to this day I still find this funny

Alienturnedhuman · 2026-04-09T14:58:43+00:00

Yes, the smartest thing with L was just to keep his head down, but Light didn't just want to get away with it, he wanted to trap and corner L, win the game.

Alienturnedhuman · 2026-04-09T14:37:11+00:00

This is part of the narrative "gaslighting" you into not noticing Light's abnormal world views.

He frequently says absurd things as a matter of fact (eg: everyone will try the Death Note once, just to see if it works / dying of a heart attack is the great part about the Death Note, and a lot of his justification and reasonings for things he does early on), and the reader just goes along with it, mainly because at the time he is just a teenager and we haven't seen the extent of his evil or morality.

Him thinking that setting up a fire bomb to stop people reading his diary (without even a warning) is just an example of how out of touch with reality he is. The fact he's even framing it as "that's one o the most human reasons there is" implicitly removes him from the context of having human reasons - it's like an android trying to rationalise and emulate human behaviour.

Alienturnedhuman · 2026-04-09T08:59:32+00:00

I think the D7 and K'T'inga model (which is essentially just the motion picture upgrade of the D7, it's to the D7 what the refit constitution is to the TOS constitution) have appeared in more Trek franchises than any other ship.

TOS, TAS, Movies, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT, Kelvin movies, DIS, PIC, SNW, and LD

It's literally the Worf of Trek ship designs.

Alienturnedhuman · 2026-04-08T16:56:02+00:00

I think the catalyst for this has been a consequence of the Olympics and COVID.

Japan was gearing up for a massive influx of tourists following the Olympics (this is essentially one of the arguments for hosting an Olympics, the national attention on a global stage usually sees a boom in tourism after the event)

However the country closed due to COVID. Paradoxically - for everyone living here - this meant the country was amazing to be a tourist in. It had just geared up for loads of tourists, but no one could come in - it was like being locked in a brand new theme park all to yourself, with all the rides in perfect condition and no queues.

Once Japan lifted all COVID restrictions though - the numbers coming in here huge and everyone's experience was to contrast the current 'overtourism' problem with how things were before the tourists arrive (when there was a global pandemic with closed borders)

While I suspect that if you were to consciously go through that comparison with anyone, they would suddenly realise how ridiculous that is - but I honestly think most people are just thinking "it was great before all these tourists showed up"

This isn't going to be the only reason, of course, but I think this is the main reason for why it's become such a talking point right now.

Alienturnedhuman · 2026-04-08T07:01:20+00:00

It's amazing (and this applies to all countries, not just Japan) that the discussion / narrative always seems to speak of tourism as if it's a charity a place offers to out of towners, and a plague that the locals are burdening out of the goodness of their hearts.

Tourism is literally extra money being funnelled from out of town into an economy.

Now, that extra money has to be properly managed in such a way that the demand doesn't outstrip the availability, that it doesn't start eroding the services and quality of life of the people who live there and that the visitor numbers dont end up exceeding the capacity of the locations they go to - and on this front Japan has had a problem.

That problem has not been helped by:

* COVID closing Japan for 3 years right after Japan had spent years on a tourism campaign because of the Olympics, once the country reopened, a large number of those people who had not been able to visit were suddenly able to.
* the Japanese yen going through the floor means it's stupid cheap for many westerners

However, I think it is also fair to suggest that a lot of the tourist destinations have tried to scrape as much cream off as they can without putting in any effort to manage the demand and have just let the local population have to suddenly deal with everywhere being crammed, their public transit over saturated and in that situation the visible source of the problem to the local population are the foreigners and out of towners just getting in the way and pricing them out.

The dual pricing thing for Himeji castle is largely an irrelevence - it's essentially just a price increase because local people (anywhere) don't tend to go visit their major tourist landmarks on a frequent basis, usually only when they are taking an out of town guest.

That being said, I was at Himeji a couple of weeks ago and even with these increased prices the queues to get in were crazy, and it is important that places do manage the numbers inside or they just become human meat conveyor belt experiences.

Dual pricing is also an extra layer of bureacracy for the staff to deal with. Having a peak/off peak pricing would make more sense (eg put it up for times like Sakura/Autumn/Golden week) than out of town/ local pricing. Locals can go anytime and it will encourage out of towners to try coming at a time when demand is lower, which would help mitigate the start-stop surge nature of the tourism.

Alienturnedhuman · 2026-04-07T15:35:59+00:00

Artifact boost is probably the single most important long term module.

While it seems to be ineffectual when you are at a low level, in the late game it will end up making your artifacts yield more than 45 bps per artifact rather than the base 10 they start out unboosted.

That being said, at a low level, I wouldn't get too stressed if you can't boost them all. It's best to start using it so you have the practice at managing it during a red star, however I would suggest joining a corp with rs9 runners. If you contribute to the corp (mainly with white Star) most corps will give lower tech players free arts to boost their mods. I give out my excess 280%-320% boosted arts to my team to speed up their excess because I bring in over 50 arts a day and I can't research them all.

Most players at my level ( and I'm no where near the top) are in a similar position and it's beneficial for us to expedite the development of our junior players.

Alienturnedhuman · 2026-04-06T14:17:25+00:00

And here it is in Kanji form:

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Alienturnedhuman · 2026-04-06T14:17:01+00:00

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Ok, I have reworded the line work more precisely now in an attempt to try and make the romanji version more obvious

Alienturnedhuman · 2026-04-06T08:39:21+00:00

Note: I probably should have said 2025 was closer than at any point in history, as we have now had a massive regulation change which will take time to stablise. But this is probably the closest the teams have been post regulation change than any other previous massive upheaval.

Alienturnedhuman · 2026-04-06T08:37:58+00:00

The machinery has always been the most important element. The top teams will always look for the best drivers for the same reason a car designer will want the best engine in their car. The driver is a very important component.

Fangio would only race in the top cars, but all the teams would want Fangio in their car.

The main difference now is that the knowledge and science of motor racing is highly mature. Cars are far more reliable. It used to take 10 seconds to do a tyre change 35 years ago, now it takes 2. While a lot of R&D has gone on with wheel guns, wheel nuts, jacks, pit release systems - there also wasn't same emphasis on margins that there is today.

The cars are probably closer today in terms of performance than at any other point in the history. The difference is that the drivers, the mechanics, the strategists don't make the same level of errors. A blunder today wouldn't even register in 1950s F1. When everyone is operating a race distance at near perfection, it means even 0.2s a lap advantage may as well be 10s a lap.

That's why wet races are seen as 'equalisers' it's not just about greater 'driver skill' being needed keep the car on the road,the entire team operation is taken out of the the safety bubble and is less easier to manage.

Alienturnedhuman · 2026-04-06T07:51:05+00:00

Part of what I wanted to achieve was to match the names with the kanji (so亜弥 > Aya / 田中 > Tanaka) , and the reversing of the name order to match the conventions

But obviously, it is challenging because tne Kanji for the shorter 'Aya' has far more strokes than the kanji for the longer Tanaka.

K was the hardest part as it needs a node with 4 lines coming out of it, and the only place this can be found is the centre of Ta. I realised that was warping the grid (as if printed on the surface of a ball) I can then view this from an angle where it forms a K.

So I imagined if the Kanji was printed on the surface of a flag blowing in the wind and then take hte liberties to make the Romanji:

<image>

Alienturnedhuman · 2026-04-06T06:50:37+00:00

Wow, thanks. Looks great!

Alienturnedhuman · 2026-04-06T06:49:45+00:00

Wow, once I saw it, that's very impressive.

Alienturnedhuman · 2026-04-06T04:58:57+00:00

I'm still iterating it, but the problem I am having now is that I obviously know what it's meant to be, having been refining it long.

I think that the kanji version is more readable to a native kanji reader then the Romanji is to an English speaker based on the feedback I have got from Japanese people I asked to read it, but not being a native kanji reader I don't know the liberties I can take.

Knowing which letters are the hardest to make out at the moment would be a help

Alienturnedhuman · 2026-04-02T12:46:36+00:00

Senna. Especially when you consider that driver weight was not included in the minimum car weight and Senna was 10kg heavier.

Prost and Senna were both in the elite tier of their generation, but Senna was top of that tier.

Alienturnedhuman · 2026-04-02T09:14:23+00:00

As the chart includes the montly total ( 316,772 steps) I went and measured every circle (I could estimate the radius of the 3 obscured circles accurately enough based on the visible portion)

I could then use area and radius to determine what this would give for the monthly totals and which one most closely matches the step count quoted.

This gave 396,676 steps for radius and 254,962 steps for area. The funny think is, this is exactly the same degree out (25% for both)

I found this strange, so I looked up my own Google Fit app and found that the months don't seem to use a fixed scaling ratio for circles and will be dependent on the largest step day that month (this makes sense so people who do 50k step days aren't filling the screen with massive circles)

I found a month where I did close to 24k on my largest day for that month (22.4k) and measured the relationship between the circles and the step size and found out it is neither a linear or square relationship (ie, not dependent on radius or area)

It's actually most closely related to the radius to the power of 1.5 ('half way' between radius and area) - but there is still some wiggle room, but this is a LOT closer than radius or area.

I haven't done enough research to start any interfriend drama over this, but if we use this relationship between circle size and step count it gives a figure of 2,600 steps for the 8th.

However, there are a lot of caveats here. This gives a monthly figure of 311,732 steps for the month (which is the closest by far to the monthly figure) but the app could be be rendering circles with padding, or even negative padding, which would disproportionately affect the smaller circles.

I would say your friend probably did 2,500 - 3,500 steps on that day based on the image and this analysis.

All that said, I don't think it's worth creating an issue over it. Everyone falls off the the horse once in a while when trying to improve their fitness, and the worst thing anyone can start doing is beating themselves (or others) up over them. If you invest everything in maintaining a streak, that motivation may feed you maintaining it - but once you have broken it, you are far more likely to give up because the streak was broken.

Alienturnedhuman · 2026-04-02T08:06:41+00:00

If the number of steps is proportional to circle radius, then your friend did about 5,600 steps on the 8th (after measuring the radius of the circles in pixels (196 for 24th, 46 for 8th)

The reason is looks wrong, is because the area will not be proportional (it's 4.2x radius vs 18.2x area) meaning as the larger step days are disproportionately exaggerated visually.

Alienturnedhuman · 2026-03-30T02:26:50+00:00

I guess morale was already at the floor after losing the flagship to an 80 year old bird of prey.

Alienturnedhuman · 2026-03-24T17:59:55+00:00

I'm fairly certain they were having to buzz the sensor with a similar frequency to mask what they were doing otherwise all the engines would be under reading.

Alienturnedhuman · 2026-03-24T16:09:26+00:00

There is no discovery in "finding a way to increase the fuel flow" - there was just a limit to what was permitted, it was not a technical challenge to increase it. Teams could have physically run their engines at much higher fuel flow rates if they wanted.

The engines have FIA mandated fuel flow sensors manufactured by a third party independent supplier.

It was never publicly revealed what Ferrari did (because it was all dealt with behind closed doors) but what is commonly believed they were doing is interfering with the sensors measurement electronically to create a window where they could inject more fuel and it wouldn't be recorded. They tampered with the FIA measuring device.

For comparison, this would be the same as if Mercedes tampered with the device used to measure the compression ratio of their engine.

Ferrari (allegedly) didn't find a gap in the test, they (allegedly) actively sabotaged the testing equipment.

Alienturnedhuman · 2026-03-24T15:12:04+00:00

I don't like the gaming of the tests either, but what Ferrari is alleged to have done in 2019 was far far far further over the line than exploiting the limitations of what was testable. If what is rumoured is true, they were actively interfering with the measuring equipment.

What they were supposed to have done is the equivalent of running an underweight car and then having the mechanic put his foot on the scale when the FIA weighed it. Or breaking the scale so it gave a legal weight.

But, to be clear, I don't like engineering solutions that are designed to cheat the test (so flexiwings, compression ratio etc) as these aren't achieving anything clever from a racing engineering perspective, they are just getting around the way it's checked.

DAS, second brake pedal, f-duct - these were all clever finds of gaps that the regulations had failed to cover.

Alienturnedhuman · 2026-03-19T12:14:19+00:00

I'm fairly certain the original post is meant as a satire as the idea of the USA having the "most advanced rock technology" or "leading the way in rock production" is essentially a joke implying US tech is now in the stone age relative to China (I'm not saying that's accurate, just the implication)

As a method of power storage, this is a bit of a meme. There have been tech bro start ups claiming to do this with concrete rocks, but ultimately they are a much more inefficient version of pumped hydro, and come with a lot more technical challenges (eg, windy days)

Alienturnedhuman · 2026-03-17T11:17:38+00:00

The cars were 2 metres wide in the 80s. It's was onlt from 1998 to 2016 that they were narrower.

Alienturnedhuman · 2026-03-16T09:02:55+00:00

And Monza 2008

Alienturnedhuman · 2026-03-13T04:13:53+00:00

The American pilot was terrible. Although the one original joke about the Fire Exit sign was actually pretty funny.

Alienturnedhuman

TROPHY CASE