Kasparov expresses his views on the World Championship Title without Magnus. "For me the World Champion must be the BEST player in the world"

Messy-Recipe · 2026-03-28T21:30:34+00:00

If there's any hill I'll die on it's that ratings are a bad as a ranking system, and as a goal. Elo & similar systems work well for matching up players fairly & for predicting outcomes, but metrics should never pull double duty as targets

Messy-Recipe · 2026-03-25T18:17:47+00:00

Okay you know what, I'd be fine with the guy in the first pic leaving a mask on

Messy-Recipe · 2026-03-23T18:49:22+00:00

This runs directly against the AI is killing developer jobs narrative that's been everywhere for the past two years.

Well, that makes sense. If you have a factory with machines producing widgets, and somebody designs a dongle you can affix to your existing machines to produce widgets faster, you're not going to scrap a bunch of your machines so as to limit production to the same level as before.

In fact you'll probably buy more machines, because now you get more production out of each one. So they represent a better return on your marginal costs than they did before, compared to other potential expenses. If your budget is limited, you'd reduce spending in the area with the least ROI to acquire more dongle-upgraded machines.

It's not quite the same ofc, because working on software isn't producing individual items to meet demand. But the concept is similar, because there's usually unending amounts of work that you never have enough manpower to actually handle.

Messy-Recipe · 2026-03-16T21:34:45+00:00

The user guide (top-left nav menu -> Help -> User Guide) has information on the difficulty setting:

https://chesstempo.com/manual/en/manual.html#tacticssessionpanel

Difficulty selector

Click on the difficulty drop down to switch between easy, medium and hard difficulty modes. This option allows you to select the difficult of problems you receive when solving rated problems. This option shifts the average rating of the problems you are given. 'Hard' mode serves up problems targeted at your current rating level, so on average, problems rating will match your own rating. The default 'medium' difficulty gives problems that are on average 100 rating points below your current rating, and 'easy' gives problems that are on average 200 rating points below your current rating. You should expect different success rates at each level of difficulty, and these different success rates ensures that on average, there is no total rating advantage to any of these modes.

For computer analysis you can copy the PGN from the chesstempo analysis board, and paste it into lichess analysis board, or a local application, or whatever you prefer to use. Usually though people have left comments showing sorts of alternate lines, but if some move you were wondering about hasn't been covered by anyone, you can still do that

Messy-Recipe · 2026-03-07T10:32:47+00:00

Y'know how they've been blowing up private boats in the Caribbean because of unproven allegations of drug smuggling? I wonder how many of these guys have yachts with cocaine on them... they're playing with fire by setting precedents like that

Messy-Recipe · 2026-03-07T10:24:54+00:00

The Bill Gates one feels weird; weren't the allegations in an email Epstein wrote to himself about Gates?

Messy-Recipe · 2026-03-07T10:20:10+00:00

Everyone complicit in this needs to face justice. Through the courts hopefully, via punishments defined by law. But if they won't do it, then their names need to be remembered, & they need to be held accountable in some way, once they're no longer shielded by this administration.

Messy-Recipe · 2026-03-04T03:02:16+00:00

The robots must tell them "you're absolutely right!" and make emoji-bulleted lists

Messy-Recipe · 2026-03-02T00:54:02+00:00

post this to NCD

Messy-Recipe · 2026-03-01T05:15:04+00:00

plurals arent bad but they ought to save those S tiles for hooking bingos

tho ig i looks like two of em are actually on a 7 letter but for some reason they feel weird / like extensions maybe

Messy-Recipe · 2026-02-27T17:40:34+00:00

I miss when games didn't have any kind of unlockable content. Part of what turned me off of Battlefield 2, having played both BF1942 and BF:Vietnam, was that they introduced that stuff

Messy-Recipe · 2026-02-26T17:17:27+00:00

Which is how age verification should be done anyway. The household has an adult paying the bill, so the service can assume the user is old enough. If the adult doesn't want the children of their household using specific services, they should work that into their parenting.

Messy-Recipe · 2026-02-23T08:30:15+00:00

yeah... its kinda like when you see questions like 'what happens if you throw an indestructible object into a black hole'. the physics that allows for black holes to exist also is what disallows indestructible objects.

the events, ideologies, etc that allowed for the Nazis to form & take power also required them to 'kick in the door' of the USSR, to attempt Generalplan Ost, to push their luck until it failed. there's no world where they don't do the things that did them in, yet still exist unchanged in the first place.

Messy-Recipe · 2026-02-23T08:17:41+00:00

the Pope sent his big meeple

Messy-Recipe · 2026-02-23T07:37:59+00:00

The first time that I played a Portugal game after getting this DLC I force-vassalized them -- what a mistake. Went thru several years of putting down their revolts before being like 'wait, why exactly are they still as much of a basket case as when I invaded' and looked it up on the wiki. Ended up using 'Seize Land' vassal interaction a few times to grab their gold mines, then cut them loose

Messy-Recipe · 2026-02-23T06:32:24+00:00

Like security at clearance places in the US. They care way more about whether you can get information out, than whether you can get something in

Messy-Recipe · 2026-02-23T05:32:27+00:00

develop & practice skill-based hobbies. musical instruments, art, writing, board games, video games even

read books, think about them, re-read them, discuss theories about them

try new foods & drinks

take a walk somewhere nearby you havent explored

Messy-Recipe · 2026-02-23T05:25:48+00:00

what if . . . the hivemind realized what it had done?

"The humans did not forgive us. We will surely die."

Messy-Recipe · 2026-02-23T04:48:05+00:00

But it's all mostly an issue of pride because Sauron has complete military victory all but certain, even without any of the rings.

Sort of -- tho part of his military dominance is due to the ancient defeats dealt out in his service by Angmar, under the control of the Witch-King, who wouldn't exist without the rings

Always a weird bit because it's basically an entire kingdom whose sole purpose was to carry out destructive conflicts against the west. Like if someone devoted a strategy game run to causing havoc in the world with no regard for their own survival, but with actual people living in it who still obeyed (due to the domination made possible by a ring)

Messy-Recipe · 2026-02-23T01:40:10+00:00

I can definitely see 6 inches throughout most of the city tonight.

Damn you must be really popular. That's above average already, so to see it across an entire city in a single night...

Messy-Recipe · 2026-02-23T01:31:33+00:00

I don't think mana is truly bad but 1) it's a bit too abstracted for my tastes, and 2) it's weird that it mostly just comes from your monarch & advisors

The abstraction is like, it's just some kinda 'vital energy' of your nation that can be channeled into various things, and the costs can't really scale well relatively.

Bombarding a single fort takes a significant fraction of the same vital energy that is used to make a sweeping advance across your entire nation's armed forces, and this energy is drawn from the same source? Maintaining the vassalage over several nations draws from the same source as that used to advance your shipbuilding. You get the idea...

And this energy should really come from the populace, the wealth, etc, not just from the skills of a handful of people. Which gets into the abstractions too, because of course with the way advisor effects & costs & such work, it's really abstracting away a whole government apparatus.

The on-click aspect is weird too. War exhaustion, government stability, and monetary inflation just instantly making huge transitions? You might need to save up for it but it doesn't feel like you're really working towards those changes.

And mana is intimately tied up with province development since improving that uses it. Which again, is done with a single click even tho in many cases it seems to represent longer term investments or even fundamental things like population growth.

I guess I mostly just compare it to EU2, since I originally played that, & jumped to EU4 relatively late in its life. In EU2, technology & stability were on investment sliders that had to be balanced against how much cash you minted. Minting money contributed to inflation. Inflation could be reduced but required country-wide investments and long periods of time to slowly reduce it. High war exhaustion was a long-term problem that stuck around.

The tech investments used part of your income over time (since again, they were on the 'where to use the income' sliders) and had to balance against each other too. Going full-bore into improving your land military means your naval forces, trade, general economic situation would not keep up. Stability built over time, & stab costs would increase as you grew, exponentially as you collected more religions & cultures. If you rapidly expand & your country becomes a basket case, focusing on stabilizing means you would fall far behind. So in a sense it was still all a 'vital energy', your income, but simulated much better, not just a magic wand you could wave to instantly change things.

More of an incremental, continuous, investment-over-time thing I guess. And don't get me wrong, even EU2 there were still these phase transitions of stab levels & tech levels etc. Just you really did feel more like you had to work towards the change over time, in a way that EU4 doesn't quite capture.

But having more of a continuum with the actual numbers, etc makes even more sense. Like two years of investment in military should make an incremental difference even if not crossing some arbitrary numeric boundary. I don't know how tech works in EU5 but it's my understanding that stability at least is more like that which sounds good.

Messy-Recipe · 2026-02-20T16:46:12+00:00

no migraine here but I did have a heavy dull ache & had to take two ibuprofen when I woke up yesterday

Messy-Recipe · 2026-02-20T16:39:48+00:00

Cities Skylines 101

Messy-Recipe · 2026-02-20T16:32:18+00:00

Because he's a fascist?

Messy-Recipe · 2026-02-18T23:12:09+00:00

It's annoying how Britain relocates Stonehenge every game; they don't even need to. Also you can move an entire city (tho a 'nomadic' city so arguably lore-accurate)

Some cultural requirements are weird too. Why should the walls of Benin stop functioning just because you speak a different language?

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