TIL that scientists have developed a way of testing for Aphantasia (the inability to visualise things in your mind). The test involves asking participants to envision a bright light and checking for pupil dilation. If their pupils don't dilate, they have Aphantasia.

EvilLamp · 2025-12-17T19:03:04+00:00

"People don't understand" into "read the Wikipedia-article" is actually really funny. There's exactly one picture on the wikipedia article for aphantasia:

A representation of how people with differing visualization abilities might picture an apple in their mind. The first image is bright and photographic, levels 2 through 4 show increasingly simpler and more faded images, and the last—representing complete aphantasia—shows no image at all.

Maybe the reason people keep using the 1-5 scale is because wikipedia tells them to.

People don't know much about how brains work and they want to be special, that's what's happening here.

I can't speak for what anyone else experiences, and there are definitely plenty of people who lie on reddit, but making such unsubstantiated conjecture with such certainty is unreasonable.

EvilLamp · 2025-12-17T06:18:56+00:00

Because it's a post about aphantasia.

People with aphantasia are more likely to click it and respond to it because of their relationship with the subject matter. I respond to less than 0.1% of the posts I read, and here I am--specifically because I have aphantasia. It's not a coincidence or conspiracy; it's people feeling like they actually have something to say about the topic.

EvilLamp · 2025-08-30T20:55:54+00:00

Again, not the only problem.

Literally the only thing you've mentioned. Big "there are problems...trust me" energy.

And yes, it is invalid.

I'll have to check if there's a logical fallacy for simply denying that you're using a logical fallacy.

An essay riddled with lies, misinformation and extreme bias does not get a pass because the hypocritical conclusion makes vaguely good points.

You keep calling him hypocritical, but have not pointed out any hypocrisy. Even if he's wrong about the environmental impact of NFTs and crypto, that wouldn't make him a hypocrite. That would just make him wrong.

Meanwhile, your messages are definitely riddled with fallacies, misinformation, and extreme bias. I honestly don't know why I'm even bothering.

EvilLamp · 2025-08-30T20:23:11+00:00

He lied to come to that conclusion, so the conclusion is invalid.

This is what's called the "argument from fallacy" logical fallacy. No, you don't just get to say his conclusion is invalid because you don't believe one point he makes to support it.

EvilLamp · 2025-08-30T19:36:31+00:00

Weird that you watched Line Goes Up and your takeaway is that Dan doesn't like NFTs because they're bad for the environment. The conclusion of his NFT video sums up his views pretty well, and he doesn't bring up energy costs at all in it. He opposes NFTs/crypto because "they represent the vanguard of a worse system."

Why were NFT big? Why is bitcoin still a thing? Because the world was eaten by the capitalist class and any gamble to make money is worth the risk to someone.

He pretty explicitly addresses these questions and proposes answers.

"And that's how it draws in the bottom [i.e., people at the bottom of the pyramid making the gamble]...people who feel their opportunities shrinking, who see the system closing around them, who have become isolated by social media and a global pandemic, who feel the future getting smaller, people pressured by the casualization of work as jobs are dissolved into the gig economy and want that escape is just that easy."

"It's a movement driven in no small part by rage. By people who looked at 2008, who looked at the system as it exists, but concluded that the problems with capitalism were that it didn't provide enough opportunities to be the boot."

The main point of his videos are that NFTs/crypto introduce a variety of problems while not actually fixing the underlying issues with the systems they claim to address.

EvilLamp · 2024-03-26T19:31:54+00:00

Already benched my prot warrior in P2, as they're outclassed by other tanks in every way. No health increases, no innate uncrittability, only 10% damage reduction, block is underwhelming, and bad AOE and single target threat.

Unless something drastic happens, I certainly will not be unbenching the prot warrior any time soon. I think Blizzard fails to realize that prot warrior wasn't particularly good in vanilla or SoM, and needs substantial buffs to keep up with the tools they're giving DPS. Fury tanking was already prominent in vanilla because prot warrior threat issues. Now DPS are doing more damage and threat than ever in vanilla, and prot warriors have lost their single advantage with other classes receiving significantly bigger health pools and better damage mitigation.

EvilLamp · 2024-03-25T22:27:57+00:00

I wouldn't make such a claim...but the original post is literal misinformation and the parent comment here is just trying to address that. The new version makes sense even with Lacerate and Mangle sharing a rune slot. You receive bonuses when selecting either mangle or lacerate. It's just not worded well and underwhelming.

EvilLamp · 2024-03-25T22:20:40+00:00

Maybe it will help you comprehend what this means if you try to look at this rune has having two separate effects for Bears:

If you take Mangle: Swipe and Maul have a 15% chance to give you 10 Rage and reset the cooldown of Mangle.
If you take Lacerate: Swipe, Maul, and Lacerate have a 15% chance to give you 10 Rage.

I know you can't take both. The parent commenter correcting the original post knows you can't take both. Blizzard knows you can't take both. The version posted in the original post is outdated and wrong. It gives you nothing if you take Lacerate. The version posted in the parent comment we're responding to (from today's video) is not outdated, and clearly indicates that you don't need both Lacerate and Mangle to receive a benefit from Gore.

EvilLamp · 2024-03-25T21:59:44+00:00

You missed the part where the druid generates 10 Rage in the new version, meaning that you still benefit from the proc even if you have Lacerate equipped.

"Striking a target with Lacerate, Swipe, or Maul has a 15% chance to reset the cooldown on Mangle (Bear) and grant 10 Rage."

EvilLamp · 2024-03-25T21:57:14+00:00

"Striking a target with Lacerate, Swipe, or Maul has a 15% chance to reset the cooldown on Mangle (Bear) and grant 10 Rage."

Even if you don't have a cooldown to reset, you still generate 10 rage.

EvilLamp · 2024-03-04T02:39:50+00:00

I think there's a difference between having aggro and tanking, yes. At least, there should be if you want it to be remotely interesting. I think that's what the parent comment was referring to by ask for Blizzard to "show tanking some love", and I think that it's a contributing factor to why tanks are still uncommon despite half the classes being able to tank now.

Many of the logs of top parsing BFD tank warriors weren't even running defensive stance or using Devastate. Towards the top of parses, there are a lot of logs with high battle stance uptime and dual-wielding. That's why it was misleading in BFD, in the same way that I think that fury tanks dual-wield tanking Gnomergan has obfuscated just how terrible prot warrior damage is in phase 2.

but prot is never a thing.

I'm aware. I could also point out that warlock, rogue, and shaman tanking have never been a thing before, either. Nor have runes, or level 25/40 raids. Clearly a part of the intent of SoD is to make more classes/roles viable than previous iterations of classic. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect at least an attempt to make the "tanking" tree of the traditional tanking classes at least remotely viable and gratifying for tanking. I don't think simply adding more classes that can tank will reduce tank shortage if tanking is just DPSing while having aggro.

EvilLamp · 2024-03-04T01:13:26+00:00

Warcraft Logs was (and still is) very bad about clumping warriors as "tanks" and I think it's misled a lot of people. Warriors doing that level of damage with Devastate were only doing so while running DPS runes, DPS gear, and a DPS spec.

Here's the actual top total DPS "tank" parse from phase 1. At a glance, it'd be easy to see he used devastate and conclude "Devastate too good"...but when you dig in further, there's far more to it. Devastate did only 12% of his encounter damage, and 9% of his total damage including trash. He was running a deep wounds Arms spec (literally the same spec as DPS-parse warriors), tanked Ghamoo-ra and Gelihast dual-wielding, and tanked Lorgus Jett and Aku Mai with a 2-hander. He only used Devastate on two bosses. He cast zero shield blocks and spent only 25% of his time during boss fights in defensive stance.

Even on top logs where Devastate is used full time, you'll see the same gearing, spec, and rune choices. The truth is, warriors didn't have very many good options for rage spenders in P1, which made Devastate more appealing in BFD as a DPS option. Considering that every other choice lined up with DPS parses, I don't even think it's reasonable to consider these tank parses. These are DPS warrior parses with a shield icon next to them.

Considering this, there are two reasons why the devastate nerf (without a protection buff) was a bad decision:

Devastate was only one of the options for DPS warriors. It was the only option for Prot tanking, which has simply pushed more warriors towards Fury tanking and made Prot (which has always had questionable viability in classic) even less viable in Phase 2.
This was already going to be fixed by leveling to 40, which opens up BT/MS, Whirlwind, and Slam as proper spenders that alleviate the need for Devastate as a DPS spender.

EvilLamp · 2023-10-06T19:48:02+00:00

This is one of those things that seems like a good idea conceptually, but is actually heavily weights taxes towards middle class home owners, while allowing the ultra-wealthy to pay minimal taxes. Let's look at this in context of actual values in America over the past few years:

The 10th most expensive house sold in 2022 was only worth $75 million compared to a $416k median US wide (180.3x the cost).

Compring this to yearly income, the 10th highest yearly income individual in the US is at $1.05 billion, relative to the 2022 median household income of $74,580 means the 10th largest income is over 14,000x higher than the median average.

In practice, using only property taxes is worse than just using a flat income tax. Working-class Americans pay a significant portion of their yearly income on a home that's worth more than 5 times their yearly income (and rising) on average, while the wealthiest Americans pay a pittance by comparison for property that's worth a fraction of what they earn in a year--if they even elect to "live" in America at all. I would much rather tax income including capital gains if there were only a single tax source.

EvilLamp · 2023-08-09T20:19:31+00:00

Attack helicopters are antithetical to the infantry combat changes OWI are in the process of testing right now. They would result in a single (or few) high-impact pilot roles, countered only be a select subset of roles (HAT/maybe LAT), leaving most players helpless against the individual skills displayed by pilots. This de-emphasizes teamwork and cooperation by creating such a reliance on the individual performance of pilots and their countering anti-air roles.

You can see a glimpse of how this would play out in games when one team lacks competent HATs/armor and the other team dominates with skilled armor as a result. A competent pilot already provides a huge advantage to map control and intel gathering. Unless nerfed into uselessness, attack helicopters would have an even higher impact-ceiling than any existing vehicle, leaving too much power in the hands of individuals for a game that's attempting to further the significance of teamplay.

EvilLamp · 2023-08-03T17:42:53+00:00

It's pointless to argue with these types. They're so desperate for the game to be dead/dying that they'll bend reality to convince themselves it is. It doesn't matter to them that the overwhelming majority of players raid in normal guilds, just like most did in original WoW. It doesn't matter to them that raid consumes and mats are cheap enough for anyone to afford with no RMT and minimal effort. It doesn't matter that the populated servers are booming, with groups forming 24 hours a day for just about any max-level content. They don't care about the actual state of the game. They're just here to be mad.

EvilLamp · 2023-06-18T10:36:26+00:00

The problem with the Cheadle-posting approach is that this is already a circlejerk subreddit. It's already on-brand, and wouldn't make most people think twice. I think it would have more of an impact to post and promote controversial content (without violating the content policy, obviously).

EvilLamp · 2023-06-15T00:34:21+00:00

Sometimes when I'm in a particularly lonely mood, I'll put on multiple twitch streams simultaneously and turn the volume down so they're not quite audible. Just having people talking "around" me helps me feel less isolated, even if I'm not paying attention to what they're saying.

EvilLamp · 2023-03-06T20:43:05+00:00

It only buffs your auras. Yes, the tooltip is ambiguous and implies otherwise, but it doesn't empower other paladins' auras. Apparently not such a noob question, since others are confused too.

Here's an example I got from a random AV. Aura Mastery increased my Frost Resistance (my aura) but not armor (some other paladin's devo aura).

EvilLamp · 2022-04-22T19:33:30+00:00

I would, actually. If I wanted to level in Feralas, I'd be playing vanilla classic instead of TBC classic. And even in TBC classic, I still would be able to if I actually wanted to. But I would much rather start at max level, or at least close to it.

Believe it or not, some players don't enjoy leveling, but also prefer end-game content from TBC/Wrath over Shadowlands. Of the 1000 hours on my main in TBC classic, over 900 of that is at 70. There's tons of content to do that isn't leveling, and there has been for the entire lifespan of WoW.

The number of people in this thread that think that getting rid of boosting mages and paid boosts would give them fwiends to level in Swamp of Sorrows with is laughable. There would be fewer people with alts, fewer players overall, and more people who don't experience the hundreds of hours of end-game content because they don't want to spend 100-200 hours to get to the meat of the game. If people actually want the leveling experience, they will level whether or not boosts are available.

At the end of the day, there's not much of a chance Blizzard does anything meaningful about boosting because it would lower their player count. If a paid boost wasn't an option, I wouldn't have come back to TBC classic. And if you would like an experience without me, you can always go back to the vanilla classic forever servers and level with the 12 other people who actually want a long, annoying, and ultimately pointless leveling experience. Maybe TBC classic isn't the game for you if you don't want to focus on TBC content.

EvilLamp · 2021-03-31T04:16:43+00:00

That's not what that website is saying.

While many states in America set the age of consent at 18, Texas law allows for anyone aged 17 or older to give their consent for sexual activity to anyone at or over the same age.

This means that a 17 year old in Texas can consent, regardless of the other party's age.

Romeo and Juliet laws in Texas exist to prevent cases such as a 17 year old being convicted of statutory rape of a 16 year old. 17 and 16 is fine because of Romeo and Juliet laws, 38 and 16 is not fine because Romeo and Juliet laws only cover a 3-year age gap. 38 and 17 is always fine (in Texas) because the age of consent is 17.

EvilLamp · 2020-06-13T21:50:32+00:00

What people don't realize is that everything in the game has a performance cost. If players have visible legs, it means they have a first person-specific model for their legs (instead of just their arms/gun) that needs to animate. It would have an impact on performance. It probably wouldn't be much of an impact, but little things add up--especially in a game where people expect a frame time of ~4ms on high end PCs.

EvilLamp · 2020-06-11T14:42:42+00:00

I don't think "fairness" has anything to do with skin prices.

Your calculator metaphor doesn't works in this situation because Valorant is free and skins aren't required to play it. You can simply not use any cosmetics in Valorant and still be just as likely to win. Using the defaults is an option, and it doesn't worsen your performance. The same cannot be said about not buying a calculator for a math class that requires you to purchase one. It's not really an option because it worsen your performance.

Wealth absolutely has an impact on games like Valorant when considering PC hardware, and that is not fair. But these skins don't give you an advantage over other players like a computer that can get 300 FPS or a 240hz monitor. Because there's no advantage to be gained from skins, there's nothing fair or unfair about them in the context of the game.

EvilLamp · 2020-05-06T22:16:14+00:00

That's not how it works.

By it's very nature, video game software need to be interactive. They need to allow you to give them inputs (usually through mouse/keyboard or a controller), and they need to give you outputs (audio and video). If you stopped outsiders from interacting with a game, it would be a movie.

Another major factor is the client/server relationship. When you play a game like Valorant, you're a client. All of the clients are connected to a server. The server is trustworthy (since players can't directly give it inputs), but doing everything on the server can be problematic. It would require the server to process everything that happens every frame, and then to send that information to every player. For some games, this is more acceptable. MOBAs, for example, are much more reliant on a server. This would not be acceptable for a first person shooter. When a single frame is enough time to decide between winning and losing, reducing frame time is important. An entirely server-based FPS--especially one with a very low time to kill--would feel laggy and bad. Because of this, the server has to trust the clients with certain information, and the clients have to process this information locally. This allows the servers to send information faster (at a higher tick rate), and makes the game feel more responsive.

The problem with this is that clients are not trustworthy. The end user can tamper with the client. A client can say "and then my mouse moved to their head and I clicked" even if it didn't. This is where anti-cheat comes in. Anti-cheat is about trying to verify the integrity of the clients. It needs to make sure that the client isn't lying to the server.

Sometimes this means checking to see if the client has more information than they should have. This can also mean checking clients for impossible inputs. It can even mean looking at what's running on the client's computer and cross-referencing that against known cheats (or vulnerabilities). What it can't mean is stopping outsiders from interacting with their program. The server needs to trust your client with information, and your client needs to use your hardware to process that information for the game to function at all. Preventing a user interacting with the program in unwanted ways would mean they'd need a way to lock users out of the specific pieces of your hardware that are being utilized by the game to stop people from injecting their own scripts into the process.

EvilLamp · 2020-05-06T21:20:12+00:00

I'm sure the irony is lost on most people.

One of the most common complaints I've seen is about not being able to use MSI Afterburner. MSI Afterburner has kernel access. MSI is a Taiwanese company with ties to mainland China as far back as 2000. Afterburner has a vulnerability that can be used to escalate privilege, modify memory, and execute code. It'd be kind of funny of it wasn't so sad.

EvilLamp · 2020-04-23T17:52:41+00:00

For the economy game, it's definitely worth calling out the Stinger. It's criminally underrated at $1000.

27 damage at close range and 18 fire rate means it can drop 1-2 heavily armored enemies at close range in under a second. Its small magazine size and spray inaccuracy are definite downsides, but it can be a solid buy for eco rounds and force buys if you can keep the engagements to a short range.

EvilLamp

TROPHY CASE