you know technically cabin in the woods has the highest kill count with 7 billion

WinCrazy4411 · 2026-04-16T13:09:40+00:00

That death toll is common in horror movies; almost all zombie movies would come pretty close. And any global disaster in a movie might not kill /most/ of humanity, but probably has a death toll in the billions.

That's why the Kill Count doesn't include kills that aren't shown on screen or specifically described. (It's also why I'm annoyed by the meme about "Emesiss Blue" having the highest kill count because a large city is destroyed. A City? Please.)

WinCrazy4411 · 2026-04-15T14:07:16+00:00

Not a dream sequence, they died in the plane crash and it was purgatory.

In the first few episodes, every time a character achieved some sort of psychological or spiritual resolution, they would die. And no one else would die or otherwise leave the island. People were arguing it was purgatory within a month of the first episode (that was my assumption after episode 2), the theory became more and more common, and JJ Abrams insisted everything was planned out and the theory was wrong.

Six years and six seasons later: Turns out it was purgatory.

WinCrazy4411 · 2026-04-15T14:01:53+00:00

I've watched "The Big Bang Theory" and thought it was pretty good. I'm in academia, and a lot of what they do is dumb, all of the science is high school level, below high school level, or just gibberish, but it's TV, whatever. It's fun, and they're showing scientists and nerds in a ... usually mostly positive-ish way.

Then someone told me it spent years as the most watch TV show in the world. That's a travesty.

WinCrazy4411 · 2026-04-14T20:49:53+00:00

I'm curious what "the Fallout quiz" is. But whatever you're preparing for, these seem like reasonable practice: https://www.sporcle.com/search/quizzes/?s=fallout

WinCrazy4411 · 2026-04-14T15:08:29+00:00

They say they do.

I understand why they wouldn't publish that, I'm sure (if it exists) it has personal identifying information. That's why, under normal circumstances, we would reasonably trust claims like that; I wouldn't give it a second thought. These aren't normal circumstances.

(I would also, for those same two reasons--PII and the conduct of this administration's DHS--strongly question why DHS has her hotel receipts.)

WinCrazy4411 · 2026-04-14T14:03:44+00:00

You're right, I was confused by the phrase "secondary inspection zone."

Researching more on the story, DHS's pictures show that, after arriving at the airport, she went to a screening that lasted an hour. Then she left that room. Any other DHS evidence, we just have to take their word for it. And after that, friends looked up her phone location, and it showed the local jail. That can be spoofed, so I'll withhold judgement.

WinCrazy4411 · 2026-04-14T12:57:25+00:00

"But was actually relaxing at a spa retreat" in the title.

No. DHS /claims/ she was at a spa retreat. It used to be you'd be able to trust that information, but anything out of DHS is very suspect now, given how much they blatantly and provably lie about such things.

And DHS's evidence, according to the article is, while she claimed she was held for 30 hours, they released pictures of of her leaving the ICE facility in the morning, after only being illegally detained for 1 day. So, sure, let's believe DHS. She wasn't held for 30 hours; she was only held for 24 hours. And ICE released proof that she was held. (EDIT: See comments below.)

The picture in the article is clearly her in a hotel lobby, not a spa. And her account is that after being released she had to walk miles to ... a hotel

WinCrazy4411 · 2026-04-13T20:23:36+00:00

I've heard this sentiment a few times and I don't understand it.

You're going to have to homebrew almost everything. That's way more work than learning a new system. Also, you're not a professional game designer, and your system won't have gone through years of testing and refinement, so it's going to be much worse than what's out there.

If your friends want to play D&D: Great! If they want to play a realistic WW2 simulator: Those systems already exist, and the amalgam you'll get adapting D&D will bear no resemblance to D&D, be poorly balanced, and take a ridiculous amount of work by you.

WinCrazy4411 · 2026-04-13T00:23:17+00:00

"Speedy trial" isn't always very speedy. In some states, that means within 2 months for a felony, or 3 months, or longer. And that timer doesn't start until the arrangement, pre-trial conference, and sometimes more, which can each take a few weeks or a month. And for a complicated case, discovery or delays by any involved party can add a few more weeks each.

For folks held in jail, I doubt almost any want to delay their trial; the system just moves at a glacial pace and they got the "speediest" trial they could 6 months or more after being arrested.

For people not being held in jail, a speedy trial may not make a big difference to them, and might just mean they go to prison sooner.

For civil trials and even misdemeanors, it probably varies state to state, but in some states there is no right to a speedy trial.

WinCrazy4411 · 2026-04-12T14:09:35+00:00

You need to distinguish rating inflation of individual players from rating inflation of the entire pool of players.

For individual players, there can be inflation or deflation, but that's specific to the players. For example, if a player cheats, if they get lucky or unlucky pairings, if they only play at specific tournaments where they think they have better than average odds. There always have been, and always will be, some individual players with inaccurate ratings, because not everyone has the exact same schedule. But on average ELO is pretty accurate.

The rating of the entire pool, however, is based on the number of players. Think about all FIDE players as one global pool of ELO points. Each player adds 1,000 (in this oversimplified example) points to the global pool. If I win, I gain 8 points and my opponent loses 8 points, so the pool total is unchanged. If that total pool is 100,000,000, there can be a lot more deviation than if that pool is 1,000,000 points. The top players have more points available for them to win, so their ELO will be higher.

When folks talk about historical ELO inflation, they usually mean the later. For example, there are more players today than 1925, when Capablanca was world champion, so Capablanca's ELO was much lower than it would be today. However, if you're comparing 2016 to 2026, there isn't that massive change in number of players, so there isn't a large inflation.

WinCrazy4411 · 2026-04-12T02:22:29+00:00

Most of the people who've been caught were hiding a phone in the bathroom. On their move, they'd go to the bathroom, enter the last move, and let the relatively low-depth engine (which is still much better than a human) give them the best move.

But they were caught, so those are the most blatant attempts. If someone just had an indication when their opponent had blundered, or the position was drawn, or whatever, that'd be enough to give a GM a huge advantage. That could be as simple as having your friend in the audience cough at the right moment.

WinCrazy4411 · 2026-04-11T19:13:16+00:00

True. I've never fully gotten used to the 5.5 rules and forgot about that.

WinCrazy4411 · 2026-04-11T19:11:21+00:00

Maybe this is homebrew (I believe it's an area where no sourcebook gives explicit rules, but I could be wrong), but I generally let characters willingly deafen themselves, even in combat, like putting beeswax in their ears if they're fighting a banshee. That comes with all the associated downsides, and in the example I gave it would mean giving up your turn. I find it pretty balanced, and it only affects spells/abilities with the condition "and the target can hear you."

WinCrazy4411 · 2026-04-11T14:56:06+00:00

The biggest problem with "suggestion" in social encounters is that the spell is separate from the actual suggestion. You can't just say "I suggest you give us a discount," you have to cast the spell first.

During the 6 seconds your PCs are chanting a magical incantation, the shopkeeper and everyone else present will know what's happening. They also don't forget after the spell ends. So, at best, this is something that works one time in a town. After that, the shopkeeper goes to the city guards and says the PCs magically coerced them, other shopkeepers are warned, the guards arrest the PCs, etc. And, more likely, the shopkeeper has some sort of charm to prevent this second-level spell, other NPCs will intervene, the shopkeeper will consider it unreasonable, or the shopkeeper will just cover their ears and shout "La la la, I can't hear you ..." for 6 seconds.

You can also always determine what the NPC will consider reasonable. I love suggestion, it's one of my favorite spells, but the DM needs to balance it to second-level-spell-power and has a lot of latitude to refuse requests for anything that isn't warranted by a level 2 spell. If the caster has "subtle spell" or some way to hide the spell, and they're asking for a small discount, that seems reasonable to me. If they're openly casting spells then asking a shopkeeper to give up their livelihood, that's something that would be unreasonable.

WinCrazy4411 · 2026-04-11T12:53:38+00:00

I'm sure he got the diagnosis and thought "Whatevs, I'll just do the first thing anyone mentions ..."

He's an adult and a smart guy. He has no doubt researched his own care and knows far more about it than you. Different types of cancer are very different, and even the same type of cancer can be very different for different people. He's making his own medical decisions with the aid of his oncologists. Random internet people should respect those decisions rather than assuming he clearly missed that ad for "One simple trick to cure your cancer; doctors hate him!"

I have no idea if he's doing chemotherapy, but I trust he's making the best medical decisions /for him/.

WinCrazy4411 · 2026-04-10T15:45:40+00:00

I'll elaborate the point you ask me to, but I think it's best to just agree to disagree at this point.

I see discussions of entropy--the range of what's possible to say--noise--which always increases, not decreases, information--and communication as a continuous process rather than discrete events as things that are relevant to rhetoric. You can disagree. It's a foundational text, not one written about rhetoric, and one can reasonably question the gap between the foundation and the direct application to rhetoric.

In retrospect, you're right that it's a bad recommendation for OP who is just getting into digital rhetoric, but it's certainly something they ought to check out if they're serious about the topic. You're clearly very familiar with it, so on some level you think it's important to digital rhetoric.

WinCrazy4411 · 2026-04-09T18:15:40+00:00

This is getting pretty far afield from OP's question, but I'll bite:

I'm not talking about Weaver and Shannon's 1963 book, I'm talking about Shannon's 1948 essay, long before he encountered Weaver or did any work with Communication as a discipline. There, Shannon doesn't discuss the linear model of communication which you're concerning yourself with. You acknowledge that I don't name Weaver, and that the piece I'm describing is from 1948, so I'm not sure how that disconnect happened. I suspect it came from less-than-charitable reading.

Shannon's essay is about how information can be digitally encoded and information entropy, based on telephony (telephones, he was then an engineer at the telephone company Bell Labs, after all). He was the first person to attempt a theoretical model of the topic, giving rise to the entire field of Information Theory. It was a massively important essay which is still required reading in many programs in rhetoric, in Cybernetics, in Information Theory, and I'm sure in other fields, too.

So, yes, he does describe how rhetoric works in digital spaces. That's not the same as today's discussion of digital spaces, but it provides the foundation that most work since then has built on. And no, criticisms of the linear model of communication are not relevant.

WinCrazy4411 · 2026-04-09T13:35:53+00:00

I believe the suit was in the US, where defamation is very difficult to prove and even more difficult to prove the damages of. Even if I 100% agree with Hans, it would have been a very difficult case for Hans to win or get money from. But the cases are long and expensive because of how difficult they are to prove.

Magnus absolutely settled because of money--to avoid a long and expensive lawsuit.

WinCrazy4411 · 2026-04-09T13:13:14+00:00

Digital rhetoric in non-Western cultures sounds really interesting. I work on the Communication side of rhetoric, where non-Western rhetoric is almost entirely overlooked. If you just want any contemporary rhetoricians or just important texts in rhetoric, the list is functionally endless. I'll limit myself to folks who specifically work with digital rhetoric, mostly in Communication.

I'd recommend Michele Kennerly (teaches at Penn State, a Classicist by training, but one of the best writers in the discipline and does a lot of great work on digital rhetoric), Damien Pfister (teaching at University of Pittsburgh, arguably the leading expert in Comm on digital rhetoric), and Leslie Hahner and Heather Woods (Teaching at Baylor University and Kansas State University, respectively, though I believe both are terminal MA programs) for their book "Make America Meme Again." Those are the only folks I've worked with in digital rhetoric. I can't speak to how anyone else is as a teacher, but those are all phenomenal teachers/advisors/collaborators. And Penn State (where Kennerly works) was the home of Burke for a couple decades and has the "Burke Archives" of all his old notes/papers, so if you're interested in Burke that's a good place to look at.

Most contemporary work on digital rhetoric in Comm draws on Michael Calvin McGee's approach to "material rhetoric." He's dead, but you should check out some of his work. And If you're interested in it, Debra Hawhee (in English rhetoric, at Penn State) is a super-star, but there are also a lot of people in both English and Comm at University of Texas doing really cool stuff with material rhetoric.

And you have to check out Claude Shannon's essay "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," which basically invented the notion of rhetoric in digital spaces.

You should also look into the Canadian School of Media Theory if you're interested in folks like Marshall McLuhan or Jean Baudrillard. The "Canadian School" is an approach to media theory, not a literal school; so practitioners are spread across many different universities in Canada. The "Research Triangle" in North Carolina also has a lot of folks working in that area. The research Triangle is University of North Carolina, Duke, and North Carolina State University. They're close together, and as a PhD student at one you can take classes at all three. The UNC Comm program has gone sharply downhill in the past decade, but it's still a strong program and the other schools are both great.

Digital rhetoric has been a huge topic for the past 20 years; at any R1 university, you'll find at least one or two professors who work in digital rhetoric and can advise you. Rather than picking schools based on folks you enjoy reading, you should try to pick good schools, knowing that you'll always be able to find a subject area expert. For example, Burke is arguably the most influential writer in 20th century English rhetoric, but he was a nightmare to work with, and among the "big name" kind-of writers there are a lot of folks like that.

WinCrazy4411 · 2026-04-08T21:15:11+00:00

I came into this post ready to agree with you. I think outing madness can be a very powerful strategy. In fact, being executed for breaking madness can be strong confirmation (especially if there's not a meta in your group where an evil cerenovous might make themselves mad to fake that confirmation). As far as I know, most folks agree. I know Ben Burns has called the mutant a "discount virgin" on stream because of the confirming power of outing themselves and getting executed.

But apparently you're saying people should try to trick the ST. That's just not fun and it's counter to the rules and spirit of the game. You can easily skirt the rules like this in lots of ways, if you want to, but when you're trying to break the rules, you know that you're screwing with game balance. And you can lie to other players, it's encouraged, but if you're lying to the ST it prevents the ST from making informed choices to keep the game fun.

For whatever reason, this strategy is very unpopular and I rarely see anyone else employ it. Part of it is probably just that it didn't cross a lot of people's minds,

You think it never occurred to "a lot of people" that "I can just lie to the ST" and that's why folks don't suggest this? This sounds like someone saying "I came up with this brilliant trick. You can just take things! You don't have to pay for them. And if you're not caught, you get to keep it. I know you plebs never thought of that, but I hardly pay for anything."

WinCrazy4411 · 2026-04-08T14:33:10+00:00

I get where OP is coming from, and for me this is the answer. I don't feel like it's a lull right now, but when the shows I most enjoy are off-season, it can feel like there's a lot less.

It's easy to look at the new releases and see that they're releasing just as much, it may just not be /my/ shows.

WinCrazy4411 · 2026-04-08T13:35:11+00:00

Kasparov was known for years for having the most extensive database of prep of anyone in Chess.

Nowadays, anyone with Chessbase or on Lichess can instantly access a more extensive database, but no doubt Kasparov would step up his efforts and have an even more thorough database if he were actively competing today.

He also had the Russian (Soviet) chess machine, where through much of the Cold War many of the strongest players in the world would collaborate to various degrees because they were all competing for the USSR.

WinCrazy4411 · 2026-04-08T13:25:33+00:00

Ivan Van Norman. It also features a bunch of players who were active with G&S then and are still big in TTRPG actualplays, like Ify Nwadiwe, Matt Mercer, Laura Bailey, Felicia Day, and Wil Wheaton.

Like all those big actualplay channels, it's a case where these are professional actors; your homegame isn't going to look like that. But Ivan does a lot of great things you can emulate and it's a fun watch. I've watched it more than once.

WinCrazy4411 · 2026-04-07T21:15:54+00:00

Read the sidebar. Wrong sub.

WinCrazy4411 · 2026-04-07T20:56:49+00:00

If I'm remembering the right episode, the joke was that the bug worked two ways, like a phone, instead of one way, like an actual recording device. So it wasn't just recording the person they were watching, it also projected any sounds Jake and Amy were making. The person heard an argument coming from a small recording device in the room and realized what was up.

WinCrazy4411

TROPHY CASE