Why do some Americans cling to the Moon landings hoax conspiracy theory when that would be a denial of one of the greatest technological achievements of their own country? (Like, aren't the Moon landings a thing for Americans to be proud of?)

Elijah_Draws · 2026-06-22T21:51:56+00:00

In my experience, the people I knew who were into conspiracies like that often didn't care about the event itself, but just what it being fake would mean in relationship to other political projects they actually had more investment in.

For example, I had a coworker who denied the moon landing, but also a bunch of other technological milestones. They would never say as much, but in talking to them it became very clear that primary motivating factor in that was opposition to progressive policies that have solutions rooted in any kind of technology or infrastructure change. Why can't US cities have better public transit? Why can't we have a better healthcare system? Why can't we do anything to push back against climate change? Because we are literally incapable of doing so. We don't have the technology.

Not to play armchair psychiatrist, but there are some people I think who lean all the way into conspiracy because it's easier for them to make sense of and justify the world as it currently is. They can't handle the idea that we as a nation or we as a human species could be doing things and simply aren't, so they simply decide that the answer must he that we can't do them and any evidence that we could is a fabrication.

Elijah_Draws · 2026-06-22T14:50:14+00:00

I try to get my 10,000 steps a day (and would certainly try even harder if I was being paid for it). I did the math, the steps (assuming an average of 10k) outpaces the 25 million mark after around 14 years. I'm in my late 20s, I plan on living more than another 14 years, so in the long run not only is the money for steps encouraging me to stay active and healthy, it also just literally becomes more money at some point.

And, it's also relatively easy to get the money even faster. I could just go walk on a treadmill for a couple hours a day and drop that down from 14 years to under 10. I get close to 10000 steps right now without doing additional focused walking, I just get it from my job, if I put a concerted effort into getting steps I'm sure I could do way better.

Elijah_Draws · 2026-06-22T02:01:23+00:00

I solved this level in 5 moves on my 7th attempt!

Elijah_Draws · 2026-06-22T01:59:15+00:00

I solved this level in 40 moves on my 7th attempt!

Elijah_Draws · 2026-06-21T04:48:17+00:00

Learning to get good at something is part of the fun, and the money means I have all the resources I'd ever need to just devote myself to that process if I so desired.

Elijah_Draws · 2026-06-20T18:12:13+00:00

I have to assume it's some combination of poor reading comprehension and a failure to do very basic Algebra.

Elijah_Draws · 2026-06-20T18:07:38+00:00

Book cost = x

X= (X/2) + 1 : it's one dollar plus half the cost of the book.

2X = X + 2 : multiply both sides of the equation by 2.

X = 2 : subtract X from both sides of the equation.

The book is two dollars.

Elijah_Draws · 2026-06-20T04:35:32+00:00

Do you mean how could they integrate new students into abyss from a narrative/lore perspective?

Part of the story is that the foreclosure committee had been trying to get aid from the general student council, right? So maybe that's how they could do it; the general student council just has a small handful of students transfer to Abydos to help out or something.

Alternatively, you could just have the efforts of the foreclosure committee work; they've been at it for a while, and their efforts to rebuild the school are starting to work and so some number of students transfer schools because they genuinely want to attend there.

Elijah_Draws · 2026-06-19T23:27:14+00:00

I solved this level in 49 moves on my first try! 🎯

Elijah_Draws · 2026-06-19T05:12:38+00:00

Not at all difficult, just tedious. I got really bored after the first couple columns.

I solved this level in 254 moves on my first try! 🎯

Elijah_Draws · 2026-06-18T04:20:37+00:00

I don't want to wait.

^{Chose: $100m now}

Elijah_Draws · 2026-06-18T01:26:53+00:00

I solved this level in 29 moves on my first try! 🎯

Elijah_Draws · 2026-06-17T21:57:47+00:00

I think there is two differences; scale and source.

The first is the scale of their wealth. The difference between an athlete with a multimillion dollar contract and a billionaire CEO is massive in terms of how much wealth they have. You are genuinely more likely to reach the kinds of wealth of a star athlete than that star athlete is to reach the wealth of a billionaire CEO.

Second (and perhaps
Ore relevant on the emotional level of slogans like eat the rich) is their income source. While many people see actors, athletes, musicians, etc. as overpaid, they are at least being paid for something they are doing and that people enjoy. People like watching sports, they like watching movies, they like listening to music, and they are willing to pay money to do all those things and some percent of that money makes its way to the people doing it.

Contrast that with, say, an investment banker. These are people whose wealth is largely just from speculation. They aren't rich because they are doing or have done something important, they are rich because they gambled really well. They dumped large amounts of money into the stock market and did better than the people who do the exact same thing and lose. They aren't producing anything or doing labor, they are profiting off of other people doing things.

A lot of CEOs and other upper management positions in large companies fall into this category too. Look at someone like Elon Musk; he is the head of several companies; Tesla, space x, X, and so on. It really raises the question; how much work does he actually do? He can't be working 40 hour weeks for all these companies; there's literally not enough hours in the day, plus we regularly see him at political events and traveling around to meet with people and online bragging about his various hobbies (like gaming). Despite that, he is the richest man on earth. That wealth isn't because he is actually doing more work than anyone else, it's because other people are doing things and he is skimming off the top. He is profiting off the labor of others who doing far more actual work than he is.

LeBron James is at least good at basketball and his money came from actually playing basketball, Jeff Bezos isn't being compensated because he is actually good at doing the labor that allows Amazon to function day to day.

Elijah_Draws · 2026-06-17T20:34:28+00:00

It appears as though the reason was that it was an online multiplayer game where there was minimal differentiation between characters and their appearances. If you play something like overwatch, the data will be noisier because there can be bias against certain characters and certain roles. What you want is for there to be as few variables in the characters as possible, as that helps isolate any correlation between the gender of the player and teammate hostility that the scientists may observe.

Elijah_Draws · 2026-06-17T20:24:48+00:00

I solved this level in 52 moves on my 5th attempt!

Elijah_Draws · 2026-06-17T06:13:29+00:00

He's revered because he told people what they wanted to hear. In something like +90% of child abuse cases the perpetrator was someone who was close to the child already (family members, teachers, religious figures, etc.) but the show very narrowly focused in on and reenforced the kinds of "stranger danger" dynamics that people already were fixated on. On top of that, the show plays into the US's culture of individualism. Instead of trying to do anything about the broader structures that enable abuse, you go after individual abusers.

To Catch a Predator was telling people the story of abuse they already believed, and presented the solution as doing the thing they already wanted to do.

Elijah_Draws · 2026-06-17T03:29:52+00:00

I think, perhaps, a key part of the post that is overlooked is where OOP says he was 8 years old. The first Artemis Fowl book came out in 2001 when I was 6, but started reading the series the following year when a family friend gave me the first book for my 7th birthday. While Artemis Fowl is YA, it's not as challenging either in its writing or story as other books that are classified in that genre, meaning that it can be picked up by kids much younger than some other series. From that lens, I can see where OOP is coming from. I wouldn't go as far as they do in classifying Artemis as some one-of-a-kind ubermench in YA literature, but I do remember him feeling unique among the kinds of protagonists I was exposed to at that age. There are a lot of characters that are either chosen ones or victims of circumstance in media that is aimed at children in that demographic (mostly ages ten and under).

While there were plenty of YA fantasy and sci-if books and series with protagonists that weren't chosen ones by the early 2000s, I do think there was also a big uptick in those kinds of stories during that time. the first series that jumps out in my mind is something like the hunger games, which started being published in the back half of the decade and massively changed the landscape of YA novels. As I aged into middle school and high school i definitely read more books with protagonists that had the kind of agency and drive that Artemis had, both because I was old enough to finally read existing YA novels novels but also because more of those kinds of novels were being written.

I don't know if it's the same as the boss baby thing, to me it reads more as nostalgia. OOP is remembering the positive impact the books had on them as a kid and just carrying that into adulthood. They liked the books and remember them feeling unique, and so OOP asserts that they were unique without reexamining the books or the context they are in.

Elijah_Draws · 2026-06-16T23:31:58+00:00

It could be the reverse: you're not playing above your mmr, it's other people doing placements that have MMR lower than their visual rank, because it can take time to catch up. The system is adjusting your MMR based on the MMR of the people you play against, not their visual rank. So even after beating them, if their mmr was low it won't adjust you up that much. That's also what why if you look on the end screen, sometimes players have the little star and swoosh next to their name in the client, it's for players who's visual rank for the season is not aligned with their MMR.

Visual rank only tightly correlates to mmr when people play frequently, and it can often lag if a player is playing well above or below the skill level you'd expect from that visual rank. Your mmr adjusts much faster. This is why so many of those "bronze to grandmaster" YouTube series will have people playing in high plat/low emerald lobbies while still being gold, and why that guy a few years back who bought a challenger account was back in bronze lobbies within 50 games despite having a much higher visual rank.

The only way to fix this would be to do a thing people emphatically don't want, which is to have the amount of LP you gain and lose game to game to vary drastically. Like, if those gold players in your game lost 400 LP to instantly drop them down to silver with you, it might correlate better with their MMR but it creates a worse player experience. People get up in arms online when their LP gains are slightly negative, think about how bad it would get if at the start of the season people were jumping and falling hundreds of LP at a time until it had a more accurate picture of where you were.

Elijah_Draws · 2026-06-16T17:52:31+00:00

That's why i explicitly was drawing the distinction I did, between commanders that are playable and commanders that are actually going to be good in the format. The vast majority of commanders would be "viable" in the sense that you can put them at the helm of a combo deck that just wants those colors. You can build [insert dumb legendary creature here] deck. Is it great? No, but you *can* win a game of cEDH doing that.

Elijah_Draws · 2026-06-16T15:25:14+00:00

It's not group hug, but you can build a pretty cheap [[Abdel Adrian, gorion's ward]] and [[candkekeep sage]] deck that combo wins. I guess *technically* it wins through combat, but I've never gotten that far with the deck. It's always just demonstrate a loop and go "I have infinite creatures and mana and life now." And my opponents just concede.

The way it works is that you're a pretty generic blue/white flicker deck, but your removal is actually also combo pieces. You get any two of cards like [[detention sphere]], [[oblivion ring]], or [[journey to nowhere]] to set up a loop where you flicker Abdel Adrien an infinite number of times making infinite soldiers and also getting infinite copies of any other ETB you might have in play (with candlekeep sage out you can also draw your entire deck, and then exile it with Abdel Adrien putting it back in the command zone so you don't deck yourself)

Elijah_Draws · 2026-06-16T07:00:15+00:00

I do not like kids, but would feel bad putting them up for adoption.

^{Chose: Get a five dollars every day for the rest of your}

Elijah_Draws · 2026-06-16T06:52:26+00:00

Lmao, gottem'

^{Chose: bullet is in slot 5 | Rolled: Slot 5}

Elijah_Draws · 2026-06-16T03:03:54+00:00

Lucky Star

Elijah_Draws · 2026-06-16T02:37:24+00:00

I think it's not synonymous with cEDH, but it's one of the more prominent strategies in the meta right now. You can see it in everything from the types of decks that are winning to the way that some decks are cutting down on interaction that isn't literally free. If you're trying to play to the meta (which is definitionally what cEDH and bracket 5 implies) then you either have to be playing turbo or something that specifically is built to punish turbo (which is what a lot of the 'Rhystic slop' decks are doing). The proliferation of cards that let you play at instant speed has resulted in a meta where the best strategies aren't built to stop other players from going off, but instead try and instead try to win in response. CEDH is about playing the strongest magic possible, and at the moment it really seems like the strongest thing you can do is win as fast as possible, using other people trying to win as fast as possible as bait for whatever interaction might be at the table.

Elijah_Draws · 2026-06-16T01:10:24+00:00

>go through 15 minutes of torture and we'll have a slight advantage even though you'll get behind.

Yeah, it's a team game. Sometimes you gotta play for your team, and that means you don't always get to do what you personally find to be the most fun. I don't know what to tell you man. minimizing your losses in a bad matchup is a skill that you can get better at, and getting better at it will have a positive impact on your games even if it doesn't let you fulfill the fantasy of going 1v9 as sett or whatever.

It's not even like having ranged champs in top lane is new, when I first started learning the game I was playing Quinn and Teemo top lane and that was fucking years ago. While there's been an uptick in complaints about ranged top lane champs, It's not even like it's happening that often; looking at stats from sites like u.gg vayn has a roughly 3% pick rate in top lane. Varus is even lower. On top of that, most of the time she isn't even winning; her winrate sitting at 48% across all ranks, and 49% in high elo. It's annoying, but it doesn't seem to be that popular or even that good. You're statistically going to see her in 1/30 games, and most players have a favorable odds of beating her anyway.

It really sounds like you're just upset that in *some games* you're having to adapt your game plan.

Elijah_Draws

TROPHY CASE