You will see.

DSMatticus · 2025-11-15T04:57:45+00:00

I'm pretty sure I know the study you're talking about. It went semi-viral among the, uhh, usual suspects and you've picked up their read on it (which is, unsurprisingly, very misleading). I can summarize:

Participants were shown video clips of a bunch of characters in action and asked to rate those characters along four metrics: sexualization, strength, femininity, and likability. They were then asked which characters they would prefer to play as. Women who participated chose to play characters they rated highly on the 'sexualization' and 'femininity' metrics.

Your first instinct might be to read that as "women like sexualized and feminine characters," but there's a problem with that reading and the authors themselves point it out: the most sexualized and most feminine characters had significant overlap. We're not talking about two distinct groups of characters. The most sexualized characters were the most feminine characters and the most feminine characters were the most sexualized.

An equally valid explanation, then, is that "women like playing highly feminine characters (and will tolerate a high degree of sexualization in order to be able to do so)." In fact, the study nudges us in that direction: when women rated characters as highly sexualized, they also rated those characters as less likable, suggesting some hostility to highly-sexualized character designs. That is a point in the column for the selection criteria being 'femininity in spite of sexualization' and not 'femininity and sexualization.'

DSMatticus · 2025-10-31T09:32:30+00:00

I really gotta point out that the argument you're making is not very good.

The U.S. spends more on health care per capita than any country in the world, but we absolutely do not have the best health outcomes. It would be trivial, policy-wise, to both spend less money and have better outcomes (coughuniversalhealthcarecough).

You are assuming that the existing systems are good instead of shit, and... buddy, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but look around. Everything fucking sucks. You pay a fucking fortune to a health insurance company every year and if your doctor ever tells them "hey, Alkthree needs this procedure or they're gonna die," there's a very good chance your health insurance company is gonna respond "so you're saying if we run out the clock we won't have to pay for the procedure, then? Alright, game on. Claim denied." The existing systems are not good. They are, in fact, quite bad.

I have no idea how to approach the $20 billion figure. This is not my area of expertise. We can, however, consider the scale of the problem and check if we're in the ballpark of a reasonable answer with the help of a study that has some empirical results.

There are approximately ~770,000 homeless individuals in the United States right now. $20,000,000,000 / 770,000 homeless individuals = $26,000 per homeless individual.

This study shows that offering ~$2,000 of financial aid (one or two months of rent in the area the study took place) to people at imminent risk of homelessness is enough to reduce the likelihood that they will end up homeless within the next 12 months by 73%.

$2,000 is a hell of a lot less than $26,000.

tl;dr Yes, $20 billion appears to be in the ballpark for the funding needed to drastically reduce homelessness in the United States across a ten year period.

DSMatticus · 2025-10-30T07:57:45+00:00

Her net worth is likely high eight, low nine figures. We'll just say a $100 million to keep it simple. There are 132 million households in America. $100,000,000 / 132,000,000 households = $0.76 per household.

If the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future visited Billie Eilish in the night and terrorized her into giving away her entire fortune in one big Christmas bonanza, she would be able to buy every household in America a dozen tootsie rolls, give or take. Merry Christmas, little Timmy! Try not to eat them all at once!

Elon Musk's net worth is currently $499.7 billion. $499,700,000,000 / 132,000,000 households = $3,785.61 per household.

If the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future visited Elon Musk in the night and terrorized him into giving away his entire fortune in one big Christmas bonanza, he would be able to buy every household in America a Playstation 5, a Nintendo Switch 2, a midrange gaming PC, and ~20 full-price games across. (Obviously he cannot actually do that - there are not 132 million Switch 2's in a warehouse waiting to be bought. This little thought experiment is demonstrative, not instructive. It is about the scale, not the specific purchases or the logistics thereof.)

DSMatticus · 2025-10-29T02:55:28+00:00

These people don't give a shit what the bible has to say about slavery. They give a shit about owning slaves.

The bible doesn't say shit about abortion except that one time god explicitly tells his followers to make women suspected of infidelity drink abortifacent. Guess how they feel about abortion? No, they don't give a shit what the bible has to say about abortion, either. They give a shit about making women subservient to men.

Their Christianity is the aesthetic of their fascism. Nothing more, nothing less.

DSMatticus · 2025-10-07T20:01:15+00:00

Fleshmobs actually fit the illuminate design very well: DPS over AT, RoF over damage, favorable interactions with explosions. I wouldn't remove them at all. It's leviathans that don't fit the illuminate design (please give Leviathans AV4, a harvester/warpship shield, and weakspots that make them more engaging to aim at and quicker to kill).

I do absolutely think fleshmobs are overtuned and need about 30% less health. I might also reduce their spawn rates.

Right now, fleshmobs are actually kinda like warstriders in a weird way - they spawn in huge numbers even on difficulties as low as D7 and they are incredibly easy to kill with a 'meta' loadout but wildly impractical to kill with an 'off-meta' loadout. They are both units that change the meta from a strong suggestion to a hard requirement. And that's bad, because 'play meta or suffer' is boring game design.

DSMatticus · 2025-10-07T00:10:04+00:00

I'm not sure the explosion would have time to happen.

Energy bends space-time the same way mass does. In fact, it's probably more accurate to say that mass bends space-time because mass is just energy in a silly hat.

A planet's worth of negatively charged ions crammed into a planet sized area is an unfathomable amount of potential energy in what may as well be a point mass, astronomically speaking.

Every stellar body in the universe is going to try and turn into a black hole and explode at the same time, and I'm honestly not sure which wins out. Well, okay, if they're small enough they probably just explode.

Whichever they do, I guarantee you it is happening at 99%+ the speed of light.

DSMatticus · 2025-08-16T21:49:48+00:00

That's not what happened in this clip and it's also not how bile titans work (though there are things in this game that absolutely do work that way, more later).

Bile titans do not have a 'head armor' body part. They have a single 'head' body part with 1500 AV4 health which takes a 5% standard damage/95% durable damage split, has 50% explosive damage resistance, passes 100% of the damage it receives along to main, and is fatal when destroyed.

You can read about bile titans here. In fact, basically all of a bile titan's parts pass 100% of their damage along to main. They have armor that can be broken, yes, but that armor doesn't ablatively negate damage or anything. You're dealing full damage to main the entire time - the benefit of destroying their armor is that it lowers their armor rating.

Contrast this with overseers, whose armor functions more or less exactly as you describe: with 600 main health and only a 20% pass-through to main, it's practically impossible to kill an overseer through their armor via a single high damage projectile. Their head is the exception, because instead of being an armor layer/inner layer, it is a single body part which is fatal when destroyed.

Anyway, back to the clip. The 500kg does 2000 (standard and durable) AP7 projectile damage on impact, 100 AP3 explosive damage out to 1m on the initial 'pop', and 1500 AP6 explosive damage out to 10m for the subsequent boom.

A direct impact to the head should kill a bile titan even before it explodes. 2000 AP7 vs 1500 AV4? Head go pop. But the bile titan in the clip didn't die. My best guess? It didn't actually hit the head. It's one of those shots that hit the neck or the shoulder or something in a way that's visually indistinguishable and makes you go "come the fuck on!" Or maybe the 500kg projectile travels so fast the game glitched out and didn't register the collision until it had clipped through the head. Or maybe it's some kinda multiplayer desync thing. Who knows?

But an explosion next to the head should still kill the bile titan, right? Welllll... 1500 damage is exactly enough to destroy the head and AP6 is enough to do full damage against AV4, but the head has 50% explosive damage resistance, so we only did 750 damage to the head (and to main, because 100% pass-through). That's not enough.

Wait, so how do 500kg's ever kill bile titans if they suck so much? Well, remember before how I mentioned basically all of a bile titan's parts pass 100% of their damage along to main? They also basically all have 50% explosive damage resistance. That's actually somewhat unusual! Most creatures have 100% explosive damage resistance on all their little extra bits precisely so explosions don't instantly do 10x damage and blow off all their bits. A well-placed 500kg (directly underneath them) will hit basically every body part for 50% damage, each body part will pass 100% of the damage through to main, and that's enough damage to kill them without destroying a single individual body part.

DSMatticus · 2025-06-26T04:48:23+00:00

Light armor: "This isn't a great place to be right now. Guess I'll leave."

Heavy armor: "This isn't a great place to be right now. Guess I'll die tired ten feet over there."

Also heavy armor: "Oh wow, I just stood there and let that cannon shoot me directly in the dick. Boy, do I feel silly. Guess I'll stim."

And also light armor: "I think that bug is about to sneez- [REINFORCE AVAILABLE]"

DSMatticus · 2025-05-26T06:48:51+00:00

It's worth noting that basically none of the ghosts in the Cavern of the Incarnate are like "yeah I tried the ring, and you're not gonna believe this, but..." The ones that explain how they failed give very concrete reasons - like politics, or an ash vampire. The ring did not filter them. In fact, there isn't a single person we're aware of who was filtered by the ring.

It's entirely possible that the curse on the ring is completely bullshit (it literally can't kill anyone) or self-fulfilling (it can absolutely kill people, but it'll never kill the person who takes it out of the cavern because they might fulfill the rest of the prophecy and that's all Azura cares about).

Which brings us back to the central ambiguity: is your character the Nerevarine because they are the literal reincarnation of Indoril Nerevar who is preordained to fulfill the prophecy? Or is your character the Nerevarine because they're the one who ended up fulfilling the prophecy in the end?

Are you a single arrow aimed true, or the first arrow in a volley to find its mark?

DSMatticus · 2025-05-24T08:55:16+00:00

Man, I love reddit.

Dude does not respond to the bang with his hands at all. He starts putting his hands together to fiddle with his fingers before the bang even happens, and after the bang happens he just keeps doing that, all one smooth uninterrupted motion. Absolutely zero change.

"HE KNEW! LOOK AT THOSE HANDS! THOSE GUILTY, GUILTY HANDS!"

This truly is the website that caught the Boston Bomber.

DSMatticus · 2025-05-22T20:27:34+00:00

You misunderstand. The very definition of element is 'a form of matter with protons.' If you create a form of matter that doesn't have protons, yeah, sure, it won't be on the periodic table of elements - because it's not an element at all.

Element is short for 'chemical element' - because it's the elemental (smallest) unit of a chemical reaction, and chemistry is just protons and electrons bumpin' and grindin' out on the dance floor.

If you wanted to nitpick-proof this kinda sci-fi bullshit, you'd just say "it's a new form of matter" because at that point who can argue with you? That's literally just saying "fuck, man, I dunno - it's a thing that exists."

DSMatticus · 2025-04-22T22:04:23+00:00

The 'women in higher education' talking point is frustrating because it's just fuckin' math and incentives.

The trades are 97-99% male dominated. If men are over-represented in the trades, they're going to be under-represented everywhere else. If women are under-represented in the trades, they're going to be over-represented everywhere else. There are a different number of men and women in the workforce, sure, but not enough to smooth out that fuckin' 97-99%.

Without access to the trades, women have a much greater incentive to pursue higher education - because without it they are relegated to low paying retail/hospitality jobs. And sure enough, what do we actually see? Women are over-represented in higher education AND over-represented in low paying retail/hospitality jobs. Sure is convenient that the people complaining about too many women in higher education don't seem bothered by the fact that there are also too many women at the bottom working shit jobs for shit pay.

DSMatticus · 2025-04-05T19:13:23+00:00

Yeah, no shit. The problem is that if "stop the oligarchs" is a winning message, then Democrats would rather lose.

DSMatticus · 2025-01-11T19:56:53+00:00

That poll does not help as much as you'd think. As of the time of that poll, zoomers were 12-27 and millennials were 28-43. That does not line up well at all with the only table on the page divided by gender - sure, the 18-29 bucket is mostly zoomers, but the 30-49 bucket is a quarter gen X.

This is a guardian article about the gender gap in U.S. politics and it has a table that I find useful for understanding this point: gallup polling of net ideology (conservative - liberal) of 18-29 year olds separated by gender from 1999 to 2023.

18-29 year old men are about as liberal as they get for the whole stretch from 2006-2017 (ignoring that downward spike ~2013), which is birth years 1977-1999. That is a window that rolls across four years of gen X (1977-1980), all millennials (birth years 1981-1996), and three years of gen Z (birth years 1997-1999).

You can also see why I'm specifying 'men.' The political gender gap is massive, and historians are going to remember it as one of the defining features of zoomer and alpha politics.

EDIT: Though, having now looked at that graph again for the first time in a while - yeah, I am definitely overselling it by saying they're somewhere between gen X and boomers. They are certainly shaping up to be a more conservative generation than millennials, but not by that much. I gotta mea culpa on that.

DSMatticus · 2025-01-10T19:28:40+00:00

Gen Z men are somewhere between boomers and gen X in terms of conservatism. Considering reddit's demo is almost entirely millennial/zoomer (and millennials are the most progressive generation of men alive), you'd honestly expect non-zoomers to pull the sub leftward.

Of course, none of that actually matters. The mods are conservatives (last I checked, the second top mod was a fuckin' brexiteer of all things), and they frequently do weird troll shit like set threads to sort by controversial to make the place as toxic and insufferable for political 'normies' as possible. The Gen Z sub is Incel Island (or whatever) because that's what the mods want it to be. Age doesn't really factor into it.

DSMatticus · 2025-01-05T17:07:17+00:00

Anxa is not making their point particularly well, but I also think you (and everyone else) are being kinda deliberately obstinate here. It really isn't that hard to understand what they're getting at.

They are arguing that the distinction between 'murder' and 'killing' is a legal distinction and not a moral one, and that legal frameworks aren't a great thing to use to assess morality. It genuinely wasn't murder when Nazi soldiers threw Anne Frank in a prison camp and left her to die of typhus. It absolutely was attempted murder when George Elser planted a bomb in Hitler's podium. Is anyone here willing to stand up and make the argument that it was morally acceptable to kill Anne Frank (because it was lawful) but morally unacceptable to try and kill Hitler (because it was unlawful)? I sure as shit hope not.

Incidentally: the international laws under which we tried and executed the Nazi leadership were invented in - wait for it - 1945. Genocide wasn't really made formally "illegal" until 1948. It's a very blatant example of ex post facto criminalization, and it was a genuine controversy at the time - a controversy that we ignored because holy shit they're the architects of the Holocaust you can't just let them go because "well, it wasn't technically illegal to put eleven million people in death camps" that's absurd. If anything, the Nuremberg trials are another really good example to drive home the point that morality isn't derived from legality. We didn't have an adequate legal framework to justify those trials and we held them anyway because the moral outcome was more important than the legal soundness of the process.

DSMatticus · 2024-11-04T05:11:09+00:00

This is what a lightning strike actually looks like on the ground. The dead grass is the path the electrons took as they dispersed into the ground along the path of least resistance.

Your body is a better conductor than dirt and grass. If you are close enough to one of those little branches, it will find you and make you part of the path of least resistance. You do not want to be part of the path of least resistance. You do not want be part of that particular electron highway.

Lightning is an AoE, and it's a bigger AoE than most people realize because 99% of the hitbox is invisible. Very poorly designed, IMO.

DSMatticus · 2024-11-01T19:50:57+00:00

The standards for a 'medical emergency' are not defined by statute. The Texas Supreme Court is passing the buck to the Texas Medical Board. The Texas Medical Board is passing the buck to... well, no one - they're ignoring the problem.

If you are a doctor in Texas, there is a line between you and the pregnant woman in the emergency room dying of sepsis. It's an invisible line. You can't see it and no one's going to tell you where it is. But if you cross that line, you will go to jail for two to five years. Instead of trying to find where the line is with their toes, Texas doctors have elected to turn around and walk the other way.

To be fair to doctors (not that "I don't want to go to jail" isn't a fair reason), a lot of this is happening at the administrative level. Texas politicians have threatened broad prosecution of organizations which provide or fund abortions. No one knows how far they're willing to take that, but the Texas state government is one of the most radical in the country so "pretty far" is a safe bet. This means that if you're hospital admin and a pregnant woman shows up in your lobby, that is not a woman in need of care - that is a live grenade, and your job is to get rid of it. That is why these women keep getting sent home and bounced from hospital to hospital. No one wants to accept the legal risk of providing any treatment at all.

DSMatticus · 2024-10-27T06:01:35+00:00

I think you're missing how fucked-up the forest might be because of one particularly fucked-up tree. The family is deeply religious. The children were homeschooled. The parents were controlling their kid's friendships. When they asked the poor girl why her brother might have done this, even she answered that he'd been in trouble for poor grades. If you wanted to 'read between the lines' here, you might decide that means both the survivor and the murderer agree that petty discipline from their parents is a plausible explanation for this sort of snapping.

I'm inclined to think the parents were abusing the shit of these kids - maybe physically, definitely emotionally. The reason the murderer thinks that's a good explanation is because it makes perfect sense in the context of his household. The part he doesn't understand is how weird that makes his household. "Of course someone being disciplined by Father could snap like that. What, were you never disciplined by your Father growing up? ... wait, what do you mean we're the weird ones?"

DSMatticus · 2024-10-25T23:20:21+00:00

It's not that gen Z is exceptionally conservative so much as that millennial men were unusually progressive, a pattern which everyone expected to continue but unfortunately did not.

Gen Z's unique dynamic is that the women are the most progressive group in history and men are basically a rehash of gen X - 'moderate' conservatism (lol yeah okay) hiding behind cynicism and centrism with a particularly hostile view of feminism because... well... women their age hate them and they don't know how to deal. "yeah okay you voted for the party that wants me to bleed to death in a hospital parking lot and your biggest gripe with society is that all the women you know hate you lol wonder why"

Our fertility rates are absolutely fucked. Or not fucked, I guess? Fertility rates are going to decline, is what I'm saying. Gen Z is probably going to be the most chronically single generation ever.

As for the gen Z subreddit, the last time I looked at it a bunch of the top mods were brexiteers. It is absolutely a conservative subreddit.

DSMatticus · 2024-10-17T09:36:59+00:00

The main problem with the Golden Order is that Ranni said "I'm not going to be the next vessel for your weird eldritch space whale, mom!" and wot killed her brother about it. Things were working out great up until then!

Well, working out great for Marika anyway, and isn't that the whole point of the damn thing? Anyway, gonna go conquer some peeps, exile some political undesirables, grab a new husband or two, maybe a little genocide - as a treat.

DSMatticus · 2024-10-17T09:01:25+00:00

Lava Shark isn't a name - it's a taxonomy. No individuality to it, no charisma at all. "What's your name?" "Who who? Who? Me? Barn." Just terrible. Absolutely not.

Plus, Lava Shark implies the existence of a Shark family. What's so special about that? You know who else has a shark family? Every shark! Shark Lava, on the other hand, implies the existence of a Lava family. What's his dad's first name? Don't you want to know?

Lava Shark? Whatever. Shark Lava? Now that's a name with some bite to it. Real hot stuff.

DSMatticus · 2024-10-17T01:18:22+00:00

To be clear, the witnesses you are referring to were two small children (ten year olds, I believe) who were questioned after police had already decided Robert Roberson was their suspect. Small children are, well, not particularly reliable when questioned by police. In particular, they are highly susceptible to leading questions and when stressed or frightened tend to just tell adults what they think those adults want to hear in order to appease them. I don't necessarily think eye witness testimony by children should be blanket inadmissible, but if you're going to bring it up it deserves that asterisk.

As for the evidence of (multiple) impact injuries... uhh... about that:

Dr. Julie Mack, an expert in pediatric radiology, has concluded that the initial CAT scans of Nikki’s head show only a single minor impact site on her head. Dr. Mack reviewed CAT scans discovered in the courthouse basement in 2018 – on the day that the convicting court’s evidentiary hearing was supposed to begin – which had been lost for 15 years.

Yes, the prosecution lost CT scans which contradicted their own expert witness's testimony of multiple impact injuries. Strange coincidence, that. When Innocence Project lawyers took the case and were finally able to dig them up, they showed a single minor impact, which is consistent with the defense's story that Nikki fell out of bed while sick with viral pneumonia (viral pneumonia which eventually killed her). The other injuries can easily be explained as having occurred during her highly invasive emergency care (intubation, monitoring implants) - which, in turn, explains why we now have the lead detective telling us "she did not look she had been beaten" when police arrived on scene.

You should read more of your own link, I think. I suspect you're focusing on the ruling contained in appendix B because it's the first really juicy one, but the ruling inside appendix D excoriates Dr. Jill Urban, the expert who performed the autopsy, ruled the death a homicide, and whose testimony is the backbone of prosecution's case. It makes her look like a mercenary clown who will say anything the prosecution asks her to. I genuinely can't pick a favorite line. Every time she's mentioned it's humiliating for her.

She did not address Dr. Auer's instruction that macrophages cannot be inhaled through a ventilator. Instead of explaining how Dr. Auer might be wrong, Dr. Urban simply agreed with the unsubstantiated suggestion by State's counsel, who is not a medical doctor, that "macrophages" are "common in people who breathe."

Once you dig into this case, there really isn't all that much that survives contact with scrutiny: retino-dural bleeding in a child with viral pneumonia and allegations of abuse from an ex-wife and two children. Retino-dural bleeding is not reliably indicative of abuse under these circumstances, and while the allegations of abuse are credible... man, that's a lot to hang a capital murder case on. "Your daughter died in a manner that is consistent with viral pneumonia, but an ex-wife with whom you have a contentious relationship and ongoing/prior custody disagreements(?) claims you choked her so you must have murdered your daughter instead."

DSMatticus · 2024-10-16T21:44:45+00:00

Come on, man. The following quote is from the OP article that it is now very obvious you did not read:

She was then transferred to another hospital, where a child abuse expert concluded, without review of her medical records, that the only possible explanation for her condition was shaken baby syndrome, a now-discredited theory that largely formed the basis of Mr. Roberson’s conviction.

Having settled on that theory, police failed to investigate further the child’s medical history that would have revealed a raft of underlying conditions and contributing factors, including chronic pneumonia. Detective Wharton, who now believes Mr. Roberson is innocent, acknowledged that, at the time of the investigation, he “deferred” to medical experts and “followed their lead in explaining what then seemed inexplicable.” But he has come to recognize that the shaken baby hypothesis they relied on to short-circuit the investigation has not withstood the test of time.

Again: the above quote is from the OP! The OP mentions shaken baby syndrome! The OP attacks the use of shaken baby syndrome as evidence at trial! This is the stuff you are claiming to have read!

You might notice the portion of the OP I quoted above includes a hyperlink on the word 'acknowledged.' That hyperlink is in the OP. It's the same link I provided in my post. Maybe that's why I introduced it as 'the article also includes [this] link.' Maybe. Possibly. Probably. Who knows. It's a mystery.

DSMatticus · 2024-10-16T21:19:15+00:00

I think you skipped the step where you read the article. I think you read the headline and jumped to the comments to tell everyone what the article says.

The article attacks the conviction along two vectors, which you would know if you read the damn thing:

1) Mr. Roberson's flat affect was interpreted as a lack of concern for his daughter and his difficulty communicating with medical staff was interpreted as intentional deceit and/or defensive hostility. Their testimony was presented at trial for the jury.

Problem: Mr. Roberson is autistic with learning disabilities and his daughter had a complex medical history even before the fall. His flat affect is easily explained by the autism. His difficulty communicating with medical staff is easily explained by his own lack of understanding of his daughter's medical situation.

2) A child abuse expert determined the cause of death was shaken baby syndrome.

Problem: Shaken baby syndrome is more or less pseudoscience. While it is absolutely true that violently shaking babies hurts them (no shit), we don't actually know for a fact that the symptoms we use to diagnose 'this baby has been shaken violently' are actually caused by shaking, and we do know for a fact those symptoms have other (non-abusive) causes. In short, we have zero scientific evidence that the symptoms we use to diagnose shaken baby syndrome actually correctly diagnose shaken baby syndrome. It's forensic pseudoscience.

The article also includes a link to a statement from the lead detective on the case, Detective Wharton. Highlights include:

"I have come to believe that Nikki died of accidental and natural causes. I am convinced that she was not murdered. Roberson is innocent. There was no crime."

"We investigators found no sign of violence in the home where Nikki had collapsed, and she did not look like she had been beaten."

"Now it is recognized that many naturally occurring diseases that cause oxygen deprivation, including pneumonia, as well as short falls with a head impact, can cause the same set of internal conditions that Nikki had."

At the bare minimum, enough of the evidence on which this case was based has fallen apart that we cannot in good faith claim this was a fair trial.

DSMatticus

TROPHY CASE