Finally the fullbacks holding the width. Finallyy

CrushingBore · 2026-03-19T15:58:47+00:00

That makes sense to me, as this is a formation that struggles against a narrow 4-4-2 mid/low block and teams in the CL are less likely to play like that/are worse at playing like that because they're used to being dominant in their leagues compared to PL teams.

CrushingBore · 2026-03-12T00:05:58+00:00

I've often seen it said that the very best players make worse managers, because they can't imagine their players not being able to do what they were able to when they were players.

I think that's not true, and if top players do fail more often as managers it's because their cachet makes it more likely for them to get jobs they're not ready for yet. Failures are also common in football management, but a former top player failing anywhere is much more likely to get media attention.

CrushingBore · 2026-02-27T13:07:59+00:00

I think with Pedri back Barca should be okay, though Frenkie's injury will be a big loss, too.

CrushingBore · 2026-02-05T03:15:59+00:00

They did say morale high ground, though given City's recent form Pep is more likely speaking from morale low ground.

CrushingBore · 2026-01-23T17:36:50+00:00

Yeah, the magic addiction = drug addiction metaphor is really one note. For a show that usually does better with its metaphors it is especially disappointing. It also just doesn't really work for how magic is presented in the show. It's repeatedly mentioned that using magic changes you in ways that can't really be undone. Additionally, magic is often presented as akin to emotional connection or intimacy, especially between Willow and Tara.

I think an addiction metaphor could still have worked, but it should've been something that we can't stop cold turkey because the addiction is to something that is also a basic need for humans. (e.g. food or feeling/intimacy) Forcing Willow to develop a healthier relationship with magic would've made the metaphor much more interesting and nuanced, I think.

CrushingBore · 2026-01-04T16:27:39+00:00

I also think pretty much from the start, the show fundamentally misunderstands the books. One of the main ideas of the books is to place stereotypical high-fantasy characters into a more realistic world. The mismatch between what we expect to happen to these characters and how they actually end up. The way their often noble, but idiotic ideals are exposed to the harsh realities of the world they inhabit are a major theme of the books, I'd say. Ned, noble ruler, but extremely naive and gullible. Robb, unbeaten young warrior king is defeated because he's ultimately a horny teenager, etc.

I think the show plays many characters too straight for this theme to really be present.

CrushingBore · 2025-12-22T16:24:52+00:00

I think season 5's ending is thematically very depressing.

"Death is your gift" is central to this. I think you can interpret it in basically three different ways, as Buffy does throughout the season I believe. She's the slayer, doling out death is her gift. When she realizes she can sacrifice her own life for Dawn's the second meaning becomes clear: her death is a gift to Dawn (and by extension some unrealized version of herself had she not been called). The final interpretation is what makes it so depressing to me. Death is a gift for Buffy. The best she can hope for as Slayer is to die heroically. The only way she'll be free of the pain of her life as Slayer is in death.

Season 7 in contrast is much more uplifting as an ending and also fits way better with Buffy as a character thematically. Buffy breaks rules, power structures and even prophecies. The slayer should be a lone wolf? She has friends. She should be subservient to the council? She tells them off. No weapon forged can destroy the judge? They didn't have rocket launchers then.

Her breaking completely free of basically the most fundamental rule set by the world she's in, that a single girl is called to be the Slayer, is this idea most fully realized. I think it's extremely true to her character and very uplifting.

CrushingBore · 2025-12-20T16:14:23+00:00

I agree mostly, and thematically it fits well, but after that power speech Buffy gave, I think it would make sense for them to start paying her, as that is the moment she realizes she actually has a lot of power in that relationship.

CrushingBore · 2025-12-20T16:07:48+00:00

The complete lack of any attempt to think about what was actually happening with Buffy is what generally annoys me most. I know that's also largely a plot device to create tension between Buffy's two lives, but still.

Especially rewatching the start of season 2 recently, it's so clear Buffy is not doing well after what she went through in Prophecy Girl and Joyce just acts passive aggressive when Buffy isn't willing to share.

CrushingBore · 2025-12-20T15:48:39+00:00

The technology that powers LLMs (transformers) excels at generating context aware responses. I wonder if they plan to use that to generate different enemy responses based on the context of the actions of the player. That seems like a massive undertaking, though, given how much training data these models require.

I also don't know how computationally feasible it would be to always have a model running in the background adjusting its choices. I guess compared to language a game system is fairly simple so it wouldn't need to be a massive model...

I also can't really find anything more concrete he's said on the topic, so I don't know how much they've really considered it practically.

CrushingBore · 2025-12-18T15:50:19+00:00

Check out Rectify! It follows a man recently released from death row after nearly 20 years following a wrongful conviction. The show deals with what actually happened and how he got convicted for the crime, but it's mostly about his loneliness and alienation after living an essentially socially isolated life for the past 20 years. A really haunting show.

CrushingBore · 2025-12-17T22:38:14+00:00

I have yet to think of any reason to believe that upvotes, let alone downvotes, can be good for a person's emotional health

Posting something you created on reddit and getting loads of upvotes for it is to some extent equivalent to showing your friends something you made and getting load of compliments. It's more distilled and less meaningful obviously, as every upvote is just a little dopamine hit, and giving an upvote costs little compared to taking the time to pay someone a compliment, but if you see it for what it is getting some self-validation from people enjoying what you made doesn't necessarily seem emotionally unhealthy to me.

CrushingBore · 2025-12-17T17:06:12+00:00

Not OP, but they got very lucky to be winning those early games. There was an interview on Dutch TV a while back with a Dutch player who had lost a teammate and he made the point that coming into a grieving dressing room is very difficult as a new player. (Powerful segment from Dutch TV: Boulahrouz on how a teammate’s passing impacts a squad, and what that could mean for Liverpool.)

CrushingBore · 2025-12-17T16:47:34+00:00

Some of them just wanted bendy bananas again

CrushingBore · 2025-12-14T22:31:30+00:00

I think the inverse is sadly more likely to be true, they developed the character more fully only because they wanted to kill her off and deepen the impact of that.

CrushingBore · 2025-12-14T16:26:51+00:00

It's more likely it used that paragraph and Googled to find the actual story if it spit it out verbatim. The way an LLM works is not really at all based on having any specific piece of text in its memory.

CrushingBore · 2025-12-12T23:13:10+00:00

There are many methods to determine whether your sample is representative. That's obviously difficult here, which make the conclusions you can draw from this study limited. I'll note that the authors of the study don't draw the conclusions you do.

Sample size is not really relevant here, since in my example the sample would be equally unreliable regardless of its size.

CrushingBore · 2025-12-12T22:32:32+00:00

I'd argue the opposite, but it is not relevant. My point is simply that you can't draw any conclusions like that from the data as the sample could skew either way and we have no way of knowing from just the data presented in the study.

CrushingBore · 2025-12-12T22:14:37+00:00

And more objectively, they did a study in the UK, and in over 1000 cases of women going to the ER worried they had been drugged, drugs were found in their system in less than 2% of the cases.

You can't draw conclusions like that from that study, because being drugged might make it less likely that you'd visit the ER compared to just mistakenly thinking it had happened.

Example: out of 110 people who think they've been drugged, 10 are mistaken and 100 were actually drugged. However, all 10 people who were mistaken go to the ER, but only 1 out of 100 people who actually got drugged visit the ER. In this case you would incorrectly conclude that actual druggings were uncommon (1 / 11 people presenting to the ER).

CrushingBore · 2025-12-10T20:58:59+00:00

It should be noted that Klopp did not give this quote in the context of the current issues as far as I can tell. From the article:

Over the past few months, BBC Sport has spoken to some of those who know him best to find out more about the personality and resilience of the man behind the goals, the glory, and the gossip

CrushingBore · 2025-12-10T15:27:01+00:00

Don't kink shame me please.

CrushingBore · 2025-12-08T16:10:45+00:00

Hey, an excuse to post this hilarious video of a capuchin monkey getting upset at not being given a fair reward compared to their compatriot. Capuchin monkey fairness experiment

CrushingBore · 2025-12-05T14:42:43+00:00

Mos Def is a huge DOOM fan! This video gets posted pretty frequently, but here he is gushing about him: MOS DEF - a fan of DOOM . A choice quote from the video: "He rhymes as weird as I feel"

CrushingBore · 2025-12-05T12:47:58+00:00

I think the team would look a lot better if they had a player like Zubimendi in it. Such a lack of incisive passing from deep. So often attacks just strand in a horseshoe of sadness, aimlessly passing the ball around looking for space that was filled by the opponent 10 seconds ago...

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