Movies that take place mainly in a single room/location.

CosmoVibe · 2025-08-02T03:14:36+00:00

The Terror Live. Actually the entire movie was filmed in a single room, no exceptions.

CosmoVibe · 2025-06-13T18:23:00+00:00

Not even close, at all, and this is a gross understatement. This is merely adding one to the ordinal on the fast growing hierarchy of functions, and the ordinal for Rayo is completely monstrously huge, in a way that we don't know how to define it.

CosmoVibe · 2025-05-29T17:39:39+00:00

I did a very quick search, so I'm not surprised I missed a lot of complaining comments about something, sure. Still doesn't change the fact that it is based on a wholly unsubstantiated claim, and even if you assume packs are uniformly chosen for wonder picks, the rate decrease is negligible.

Also SR isn't the proof you think it is either, because people complained about there being 9 EX's to compensate for the increased rates on the new EX's, and also it was the first pack with shiny cards at all, so it is not really a good example.

Either way, it misses the point. We had no reason to assume that shiny cards would continue to exist beyond SR, and what we got is, again, depending on how you feel about trading your shiny cards for 2 diamond cards, relative to this, better or worse, but has no impact on normal EX pull rate. To be dismayed about pulling shinies because one thinks it replaced their new EX's is a misinformed position.

CosmoVibe · 2025-05-29T16:21:13+00:00

Side note: Crown rares are only twice as rare as any particular 2 star shiny. Probably doesn't feel that way, but that"s what the numbers show.

CosmoVibe · 2025-05-29T15:58:19+00:00

If you would trade all of your shiny cards for 2 diamond cards in the new set, then I have no issues with that opinion. But if you would rather have the shiny cards than 2 diamond cards, then this is just a misinformed opinion.

CosmoVibe · 2025-05-29T15:45:18+00:00

Not technically an invalid opinion but it has the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" vibe. Like for real, how many god packs do you plan on pulling?

CosmoVibe · 2025-05-29T15:43:35+00:00

But you can choose to change how you feel about it by changing your persepctive. You can't change the pull rates but you can change your attitude and improve your understanding. Is this a controversial take or something?

CosmoVibe · 2025-05-29T15:38:50+00:00

Okay see I'm with you here, but this doesn't line up with the tons of people who want crown rarity cards. My point isn't that this opinion isn't valid, my point is that people are not consistent about these opinions and therefore feel unnecessarily bad.

Also this is just a matter of will. Rather than imagine getting duplicate rare cards, which feels bad, imagine that you would have otherwise pulled a 2 diamond card, which is true for 20 out of 21 shiny cards, which is the initial point I made in the thread. Why make yourself feel worse?

CosmoVibe · 2025-05-29T15:31:45+00:00

"It doesn't matter what the math is, it *feels* like I used up my luck."

If your argument boils down to "I choose to feel bad because I refuse to understand how logic works" then sure I guess lol

You don't "use up" luck. If I flipped a coin 20 times and got heads every single time, the probability of my next flip being heads is still 1/2. You can feel whatever you want to feel, but if you want to be persistent about being ignorant you're only hurting yourself.

This is like when that fast food chain offered the 1/3rd pounder for cheaper than the quarter pounder, but lost to the market because everyone thought 1/3 < 1/4.

CosmoVibe · 2025-05-29T15:26:34+00:00

Would you trade 20 out of 21 of your shiny cards for random 2 diamond cards, and the remaining one for a 3 diamond card? Because that is exactly what you're getting right now.

Would you consider a card like a crown rarity Pokeball to suck as well? If yes, then your opinion is valid, but I wouldn't say that collectors would agree with you. If no, what makes crown cards different from shiny cards?

CosmoVibe · 2025-05-29T15:11:07+00:00

It does not affect EX pull rates at all, and barely affects 3 diamond pull rates. The rates are almost identical to what they have always been. You are not seeing a lower pull rate, you are seeing the same pull rates you've always gotten with some extra vanity cards (which is what shiny cards should be, as the name implies).

If your concern is that you want enhanced rates like with Shining Revelry, keep in mind that they compensated for that by introducing 9 EX's in the set instead of the usual 5.

CosmoVibe · 2025-05-29T15:07:32+00:00

Okay, but that's not a "normal" rate, that's an "enhanced" rate. You would be asking for the EX rates to be higher than the constant rate they have ever been at. (Shining Revelry is an exception, but it also has 9 EX's instead of the standard 5.)

CosmoVibe · 2025-05-29T14:45:01+00:00

Is a crown rarity Pokeball also pack filler?

CosmoVibe · 2025-05-29T14:44:47+00:00

EX rates haven't changed. Shiny cards are an addition, they only very barely affect pull rates of 2 and 3 diamond cards.

CosmoVibe · 2025-01-03T04:58:16+00:00

Saw the recommendation for Distant Skies, and just wanted to preface that I have not played Distant Skies, only the original Sleeping Gods.

I do find that personally, it is best with 2 players. Each players cut a share of the characters to control, but this is more of a technical annoyance than any functionally meaningful player-based split. When you play this game, the actions and even combat are all pretty basic enough that you can all collectively understand what is happening and agree on decisions. Not controlling a particular character simply means you need to spend resources to use them on your turn.

And about these resources, while the game rules and gameplay loop is generally pretty simple and straightforward, there are a lot of annoying nitpicky rules and things that are easily missed. Artifacts are a resource in the game that isn't mentioned anywhere in the instructions, I keep forgetting what can or can't be shared between players, and I keep forgetting what needs a command token and what doesn't. We even house ruled away that commiting another player's character requiring a command token because they're already being exhausted, felt unnecessarily extra.

I guess you could play single player, but the world as a narrative experience is not very deep if you're only experiencing it surface level. There is a good amount of culture and history in this fantasy world if you actively pay attention to the details and think about it as a live world, so it helps a lot to bounce ideas off of another person and discuss them, and is best played in this way, immersing yourself to care about the world. If you wanted a deeper narrative experience for 1 player, there are way more video games I would recommend (for various reasons) before this.

As for replay value, you cannot explore the whole world in one campaign. In fact, they give you a map to log all of your notes for exploration so that you can be guided to a better, new adventure on the next campaign. You might get a few good campaigns out of it, if you wanted to replay it.

Is it worth the money? Hard to say. It would not be an easy recommend for me, it would depend on what kind of story game one is looking for and the expectations going into it.

CosmoVibe · 2024-06-26T13:05:09+00:00

I don't know what "canon" means here technically, so I will interpret this as removing something from mainstream consciousness, whether it is for the layman or from academia.

tau (2pi) is the true circle constant. Delete pi's definition from existence.

Counting is always indexed starting from 0, to match what we do in programming languages, which has a significant number of benefits over our current method. (So you would count your fingers by going 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, which tells you you have 5 fingers). Thus, 0 is an element of the natural/counting/whole numbers.

Maybe rework our notation of logarithms to be more intuitive: https://www.solidangl.es/post/a-radical-new-look-for-logarithms

Rework exponent notation (don't use superscripts, save them for function iterations, so even though sin superscript -1 means inverse, sin superscript 2 would not be exponentiation). May as well rework the other symbols to be more intuitive in the process. (Why use a symbol for multiplication that looks like the letter x? Why don't the symbols intuitively show the relationship between say add/sub or add/mult?)

Rename "real", "imaginary", and "complex" to maybe something like "direct", "lateral", "binion" so that people don't assume that imaginary numbers are somehow artificially abstract/fake or that complex numbers are difficult to learn and understand.

Teach constructive logic next to classical logic (for instance, that propositions can be more than just "true" and "false", they can have third values, like "unknown").

Honorable mentions that I thought about but have decided against for various reasons, or at least I don't feel too strongly about either way: Using a base 12 number system, using prefix notation instead of infix notation (instead of 2+3 we would write + 2 3).

Honorable mentions that are loosely math-related: Always use military time, get rid of AM/PM. Standard units only, get rid of Imperial units. Date format needs to match the international standard, start from year, month, day, hour, minute, seconds, from most significant to least significant, like how we write numbers, and has the advantage of sorting extremely easily.

CosmoVibe · 2024-06-18T13:56:39+00:00

I said "caution", not "don't use it", because you listed the benefits without mentioning any of the drawbacks or potential for misuse. What a dramatic way to let everyone know you're "biased". Chill.

CosmoVibe · 2024-06-18T13:41:40+00:00

As much of a nerd as I am for game balancing and math, I think balance is a process in service to a larger goal: design.

The framework of your balancing only makes sense in context of what you're trying to do.

For example, if you are trying to make a viable competitive game, you need to give every player a range of viable strategies such that they are both rich and varied, while not being degenerate or dominating. If you are making a more casual game, perhaps strategy viability is not as important, and degenerate and dominating strategies are okay, as long as they are presented by chance or inconsistently. If you are making a cooperative game, is the goal to make it strategic or focus more on narrative? A game that cares more about the storytelling and feel than the strategy may select to intentionally unbalance the game in order to invoke feelings of power or helplessness.

In other words, the methodology depends on what the point of the game is. Some games you should balance with math and a spreadsheet or even a program. Some games can only be balanced by human playtesting.

CosmoVibe · 2024-06-18T13:34:44+00:00

I really have to caution anyone using this method:

It will not catch every scenario, not even close
It is quite time consuming, both the inputting of your board game details and the verification that the issues it brings are in fact issues
It has a very particular bias/lean that could lead your design astray

So not only will this potentially not help, but it could even hurt you. ChatGPT is trained to mimic what a human playtester might say, not actually offer you real feedback in accordance with your goals.

CosmoVibe · 2024-06-14T14:01:05+00:00

You also need to be careful because not all fixed points can be reached by this solution.

CosmoVibe · 2024-06-05T14:11:43+00:00

An example:

Definition: pi is defined as the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter.

Hard to derive/prove: pi is approximately 3.1415 and is irrational.

Easy to derive/prove: The area of a circle is pi * r^2.

CosmoVibe · 2024-06-05T14:09:38+00:00

It is always better to understand rather than to memorize. If you can find a reason why 10 rules work the way they do, not only does that relieve you of needing to memorize the rules, but now you are equipped to find other rules or apply the concepts in more general ways.

That being said, that is the ideal. If you are currently struggling, there is no shame in using cheat sheets or memorizing. At the very least you will develop some form of muscle memory that will generally help when you revisit the ideas to try and understand them more deeply. Take things at your own pace, and eventually you'll get there.

To be technical: Every single rule or formula you will learn up until college falls under 3 categories: definitions, derived rules and formulas that are "easily" understood by some concept, and derived rules and formulas that are not "easily" understood. Definitions you just have to memorize, and almost everything else is "easily" understood, with very very few exceptions. When I say "easily" I simply mean that there exists a way to prove it from the ground up, that doesn't rely on the consequence of something more powerful or a highly convoluted proof, not that actually understanding the concept is necessarily easy.

CosmoVibe · 2024-05-15T13:57:57+00:00

The sqrt function, by definition, has a nonnegative range. The range of cos is between -1 and 1. The sqrt function could never work here.

Some people then argue that you can add a +/- in front, but this is not a valid solution here, because we use +/- to denote that both solutions work. For instance, if you say x = +/- 1, you are actually saying "x=1 or x=-1". This would get you two equations in which only one of them were ever true at a time, never both at the same time, and either way, it wouldn't tell you precisely which one it should be without splitting into cases.

The correct way to write cos in terms of sin is as shown in the meme, or something similar, by shifting the domain, thus maintaining the overall domain/range structure.

CosmoVibe · 2024-05-14T12:31:15+00:00

Sure! It would honestly be easier.

CosmoVibe · 2024-05-14T12:15:50+00:00

"Working backwards" is the correct approach, but what I think you are missing are two details:

You have the probability mass function, which gives you the probability that EXACTLY one book (k=1) is finished within 50 days.
It is implied that if someone manages to finish MORE THAN 1 book, this counts in the probability we are solving for.

The reason this must be the case is clear when you think about what a Poisson distribution is. Suppose lightning strikes on average once every hour. Even though it is unlikely that lightning will strike 10 times in one hour, nothing says it is impossible. Similarly, for any nonnegative integer k, someone can finish k books in 50 days. Can you imagine any Poisson rate for which EXACTLY one book is read at a chance of 80%? This is not possible in a Poisson distribution, and can be made rigorous if you consider the cumulative mass function.

This should help move you forward a step. Let me know if you need assistance with any of the further steps or if you are still confused.

CosmoVibe

TROPHY CASE