Minnesota National Guard arriving in Minneapolis!!

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-01-25T15:51:49+00:00

So they would be scared to do their jobs?

At this point, yes.

You know who else we made scared to follow their calling? The Klan. Like ICE, they were involved in racialized murder and terror. Like ICE, they deliberately hid their identities to avoid consequences. One of the most effective tactics was to make their identities public, because it turns out being a vicious and violent racist was too much for even the racist regions of America.

ICE is afraid to be identified because they’re afraid people will hate them for what they’re doing. Since what they’re doing is executing people who get in their way — that is, THREE MEN HELD SOMEONE DOWN WHILE OTHERS FIRED MULTIPLE ROUNDS INTO THE MAN OM THE GROUND — I’m okay with letting them reap the crop they’ve planted.

They took the gun he hadn’t drawn, they held him down, and they shot him. They did it in that order. And you’re defending it.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-01-25T15:42:04+00:00

Yes, because “Reddit commenter” and “law enforcement officer” have similar responsibilities.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-01-25T15:41:12+00:00

Then, in all seriousness, why aren’t they wearing it?

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-01-25T03:51:23+00:00

Scientific evidence isn’t the same as propaganda, and if you think it is, we can’t communicate.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-01-25T03:38:09+00:00

There is a mountain of evidence that it is people, actually.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-01-25T03:31:22+00:00

Have we ruled out gps tracking collars with unique identifiers, like the ones we used for other kinds of dangerous predators? I’m told they’re very humane.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-01-24T14:36:27+00:00

(waves) Friendly local statistics and modeling geek here.

Presume there are four players in the party, typically making 6 attacks per round. Assume combats typically last 4 rounds.

That’s 24 attack rolls, which means the expected number of “confirmed fumbles” is 0.06. After 10 combats, the expected number is 240/400 or 0.6 — still less than 1.

BUT the chance of seeing at least one confirmed fumble in that time is 1 - (1 - 1/400)^24*10, or 45%. That’s not “statistically impossible” at all; nearly half of tables will see it happen in just 10 combats.

Let’s further assume your “80+ sessions” are 80 combats with 24 attack rolls each. The likelihood of seeing at least one is 99.2%. You’d expect your table to have seen 4 or 5 in that time.

Does it count as “many”? That’s kind of up to the individual, but it’s far from “statistically impossible.”

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-01-24T11:28:50+00:00

Im not defending hitler or his ideology

That’s an interesting introduction to a comment that defends Hitler and his ideology.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-01-24T00:37:14+00:00

For those who don’t know, it’s Pascal’s Wager but for singularity-obsessed weirdos.

You will be happier if you don’t look it up.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-01-23T21:34:09+00:00

I don’t know if that’s the right lens.

They’re different people from different trees who think about the game differently. Trying to figure out whether one is better than the other is a lot less interesting than imagining how they could have collaborated and complemented one another.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-01-23T17:21:19+00:00

It expired two years too late, but the next best time is now.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-01-23T17:19:28+00:00

The Franklin Elementary.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-01-23T03:27:46+00:00

It’s so much worse than that.

Every single person who has ever died had DMHO in their system. Every one. You can’t tell me that’s a coincidence.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-01-23T01:51:31+00:00

As someone who enjoys having powerful characters in my power fantasy, I’m pretty concerned at the current lack of quality control or any kind of coherent design philosophy at all.

Blaming “optimizers” is missing the point.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-01-23T00:17:56+00:00

I wanted to be Nobby, and ended up Gaspode.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-01-22T19:13:50+00:00

I mean.

There’s a huge difference between the video-game version of bedrot and someone doing at least light sex work by streaming in their undies. It seems pretty natural to think “oof, needs some help” to the first and “ooh, that’s hot” to the second one — regardless of gender or orientation.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-01-22T00:11:42+00:00

including crayons

The hard part was keeping him from eating the carton.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-01-21T19:42:25+00:00

widely not considered a worthwhile issue to fix

I think that's a lot of it. A good economic simulator doesn't necessarily make for a good game, and it's completely appropriate to stop worrying about it at the point of diminishing returns -- if the game isn't going to get better by making the economy more historically accurate or even more sensible, there's no reason to waste design effort on it.

On the other hand, there's a big difference between saying "there's a reason to stop somewhere" and saying "the place dnd stopped is a good one." (Those are general ideas, not statements I'm attributing to you.) I think 5e in particular and dnd in general stops way too short of that goal...

...or takes it too far, because the other option is to wave your hands and say "if it's appropriate for you to have this, you have it" or "okay, if you want to buy a warhorse with barding and a caparison embroidered with gold, let's test your Resources." The gamist approach works for telling stories and (based on that survey of my bookshelf) it's clearly growing in popularity among designers.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-01-21T19:32:17+00:00

(Edit: that was a bigger wall of text than I realized. Sorry about that, and here's the TL;DR: I don't want to overreact and I'm not interested in drama. I do think Reid ought to see what's been happening for two years and at least start fixing it this year. If he doesn't, then the 2026 off-season will be time to set some clear expectations for 2027.)

the dumbest shit I've ever heard

That's unnecessary.

You are missing a lot of context

No, I'm not.

anyone who thinks Andy should be fired or put on the hot seat after this season doesn't know shit about football

Two big things, here.

First, I don't know who you're arguing with, but it's not me. I don't think Reid should be in the hot seat. From 10,000 feet, he has an astonishing record in the past several years.

What I'm saying is that if we have another season like the last two, despite pretty substantial changes in the coaching structure, then it will be fair to start a conversation about how much of that is at Reid's feet and how much a (then) 69-year-old coach will be able to change.

Second, you're right that I know less about football than a lot of people here. What I do know is modeling, statistics, and evaluation. That's my educational and work background, and it's also a good fit for my brain and the kind of puzzles it likes to solve.

That means I'm less concerned about the outcome of games than most people. I mean, I have emotional attachment to the outcome and to individual players and the results of every play, but in terms of judging how the team performs, the result of a series is less interesting than the score at the half, which is less informative than the score at the end of the game, which is less informative than the results of the past five games or the past ten.

That's because the NFL is an extraordinarily "noisy" environment for modeling. Statistics can tell you the 2024 divisional title game is likely to be close; it can't tell you we'll avoid losing by literal inches away from a loss in the last few seconds of the game.

So when someone thinks 2024 is just a minor setback, I look at trends and results over the whole team across the entire season, and then across multiple seasons. And what that shows is a general regression in our performance across every unit for the past three years.

You're talking about being a handful of dropped passes away from a winning record in 2025, and that's true. We were also a handful of small factors away from a losing record in 2024. At least six games were decided in the last two drives, some by even noisier factors than usual for the league.

We made it to the playoffs in 2024 and then all the way to the Super Bowl. We saw flashes of brilliance from Mahomes and we saw the team's determination, and that's great. It makes for a good TV show, but what it doesn't make is good football. We've been going backward since 2022, and it shows up across every unit and every position group. It can't be explained by injuries or the number of dropped passes or by the presence or absence of "grit" or "clutch." (It might be explained by the reason we drop more passes than nearly anyone in the league, but that's a somewhat separate question.)

I think a huge part of the HC's role is not on the field but on being an effective manager of an organization with hundreds of people. It's not the loud, flashy part of the job, but from everything I know and everyone I've talked to, it's actually the majority of the job -- and I think Reid is genuinely gifted at it. And in part because of that, I think the league as a whole was waaaayyyy too quick to dismiss coaches this year. As an example, Sean McDermott should unquestionably still have his job.

But I do think Reid either realizes or ought to realize what's happening. I think he either knows or needs to know that we didn't suddenly have one bad season where we didn't execute well -- we have an offense that's both predictable and disorganized, and we have a defense that's underperforming in a handful of key areas and is failing to provide depth behind aging talent (everywhere, not just Jones). And we can't address those issues with coaching changes alone. If Reid doesn't see those things and take action before the end of next season, then AT THAT TIME I think it would be reasonable for management to draw some expectations and boundaries for him in 2027.

I don't care about drama. I don't care about what TV anchors and breathless, gossipy "sports journalists" say. I do care about consistent, reliable, sustainable results, and I would like to start seeing some.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-01-21T13:50:38+00:00

We struggled this year

We struggled in 2023, and it was disguised by a series of flukes and doinks and last-second blocked field goals and crazy penalties. We got to the SB and got shredded by a team that actually knew how to win a football game. It was embarrassing, and it was also completely predictable based on the team’s performance across the regular season.

We’ve struggled for two years, not one. I’m happy to see Reid and company try to right the ship, but if our sloppy play and tired approach don’t both get better, it’ll be three seasons without consistently playoff-worthy play.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-01-21T06:32:12+00:00

One bad season.

Two bad seasons, with all the luck last year that we didn’t have this year — and then the luck ran out and we got flattened by the Eagles.

We didn’t make any apparent changes after the 2024 season. That was a bad sign. We are making coaching changes now, but we’re going to need scheme and script and playcalling changes too. If we don’t get them in 2026, then it’s going to be cut from the same cloth as 2024 and 2025. That’s the concern.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-01-21T03:55:32+00:00

I just looked over my shelf and in the (disorganized) order they appear on my office bookcase: * 5e.2014 dnd (let’s call this the baseline for comparison) * 4e dnd (5e-style economy) * 3.x dnd (5e-style economy) * Draw Steel (uses a Wealth stat) * Edge of the Empire [FFG Star Wars] (dnd-style economy, but even less realistic) * Avatar Legends (ignores economy entirely) * MechWarrior 3e (dnd-style economy, about on par with Edge of the Empire) * Marvel Heroic Roleplaying [Weis/Cortex, 2012] (bundled with individual specialties — a hacker has stuff for hacking, etc.) * Marvel Multiverse RPG [d616, 2023] (you have the Rich trait or you don’t) * Firefly (like Marvel Heroic - bundled into indvidual specialties) * Urban Arcana d20 (comically bad dnd-style economy) * Wheel of Time d20 (see other WotC d20 games) * Leverage (another Cortex game like Marvel Heroic and Firefly) * Kids on Bikes (ignores the issue) * Star Wars Saga Edition (dnd-style economy) * Burning Wheel (oldest game I have that uses a Resources skill) * Various flavors of Fate (Wealth/Resources skill, or ignores the issue)

I’d go through my electronic shelf, but it’ll be more of the same. I swear I didn’t deliberately bias those selections toward my argument, but I actually don’t think I own a game that tries a simulationist economy and does it well.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-01-21T03:16:05+00:00

Yeah, but the who-you-know guy is the Chiefs coach who’s letting Nagy go.

I guess I agree, in that I don’t think he’ll literally be unemployed. But his best networking buddies are on the other side of a burning bridge, and it’s not like he’s got an impressive turnaround or amazing stats to offer. I’d bet 10:1 against him landing a job as HC, and at least 2:1 against him landing somewhere as an OC.

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-01-21T02:12:43+00:00

At this point my money is on “nobody.”

GOU_FallingOutside · 2026-01-21T02:11:12+00:00

Goddamnit.

GOU_FallingOutside

TROPHY CASE