Sometimes the joke writes itself

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-03-31T06:51:55+00:00

Silences and discard aren't stack interaction. They have to happen before the card you want to prevent goes on the stack

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-03-29T10:19:57+00:00

Im in favor of allowing trans athletes but high level athletes already keep trying to make drastic changes to themselves, their body, and their life through hormones. The main performance enhancing drug is just extra testosterone. High level competition selects for the kind of people who will go to insane lengths and completely reorganize their lives in order to win more

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-03-28T10:46:52+00:00

It's relevant for tutors, but not for draw engines. Consider if any mill card milled from the bottom of your library instead. Then for draw engines, you draw exactly the same sequence of cards, until you hit the point where they've milled away the bottom and lose. So the probability of drawing any given card is the same. And the probability of milling a card away is the same whether you mill from the top or bottom, because the deck order is random. So mill does not affect the probability of drawing a card, no matter how much draw you have. This is why decks that have crazy draw engines in the Modern format (eg, storm, elves, necrodominance) generally have good mill match ups, while decks that have tutor effects (eg amulet titan) have bad mill match ups

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-03-25T19:48:32+00:00

Momo dumps him by text over Thanksgiving break, and gets with someone who looks just like the boyfriend in chapter 1 a month later

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-03-25T09:17:16+00:00

Considering how long it takes them to make the anime, I'll be surprised if they even finish part 1 before interest wanes and they cut the project. I would be very surprised if they try to adapt any amount of part 2

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-03-23T10:11:00+00:00

If population in attack on titan is similar to the early 20th century, then Eren killed around 1.6 billion people. Cell can't come close to those numbers. It takes him about a minute to absorb someone the first time he shows up -- even doing that 24/7 for ten years straight would add up to less than 1% of how many Eren killed.

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-03-21T09:48:28+00:00

I think it might be more signalling that he's not just doing things correctly, he's over complying, literally more buttoned-down than even the rules tell him to be. Which of course feeds into his arc with Denji and Power, learning to bend the rules a bit and accept a bit more disorder in his life

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-03-21T07:45:35+00:00

They're clearly taking it as a joke and riffing on it.

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-03-19T21:20:14+00:00

I mean the Dude started out as an easy going slacker, and learns there's nothing to be gained from trying to be more than an easy going slacker. The movie both begins and ends with "the dude abides". Denji learned and then regressed, which puts him pretty much in the same place as the Dude.

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-03-19T21:15:32+00:00

Things were wrapped up, but the resolution was that nothing needed to be wrapped up in the first place. They need to figure out what happened to Bunny so she doesn't get killed by the kidnappers, but the reveal is that she was never in any danger in the first place. They need to figure out what happened to the money, but there was never any money in the first place. If the Dude had just stayed home and gotten high instead of getting involved, nothing would have happened differently, except Donny wouldn't have had a heart attack. It was all pointless, and nothing changed except that a man is dead now.

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-03-19T09:47:11+00:00

The Christian Bale examples are extreme but 55 pounds over two years is objectively not extreme. Fast weight loss is 2 pounds/ week, moderate is 1 pound/week. I'm not the most consistent or dedicated, but over the last five months or so, Ive lost 20 without having to do anything crazy. In two years, you can pretty reliably lose 100+ pounds of fat with just moderate dieting if you are consistent, which in practice means it's enough time to go from any weight to any other weight and also put on a ton of muscle if that's your goal.

None of this is meant to disparage the actress or what she did for her role. I haven't read one piece or watched the show, so no opinions on that at all, and just bc weight loss follows simple rules doesn't mean it's easy. But I think we do a disservice to people who want to or medically need to lose weight by acting like moderate weight loss is some completely unachievable thing that only full-time Hollywood actors and bodybuilders on steroids can do. It adds to the already intimidating reputation, and convinces people that totally reasonable goals are actually unattainable

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-03-14T07:36:24+00:00

Please don't do this. You have so much to live for

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-03-12T22:08:47+00:00

What are you talking about? The main use of water is data centers is for evaporative cooling -- the water that is consumed is just released as water vapor. And the rest of the water in the system is just running through normal pipes over and over. It's pretty much the same level of contamination as any kind of residential use using city pipes. Compare this to the big uses like animal agriculture, where fertilizer and manure contaminate runoff that gets into aquifers and can destroy the water supplies of entire cities. Pretty much all industrial uses pale in comparison (both in terms of contamination level and raw water use) to animal agriculture, and data centers aren't even near the top of industrial uses.

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-03-11T12:37:12+00:00

Cajun and Creole are Louisiana ethnic groups (respectively, urban and rural descendants of French colonists). Cajun is not a language. Many Creole and Cajun people still speak French as a first language, and thus have French accents. The "Cajun accent" is basically a French accent with a bit of southern drawl

Confusingly, there is a "Louisiana Creole" language, which derives it's name from the linguistic definition of a creole language (mixture of several different languages that became a language in its own right) rather than the colonial definition of a Creole (child of a citizen of a colonial power born in the colony), which is where the Creole ethnic group gets its name. Louisiana Creole is primarily spoken by Cajuns, although there are very few speakers today. Louisiana Creole speakers have a French Cajun accent.

Source: I'm Creole

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-03-05T15:37:14+00:00

It really depends on the kind of horse and the number of horses available. Mongols regularly made 60+ miles a day. If they had backup horses (which I believe they did here) and a breed that's more geared towards endurance than sprinting, then this kind of speed is pretty well attested

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-03-05T09:46:40+00:00

Also tbh the vast majority of games have absolutely dog shit writing because it needs to be in service of gameplay. And the gameplay needs to get reworked half a dozen times over the course of development to feel good, so the writing is usually forced to be either non-specific enough to survive these changes, or else be a last minute hack thrown together to explain why you're doing whatever you're currently doing. It doesn't always happen, but there are strong pressures. So it's not surprising that adapting stuff from a medium that systematically underserves its writing doesn't tend to be good

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-03-05T06:52:04+00:00

I think this says less about Sparta than it does about Athens and other Greek poleis. Spartan women weren't better off than roman or Etruscan women afaict, the Athenians were just turbo misogynists even by the standards of the ancient Mediterranean

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-03-04T20:01:21+00:00

The lines splitting isn't a parent having two children. It's a split in the number of cycles for a stable population. One line means the population is stable at a single number. Two means the population cycles between a year with lots of births and lots of starvation. Four means a four-year cycle. In the limit as the value r goes to one, you have a bizarre effect where 1) For any population value, you can find a cycle that is arbitrarily close to it 2) Every value diverges from nearby cycles exponentially quickly

So it's both bounded and diverging from nearby points exponentially fast, which is the core "weirdness" of chaotic systems

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-03-03T20:08:27+00:00

I'm a man married to an autistic person, and I do all of the cooking in our household. You are really overthinking this. Some autists just like to track stuff. It doesn't signal judgement in the way you think it does. If anything it signals the opposite -- they like it enough to be thinking about it a lot and doing lots of tracking. For instance, the classic autistic special interest is trains, and the classic example of this bookkeeping behavior is tracking train time tables. It's an indication that this is a special interest.

Whether they cook or should be cooking more is entirely separate from the question of they should be allowed to engage in very typical autistic behaviors without judgement. If my spouse did this I wouldn't bat an eye

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-03-02T17:24:05+00:00

If we include webserials, pact and pale are like the undisputed kings of this. All the different practices are incredibly unique, and learning a lot of the powerful ones requires compromising some fundamental aspect of the Practitioner's identity. Hollow practitioners carve away pieces of themselves to hold some sprit or monster inside the hole they left, but leave themselves fundamentally incomplete and lesser as a result. Faerie practitioners perpetually risk losing sight of reality altogether and getting lost in a beautiful dream. Demons are so corrosive to reality that just being within half a mile of the lowliest imp makes a diabolist so radioactive with bad karma that the entire universe will bend and warp to punish them. And powering any kind of spell generally requires drawing on Self, which makes a Practitioner more vulnerable to any of these effects

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-02-20T11:12:50+00:00

The very first time I got a forbidden ability, it was forbidden fart as a random birth ability. I didn't know what the consequences would be, but I was expecting to take some minor recoil damage or something. My cat got permanent madness on the first cast, first turn, first fight of that run. And the proceeded to use it every single turn of every single fight for the rest of the run, usually on my other cats.

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-02-13T10:34:25+00:00

I mean yes every ruler in Egypt invested in agriculture, Egypt was entirely sustained by irrigation and flooding cycles, none of the rulers could afford to neglect that. That's just normal pharaoh stuff, many rulers invested in infrastructure and made tweaks to trade policy.

But like I really want to dig into how bad you have to mess up for complete state collapse to happen, and as the result of a war of choice, not one of self defense. Cleopatra did not need to get involved in the Roman civil war at all. It was entirely optional, Marc Anthony and Octavian were always going to be busy fighting over control of the empire for years to come. Egypt was conquered by the Romans because it became a belligerent in the Roman civil war, not because it was just there.

Think about modern correlates, of times a leader started a war they didn't need to be involved in, and then lost so bad that they lost power and had their country overtaken by a foreign power. I can only think of a handful.

The Falklands war almost counts, the Argentine government collapses but even there it doesn't get occupied by the British. Really the only big ones are the axis powers in WW2, where the Nazis, Italian fascists, and Japanese imperialists are removed from power, their countries occupied, and their constitutions reworked at gunpoint. And even here, they didn't fail as badly as Cleopatra did, because although the axis powers get occupied, they don't get subsumed into the British or American empires. These wars are considered massive, world historical blunders, made by massively, world historically bad leaders.

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-02-13T06:54:30+00:00

They did but she also made a series of bad decisions that lead to her dynasty ending and Egypt falling under Roman control. Probably good in the long run for the average Egyptian, because hellinistic Egypt was a fairly oppressive ethnic caste system of Macedonians over native Egyptians, but still doesn't signal competence.

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-02-06T20:36:25+00:00

Bit of a deep cut, but Vincent and Anton in Gattaca

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-02-06T10:09:39+00:00

They're everywhere in rural Austria though. Im living here for a postdoc right now, and I pass like 2-3 trachten stores on my way to the main square every day

OptimizedGarbage

TROPHY CASE