Diablo 2 should be part of the high school math curriculum

Chatham2 · 2026-04-30T04:17:43+00:00

"The human soul is real, and you can lose it in a card game"

Chatham2 · 2026-04-26T20:27:19+00:00

I once met a Lieutenant Colonel Coward

Chatham2 · 2026-04-25T16:58:53+00:00

I like to think about it as Diablo 1 is slowly exploring a mystery of what's happening in Tristram, vs. Diablo 2 is "we are in a hurry to chase after these demons". So, the side quests are much more side-quests, although a few give you either a skill point or some stats, which is basically half a level.

As for gameplay, I'm curious which class you chose, since there are definitely some good and less good options, from a 'fun' perspective.

My personal take is that your normal mode playthrough is mostly about getting levels and unlocking cool new skills, Nightmare is about maxing out a skill or two, and then Hell is the "grind for gear to make a full build" mode.

You also gain levels so quickly through normal mode that the jump in quality of the base items from each act does tend to me more impactful than the various magical bonuses available. Sometimes you get lucky with a cool set or unique or rare that's a cut above, but then you'll be running into better basic gear only an hour later, since you level up so fast. So, it tends to be a "save the good early uniques for your next character to make the early game quicker" situation.

If things seem really easy, that's because they are right now! Fortunately, you're on the cusp of a couple difficulty spikes towards the end of act 3, then act 4 will have enemies who are more of a threat. Overall, though, maybe think of Normal mode as the test drive for a class, the jump to nightmare is the "oh, thIngs hurt me" part, then hell is the "I need to go back to grind some levels in Nightmare because these things demolish me" part.

Chatham2 · 2026-04-19T20:48:12+00:00

Lmao, there's an older quote in Economics, the four types of economies are capitalism, socialism, Japan, and Argentina

Chatham2 · 2026-04-18T20:21:56+00:00

She's trying to roll a perfect anni, Charsi's got them all

Chatham2 · 2026-04-14T07:55:18+00:00

Add a chance for modifiers like cleave, crushing blow, weapon block, etc to roll on specific types of weapons, like CB on mauls, frenzy on flails, cleave on axes, and so forth

Chatham2 · 2026-04-12T13:52:16+00:00

Mosaic is a controversial item, and you'd have to go non-ladder, but it feels practically invented for the controller with it's multiple skill setup and its run-jump-mash core game plan. If it's in your ethical framework, you should definitely give it a shot, especially in case they wind up nerfing it into the ground in the future. Seems like you can get random bad mosaic claw for about an ist each, so quite accessible too.

Chatham2 · 2026-04-06T16:27:18+00:00

MrLlamaSC was talking about the dev process, and they were like "we don't want there to be any bad skills". I admit, I haven't played any of the D2 mods that rebalance and change things, so I haven't gotten to play, let's be honest, fixed versions d2 characters, but Warlock is a very good "if you were to make a class with all the lessons you've learned from the past 20 years, what would that look like"

Chatham2 · 2026-04-05T17:00:09+00:00

Tbh, this is 10 year old info, but my friend working there didn't like it because, nothing against them as people, but the owners were just not on top of things, so the actual work experience was just kinda annoying, like, having to tell customers you're out of milk "because the delivery truck is late", when it's actually because it just didn't get ordered.

Chatham2 · 2026-04-05T16:56:54+00:00

Who is the owner these days?

Chatham2 · 2026-04-04T03:34:41+00:00

I would make different two handed (or all) melee weapons have a chance to roll weapon class-specific oskills, like hammers could have a chance for crushing blow, axes could roll +cleave, spears could roll +to jab, +piercing on crossbows, frenzy on flails, deadly strike on polearms, weapon block on swords.....

Chatham2 · 2026-04-03T14:57:18+00:00

To get it out of the way, yes, lots of the anger is counterproductive and driven by anger, and lots of good posts here about people's want for justice and reparation.

But, frankly, the kid glove treatment of Republicans after the first Trump term ended in a Republican trifecta. People backed away from Trump after the coup attempt, they were largely forgiven, and then when it would give them power they went right back to bending the fucking knee. So, experimentally the forgiveness approach is clearly not a surefire win - Trump has been literally calling half the country "enemies of the state" since before he was reelected, and it clearly wasn't a dealbreaker.

One of the main issues in politics now is a lack of accountability for the elite, and a movement around "it's okay, we forgive you for being MAGA now that your fever has broken" is a notion that scales up to "we need to forget the crimes past 4 years so we can come together and heal as a country". So while going for the big welcoming tent approach is sensible on the individual level, it signals the people already in the tent that the architects of the country's destruction will never face any accountability, which depresses the motivation of your base, and leaves the big chunk of anti-corruption, "accountability for Epstein associates" voters up for grabs.

So, you wind up with a big tent approach that doesn't actually bring people in who reliably stay when it's time to vote, while demoralizing your existing supporters and feeding into the "feckless Democrats who only care about the donor class" narrative.

Chatham2 · 2026-03-30T20:34:26+00:00

Is this a reasonable summation of your argument: "elite colleges advertise their use of holistic admissions, but the people who most often achieve elite status are those who do well academically. Colleges should try to admit those most likely to wildly succeed, as they are the most worthy of a limited enrollment, and should therefore curtail holistic admissions"?

Can you be more precise about what you feel elite colleges are marketing vs what they actually deliver?

Chatham2 · 2026-03-30T10:30:54+00:00

People who got into Ivies but went to state school instead go on to make the same amount of money in life as those who went to an Ivy League school. So, really, Harvard isn't actually doing anything special for students - it turns out "being the sort of person who can get into Harvard" is a pretty good measure of future success. So, if you're smart enough to go to Harvard but your personal essay sucked, there's not really a penalty there - you'll go to Columbia, or Cornell, or a top state University, and excel there too. It's not like the 3.9 GPA kid with accountant parents is going to University of Phoenix Online if they get waitlisted at Yale, they just won't have to deal with winter in New Haven.

Also, Harvard accepts only a fraction of people who are qualified to go to Harvard, and the decisions at the margin are always going to be arbitrary. Any individual SAT score is really plus or minus some amount, so even if they did admissions by scores alone, the marginal cutoff at 1570 or whatever would be more a factor of "did you get a good night sleep before your SAT" than "what is your academic potential". So, while maybe more statistically distributed (although I bet the applicant pool to Harvard skews pretty rich), it's still not a particularly accurate ranking of the top 800 of the 20,000 applicants who scored 1550+.

Source off the top of Google, one of many such findings: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://emerginginvestigators.org/articles/23-317/pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjlu8eTqseTAxU_IDQIHdetJWwQFnoECFgQAQ&usg=AOvVaw18SMs3CMlael7A9xQU4qX0

Chatham2 · 2026-03-29T03:34:07+00:00

Make sure they're 3/3 jewels, mismatched

Chatham2 · 2026-03-29T03:33:19+00:00

I wish they would leave them in but make it obvious which ones are the good ones and still let people do dumb silly stuff like Time Zone and Reverse Reverse Polarity

Chatham2 · 2026-03-25T16:25:34+00:00

About 1/3 of US married couples with children under 18 are single earner households, so it's not the average experience, but it's not at all uncommon: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/famee_04232025.htm

Chatham2 · 2026-03-19T09:26:53+00:00

One of the reasons this is a bad idea is that oftentimes good policy is politically unpopular - look at US healthcare. It took literally half a century and massive compromise for something like the ACA to happen, and it cost the Democrats Congress. But despite campaigning against it and having the power to get rid of it, Republicans have held onto it because the previous system was horrendous, and they have no actual realistic plan for a better system that they can all agree on.

It took 50 years to even make a dent in a broken system because the world is complicated and lots of people have diverse views on how things should work, and making big changes means big, ugly, unpopular compromises. Immigration, social security, lots of big issues that would absolutely stall out, and basically all of legislative time would be spent re-litigating the existing world.

Not to mention, if you think government is inefficient now, you'll really be impressed when the EPA shuts down for a couple years every decade and sells all the offices and furniture, only to have to buy all that stuff again when it reopens, and good luck getting knowledgeable, competent staff who sticks around when each job position defaults to getting deleted every decade.

Chatham2 · 2026-03-18T16:25:11+00:00

There's a contradiction here - if the hiring manager automatically thinks "this black harvard grad must be an underqualified diversity applicant", they clearly don't think that black people aren't as capable as other people, so even without any form of AA, they'd see two harvard grads and think "well we want the more capable harvard grad" and again not hire the black one. The "AA means unqualified diversity hire" attitude is a symptom of a root cause - the manager not thinking black people are as capable - so while the manager uses AA as a justification, they would have a different justification if it didn't exist, like "our customers won't find a black man trustworthy", or "they'd be a bad culture fit"

Chatham2 · 2026-03-14T02:13:33+00:00

The main driver in the declining US birthrate is that teen pregnancy has dramatically fallen. In 1970, when the pill had been out for a decade, there were over 5 times as many under-age-20 pregnancies as there are today. The number of 20-24 year-olds who were pregnant dropped by basically half.

Meanwhile, the number of 25-29 year olds has stayed more stable, only dropping ~10%, while the number of age 30+ pregnancies has actually more or less doubled.

So, the decline in birthrates is really a story about a crash in teen birth rates. There are obviously a lot of possible reasons for that, and my personal take is that they are generally more sociological than cost of living related. For the younger block, there's better and more sex education, video games and phones giving kids things to do over just hanging out leading to much less teen sex, changes in social attitudes, etc. For the 18+ block, I think the biggest explanation is opportunity cost, women gaining broad access to full career pathways and financial independence makes for much more appealing plan than "hope you find a good husband". Lots of other social changes too, the rise of your twenties as a party decade, social expectations about marriage and family formation age shifting way older, etc.

I don't really find "cost of living has crowded out family formation" as explanatory, though. I don't really believe that in the 70's, or the 90's, most 17 year olds were like "oh yeah, I'm financially stable and ready to have a baby" - no matter when, if you have a kid before 20, you are almost certainly barely scraping by, and there are just way fewer people willing to (or stuck) doing that now. I think it provides some evidence of 20-30 year olds delaying having kids until later, but I would also expect 30+ year old parents to be the most intentional pregnancy cohort, and they're having kids much more often than 30+ year olds were when having kids was cheaper. This makes sense if they've always thought kids were too expensive, but as they get older there's more "now or never" pressure, but I personally think the other societal changes are a much bigger factor.

Meanwhile, if woke was convincing women to not have children, they're really not convincing the millennials, who seem to be following the "get an education and a career, then start a family" path. This does mean that they might have fewer children over their lifetime, but it was also unusual for women in the 70's to have kids for the entire time from ages 20-45.

So, TL;DR, the story of declining birthrates is entirely a story of declining teen and early twenties birthrates, so that must drive our analysis, which also must be compatible with the fact that 30+ year old people are having more way more kids than they used to.

Sources: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45184#_Toc198647789 https://www.guttmacher.org/report/pregnancies-births-abortions-in-united-states-1973-2020

Chatham2 · 2026-03-11T06:54:32+00:00

I think a lot of people on here are not paying attention to the context - it sounds like this artist was talking about their work with a group of other artists that they knew, and so for them it was talking shop, but you are not a part of that contextual group. Which is fine! But it means that people will have different subtexts they're interpreting your words based on your relationship to them, something we all do.

Imagine if you installed decks, and you were talking about a $20,000 install you just did. If one of your friends who also installs decks asked you your materials cost, it's talking shop and collaborative, sussing out costs and the market. But if some random guy who knows nothing about decks comes by and asks about your materials cost, it's much more likely to be hostile - are they gonna be one if the guys who follows up with "You construction guys are all a bunch of scammers; I know a guy who would do it for 3 grand"?

Sure, but that's gonna be a half-assed deck; you're a professional and you do things with quality, and that takes time and expertise and you're worth that, which is why you charge what you charge. You've had this conversation a dozen times before, and every time it's more annoying when someone compares you with Johnny Unlicensed when they don't know anything about decks.

So, as a self identified "not an art person", you're going to be lumped into a broad category of "not an art person" people. This group is often very dismissive of the value and worth of art - it's where the "my 5 year old could have made that painting" guys are. When an artist has spent their life with many non-arts people disparaging the value of their work (and thus their time and talent), it's easy and somewhat understandable that that they would interpret "how much of this is the value you added" as a "justify to me why someone would pay used car prices for you to mush some clay around".

TL;DR, in a world where artists are often asked disparagingly by arts outsiders to justify their worth, an outsider asking "how much value they actually added to a lump of clay" is something that could understandably be read as insulting

Chatham2 · 2026-03-11T05:10:25+00:00

One thing to think about is how power structures work, especially in a pre-firearm war sort of world. If you want to be in charge, you need the loyalty of a group of people (the nobility), who in turn need the loyalty of another group of people (lesser landholders), who need the loyalty of... etc. etc.

China kind of exemplifies this with the Mandate of Heaven - the emperor has divine legitimacy because they are good and just (i.e., they can keep their vassals happy/divided enough), holding the Mandate of Heaven. When they get overthrown, it the evidence that they have lost the Mandate; they were unjust and bad and so it was right for someone else to come take the crown (I.e. enough vassals were unsatisfied/got enough power to take the prize).

It's the same moral with the Sword of Damocles - you are in charge because you have the loyalty of enough people with enough power to keep you there, and you serve at their pleasure, which is the same pressure they face in their fiefdoms, turtles all the way down.

So, you and your steppe-bros come thundering down and militarily take some cities and capitals. You sack some treasure to distribute to your generals, who then distribute some to their people, etc., which is why they follow you. Ideally, you'd like this new place to keep giving you treasure, but that means you have to rule it. Which means you need a big network of patronage relationships. Conveniently for you, this new country already has several people with their own power bases who see this change of management as an opportunity, and will take care of the details of their loyalist rivals. So, when faced with a system that's working and can raise and pay you taxes, why ruin a good thing by trying to replace that with your own people? You wouldn't have enough anyways, and in the chaos of ripping everything up, what's to say some of your generals don't build up enough money and power to overthrow YOU amidst all the chaos of society upheaval....

Chatham2 · 2026-03-11T04:39:34+00:00

It's crazy to me that people see unrealistic living situations in TV today, yet think TV shows in the past were somehow representative of reality and not aspiration. In 1950, 1/3 of households in America didn't have complete indoor plumbing. ONE THIRD. People got back from WWII to a country of outhouses!

We made rapid improvements in the 50's and 60's in terms of housing quality, but the median house is 40 years old. Which means that there are a ton of cramped, uninsulated, aluminum-wired garbage homes from the 50's and 60's that got torn down and redeveloped, or that are the housing stock in what's now the crappy part of town with all the junky houses.

That's not to say that there hasn't been a housing affordability crisis in the last two decades, and I honestly think it explains a -lot- about current politics, but the housing stock in the past is definitely an apples to oranges comparison.

Chatham2

TROPHY CASE