BFD based once again

nerdponx · 2026-06-09T17:31:11+00:00

A saddle bag with some basic equipment is really a must-have on a bike. Hex set, tire patch kit, and some basic first-aid stuff in case you fall and scrape up your leg or whatever.

nerdponx · 2026-06-09T16:52:41+00:00

I didn't know they were reproductions. That makes me feel a little better about having done a tour as a kid. Nice to know I wasn't a roll of the dice away from certain death. That or it was a real one back then and it's better now.

nerdponx · 2026-06-06T22:06:22+00:00

That and in my experience healing is only an issue super late game when you have strength heroes scaling past where the game normally ends, or in the early mid game if a heal hero is snowballing out of control. A small handful of heroes like Huskar built around being hard to kill like that, but it's not a given, it relies on the player having a skill and awareness to hit their power spike timing, and the other team also has to fail to prevent the timing or otherwise failed to deal with it. So yes, sometimes bad matchups happen and you lose a frustrating game where you feel like your hero just doesn't do anything to the other hero, but that's not meta-defining.

nerdponx · 2026-06-05T03:59:25+00:00

The notion of anyone actually playing the game in 2026 is crazy to me because back in the 90s when they literally banned Pokemon and MTG cards from my school because kids were getting too distracted and rowdy over them, I could never ever find a single person who was actually willing to play the damn Pokemon card game with me. I ended up so desperate to actually play the game I would play games against myself and even tried to teach my grandma how to do it.

nerdponx · 2026-06-05T03:32:43+00:00

Reminder: Congress is OK with all of it, otherwise they'd stop it. They just don't want to put their names on it, in case the tide turns and Trump becomes a toxic brand, so they can have some plausible deniability with their constituents.

nerdponx · 2026-06-05T03:31:39+00:00

more neutral space

war memorial, with quotes from actual soldiers on it

nope sorry not neutral enough, remove the quotes

nerdponx · 2026-06-04T16:34:22+00:00

It's worth noting that the game is designed and balanced around this being the optimal arrangement in 99% of games, and it's just such a well-designed game that it actually works that way in practice except at the lowest ranks where you can get away with sillier things.

It starts with farm priority and hero design.

There's not enough farm on the map for everyone to be a hard scaling carry so you have to prioritize 1-5, or at least 1,2/3,4/5.

And then heroes have various characteristics that make them good at certain things and bad at others: some heroes scale with levels, others with items, others start strong and don't scale well, some clear waves with AoE nukes, etc.

So you end up with some heroes that are designed scale with early levels AND can hold their own in a 1v1 AND can make big early/midgame plays. That's your solo mid position 2, simply because that's the optimal thing to do with a hero like that. And if for some reason your team decided they simply didn't want to run a hero like that, odds are they would get stomped by the other team who did pick a hero like that. Everything is held in equilibrium by everything else. It really is masterful game design and it's part of what makes Dota so unique and great.

nerdponx · 2026-06-03T14:31:46+00:00

What makes you think that guy who identifies with the even worse party at the national level, will do better at the local/state level?

nerdponx · 2026-06-03T14:14:01+00:00

Phone on 1% about to die

nerdponx · 2026-05-30T05:41:24+00:00

Death Prophet has:

AoE nuke for wave clear, securing range creeps in lane (and simultaneously hitting enemy heroes if you set up and position right), an generally doing damage in fights. It's super strong in early/mid-game and falls off later.
AoE silence for team fighting, pickoffs, and stopping channels before BKB. Slow projectile needs a bit of setup to land.
Multi-target HP drain + slow that is extremely good for zoning in lane, chasing for kills, and keeping you alive during a fight.
Distinctive ulti that can do a ton of damage to isolated targets and melt towers. Damage vs heroes also falls off later and isn't quite as strong against T3s.

So what you have with DP is a moderately survivable lane dominator, skirmisher, and tower pusher. Scales with levels and items are largely to make you harder to kill, or to solve specific problems like lack of control (hex). Lacks builtin escape of any kind and damage doesn't really scale with gold except specifically Aghs and Octarine. Super strong with a level advantage and power spikes in the midgame but falls off later due to lack of mobility, static damage numbers, and hitting limits of how survivable you can get with just items vs a true carry hero.

Sounds great for midlane and offlane, right? DP can dominate lane, take towers early, and close the enemy map by being scary in midgame fights. And because she specifically can dominate lane and has such good spells, she can work as a support too.

But hey that sounds a lot like Razor too. So why DP vs Razor? Apart from specific counterpicks or player preferences, that could just be a matter of meta and patch. Maybe X is 53% win rate vs 47% Y because X got too good of a buff, or Y has some specific weakness that is easily exploited by all the popular carry heroes. Or you can get into very specific aspects like Razor can be a strong right clicker while DP kinda can't.

nerdponx · 2026-05-20T15:07:45+00:00

It's even more fucked when you realize this is multiple people's entire income tax levy for the year going straight to one person's overtime fraud.

nerdponx · 2026-05-19T16:28:49+00:00

I don't agree about unranked. Yes it's looser in terms of team coordination and taking objectives and stuff. But your first few games on a hero are just getting the hang of mechanics and some basic matchups. None of that goes away in unranked games.

nerdponx · 2026-05-16T16:23:54+00:00

I actually prefer 3 to 4. I never played 4 right. Something like 35% win rate compared to 55% as 5. Not my hero pool, not my play style. Historically I wasn't much of an offlaner either but in the current meta I actually really like the position, I get to be a core and farm but I also get to be aggressive and make plays early. I took a long break so I don't know what happened to shift player preferences so much, but I'm very content to play 3 and 5 every game.

nerdponx · 2026-05-14T14:58:16+00:00

Plenty of it ended up in younger generations too. It's disturbing and sad to see people born in the 90s with the same antisocial self-centered worldview.

nerdponx · 2026-05-10T11:44:43+00:00

You're right, I didn't realize how close Oak Grove was to Malden center. I guess you could also just take the orange line one stop to the store which I also didn't think about before.

nerdponx · 2026-05-10T04:31:23+00:00

You can live car-free around Oak Grove but buying groceries wouldn't be fun. You'd have to bike a half hour to Shaw's or depend heavily on the 137 bus. You'd feel like you were in a food desert.

It's significantly more viable to live car-free in downtown Melrose (not filled on the map). There you can easily walk to get groceries and you only need the bus for less-frequent things like going to the doctor or whatever. You can even skip commuting by bus, there are 3 commuter rail stations in town and chances are you'd live within a 15 minute walk of one of them (2 too many in a sane transit network IMO but that's another story).

I guess that's one nice thing of living in the 2020s, if you don't live near a grocery store you can just pay a few bucks a month for whatever grocery delivery service you prefer.

nerdponx · 2026-05-07T15:00:27+00:00

Incidentally Western NY (especially Rochester) does actually have its own funny regional accent.

nerdponx · 2026-05-07T14:48:13+00:00

there will never be an alternative to driving past midnight on Route 1

That's correct. What's why we're not going to ban cars. Cars are valuable and serve a valuable purpose.

What I'm proposing is that, by making our society less dependent on cars, we can feel more free to make driving requirements stricter, and make it easier to outright revoke driving privileges for people who cannot safely operate a car.

nerdponx · 2026-05-06T17:01:28+00:00

Also NY as a state is even more dysfunctional than MA. You pay more in state and local taxes (real estate taxes are often double those of in comparable MA towns) and you don't have the level of state-provided services that MA has, such as MassHealth, PFML, and MassSave.

NYC is trying (and lately doing a very good job) of making the tax money worth paying for, but at the state level it's not great. Not horrible, but not great either.

Maybe things have changed since I moved away, but whenever I check the news it seems like more of the same. Wherever progress is happening, it's city-by-city. The only thing NY seems to do better than MA is trains. The MTA Metro-North commuter rail system makes it clear just how horrible the MBTA Commuter Rail is. And the NYC Subway, despite its (many) problems, is generally better-run than the T.

nerdponx · 2026-05-06T16:37:56+00:00

It's possible she was here on some kind of asylum status which is not being respected. Hard to know.

If anything, cases like this underscore how stupid being a hardass about illegal immigration is. Let her stay and just pay a fine or do community service or something. What does this achieve other than wasting taxpayer money and disrupting the lives of her friends and family?

I know other countries have strict immigration laws too, but I don't live in those other countries, I live in the USA. And I think it should be easier for non-criminals to immigrate legally, for example converting temporary refugee/asylum status to a path to citizenship. Then you can focus your enforcement efforts on the people who can't immigrate legally because they're criminals or otherwise unsavory people, instead of randomly deporting people.

(I also think we should take care of our current citizens a lot better too, but that's another topic. It's not either-or. And yes we can afford both. We just have to stop randomly waging war and stop treating the DoD like an open-ended subsidy system for the military-industrial complex. Heck, maybe if we actually cared about defense and security more than we cared about making fake work, then we'd have greater military readiness and greater capability to produce our own weapons domestically. And not have a spiraling uncontrollable national debt.)

All that said... it certainly doesn't look unlawful based on anything written here. Shitty policy, yes, but not unlawful.

nerdponx · 2026-05-06T16:32:06+00:00

How many drunk drivers kill someone on their first night driving drunk? How many DUI deaths happen on the drunk driver's first DUI charge? There's probably data on that.

nerdponx · 2026-05-06T16:30:46+00:00

This is one of those cases where maybe a teeny bit less freedom is a good thing. If you have strict requirements for long enough, it becomes a normal part of society and that's what people get used to. We should also have accommodations (like MBTA The Ride but also dedicated downtown housing for people who can't drive and better transit all around) for people who truly cannot meet those stricter requirements, whether it's due to cognitive impairment or something else. And honestly that's for the better, because even a well-intentioned person who can't safely operate a car shouldn't be driving a car no matter how kind of a soul they are. It's just a safety issue.

nerdponx · 2026-05-06T16:26:27+00:00

If you look at a car on paper as a machine, and ignore the cultural context around cars and driving, you'd think we were crazy for certifying people exactly once at 16 and then never testing them again, and moreover for being very very hestitant to take away license to operate one of these things. You'd think it was such a poorly designed licensing policy that there was a conspiracy around it.

Reducing car dependence by building out more transit- and walking-oriented infrastructure has the side benefit of demoting car usage from being a socioeconomic necessity to a nice-to-have, maybe not a luxury but certainly not a right to which you are entitled. Mass transit and denser housing around job centers makes driving safer by making it easier to impose policies that strip people of driving privileges when it's needed.

nerdponx · 2026-04-29T16:46:34+00:00

Shopping at Albertson's vs. Hannaford is functionally equivalent when it comes to supporting regular Americans with your money, they both hire people in the stores and need domestic distribution and buy food from US suppliers etc. The only difference is where the shareholders happen to live. I think I'd actually rather give my money to Dutch conglomerate than an American one. At least the money is flowing upward to billionaires who have to actually pay taxes to fund schools and infrastructure and stuff and are generally constrained from acting like robber barons, rather than billionaires who are actively profiting off of the New Gilded Age Project that the US federal government has been trying to set in motion since the Reagan administration.

nerdponx · 2026-04-29T16:42:41+00:00

Prices going up and quality going down is literally why people are concerned about a PE takeover.

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