramatic. (Did I ever mention, at slight risk of my accounts getting hacked, that my main email password is based on the word "dramaticized"? It was originally based on "imagine", from the lyrics immediately preceding the "me and you" used for my other email account, but I eventually forgot that password and changed it to this one. No criticism about it not being a real word, since that's good for a password.)
At the moment the female character intervenes, the male character is being severely bullied and beaten.
So you might be disappointed that sharing this idea would not immediately seem to help me. It's true that it wouldn't help me. But this has always been true. Even when I was living outside, worrying about the condensation from my breath causing my sleeping bag to become damp near my feet, I would not have directly been helped if someone had shared this idea. The only way it would have immediately helped me is that I could have stopped sharing it and done other things that it was possible for me to do in that situation.
The only real difference is that when I was living outside, I could say "but at least someone sharing it wouldn't harm me." If one imagines that sharing this idea is a bad thing to do, and people would get mad at me, then when I was living outside I would have been hard to find.
Ok but I'm not waiting for you to share this idea. I forgot.
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Update 08 Jun 2026, 02:01
So anyway, I was over two minutes in to another AoE2 video when I heard a weird sound that made me suspect that it might be auto-dubbed. And it was. Many creators leave the auto-dub feature on when it only harms their channel. This might not be a good example: Zuiikin' English - How dare you say such a thing to me....
It's so bad that it might actually improve the video's performance in the algorithm. Like at 0:20, the auto-dub adds something that sounds like "how you say tone". Even the subtitles don't know what it's saying, since the auto-dub is just audio being fed into an AI, that doesn't necessarily interact with the same process that produces the Japanese subtitles. The comments are an interesting mix of recent comments alerting other viewers to the fact that they're probably listening to the auto-dubbed version, and popular comments from up to 12 years ago: "Anti-bullying groups in a nutshell." (3.3k upvotes)
Basically, it's the default. It's probably an experiment at the moment, just like when all Google searches were giving an AI answer. (I assume that this is no longer the case for everyone, rather than just that my browser is old.) Microsoft learned long ago that most people leave settings at the default for many software programs (UI customization in World of Warcraft is an extreme counter-example). Hoped for a Wikipedia article about it, didn't find it; found this, which doesn't even mention Microsoft, but conveys the point: The Luxury of Ignorance: Part Deux
. . . the most valuable gift you can give your users is the luxury of ignorance — software that works so well, and is so discoverable to even novice users, that they don't have to read documentation or spend time and mental effort to learn about it.
I would compare it to what I wrote about knowledge specialization in the first public argument for this idea, but I'll try not to talk about this idea in any more updates to this post.
Defaults should be good. Even if the auto-dub feature is generating data for Google, like which settings for the auto-dub leads to people using the output and increasing the watchtime for a video, it's still bad for a lot of channels. Creators that don't turn it off when it's harmful either don't notice that the auto-dubs are being created, or they don't realize it's harmful or don't care.
And this kind of auto-pilot is just how a lot of people are. They watch ads and are affected by those ads, like in which shows they watch or which games they play. This helps some people; creators, and people who benefit from creators that create ad-supported content.
The channel has several other videos, which are not nearly as popular. They just got lucky with that video. I have no idea what people say in the comments (I assume this link works even with the wrong @username, but my browser is too old for it to work), like whether they realize it's AI-generated, but the creator definitely benefits from the video's popularity.
I'll just assume that the comments on that video are people laughing at it being AI-generated; that if 100 million people watch an AI-generated video and have the ability to comment on it, the truth will prevail.
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Update 08 Jun 2026, 09:53
Dream of being in a passenger plane that gently ditched in the ocean, which was fine, but I couldn't find my laptop because it had been stored in the overhead compartments by someone else, which was not fine. I was literally prepared to die trying to find it.
(The plane dream had been going on for a while, but in the dream I had fallen asleep for a while, and it's a bit confusing because I had been trying to figure out how we had gotten from being over New York to being over Spain, but if we were over the ocean then clearly we weren't over Spain)
The obvious explanation for this specific dream was that I am playing a wave sound on a loop. This was the first time I tried playing the original sound, not an edit, and with no volume normalization to make the quiet parts closer in volume to the loud parts.
time ffplay ~/stolen\ \&\ temp/'Waves Crashing on Rock Beach[YouTube Sound Effect].webm' -nodisp -v quiet -volume 100 -af "asetpts=PTS-STARTPTS,asplit[mid],afifo,atrim=0:3[st],[mid]afifo,atrim=0:186.7[mid],[mid][st]acrossfade=d=2:c1=qsin:c2=qsin, lowpass=700, lowpass=3000, aloop=-1:$((1847*4800)):96k, asetrate=30k,channelsplit[l][r],[l]volume=sin(time(0)/30)/4+sin(time(0)/4.153)/10+1:eval=frame[l],[r]volume=sin(time(0)/27.4)/4+sin(time(0)/5.153)/10+1:eval=frame,[l]amerge"
(The split and merge is meant for two speakers, but one of the speakers is broken and I'm too lazy to modify the command to remove this part. It uses the aloop filter in the first place because I couldn't get a seamless loop due to not realizing that the first frame of a webm with Opus was being cut off due to -0.007 timestamp offset, so it was seeking to 0 to loop when the first frame was at -0.007.)
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Update 10 Jun 2026, 00:41
Sometimes I forget: there is someone who talked to me in the past 15 years.
Song lyrics, like from Boukyaku no Sora, used as the theme song of the drama IWGP: "<insert lyrics>"
And Only My Railgun or LEVEL5-judgelight-. As well, "【GUMIオリジナル】 正義粉砕 【NfN】" (Justice Breaker).
In these songs, words or events that have happened are important. They may or may not be difficult to remember, when they seem to have left no trace in the present (people for whom this does not apply would be listening to other songs). But they are treated as significant.
It isn't a coincidence that all these songs are Japanese. It's consistent with the explanation of Japan having a moral framework based on the individual, with a high awareness of the hidden problem ("level 2" or whatever). This makes Japanese people avoid the explanation that is common in the US, that 'people are just evil and it's fine to secretly be evil in certain ways'. This allows Japanese people to think that honesty is important, though just like with any society there are some people who did not act in the way that the majority considers to be moral and a reasonable person should be aware of this possibility when interacting with others.
The person who talked to me on Chirp Club is someone to whom I did not say something like "I love you". Of course, they never said their gender, and I am only interested in females. It felt like this person was female, though. I might also only have talked to them for a few hours, or possibly even less than an hour, but this was enough time for them to say "ellipsis" when I used those to continue my tweets, when hindered by the 140-character limit that existed at the time. Many people probably do not know the name for triple dots. (In Jimmy, the World of Warcraft story, they're referred to simply as the triple dots, for example.)
I stopped talking to this person when it became apparent that they were acting like this idea wasn't important, even though they were talking to me. Or perhaps more precisely, they were acting like they were acting like it wasn't important? Since they emphasized that it was "my" idea, which in a way was treating it as something that was important.
I have said to both Mei and Kate that I l*ved them, though maybe when I said it to Kate, it was in an email that also had Mei in the "To" list of recipients and I made no attempt to clarify anything. If one of them had talked to me, the way the person on Chirp Club did, I would not have stopped talking to them. This could easily (would likely) have led to me stopping my efforts to get people to use this idea.
I like to think that when I stopped talking to the person on Chirp Club, who did not have anything that seemed to be their name on their account that I recall, that it was the better outcome for this person. I avoided 'discriminating' against them by not checking my notifications on Chirp Club from that point on. The risk was too high that if I saw a message from this person, I would reply. If Mei or Kate had talked to me, in a way that suggested they thought it was fine if people didn't use this idea, then I think it would also have been the better outcome if I stopped replying to such messages. But because what happened in the past is important, I would not have stopped replying, and so they would have gotten a bad outcome. (I can confidently say it would have been a bad outcome because I was and still am poor, with no useful work history etc.)
I posted the following as a comment on YouTube. It didn't show up; YouTube felt my comment was not civil enough (this phrase is literally what I wrote down when I was thinking about making this post, and I typed it again rather than copy-paste). I think it would be better if I did not link the video on which I left this comment. I also made a second note, about a different video by someone else that I was thinking about also linking, but I am not linking that video either, or any of the several other videos that I opened without watching.
If there's a whole government conspiracy thing going on, then maybe the creator of the video would have seen what I wrote even though YouTube's comment filter didn't accept it. Or maybe I don't understand the comment filter, and comments can get held for approval by a channel moderator even though they don't show up for the commenter. (Whereas it's common for a commenter to see their own comment after posting it, but no one else or almost no one else is shown the comment.) By not linking any videos, it makes it less likely that anyone could benefit from this update (either other people, or me), and so reduces the incentive for Greta Thunberg to procrastinate in sharing this idea.
My comment:
I haven't watched any of your video or seen the film Obsession, just talking about the topic. I've been thinking a bit about this sort of thing lately. 'Starting a company that sells to rich people should have the same average profitability as starting a company that sells to poor people, since if it's more profitable more people will try it which reduces chance of success.'
It makes sense that the same should apply to many other things that involve competition. If there are two strategies in relationships, 'nice' and 'mean', it wouldn't be surprising if they both have about the same chance of success. Just as with starting a business, same average success doesn't mean same variance in profit: maybe being 'mean' has a chance of a passionate relationship (large success) but also a large chance of failure, while 'nice' has a high probability of a stable, but boring relationship. It could also be the case that one strategy is inherently less successful, but if its frequency becomes too low, it becomes more attractive until it matches the success rate of the more popular strategy.
One might say that with relationships, ideally everyone just acts honestly. But when someone changes their behaviour because what they did led to embarrassment or shame, is it being dishonest to act a certain way to get people to treat them differently? Or can people change?
Just as using the strategy of 'nice' or 'mean' might have the same average chance of success, preferring a partner who is using the "nice" strategy might be no better, on average, than preferring a "mean" partner.
Distortions: when expectations don't match reality. This is, of course, made worse by deception, but people can also deceive themselves (or can unintentionally deceive others by giving bad advice). And when there are other parties to consider: most notably, the influence of genders as groups, who look at the overall gain or loss for the group for members of the group using the 'nice' or 'mean' strategies. Just picking males for this example: do males prefer for other males to be 'nice', or 'mean', regarding romantic relationships? Peer pressure pushes the rewards for each strategy in a certain direction, which can be partially but not fully compensated for by higher out-group rewards (romantic success).
People are always looking for a secret way to win: if it wasn't secret, then it wouldn't be better than any other solution. But sometimes there's no easy (but secret) answer.
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Update 10 Jun 2026, 17:45
Just had a thought. Human vision is sort of the essence of acting based on contradictory information. Is Object A in front of Object B, or not?
Computers can use multiple viewpoints to more accurately estimate the position of objects in a scene. One reason I sometimes try to take note of when a dance has been recorded and uploaded on YouTube from multiple angles is in case I ever encounter a technology that uses this approach.
It is necessary to show some examples of this. Featuring 書璇、大妞、思思 as dancers:
It doesn't seem to be common for computers to do this. Reading about self-driving cars that have accidents, screenshots of the camera output or whatever don't show or mention it. Instead they just use radar or something.
When eyes have contradictory input to the brain, which is all the time, the brain needs to decide which of the inputs is correct. Our brains do this constantly, discarding 'incorrect' information, instead of failing to work in the presence of these contradictory inputs. Many young people have probably tried holding up an object, like their fingers, and then trying to see the object as solid, and then as transparent, without moving their eyes.
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Update 11 Jun 2026, 23:52
"An evil supercomputer with a power level that's over 9000 enforces a rule: if two people fall in love, they will be separated for 20 years. It's like a military family moving away, but all communication including texting is disallowed. This can only happen to a person once; after that, they are safe. No one has yet found a way to destroy the evil supercomputer. What would society say is moral: to wait 20 years, or to find someone else to love?"
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Update 12 Jun 2026, 00:39
AoE2: for 'pick advantages', also an extra herdable.
To avoid everyone choosing advantages, it seems it would be available only to weaker players. Note option of choosing 'true' rating, maybe chosen strength appears in front of nominal strength as a 'mask'? Example: player did poorly in placement games, assigned a low rating, but then did campaigns and gained much skill. Could claim higher rating. Opponents with same rating would see 'strong opponent' as a mask, would be given the option of selecting advantages.
Maybe claiming low rating (as a 'mask') could give option of picking advantages. Having advantages, and losing, would mean more ratings loss. Winning due to advantages, after claiming low rating, could make opponent think it was a lie, but at least they wouldn't lose much rating from their loss.
Both picking disadvantages before queueing, and declining to pick advantages against a strong opponent, are actions that promote the idea that winning isn't everything and that having fun, or becoming more skilled, are also important.
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Update 12 Jun 2026, 00:52
As previously suggested, having advantages would allow a player to win more than 50% of matches at a stable rating. A lot of ratings loss for a loss, and small ratings gain for a win, means many wins at a stable rating. In case a lot of players end up wanting this, prefer to match players who use low ratings as a 'mask' against each other. Can probably work as just another dimension for calculating matchmaking distance.
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Update 12 Jun 2026, 00:58
On Chirp Club, when I was describing something, I named it the "Sherine rating system" (like how Elo rating is also named after a person). It might have basically just been the ability to claim a higher or lower rating. These details go beyond what I described then.
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Update 12 Jun 2026, 01:34
>ask AI: why is it called the X factor and not the Y factor?
>ask AI: in Three Body, why did the sophons cause the countdown timer to appear?
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Update 12 Jun 2026, 01:41
Remember in Three Body when a person who was better at mathematics than almost everyone else in the world could not understand why his wife threatened him with a knife and said that his failure to solve the titular problem would be exactly twice as bad as the human race going extinct?
(I was going to start this update with "Three Body is not without problems", and then maybe continue the sentence with "even though I can't think of any at the moment", but I just remembered that the idea of a planet not being ejected when its distance to three suns is variable enough to cause the scenarios suggested is the first and most obvious inaccuracy. The scenario in A Deepness in the Sky seemed more realistic, though it might be just as bad for someone with more knowledge. Like, maybe glaciers? And if it's really the closest stars to our own in Three Body, the third star is too distant to contribute anything. But one could argue the third star is unimportant to the story. The purpose of this parenthetical observation is to make me look stupid, since I missed something obvious.)
(This is related to the previous question about sophons because of the foreknowledge regarding the celestial observations)
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Update 12 Jun 2026, 15:28
Only watched the first 100 seconds of this video, linking a comment:
The description of the video is very helpful, unlike some channels that deliberately avoid trying to summarize anything in the video to force people to watch it, increasing its watchtime and making it perform better in the YouTube algorithm. The linked comment:
The only solution for the que dodging is giving people a free choice on what maps they want to play. Sometimes the map pool is just forcing you to play open maps or closed maps. When I play with friends they only can play in closed maps so an open map is almost always a loss as we are facing players who are stronger there. But if we then play closed maps people of our own elo are matching better with us. Some things should change in my opinion: Communication should be possible when queing in a party. As chat is only possible when choosing civs. And people should not be forced in playing maps that are not why they are there to play for.
Still relevant, though with Age of Empires II there are actually a lot of people who communicate in English but are not native English speakers. (I still have never read the entire comic, or made any attempt to continue where I stopped ~20 years ago)
This comment shows why the most obvious possible solution, "just ban people who quit games at the start", is not the best. People find ways to justify what they want to do, and when people think that they are acting in a moral way, it's better to fix what they see as a problem. I'm not linking this video because it's about AoE2; I'm linking it because the video and its comments illustrate a problem that definitely has solutions which have not yet been taken. This can be compared to problems that might not have a solution: "How to profitably generate energy using fusion reactors" or "How to make a space elevator using available materials and technologies". If someone only looks at impossible problems, one might think that humans don't need to be doing anything differently, and spending time looking for or evaluating solutions is time wasted.
The commenter actually has a valid point: if someone only played one type of map, they would stabilize at a rating where they win 50% of games. If they occasionally play another map that they're bad at, they will often lose on that map, which makes their rating go down and makes them win more than 50% of the time on the map they're good at. Even if there are only 20 players total, and half of them like and are good at one map and half are good at the other map, and they are forced to play on a random map, then each half could find the experience of playing the map that they're bad at unfun.
This is true for any variable in gameplay, like "which champion to use" or "which role or lane you are assigned". I'm vaguely familiar with the autofill system in League of Legends, though I can't remember which role is considered undesirable and frequently must be filled through autofill.
In AoE2, the maps in multiplayer are rotated based on voting. They are what some players want, just not what every player wants. There's an argument that it's better to force players to play on a variety of maps, even if it leads to an unbalanced win rate as shown above. Everyone who plays games also has to deal with real life, and life also forces people to deal with situations that they don't like. Like when Adam Lanza shot young people, and one of them said "I don't want to be here", and Adam Lanza replied something like "too bad, you are here".
Bringing attention to this part of the comment: "so an open map is almost always a loss as we are facing players who are stronger there." The commenter implies that this is a bad thing, a reason for them to avoid this situation, and a reason that the best solution is to allow them (and people with similar preferences) to avoid this situation without breaking the rules by quitting when they get games like this.
My recent game-related ideas that I've posted here have been about changing how much people care about winning or losing (as opposed to changing how much they care about what their rating is). But I would agree that playing a game where you always win, or always lose, is not fun. (Some WoW-related suggestions are about finding different ways for a weaker character to 'win', by contributing to other players defeating the player who killed them, even if they can never win a 1v1 fight.) Games are fundamentally about measuring performance and predicting outcomes, and if you always lose even if you play 3x better than you've ever played or better than anyone else can play, there's no point in the game even describing an outcome as a win or loss. So it should be fine if a player loses 60% of the time, but at some point it stops being fine, and that might be at 90% loss rate, 99% loss rate, or just 80% loss rate.
The system I have described, with picking advantages, would not help players affected by this problem, since a single matchmaking rating does not measure map-level performance. Rather than saying "players should just accept that they will lose on some maps", I'll suggest that a matchmaking system could measure performance changes on a variable like the map, and balance teams accordingly. Like, track the last 20 games on each map, recording a victory or loss. If four players who always play together lose 80% of 4v4 games on Arabia (without it being attributable to a player quitting at the start of the game etc.), and win 60% of games on Arena, then the matchmaking system can give them weaker opponents on Arabia and stronger opponents on Arena, to try to get both numbers closer to 50%. Rating changes would not care about these different win rates: if the system gives them a match against lower-rated opponents on Arabia, who still have a 50% chance to win, then those opponents would still only lose a little rating if they lost and would gain a lot of rating if they win.
This can lead to ratings distortions: if one month has a bunch of open, Arabia-like maps (I still think that there's a big chance Arabia became popular in AoE2 simply because it was the first map in alphabetical order), then these players might lose a bunch of rating (even while winning 50% of games), which would make them win even more games if they happened to get a closed map. But they could use the system for claiming a higher rating if this happens and they don't like it.
Basically, this is balancing two outcomes: losing more games vs losing more rating. This commenter was complaining about losing games, and didn't mention rating. If forced to play on open maps, their equilibrium rating should decline to the same value without using map-based winrate to balance teams, but some players might prefer that this happen through a 50% winrate, rather than a 20% or 10% winrate.
(An AI says that "happen" is correct. Native English speaker here.)
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Update 12 Jun 2026, 22:20
I said I would try not to mention this idea in updates to this post.
If your moral code is whether something is legal or not, you don't have one
I think I suggested in 2012 that things that are legal to do are ethical to do. And I made the mistake of trying to find this, with a search for "legal moral". It turns that when I made an ethical standard,
It did say that not signing petitions made someone 'evil'. I had suggested recently that I did not say this, and I was wrong.
The search also turned up a post from 11 Apr 2012 that was in draft form. It had three views. Most likely I unpublished it shortly after publishing it, because it was not polished or was likely to be confusing. I have republished it:
I don't know if there are any other posts in that timespan that remain in draft form.
Someone might have thought in 2012 that sharing this idea would be an unethical thing to do. For example, red and blue buttons, if sharing it was like pressing the red button. Many people who encounter the red and blue buttons question think that pressing blue is ethical and red is unethical. Sharing this idea was, and is, completely legal. It is legal even for government employees to share it, as there is no reason to think it is a political ... https://www.justice.gov/jmd/political-activities
All Department of Justice employees are subject to the Hatch Act, 5 U.S.C. 7323(a) and 7324(a), which generally prohibits Department employees from engaging in partisan political activity while on duty, in a federal facility or using federal property. Political activity is activity directed toward the success or failure of a political party, candidate for partisan political office, or partisan political group.
Permitted Activities
Campaign for or against referendum questions, constitutional amendments, or municipal ordinances
I do, however, note an interesting coincidence. A police department in a city just ~15 km from me is attracting controversy for some of its actions. These actions may exceed the limits of legality; for example, supposedly the CEO of a company asked the police what they could do to get a certain person or persons arrested. If the moral code the police is using is not based on the question of what is legal, do they deserve criticism?
Not everyone thinks that Japanese people are honest. I think Japanese people being strongly against piracy, even for a game that has been dead for a long time and cannot legally be played, is evidence that Japanese people think that honesty is important.
Also, just a few days ago I downloaded the game Archon: The Light and the Dark, which was published before I was born. The game file actually has a modification time of 27 Dec 1984. It's also just 44800 bytes in size, about the size of a single keyframe of video at 720p (when I checked a random video, its vp9 encode at ~1400 Kbps had a first frame of 46756 bytes, while the H264 which is the only format still available has a first frame of 83890 bytes at 720p, ~2300 Kbps).
Other comments, on the same video and another that seems to have a similar topic:
All of these comments are at risk of disappearing. Links are not guaranteed to work in the future, but I am not taking the small effort of copying what they say. If this post is addressed to you, it doesn't matter if one or more of these comments isn't viewable in a month. (But I did copy that first comment, because it explains why I said anything about this.)
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Update 14 Jun 2026, 00:41
Red and blue buttons which everyone in the world must choose between including illiterate people, but under the blue button is written "I don't care if millions of people die" and under the red button is written "I do care if millions of people die". This is mentioned in parentheses after the main question.
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Update 14 Jun 2026, 00:51
I was thinking something like, a third button that says "This button does not exist". Including a third option in the poll would not be useful, but this third option reminded me of the good vs evil thoughts I was having a few days ago.
For some people, it might be useful if a dating site or app allowed users to explicitly specify whether they were 'good' or 'evil', using other terms for these concepts. But other people would dislike such classification and would not want to use a service that used it, or date people who used such a service. This is the third option.
In real life, there are many more options than in an online poll. But they condense into a smaller set of options. Some people think that it can be accurate to say there are just two main options, when looking at any particular situation. I don't think this is true. If the buttons were labeled like this, a majority of people might still say that it's moral to press to blue button. I don't think I would be interested in pressing the blue button even if people thought this, but it doesn't mean I would want to push the red button either.
The danger of including a third option in the poll is that it could make people wonder, what if everyone just pushes the third button? But in real life, maybe the third button does not, in fact, exist, or it leads to unpredictable or catastrophic consequences. It's the "道なき道を選んで", "Choosing a path where none existed" from 荒野流転. You can't suggest that people travel a road that does not exist.
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Update 15 Jun 2026, 03:02
It's my friend's birthday. She might not remember me. She is probably 41.
Even though I'm sick, I couldn't sleep. Still slightly confused about melanin vs melatonin; my youngest sister would take melanin tablets to help her sleep. I have never used things that help with going to sleep or help with staying awake (other than the possible side effects of chocolate). And maybe other people would criticize this. If I was in a relationship, maybe someone would say "just taking a sleeping pill so you can go to sleep, instead of staying awake for over an hour." And maybe I would get cross at them and say YOU ARE TRYIG TO CONTROL ME I AM MAD. I just don't know.
Not bothering to watch this video by Clara Dao: Boob Job & Cancellation Q&A – I’m Answering Everything, since I'm trying not to comment on her videos, but it could be useful or interesting to see whether she addressed the things that continue to lead to negative comments; if she did, then it just shows the difficulty of communications when people only devote a small amount of attention to something before forming an opinion, commenting, and moving on. (This video has 264k views, many of her recent shorts have ~500k views, so probably many people who comment on and watch her shorts did not watch this video.)
I was thinking a little about herd-like behavior. Like, "you are rewarded for going in the right direction, but the reward is the same whether you contribute X or 10X". It reminded me of how in high school, when I took Advanced Placement physics in 10th grade after my physical sciences or whatever teacher decided I was too smart for his class and moved me (it might also have been material that I had previously learned in an earlier school), on the final exam or exams my teacher excluded my score when normalizing scores to grade 'on the curve'. Normally the highest score was given 100 points and everyone's score was adjusted accordingly. (With the teacher's permission, I later reviewed the test questions and offered my suggestions on improving them, but I don't know if he made any changes as a result; I can't remember if this was the end-of-school-year exam, or if there was a similar exam in the first semester.)
I'm probably repeating myself, but it's fair to say that I took on too many challenges in school after that. The fact that in my final year, I took at least one AP test, environmental science, that I had not had time to study for at all, despite having borrowed the textbook for it. (I also did not take the class for it.) This is in contrast to how I quit the advanced classes I had taken just ~8 years earlier, in 4th or 5th grade. The point is that I might sometimes mistake whether things are obvious.
Hopefully I haven't forgotten anything I wanted to say. I was recently thinking about events that happened in 2012. Ok, pasting stuff:
14 Jun 2026 AoE2: wait longer in queue to get favorite map. Instead of just getting maps that are mediocre because no one has banned it.
"If Imane doesn't share the idea, she thinks it's not appropriate for me to like her if I also like anyone else"
"I won't say anything more about the idea until the amount of money I have increases by $0.01"
[...]
16 Jun 2026
[...]
Poll: "If a large-scale, accurate study found that infection with Covid-19 caused an average decrease of 2 IQ points by killing brain cells, would you support a stronger response to the next pandemic?"
Poll: "Which comes closer to your views: people should try to treat others the same no matter which group they come from, or it's fine for people to want to avoid associating with members of other groups?"
"As explorers and settlers arrived from Europe, a tidal wave of disease, especially from 1616 to 1619, reduced the native population by up to 90 percent. [...] Among the many diseases introduced to the Native American population were smallpox, bubonic plague, chickenpox, cholera, the common cold, influenza, diphtheria, malaria, measles, scarlet fever, sexually transmitted diseases, typhoid, typhus, tuberculosis, leptospirosis, yellow fever, and pertussis."
I am still a little sick. I was thinking a couple days ago that my perception that I got sicker while lying down, and while sleeping was accurate and not an illusion, and that it could maybe be explained by cells in the respiratory tract creating a bunch of viral particles that spread to other cells through the extra secretions. I've read that extra snot etc. is the body's defense and reaction to getting sick, but maybe this is wrong. What if it's the virus deliberately causing these symptoms because it helps it to spread? From a few cells in the throat etc. to many more cells in the throat (when mucus pools in the throat while lying down). Now, when I almost feel normal but still have a runny nose etc.: these could be the programmed effects of the virus, maybe from actual whole copies of the virus or just from fragments of like RNA code or proteins. It wouldn't be surprising if cells in like epithelial tissue, close to airways in the throat, are harder to reach for the immune system, and they stay infected longer, maybe until they just die from stress and are replaced.
Anyway, about 'obvious' things. I would say the reason for two major mass shootings in 2012 is obvious. Since the amount of money I have has not increased by $0.01, I won't say more.
Also maybe sort of obvious; when I created a petition in 2012 on the White House website, as anyone had the ability to do at the time, I suggested in the explanation of the petition that it was about whether humans were, by nature, good or evil. Note the last suggested poll about the red and blue buttons, from the first update to this post on 14 Jun 2026. Suppose that 80% of people all pressed one of the buttons. Which would correspond to people being evil: if they pressed the red button, or if they pressed the blue button?
This isn't to say that the question is inherently meaningless. That suggested poll makes it seem rather like a meaningless question. But many people think it's an important question, which means it has a chance of influencing their behavior, and I think this possibility is relevant to the last major mass shooting of 2012 in the US.
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Update 17 Jun 2026, 12:08
"$4 billion (tax-free, due to a special law) if you do a thing that no one would do if they weren't getting paid" "If you don't, half of the $4 billion is used to buy firewood that is burned during a hot summer to create global warming emissions and worsen air quality, while the other half is used to feed hungry orphans in war-torn Sudan"
"You receive a lot of money, but for half of each month, when you leave home you can only wear clothes that are simultaneously extremely revealing, and also very lame, uncool, and embarrassing"
A law is passed that every book must describe all main characters and romantic interests as "ugly". They can then say whatever: shiny hair, muscular, rugged features, smoldering eyes, etc. Are book sales significantly affected?
Remember when, around 2011, I told Sam Sam — the person I met on the World of Warcraft PTR who is probably around 35 years old now — that the reason I expected to die was explained by the Tsurupettan video? (After this person initially replied saying that they didn't think it was funny.)
I am still alive. But the fact that I said this showed that I thought that the reason Mei had not agreed to meet me was that she considered herself to have a flat chest (noting that I had never seen an image of her at that point), and by extension that she was acting like she did not think she was someone that another person would want to spend their life with. So this made me think of a poll:
"Do you think that people you know and care about would benefit more if you had a lower opinion of yourself than you currently do, or if you had a higher opinion of yourself than you currently do?"
It might not seem like an interesting poll. But what if benefit to others conflicts with benefit to self? If someone thinks about this possibility, might it influence how they respond to this poll?
I'm just using this as a place to put game-related thoughts.
'comment friction, Moments of Warcraft maybe, 22 Jun 2026.txt':
This is a video with a particular thesis, which you believed to be correct, supported by an explanation: You say that players vote against friction. A counter example: the intro survey, Question 30, flying mounts: 80% said no.
Minor, but 4:54: over 300k responses, not respondents. Intro survey has 51k, Dungeons survey has 32k, PvP survey has 18k, etc.
What you say here, that players should not offer solutions, is the same as what Blizzard's community managers like Tseric were saying in 2006. Supposedly there was some old case where a player made a Starcraft-related suggestion and then complained, maybe filing a lawsuit, when Blizzard actually used the suggestion, but without crediting the player. If Blizzard makes up its own solutions, no legal risk. But other companies act the same way: wanting to use internal ideas (like with the Japanese drama Haken no Hinkaku, where certain employees try to give credit to a regular employee for an idea conceived by a temporary worker).
It could be a good approach if the development is competent. Do you really think that about Blizzard, after 20 years of Blizzard turning Classic WoW into retail WoW? (Noting that one of the biggest mistakes, flying mounts, happened just two years after WoW's launch.)
Even if you try to follow this approach, you immediately run into the issue that _*many players are not able to correctly identify the real problems.*_ Why is leveling in retail WoW so easy? Because retail players want it to be easy. Why do they want it to be easy? How do you fix the answer to this question, which might be obvious but I won't state it?
Why is world PvP in WoW often just ganking, even in Classic where world PvP is actually possible because no flying mounts? Ganking is a problem; how do you fix ganking? Is the solution obvious, if players just state that they don't ganking to be a common activity even on the PvP servers where it's possible? Can players even agree at all that ganking is a problem, when PvE servers exist? If players say that ganking is a problem, should the solution be War Mode and making it even easier to switch layers to escape getting ganked twice?
How to fix community? Well, I suggested back in ~2010 or early 2011, just after Cataclysm launched and made dungeons hard again, that the only way to stop dungeons from being nerfed was to remove the ability to kick players.
I might have been wrong: I did not know at the time that the early levels were too easy because Blizzard was bad at math when it removed spell ranks. It might have been possible to fix this, making new players more skilled, and therefore causing fewer complaints when new, unskilled players joined groups in which their inexperience got everyone killed.
But Classic WoW does not have a dungeon finder that makes it easy to replace any player who is kicked.
I have to describe my limited experience. Every dungeon I did in WoW was for a quest, except when I went to the Ragefire Chasm at lvl 60 as Alliance and kept pulling the whole dungeon until I finally didn't die from being stun-locked. So I think it's quite possible that the number of dungeons I did with a well-geared player in the group was not much more than two: the run of Sunken Temple where Mei came along at my request and suggested that she might solo the dungeon for fun in her spare time (she was lvl 60, in Tier 2.5 gear, in a dungeon meant for lvl 45~50 players), and a run of Stratholme Live, where a well-geared holy-specced paladin was healing. A Righteous Orb dropped; I won the roll; and he bought it off me for what he said was a fair price. I think he used a smily, like ":-)", in one of the whispers where he agreed to heal or when he offered to buy the orb.
I never did any runs where the other four players were only there to farm drops off of a boss or gold.
Ideally, this lack of experience is something I would rectify before I made suggestions. But I stopped playing WoW, due to Mei changing servers, before I ran out of quests and had to make a decision about whether to do dungeons solely for gear. (Noting that I still played on PTRs, and later on my paladin in battlegrounds, where the levels I gained from NPCs in Alterac Valley were unwanted and unavoidable.)
So, why don't experienced players who are farming gear want to play with new players? It's both obvious, and not obvious. "They are farming for a goal, and a new player would hinder that goal." Thought of an analogy: you are in a group. You get a reward if everyone in the group can output a certain, memorized sequence of 10 or 20 numbers in five seconds. This is something that requires practice. If anyone in the group fails, no reward.
A given player either passes the challenge or fails it. Once they can pass it, it requires no more effort on their part; it isn't really fun. But failing it because of someone else in the group is not fun, and players would want to avoid this experience. So they avoid grouping with new players.
Maybe it's not the closest fit to World of Warcraft. If two dps players are new, a group can still complete a dungeon, just slower. So: "The most precious asset is time."
Some people might look at this quote and say, "Well I should try to spam as many dungeons as possible, grouping only with other highly skilled and well-geared players." Other people reach a different conclusion: the 'purple pixels' of the gear obtained from spamming many dungeons has no value. What matters is the experience of playing the game, and the enjoyment of participating in an activity, especially when it involves interacting with other people. (Most humans do not want to be completely alone.)
A game can be inherently fun even without meaningful rewards. This is many games, like Age of Empires II. There is not even the reward of matchmaking rating for winning a game of Rage Forest, started from a custom lobby rather than through the ranked queue. But having challenge is essential.
And challenge is what tends to disappear when players do the same content over and over again. Retail WoW has dungeons that scale to an arbitrarily high difficulty, such that everyone is challenged, but the Classic Plus Project's survey shows that not everyone wants this for Classic. It gives challenge, but at the expense of roleplaying, among other outcomes: in retail WoW, players might not do this content if they didn't get better gear from it. Giving everyone good gear from doing 5-man content is probably not compatible with Classic WoW.
So it becomes a thing where limiting player power is helpful. For lower-level dungeons, scaling down player level to fit the dungeon; for high-level dungeons, only limiting the quality of a player's gear within the dungeon or raid. It preserves challenge. Challenge gives players a reason to do content for a reason other than to get items (though other content might still be more attractive, just as not everyone in Age of Empires II likes Rage Forest, or 1v1 Arabia, or water maps). And seeking challenge is compatible with taking the time to help new players.
If you just say, "the community acting badly towards new players is a problem. Fix it!", how likely is it that a game developer will reach the above conclusion and solution on their own?
More likely they will do something like, "you get extra items if you help new players. Enjoy!"
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Update 24 Jun 2026, 13:06
I was letting a video featuring Lenovo Ladies 胡欣雅, 陳育涵, 張景嵐 play in 144p resolution with my $1 headphones with almost no low-frequency response, when about a second after the page loaded I noticed a video disparaging a recent film. Many such videos exist, but this one's title referred to "shill media" not being able to defend the film.
It got me thinking. If people perceive media to be unreliable, are media organizations rewarded for being less biased?
Maybe not. If a particular audience thinks that news media are biased, secondary creators are not rewarded for including examples which contradict their audience's expectations.
So maybe the growth of platforms that create secondary creators is driving the polarization of discourse. If a film's average rating is 6, but society can be split along broadly-recognized categories (like political affiliation, gender, or age) into two groups which rate the movie as 3 and 9, should a news organization hire a film reviewer who will rate the movie as a 6, or one who will rate it as a 3 or a 9?
If these two groups perceive themselves as being 'at war' with each other, it seems the polarized rating is better for attracting support from secondary creators.
If there were no secondary creators, I think the rating of 6 would be better for publications.
Edit: "When benefit to the group is not clear, motives can become distorted" or whatever.
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Update 24 Jun 2026, 14:12
Poll: "Would your ideal romantic partner be someone who chooses to help you, or to help a large number of other people who are morally similar to you?"
- They would choose 0.5X benefit to others over X benefit to me
- They would choose X benefit to others over X benefit to me
- They would choose 5X benefit to others over X benefit to me
- They would choose 20X benefit to others over X benefit to me
- They would choose 1000X benefit to others over X benefit to me
- They would choose X benefit to me over 1 million X benefit to others
Poll: "Would your ideal romantic partner be someone who chooses to help
you, or to help a large number of other people who are morally similar
to you? They would give up helping you if at equal cost to themselves, they could instead help . . ."
- Half of a person
- 1 person
- 5 people
- 20 people
- 1000 people
- 5 million people
- 30 billion people
- Half of the universe
- It's a secret/it depends
. . . Chirp Club only allows four options, so most of these would have to be omitted.
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Update 25 Jun 2026, 01:16
My relatives were watching the show The Diplomat. There was some kind of storyline where a UK warship was hit with a missile from Iran and 20 sailors died. I avoided watching it so cannot say more; I only overheard some dialogue. Afterwards, I asked my brother-in-law, who I think works at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and knows about things like X-ray diffraction (I had a minor argument with him in the past about whether life would be possible if everything was mirrored; of course I think that I was right and he was wrong, but his view was a result of his work in this area), which nations had nuclear weapons. He named four, and then named the UK with a questioning intonation.
So, to be clear, I think the storyline sounded unrealistic. There was, apparently, no military retaliation in the show; as the title suggests, it's about people talking, not people fighting.
For example, when I looked up the incidents where a US aircraft carrier was targeted by over 100 missiles, the page I found said that some of the missiles seemed to be inaccurately aimed. Combined with the information about the US carrier battlegroup moving south after one of the attacks, it seemed possible that Iran deliberately missed, and the US failed to intercept all the missiles. Why would Iran deliberately miss? Because the US has thousands of nuclear warheads.
I had thought of asking my relatives if they thought the show gave them a more accurate view of the world. But, maybe it does. If it's 80% accurate, and they know nothing, then the accuracy of their perceptions improves.
So my criticism seemed to be based on my view that the show isn't accurate enough. It's like a math problem: if you multiply one 10-digit number by another 10-digit number, the result is mostly correct if you drop all but the leading two digits of both numbers. There are situations where accuracy matters, and situations where it doesn't. Some people just try to be as accurate as they can be, all the time, and this can lead to things like them getting a perfect score on a hard test, while someone else only gets 90% of the answers.
(An example is how I sometimes edit these posts to remove the non-breaking spaces that often get added to the ends of lines.)
The world is a bit different because it's full of information gaps that make complete accuracy difficult. But there are also plenty of hard predictions: would an Iranian attack on a UK warship end well for Iran, and would Iran carry out such an attack? Would the UK put its only aircraft carrier in a vulnerable area without taking measures designed to protect it against attacks? (Compare the Russian warship that was hit by a missile because its radar was turned off, perhaps because they assumed that Ukraine would not know where the ship was.) Noting that Yemen also launched an attack against a US warship, which resulted in the bombing of what were possibly Yemeni military facilities. But the missiles that Yemen has access to are much less advanced; reports were that Iran used Chinese missiles, maybe the ballistic missiles specifically designed to kill US aircraft carriers. So it's reasonable to think that an attack by Yemen would fail, but it isn't reasonable to think that an attack using Chinese ballistic missiles would fail unless Iran intended for it to fail.
The point is that most people don't really care if their views are a bit inaccurate. They can still be happy. But I can't really say more because the amount of money I have hasn't increased by $0.01. "Ask for nothing. Offer everything. Expect the same."
There was something that made me think in an accusatory way, "I don't even know if you're interested in me, and this is something you could easily clarify." But that gave me an opportunity to mirror this question onto myself.
The short story "In a Grove": when I check my bookmarks for that, to confirm the title, it turns out I have a bookmark folder, "In a Grove - Rashoumon, 19 May 2022":
I haven't watched the movie or read the short story. (Note that the Chinese film Hero (2002) has a similar thing of multiple retellings, but the audience is not supposed to be confused at the end.) I'm referencing the short story for the bit where the husband or fiancé seems to be angry when he appears as a ghost.
A previous time when I mentioned this short story, maybe on Chirp Club, I noted that all of the stories had some kind of inconsistency regarding whether the ropes that had supposedly bound the husband had been cut with a knife. Why would a ghost lie? To help his wife or fiancée. Why would a lie be necessary to protect her? Because she did something bad, that other people would disapprove of.
So I thought I would talk about various possibilities.
Possibility: I'm crazy. There is no government conspiracy. This would be my own fault; it would mean no one did anything bad.
It's inevitable when I discuss various possibilities that there are some where I'm not interested in you. If there's no government conspiracy, then there's no reasonable explanation for your actions in which you have any interest in me, and so I would truly not be interested in you.
I'm having difficulty thinking of other possibilities that matter. I was too busy trying to remember the other things I said above to think about specific scenarios. I didn't want to say what I would respond to the poll I described in the previous update, because that would discourage you from making it as a poll (I'm a bit worried that you don't want to take any action that wouldn't in itself make me think that you're smart, and copying something that someone else has written does not take any special intelligence). But I don't know what else to say. So, I think I would answer, '1 person' in the poll.
I was thinking about which of the four options should be included if it was made as a poll on Chirp Club, though, and I think that with just four options, the first option should be '5 people'. Maybe this is obvious, but part of the purpose of the poll is to make people think about, "should I only be in a relationship with someone who gives the same answer? What if the poll had 100 options, if I choose '20 people' am I incompatible with someone who chooses '21 people'?" So in a way, having even fewer options could make people more likely to think about it in this way.
This isn't really about possibilities, just about the poll, but the question made me think again of the scene in A Dream Within A Dream that I linked in pt 88. Saving the lives of two strangers, who also happen to be young, when it could have led to the male lead's death. This would have been to the detriment of the female lead within the story, as he had demonstrated a consistent behavior of saving her life, even though this was only from being forced to by the author. So it was sort of, helping two people instead of helping her: n=2. Logic might lead to many people being more willing to accept n=2, than n=1. (Note n § Symbol "(mathematics) An arbitrary natural number", which are integers, which is inconsistent with the "Half of a person" answer.)
I previously avoided Sherine's question of what the ideal person I would want to be in a relationship with would be like. I also sort of avoided a similar question (maybe around 2008) from my friend, Mai, whose birthday was this month; my answer was that I didn't know, because I had never met Mei and so didn't really know how she acted (or what she looked like). So I am suggesting here that there is at least one characteristic that I care about. I don't know if you, or Mei, or Sherine possess this characteristic.
Note the qualification in that poll question: "who are morally similar to you". When I wrote this, I was thinking of all the movies from the US where lots of males who are paid to commit crimes are killed. But if people view the poll as having a moral dimension, then one could consider the possibility that someone who gives one of the later answers could be seen as immoral, and that someone whom other people might view as the ideal romantic partner would, in fact, prefer to help "Half of a person" rather than the person who chose the answer, "30 billion people".
But I didn't really think about this when writing the poll. And it's supposed to be implied that the people being helped are "morally similar", so they would also be people who would choose the answer, "30 billion people", if the poll is seen as having a moral dimension.
One implication is that people will, in fact, have a preference in this poll: they won't choose randomly and they wouldn't want someone they're interested in to think that they would choose randomly. Do you have a preference? What should I think your preference is? If other people answered this question, I might be able to guess how you would answer it.
I have not actually talked about whether I would be interested in you for any possibility other than the first one. In fairness, I did think a little about some other possibilities but I can't talk about them.
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Update 25 Jun 2026, 17:57
If I have said anything that means I shouldn't make this update, I apologize.
John: They, whoever they are, don’t stand a chance, because they can’t beat love."
For the curious, at the time of writing, the command
HEAD jobcreationplan.blogspot.com
returns Last-Modified: Thu, 25 Jun 2026 09:02:39 GMT. This was some minor edit, like to spelling or grammar, after I had updated this post some time earlier. Yoko Ono's tweet was at 9:01 GMT.
Spoilers, the end of Cutie Honey (2004). Unsurprisingly, there are very few or no clips of the movie on YouTube, but surprisingly, the whole movie is there, uploaded 21 Aug 2023 in 1080p with 53k views (and English subtitles). The end is rather longer than I remembered. Skipping to https://youtu.be/HA8RNXVvw-o?t=4773, I sometimes rather feel like I am slowly petrifying like Cutie Honey was.
A few days ago, my relatives watched two episodes from The Goes Wrong Show. There is a particular comedic element they use, where something is supposed to happen but it doesn't, and the actors are stuck sort of improvising, or merely repeating a word or phrase in an increasingly agitated way, until it does happen. In the show, this might continue for a minute or two at most.
But forget about timing. If Cutie Honey's I-System had not activated (in English, the letter I usually has a pronunciation similar to the character for 'love' in Japanese and Chinese, which is the same pun I was thinking of when I mistakenly thought that Sherine's middle name was Ayy in the title of the post made for her in 2013), 'love' would not have won. Cutie Honey's friend, and her uncle, would have been saved, and maybe all the hundreds of female beauties who had been kidnapped would also have been saved, but Cutie Honey would have lost her identity and agency. She did not attempt to fight, whether or not she would have won, because she was also willing to 'love' the character, Sister Jill, who is presented as the main villain of the story. Doing what Sister Jill wanted was harmful to Cutie Honey, and yet she still was willing to do it to help someone else that she cared about.
But that's not all. I also thought about the drama version of Cang Lan Jue (note my complete ignorance of tones, which is like the jokes in the novel Interesting Times about mistaking similar words), which is probably where a memory of an 'evil' voice saying 愛, "love", comes from. It's either that show, or Till the End of the Moon.
But I can't remember what the 'evil' voice might have said about love. So I thought I'd just reference the plot thread related to Rong Hao, his efforts to accomplish a certain goal, and what results from it. Basically, things related to the song played on the flute or whatever instrument.
My efforts to avoid spoilers make this post rather ineffective in changing anyone's mind on any topic. I remember I cried during the scene after the wedding. I'm worried that I might not see it as sad if I watched it again.
Honorable mention to this scene, though as always it comes with the caveat that the subtitles on YouTube miss at least one important detail in this drama (the dialogue lines about 'riding a tiger' or whatever, in earlier scenes) compared to the subtitles on Viki:
Why did the drought demon Si Ying 姒婴 kill two males and threaten to kill a young human female if the male lead did not use his demonic powers to save her? Because of love. She expected to die from doing it. In this short section of a story, approximately six minutes long from the timestamp I linked to, does love win, as Yoko Ono's tweet suggests it always does?
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Update 25 Jun 2026, 22:00
My plan is to do nothing until Demi Rose posts on Chirp Club, for the first time in six years, or the number of Likes she has on the platform increases from its current 18,402 to at least 18,430. (Noting the possibility for banned people getting their accounts back causing the number to increase without her involvement.)
I plan to say nothing to anyone on any platform, even if it's someone talking about how something made them want to kill themselves in the past and there's a chance they might do so in the future, or someone makes a mistake that would easily be corrected if someone pointed it out. I plan not to check the accounts of, or engage with (let play for watchtime, etc.) any content created by, anyone who might potentially be interested in me, on YouTube or any other video platform like Douyin or Twitch.
I also intend for this to be the last update to this post.
___
Update 27 Jun 2026, 23:25
My relatives had an informal family reunion at a park today, which of course I did not attend. Years ago, maybe before you were even born, I went to a family reunion that I don't really remember. What I do remember is that the transportation arrangements worked out so that I got a ride with an older male relative, when going to some location. What I remember is that in his truck, there were Sandies pecan shortbread cookies, and I ate some; and he was apparently single.
I'm honestly not that familiar even with my direct relatives. My parents probably have like 15 siblings between them, and I wouldn't be surprised if all of those aunts and uncles of mine had been married at some point. I wouldn't be surprised if out of all of them, only one of them never had children. But the older male relative whom I got a ride from did not seem to be married. He seemed to be smart, and I took the fact that he had store-bought cookies to mean that he was not poor. I have no idea if he's still alive.
I think this is the person who wrote a poem on the World of Warcraft forums in early 2012, about meeting someone in a random dungeon. A search for "Mindmistress" using the search box on worldofwarcraft.com does not return this profile; I only found it via a Google search. I don't remember there being more than one character with this name in the past, but I am a little surprised that this character is on Moon Guard. The server has some notoriety in the WoW community and it should have been a detail that I noticed, though that doesn't mean I would remember it.
The old forums were replaced, and even before that, this person somehow got themselves banned from the forums, or so I concluded. So if this person did not save a copy of the poem they wrote, it's probably lost forever. (There's a small chance it was saved on archive.org, but most threads were probably never saved there.)
So I can only attempt to summarize the poem. I don't even remember how long it was. In the poem, the author meets someone in a dungeon through the random dungeon finder. This was a system that required no communication between players to form the group. The author sensed that the other player was attractive, based on their behavior, but once the group completed the dungeon, it was reasonable to think that the author would never encounter this player again. There was also something about the perception that this other player was already in a relationship.
I think I can describe my comment, though. I think the poem used, and misspelled, the word "seperate". I commented about remembering the spelling through the related word "separation", and then I added, "Desperate, etc." This being a word that seems to rhyme with "separate", but uses a different vowel.
I consider this person to be someone I might be interested in, despite that they never replied to me and it has been over 14 years since I left a single, short comment on a thread they created. They are, obviously, 14 years older than they were at that time, as am I.
This person created another thread after I commented on their poem. They said they only did arenas for gear. There is, I think, a problem with any game where players do things other than because that particular activity is fun. This maybe actually plays into this person's character being on Moon Guard, which I think was one of the original roleplaying servers in WoW. (RP-PvP servers were not part of the starting lineup; I think players might have tried to treat Gurubashi-US as an unofficial RP-PvP server, but the first RP-PvP servers did not launch until 10 months after WoW released, so the original RP servers all had the PvE ruleset for PvP flagging.)
Basically, arenas are terrible for roleplaying. From my 'online tasks2' notes from 02 Feb 2026,
WoW: arenas could use FFA format for initial matchmaking rating as well. Eight players; when only four remain, another four join; and so on until 24 players have entered, and last four are winners. For healers: three sets of two flags are in the arena. Picking up a flag takes 2 sec, interrupted by damage. Players with the same flag color become teammates, with the flags resetting if both of them die.
To stop rogues from staying stealthed, footprints of stealthed and invisible players are visible in sand. Exception, levitating priests who are invisible or stealthed. But just surviving is not worth much, compared to getting 'kills', except that 'killed' players stay at 1 HP. Powerup-type item that reveals stealth and invisible.
Several matches ongoing at once, so that waiting participants have a shorter average wait time, since they have to wait for four fighters to be eliminated. It's fine if there is a long wait time for a group of matches to start, as long as the game has other things to do while waiting, just like with waiting for battlegrounds in original WoW before cross-server BGs.
Experienced players could still join these matches; purpose is to make new players not feel bad about losing in the interactions that measure their ability, since 20 out of 24 players lose.
Arenas in WoW currently do not have the feature of defeated players staying at 1 HP, like they would in a duel. Instead they just die. Dying in an MMO is, basically, never consistent with roleplaying. It's one reason why I didn't really like battlegrounds when they were introduced. But battlegrounds at least pretend that you're dying for a reason: to help your faction. Arenas in WoW have basically no justification for existing. In real life, arenas were profitable because of spectators, possibly including very rich spectators like the emperor. WoW's arenas have no spectators.
So, 'roleplaying server' could basically be, 'in-game justification for fighting the other side'. WoW has always had very little in the way of concrete ways in which PvP helps other members of your own faction. Rather, doing more PvP often tended to hurt your own faction, by making the honor grind more competitive. A few of my suggestions in the past were about ways to actually help your faction, like winning a higher percentage of battlegrounds meant your own side gained rank faster or something. In the absence of actual benefit to other players from the general activity of engaging in PvP (contrasted with specifically fighting against gankers, which doesn't really exist as a problem in modern WoW due to easy escapes etc.), what remains is roleplaying: a purposeful attitude of treating as real, things which cannot be conclusively proven to exist. Like one's character having an existence that extended earlier than when you pressed "create character", or other player characters and NPCs in the game having desires like a desire to live.
Yesterday I was checking a book I downloaded a few years ago, 'Signal to noise -- Nylund, Eric S -- 1. paperback printing, New York, 1999 -- New York Avon Eos -- 9780380792924 -- c74fd4eb2163f2648a176b922880bae0 -- Anna’s Archive.pdf'. In fact what I was looking up then was under what circumstances it was revealed that no human nation was responsible for nuking Singapore. (This search was made a bit more difficult by the author mistakenly writing Shanghai later on, instead of Singapore.) But it reminds me how when a week or two ago I was looking up something else that I don't remember from the same book, I reread the bit where the main character is uncertain whether some microprocessors were lying when they said they didn't have consciousness.
It's a good book because it doesn't try to explain everything or treat the main character as infallible. p320:
A hundred windows spun around him, filled the air with simulations of the enzyme and gateway code, data on cosmic background radiation, a Barlinque commercial, and black-and-white movies. They collapsed in the blink of an eye.
Jack and Panda had made it to his command center <redacted>.
A link winked open to the microprocessors, and they asked: HOW MAY I HELP YOU, JACK?
What was it doing with all those active windows?
So, there was some thought I had in the past. I don't know if I recorded it somewhere. —a zero-length file, made with the utility 'touch' on 2024-02-21: "is it possible to be conscious without having an interest in one's future? Behaviour of microprocessors in Signal to Noise"
So an 'AI' that just returns answers isn't conscious. Something that doesn't act if left alone has no goals. But one can treat entities in a game world as having consciousness and goals just as one can treat the people evoked by the words on the page of a novel as having lives, dreams, and goals.
Some players might say, what's the point of trying to imagine what NPCs or even other players in the game want, when doing so doesn't give you more items?
But the exercise of imagining what an NPC in a game would want is not that different from imagining what another person in the real world would want. If I read an article written by an Indian person, and all I know about them is that they are responsible for the words in the article (maybe with help from an 'AI'), that they are employed by the website that published the article, and they have a name which suggests they are a male or female Indian person, what can I guess about what that person cares about; what they wanted to happen today, or what they wish would happen this month? This is making judgements based on about the same information as an NPC in a game appearing at a particular location, with a particular name and appearance. If you can guess what an NPC would want, you should be at least as good at guessing what real humans want and care about.
Some people would still say, who cares? I just have my job, my friends, and my favorite TV shows. So I think caring about roleplaying has a positive correlation, though not necessarily a strong one, with intelligence.
I have mentioned that Mei got Rank 14 on a rogue through world PvP, which she did on an RP-PvP server. If RP-PvP servers had been available at launch, I would definitely have chosen one. (Mei played on the server that I picked, when WoW launched.)
If this person who has the character Mindmistress has been single for 14 years, and of course if they are female and they remember me, then I think I should definitely try to be in a relationship with this person, no matter what they look like.
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Update 30 Jun 2026, 01:48
I just remembered that the first character I created after WoW launched (with open beta characters being deleted, although the game client didn't need to be updated) was on the role-playing server Silver Hand. But I never logged in.
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Update 30 Jun 2026, 02:03
Had thought I might mention this, didn't seem to fit. But the story is actually relevant. If I had a lot of money, I would give $50k or something to iQIYI so they could purchase the song license that they might already have, for
I stopped at the point where the audio is missing. The story in the episode or two before that is about the '2D characters'. In the first season, the 'Point of view' characters, who are not supposed to be the main characters of the story, make explicit references to other characters being '2D'. And they even treat some characters as being '2D', like a courtier or something that tries to frame the story's female villain by jumping into water and acting like she pushed him, but she just ignores his acting. Deciding not to treat the other characters as '2D' characters is quite similar to roleplaying in a game.
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Update 30 Jun 2026, 12:48
I've thought about this before, but I think this simple model is enough to show the problem.
We have 10k lemming viewers (apologies to real-life lemmings, who do not act as a documentary deceptively suggested they act: "Sense 2 derives from a longstanding myth that they exhibit so much herd mentality that populations jump off cliffs to their deaths together"), who watch lemming videos from 100 channels. Each lemming viewer only cares about one lemming channel.
We also have 10k variety viewers, who watch videos from 100 variety channels. Each variety viewer cares about 10 variety channels.
Then we have boring videos, which is all the other videos on the platform.
Each day, each channel releases one video. We simplify the recommendation process so that each viewer is only recommended five videos. All viewers start by watching a boring video (selected using some other process). They are then recommended five videos and they watch a single one of those videos.
The lemming viewers are recommended the new video from their favorite lemming channel, and four boring videos. They watch the lemming video. (If they are recommended a variety video, they will never click on it.)
The variety viewers are recommended one video each from five variety channels they like. They watch a random one of them. (If they are recommended a lemming video, they will never click on it.)
The lemming videos get 100% clickthrough rate from the lemming viewers. The variety channels get 20% clickthrough rate. The lemming videos consequently perform better in the algorithm and are recommended to people outside of these groups, even though there are just as many variety viewers influencing the algorithm, who collectively watch just as many variety videos as the lemming viewers watch lemming videos.
This is a diferent issue than the 'duplicates' problem. As I may have suggested before, video platforms should let videos specify a video they are equivalent to; for example, the How Dare You collection of Season 2 episodes 1-10 could be set as equivalent to the video for Episode 01. (The alternative solution, of Ep01 being set as equal to the collection, fails for cases like the drama series Love Game in Eastern Fantasy being uploaded both in collections of ~4 episodes, and also in collections of ~5 episodes, in addition to single episodes of full length, shorter length, and shortest length.)
It's likely that these videos fall victim to algorthmic attempts to deliberately discourage duplicates. Historically, these were reuploads of existing videos by small accounts that wanted to gain influence and views. Sometimes the algorithm fails, and the original video (with lots of views) is hidden from search, and only the duplicate upload with worse quality is visible in search. I just thought I would show an example:
This returns two results for the dance performance by 李萱萱 and 米妮, with pleated blue skirts and white boots. 20121204 101資訊月-Panasonic開場舞（萱萱、米妮） and 2012.12.01-101資訊月Panasonic舞台李萱萱&米妮(1).MP4. But even just clicking on the second video, it recommends another video of the same dance from a week later *which falls outside of the specified upload date range. Well, anyway, increasing the range to before:2012-12-15 adds two videos, removes one, and increasing it to before:2012-12-30 removes those two new videos from the search results and adds a different one.
The original video not getting shown in results, while a worse reupload is shown, is something I've noticed with 'fancam' videos from Korea. Maybe the original video has worse metrics because it's being recommended to viewers who have already seen the video, or who are simply being recommended many videos from the same uploader which are of similar quality, despite not being the same performance. Whereas the reupload, with the exact same title and degraded video quality, is being recommended to completely different viewers so it gets better metrics.
Anyway, this is completely different from the 'lemming viewers vs variety viewers' problem. I'm not even bothering to attempt to describe a solution; I just wanted to prove that it is a real problem.
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Update 30 Jun 2026, 22:04
"lemming snowball" re: video recommendation algorithm
Poll: "What leads to better results: when most people are greedy in their business dealings with non-relatives, or when most people are generous? Where people play a mix of prisoner's dilemma games and zero-sum ultimatum games." 90% greedy, 10% generous 50% greedy, 50% generous 10% greedy, 90% generous
Poll: "Which do you think would lead to an objectively better society based on measurable indicators: if most people were selfish in their business dealings with non-relatives, including salary negotiations, or if most people were generous and let others have more money?" Selfish is best Generous is best Equal mix is best
Poll: "You work for the most prestigious company in your country, which is owned by people from your country. Who are you helping when you stay at work even when there is nothing to do?" Yourself Your boss The company No one
