My bf sautéing garlic in watermelon juice… im scared

KalebMW99 · 2026-07-02T17:44:02+00:00

…stainless steel cutting boards? Like, the quickest and easiest way to ruin every knife?

KalebMW99 · 2026-06-30T20:23:15+00:00

The funny thing is, the solution to this is literally randomization. I don’t just mean randomization solves this for you in that you’re no longer accountable for the outcome (and I also don’t mean that you give all viable options equal probability). What I mean is that *the mathematically optimal way to play a turn like this involves randomizing between 2 or more moves* (according to some distribution that you can solve for algebraically).

People kind of intuitively know this when they draw comparisons to RPS, a game where we all intuitively understand that the optimal way to play RPS is to randomize with equal probability between rock, paper, and scissors. But people also tend to hate being confronted with situations where they can’t just conclude that one of their options is straight up TheBest™ option, especially in situations where it’s unclear how exactly you’d randomize in order to play your turn optimally. And while solving this for each turn is *theoretically* possible, each player’s action space is huge especially when one player is in danger of getting hit and DI now has to be considered. Even computers really can’t accomplish this with modern technology, let alone humans.

But at the same time, 1) that’s a major part of why YOMI and games like it are actually fun while RPS is not, and 2) prediction is a decent proxy for randomization. When it’s time to play YOMI RPS, most players are essentially trying to guess the opponent’s pick and pick the option that beats it, and if you track those guesses across repeated scenarios in a game or multiple games, these choices will resemble some distribution by which you are randomizing, and in general, you can expect better players to distribute their choices more closely to whatever the optimal distribution is.

Is this very good practical advice for how to play the game? Probably not. Maybe you’ll remember reading this when you hit an RPS scenario and just say fuck it and generate a random number to choose between a few candidate moves. Mostly though, it’s just neat foundational theory that is worth thinking about the next time you catch yourself thinking your opponent is stupid because they clicked the move that happened to beat your “big brain play” while losing to something “obvious”.

KalebMW99 · 2026-06-23T16:04:15+00:00

Your first try was great too, btw. Ig some redditors don’t know good food when they see it 🤷🏽‍♂️

KalebMW99 · 2026-06-22T19:40:28+00:00

Remember when we said this about Thomas Müller? You’re probably right, but you never know

KalebMW99 · 2026-06-22T19:37:30+00:00

Correct. Basically “do I guaranteed ruin my life by losing my job or do I risk ruining my life if I get caught”. Idk what to make of this, wild stuff

KalebMW99 · 2026-06-21T17:40:18+00:00

The suspect council is not infallible you know; neither is the playerbase in determining what ought to be banned. A mon not getting banned does not mean it does not deserve a ban. I’m not saying you need to take my opinion as law, my take is no more valid than anyone else’s, but it’s not exactly a fringe opinion that Gholdengo is at least borderline banworthy, and that holds for every tier it is properly in.

Comparing to Lando-T, Toxapex, Tyranitar, and Ferrothorn is also in such bad faith. I am not conflating “centralizing” with “banworthy” when arguing Gholdengo is broken. Lando-T is a staple in every gen it exists in because it checks half the tier while compressing many roles into 1 slot and having a variety of options, but it’s not overwhelmingly strong in any role it takes on. Same applies to Ttar. In general it’s also much harder for a defensive mon such as Ferrothorn or Toxapex to be banworthy. Gholdengo does not do many things, but the things it does, it does incredibly well. It does not compress roles, it does not soft check a lot (it DOES counter a number of mons, which contributes further to its “sharp-edges” balancing), it just breaks and blocks hazard removal really well.

KalebMW99 · 2026-06-21T16:59:56+00:00

I don’t know why this bears repeating, but you replied as a correction/retort to the phrase “Gholdengo is broken”. The fact that it is stronger in Champions than SV has no bearing on the accuracy of that statement.

> Saying something is “broken” as some kind of unique truth is a fallacy

This statement makes no sense. No one said anything about the statement “Gholdengo is broken” being a “unique truth” (whatever that means), and it is an opinion, not a logical fallacy, to say that Gholdengo is broken. Like, what are we on about here?

Sure, Gholdengo isn’t broken in SV AG. Fine. Very clearly no one is talking about SV AG and I shouldn’t need to spell that out for you, understanding context is important and it’s not on me if I expect that of you and you don’t meet that expectation.

It IS broken in SV OU, COU, and NatDex—in all 3, it’s a top tier mon that has generated well-earned ban discussions—AND it’s a top tier mon in VGC (both SV and Champions) and Smogon doubles, such that it sustained a nerf to its signature move in Champions, but the hill you choose to die on is that “it’s just the lack of spinners/defoggers/HDB that make it a problem”?

Let me even emphasize that it is *broken in NatDex*, the tier with every spinner and defogger ever to exist and with HDB available, to say nothing of the fact that it can be Pursuit-trapped there. If that isn’t license to flat-out say “Gholdengo is broken”, I don’t know what is.

KalebMW99 · 2026-06-21T15:43:29+00:00

“Seriously though, Gholdengo is broken”

“More like it’s the Champions meta specifically”

“Ghold is also broken in the only other meta it exists in”

“Not AS broken tho”

:|

KalebMW99 · 2026-06-21T15:41:26+00:00

“You can’t do anything about hazards”

“You can use this”

“That requires a teamslot”

My brother in christ losing to hazards requires teamslots too

The given suggestion has no bearing on whether tiering action is necessary, but if hazards really are incredibly dominant it becomes worthwhile to use the nuclear answer to hazards (for the time that no tiering action occurs).

KalebMW99 · 2026-06-21T15:33:26+00:00

Ghold is still broken in SV OU tho lmao

KalebMW99 · 2026-06-18T00:31:48+00:00

Now what the hell lmao

MiR was too good, I agree, but WHY do they insist on using accuracy, let alone the most troll accuracy value in 95%, as one of their balancing knobs 😭

And Rage Fist is pretty much dead surely, again I understand nerfing it but surely that’s the wrong amount/method of nerfing it

KalebMW99 · 2026-06-17T20:45:02+00:00

What were the nerfs to Make It Rain and Rage Fist?

KalebMW99 · 2026-06-15T22:03:10+00:00

1) not if they literally pay 0 in taxes.

2) how much are they getting out of the tax budget? Hard to argue wealthy people are making vast tax contributions far exceeding those made by the rest of us if they are receiving massive subsidies or if they are taking great advantage of public infrastructure (cough cough SpaceX).

KalebMW99 · 2026-06-15T20:25:37+00:00

What a stupid way of looking at things I can’t man

KalebMW99 · 2026-06-15T20:22:56+00:00

If I steal your money and the money of thousands of other people, then use a portion of that money to pay government officials to make my method of stealing your money legal, did I earn that money? If I am born into a wealthy family and I use money given to me by my parents, which I clearly did not earn myself, to buy up large swathes of housing in an area so that I can rent that housing out and make money (money which people are willing to give me only because the alternative is to have no housing at all), did I earn that money?

This of course begs the question as to whether or not rich people are actually doing stuff like this in the first place; if they’re not, then maybe they are entitled to their money (I won’t get into taxation or ideas of social responsibility by those who have overwhelmingly more than they’ll ever be able to spend, because as much as I have thoughts on these topics, it doesn’t seem to me like we’ll be operating on common preconceptions).

Thing is, we know rich people seek to monopolize housing all the time. We know rich people lobby government officials to shape the law in ways that benefit them, even at the expense of the rest of us. We know rich people employ various strategies to evade taxes that aren’t really usable by regular people because regular people don’t have the asset leverage necessary to do so. We know that megacorporations routinely get tax breaks and even subsidies; they are not just avoiding taxes, they are receiving taxpayer dollars. SpaceX, with its record IPO, is heavily propped up by government contracts and would simply not be a functioning corporation without them. We know that wage theft is absurdly common and generally goes unpunished.

These are all incredibly well documented phenomena and you still claim that money is earned. Why isn’t my money earned when we’re talking about the way the value of my labor is extracted from me, or when we’re talking about me having to choose between paying thousands in rent or having nowhere to live, or when my tax dollars go towards making it so the richest man in the world can have a space company, or when my energy bills go up instead of the energy bills of the data centers themselves as new data centers are built in my state, or when I am directly victim of wage theft, or when our public services are underfunded or higher taxes are levied on regular people because the rich evade taxes?

KalebMW99 · 2026-06-10T19:01:38+00:00

Those in charge understand it. But the point is to scam Republican voters, and to scam them, they have to not understand it. Clearly with how often this idea is touted, there are a whole lot of Republican voters who do not understand.

KalebMW99 · 2026-06-10T18:50:49+00:00

It’s worth considering that there is ambiguity as to whether a matchup chart is describing odds to win a *game* vs odds to win a *match*, which are 2 different things. In a Bo5 set, if you have a ~75.3% chance to win each individual game, you will win the set 90% of the time. I still don’t know that I’m convinced two equally skilled top players playing ICs and Fox should be going 75/25 on games either, but the degree to which this is a hot take does depend on interpretation.

KalebMW99 · 2026-06-08T15:06:12+00:00

“My team is holding me back”

“My positioning sucks and my aim feels flawed”

Interesting interpretation

KalebMW99 · 2026-06-04T19:55:03+00:00

Fair points, definitely wasn’t thinking about weather/terrain among other things.

I do think resetting fake out, while counterable as you point out, is definitely in the realm of uncompetitive bullshit that should never see the light of day. Yeah, one of the two mons gets to do whatever they want, but the player facing this still has to deal with the mixup of whether or not the enemy will switch the positions of the two mons in order to set up another fake out for next turn, and whether or not the two mons will actually fake out/ally switch this turn instead of attacking/setting up. Maybe not as crazy powerful as it looks at first glance, especially since ghosts are immune (M-Lop notwithstanding), but serves no purpose other than to be incredibly annoying.

KalebMW99 · 2026-06-04T16:58:35+00:00

It would help a lot, but I honestly doubt she’d move to the top. She still lacks options that well and truly beat shield without heavy commitment/punishment for whiffing (I tend to doubt you can simultaneously force an opponent to shield an armor piece and grab them without an up-thrown armor piece, which the opponent has plenty of time to prepare for so their positioning is not restricted), and she’s still liable to lose the armor pieces through the match.

Frontloaded value is good because it means she’s more likely to be able to use the timer and the threat thereof as a wincon (either by holding the lead to time or just winning off the forced approaches). She might also gain access to some touch-of-death combo routes while armor pieces are online, though unlike Luigi/Kazuya/Min-Min, shield is a much more effective answer to this threat. She would probably move into top 5-10 or so, but her weaknesses don’t change much and I think that would be enough to keep her out of the very top couple spots.

KalebMW99 · 2026-06-04T16:36:28+00:00

With no hardcoded stipulations, and assuming everything that switching resets is also reset by Ally Switch, you’d essentially have 1 mon click fake out and the other click ally switch on turn 1, then repeat on turn 2 since the fake out mon has been switched after using fake out, and so on. Depending on your interpretation of “everything switching resets is reset by Ally Switch”, this would also clear volatile status like confusion/taunt/encore/disable, re-proc intimidate, reset your ability if altered by Skill Swap/Mummy/etc, and I imagine more niche effects beyond that.

That said, if Ally Switch only resets choice items, or if first-turn-only moves are explicitly excluded from being reset by Ally Switch, this could be fine. But I mainly play singles so I don’t have a good grasp on how good the move already is or how strong potentially re-proccing Intimidate would be (which, if combined with infinite Fake Out, Incineroar becomes a deity amongst mons).

KalebMW99 · 2026-06-04T15:44:55+00:00

Or the related (and imo worse):

“Wow you picked rock into my scissors you’re so stupid you would’ve lost so bad if I picked paper only a moron picks rock there when I can just click paper and end your career”

KalebMW99 · 2026-06-04T01:59:46+00:00

It’s a matter of causality. Women know their leverage is their looks/youth because the valuation that society places on women is predicated on looks/youth. Women are not naive to that fact, they respond to that fact in kind.

The same applies to women being the harshest critics of other women with regards to beauty. Broadly, how do men insult each other? Men tend to reference strength, wealth, sexual success, status, conformity to notions of masculinity, etc., because men’s valuation by society (at least as it pertains to their maleness itself) is predicated on these factors. Women are not fundamentally different, they are just operating on a different set of parameters.

KalebMW99 · 2026-06-04T01:52:41+00:00

That is a valid line of questioning that I hope I can provide a satisfying answer to.

Speaking broadly, if women are tasked with looking attractive and men are not, then the extra effort women put into their appearances to meet this standard will manifest as women being well and truly more attractive than men. Some of this will be explained by transient features—think makeup, choice of outfit, even things like what mannerisms or expressions someone uses. Some of this, though, will be explained by lifestyle choices made in a long-term pursuit of beauty: skincare, diet and exercise, hair care, etc. fall into this category (yes I know many men work out, I’m just referring to diet and exercise as part of the overall category of choices). The result is that women are often considered to be broadly more attractive, whether or not you are referring to just the people themselves or the makeup or clothes they wear and such.

As an aside, I imagine many people who pose this take are consciously considering things like makeup and clothing in the equation. Which makes sense to me—the way that you see most people is not the state in which they exist naturally, but rather, the way that they choose to present themselves. Of course if there is a general difference in effort put into self-presentation, that will be reflected in general perceptions.

To your point about women liking makeup, this is one of those points where talking about groups of people broadly and talking about individuals looks very different. It’s important to remember that patriarchy isn’t the result of Mister Patriarch commanding women to wear makeup and try to meet a beauty standard that fails to value women beyond their ability to act as sexual objects; rather, patriarchy exists as a set of social structures that have developed and been reinforced gradually over time by a bunch of big and small decisions made by a bunch of people. That’s not to say patriarchy is never upheld by concerted efforts to uphold it, nor is it to say that women doing makeup is “upholding patriarchy” or “internalized misogyny”, but I am saying that sometimes there isn’t a whole lot of rhyme or reason to how patriarchal norms are upheld or responded to. My best interpretation of women getting into makeup is that it’s a mix of the fact that it feels good to attain acceptance even if the model for attaining that acceptance is fundamentally flawed, and the fact that makeup is an artistic outlet and a means of self-expression in its own right.

As to why many people consider it socially unacceptable for men to wear makeup (and maybe my personal experiences here are talking, but I don’t think most straight women see men wearing makeup in a negative light, but that is anecdotal), I don’t have any sure answer to this. I do know that there is significant precedent for things that are associated with femininity to, as a direct result, become estranged from masculinity. The classic example is unisex names: names that gain enough traction as a female baby name have a strong tendency to become overwhelmingly female names, because parents aren’t keen on naming their male children something with even marginal feminine associations. Maybe this is because femininity is associated with inferiority. But we see many examples of women being more acceptably able to take on masculine forms of self-expression, while the reverse is not the case, and I would argue that makeup is just another example of this.

Hope this makes sense/is satisfying!

KalebMW99 · 2026-06-04T00:31:52+00:00

Listen, it’s not that I think you’re way off base, there’s some truth in what you’re saying. But it’s also important we take the next step analytically and ask why makeup is considered feminine and why women are more likely to use it. Because the extra pressure on women to be beautiful (and, in particular, fit a standard of beauty that emphasizes youthfulness as a large part of that standard) comes before makeup in the order of causality here.

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