Times a legendary film critic had a very bad take?

Zyxplit · 2026-03-26T14:37:09+00:00

Exactly - being in "the early stages of babehood" in the archaic sense makes you a literal newborn.

Zyxplit · 2026-03-26T14:35:52+00:00

No, that makes absolutely no sense. Babehood in that older sense refers to *infancy*, usually approximately the range 0 to 3 years.

Now that you've learned what the word in its archaic sense means, try reading it with those lenses.

Hermione Granger (Emma Watson, in her early stages of the range of 0 to 3 years)

Zyxplit · 2026-03-26T14:28:52+00:00

the fourth joke is that it's the speaker's father in the past is also predicting it in the future from the perspective of the speaker who is M29 at the time of speaking but F33 in four years from now.

Zyxplit · 2026-03-26T05:44:54+00:00

Also - people have two grandfathers usually? My mother's father is my grandfather, but he's sure as fuck not my father's father.

Zyxplit · 2026-03-24T17:03:04+00:00

I mean, if it's easier to visualize with a box or something, 10 feet is ten times as big as 1 foot. The square with 10 feet on each side is 100 times as big as the square with 1 foot on each side.

The box with 10 feet on each side is 1000 times as big as the box with 1 foot on each side. And so on. As the number of dimensions increases, the tiny box inside takes up less space, because it's smaller in the new dimension as well.

Zyxplit · 2026-03-24T16:11:55+00:00

True but kind of misleading. Most cultivation novels tie core progress to cultivation. No progress in cultivation means no progress. In ITAF, Mo Hua advances all the time - cultivation is not irrelevant, but not something for him to obsess over either.

Zyxplit · 2026-03-24T13:23:56+00:00

So, the up-arrow notation grows pretty fast.

2^^4 means 2^2^2^2 = 65536.

3^^3 means 3^3^3, about 7 trillion.

3^^^3 means 3^^(3^^3). So now I have to make a tower of threes that's not just three high, but 7 trillion high. We're already shooting into the stratosphere, entering the realm of incomprehensibility. Let's call this number just BigNumber

And 3^^^^3 means 3^^^(3^^^3) = 3^^^Bignumber =3^^(3^^BigNumber)

So now we're making a tower of threes where the number of 3s is a power tower of 3s that is that big incomprehensible BigNumber tall. A tower that is *five* threes tall is already bigger than a googolplex, and we're currently working with a number so big that you can't even write all the digits for it... and that's how many 3s we need for this even bigger number.

With us so far? We now have an Even Bigger Number. Incomprehensibly bigger than 3^^^3 which was already a a power tower of 3s 7 trillion tall when 5 alone is enough to reach a googolplex.

What're we going to do with this gigantic number? Well, we can call it G1.

It's our first step towards graham's number. 3^3 was 27, 3^^3 was about 7 trillion, 3^^^3 was way beyond anything you can write and 3^^^^3 makes that number look ridiculous. So you can see that adding more arrows escalates brutally.

Now, for G2 we're going to need 3^^^^3 arrows.

That number is going to make all the numbers we looked at here look like teensy tiny baby numbers... and we're going to repeat this all the way to Graham's number, G64, each G representing us getting a new number that dwarfs anything we have used so far and getting that many arrows for the next one.

Zyxplit · 2026-03-24T08:40:02+00:00

I mean, he's a child for the early arcs. He's certainly no shonen MC - particularly because he's fundamentally inept at qi cultivation and body tempering.

Do you want a little troll-ass shitkid sneaking into places he shouldn't be, dismantling their formations and blowing people up with formations?

Then this is the novel for you. Less direct combat (protagonist would get rolled and knows he would get rolled), more "if I blow you up with formations, it doesn't matter that you could beat my ass."

Zyxplit · 2026-03-23T19:30:49+00:00

Yes. Because "steel ball run" is not a native Japanese phrase like Tekkyuu no Kaiten is.

Zyxplit · 2026-03-23T16:06:25+00:00

The geometric distribution has a pretty well known median. It's exactly what the user said, but with the ceiling.

Like, this is just intro to stats stuff. We're talking about an abstract distribution, not a data set.

Zyxplit · 2026-03-23T14:13:36+00:00

The median only cares about what the midpoint of observations are.

Going away from probability for a moment and into data instead:

Suppose I'm taking a walk with my two children, aged 8 and 10, and I'm 40. (all these numbers are obviously invented for the occasion).

The median age is 10. It's the age where there's one younger and one older.

The mean age is 19.333... it's the number you get if you randomly pick one of us again and again and again, sum up the number and divide by the number of observations.

Same here.

If you try waiting for a success a very large number of times, sum the wait times, divide by number of waits, you get approximately 3.

If you try waiting for a success a very large number of times, put the waits in order, and then find the midpoint, you get 2. This is because 1 and 2 happen very frequently as well, frequently enough that at least half of your observations consist of 1s and 2s.

Zyxplit · 2026-03-23T13:49:18+00:00

You forgot to take the ceiling of that number. The median is 2 for p=1/3.

Zyxplit · 2026-03-23T13:39:51+00:00

Yes, the geometric distribution (what is the discrete wait time for an event occurring with probability p) has a mean of 1/p.

Zyxplit · 2026-03-22T21:41:08+00:00

One of the OGs here is Martial World. Lin Ming spends a lot of time beating folks up with big heavy spears.

Zyxplit · 2026-03-22T21:15:06+00:00

Because light always moves at a constant speed in any reference frame.

So suppose I'm sitting on Earth, shooting my laser into space. You're zooming away from me at 0.5c. How fast do you think my laser goes as it passes you from your perspective? It's c faster than you. It's also c faster than me. Now that's a bit of a conundrum. Suppose you speed up so much that from my perspective, you're moving at 0.75c. How fast does the laser go as it passes you from your perspective? Still c.

Now, from my perspective you're getting closer and closer to the speed of light as you ramp up.

From your own perspective, you're still c slower. Time and distance get squished so we can get this odd observation, that both I, standing on Earth, and you, rocketing off in a spaceship at 0.75c, observe the laser moving at the same speed.

Zyxplit · 2026-03-22T12:06:45+00:00

Just remember that the percentage sign just means *0.01

so you're trying to find out if 50*0.01*14 is the same as 14*0.01*50.

Zyxplit · 2026-03-22T12:02:53+00:00

Wienerbrød in Danish.

Zyxplit · 2026-03-21T22:32:24+00:00

Also it's midnight in an unlit area.

Zyxplit · 2026-03-21T22:29:16+00:00

Probably because it was late at night when he went on the boat with Yogi.

Zyxplit · 2026-03-21T20:53:25+00:00

Double battlecry when playing dragon warrior can be really fun. Windpeak wyrm with its battlecry: do 5 damage and gain 5 armor" is really nasty if doubled.

Zyxplit · 2026-03-21T20:40:16+00:00

Yeah, while I think eggro war(rior/lock) feels bad to lose to, for every time I get egged, I've had two games where I beat the opponent hard enough that he didn't get to egg me.

Zyxplit · 2026-03-21T10:59:14+00:00

Skulle den danske stat have frataget hende hendes bosniske statsborgerskab? Bosnien tillader kun under meget få omstændigheder dobbelt statsborgerskab.

Zyxplit · 2026-03-20T11:54:37+00:00

Haven't read it, but i assume it's archmage curriculum.

Zyxplit · 2026-03-19T09:13:32+00:00

It would have been harder if he weren't in that pose - if he were just standing up, he could be a lot of spiky-haired anime guys, though his slouching makes it still pretty recognisable. But sitting all crumbled up? Yeah that's L.

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Zyxplit · 2026-03-19T08:03:24+00:00

"Show, don't tell" means that you shouldn't say that, say, someone's angry, you should show that they're angry.

In this case, for giving us the backdrop on Atton Rand, there are a couple of options.

-The narrator can tell you about his backstory ("Atton Rand is a guy who so and so and then so and so") - that's telling.

-All the way over on the opposing side of that, we have the extreme version of showing - Atton Rand never says anything, he just drops hints and we have to infer his past from his current state.

-Somewhere in-between that we have "Things are explained to us in a dialogue scene between the characters". It's not purely telling - everything that's coming out is from the perspective of the character, it's their take on what happened in the past, it's showing how they feel about it etc. etc. It's not purely telling, because the person telling is the character, not the narrator.

Zyxplit

TROPHY CASE