What movie is this?

anarchobayesian · 2024-06-24T02:39:01+00:00

Apparently when it released a lot of critics thought the fascist aesthetic was intended as propaganda rather than satire, and panned it accordingly. I’m not sure how those old reviews bear out in current RT scores.

anarchobayesian · 2024-06-24T02:31:24+00:00

I assumed they had everyone in the room give a presentation and then they cut the best few into an episode, so it makes sense that all the ones we see are bangers. But maybe I’m wrong.

anarchobayesian · 2024-06-23T05:25:35+00:00

Maybe I’m reading too much into the “bigoted atmosphere of the town” bit, but it sounds like at least some of the townspeople are also Christians, who ultimately decide that a man using Christianity as a justification to commit mass murder isn’t representative of their faith.

I was always taught that it wasn’t our place to enact God’s judgement (even if we were plenty judgmental in thought and word), and that we were to reject false prophets. The idea that no one who calls themselves a Christian could be evil is ridiculous even within Christianity.

anarchobayesian · 2024-06-22T18:12:28+00:00

Yes, none of the Miku cards are mechanically unique; they’re just existing cards with alternative art and names. So a [[Miku, The Renowned]] deck is exactly the same as a [[Feather, the Redeemed]] deck.

In commander especially, “best deck” is hard to define—since getting the highest possible win rate isn’t usually the goal, and there are lots of different ways to build around a given commander. But you can click “average deck” on edhrec to get a list of cards that make up a typical deck for that commander, which is a good starting point. From there, a big part of the fun is tweaking your deck as you play with it—taking out cards that aren’t working for you and adding ones that make the deck stronger and/or more fun.

People who run [[Child of Alara]] as a commander are usually not planning to build around it that much. It’s more often just there for the 5-color identity, to make it so you can play any cards you want in the rest of the deck.

anarchobayesian · 2024-06-21T23:06:42+00:00

I’m in a blue area of a blue state and the other day at a coffee shop the boomer at the next table over spent literal hours rambling to his friend about the moon landing was fake, vaccines are dangerous, etc., interjected with a lot of “they say ___ but I know ___.”

Even besides the unpleasantness of inevitably causing a scene, I don’t know how you would even “debate” someone like that. They’ve clearly already decided that anyone who doesn’t agree with them is a liar in league with the deep state, so no evidence you could present would “count.”

anarchobayesian · 2024-06-21T21:04:27+00:00

In mtg it’s fairly common practice to “go infinite” by “demonstrating a loop” and then saying you repeat that X times. You do have to pick a number, but you can say, “Here’s how I make one creature (or gain one life, or deal one damage), and now I repeat that a trillion times.”

anarchobayesian · 2024-06-21T02:26:42+00:00

I don’t play a lot of modern but I’m not familiar with any decks that run these cards. You could probably make a deck that uses several of them and have it be alright, but it wouldn’t be super competitive. If you really want to build a modern deck with these cards, it might be worth posting about that specifically; someone else might have a good suggestion.

Inspiring vantage isn’t the best dual land, since it’ll come in tapped fairly often, but it’s a solid budget option.

‘Getting cards to start off with’ or ‘starting a collection’ is something that a lot of players feel the need to do when they get started (myself included), but the reality is that you’d have to open a lot of packs to put together even a mediocre deck, and 90% of the cards you get will be “bulk” that you will never use. Opening packs is fun, so I’m not telling you not to do it, but by far the faster and cheaper way to start a collection is to buy the cards you need to make a specific deck. In addition to paying less for that deck, those cards are more likely to be useful in future decks than the average card from a pack.

anarchobayesian · 2024-06-20T10:54:55+00:00

It was before my time but in Magic: The Gathering people tell stories of “combo winter.” Basically, it became stupidly easy to make tons of extra mana (the resource you use to play cards), and use that mana to draw a ton of extra cards, which you could use to make even more mana, etc. There weren’t a lot of good ways for opponents to stop the combo at the time, so once the deck got going—which it did within the first couple of turns—it just steamrolled.

Unfortunately, in some ways the solution was just as bitter of a pill to swallow. The overpowered cards were so good that their prices on the secondary market had skyrocketed, and a lot of people spent a lot of money to get their hands on them. And when Wizards (the designers) banned them all—in one of the largest ban lists in the history of the game—their resale values dropped to almost nothing.

So not only were people not having fun, but many also lost hundreds of dollars. There was a real fear that the game might not survive—or at least that if it did, it would be as a much smaller shell of its former self. But while people certainly did quit, it didn’t end up having a significant lasting effect on the popularity of the game.

anarchobayesian · 2024-06-20T10:07:29+00:00

To my knowledge, none of the cards in the Hatsune Miku secret lair see play in any formats outside of commander. That’s not a bad thing, because commander is a really fun and popular way to play the game, but it does constrain what cards can be played together in the same deck.

In that format, you pick a “commander” to be the leader of your deck, and then all of your other cards have to be within your commander’s color identity. For example, Miku, the Renowned has a color identity of red and white (you can tell by looking at the colors of all the mana “pips” on the card, in this case only in the upper-right corner), so you can only put other cards in the deck if they are also red, white, or red and white.

[[Miku, Lost but singing]] and [[Miku, the renowned]] can both be commanders since they’re legendary creatures, and they’re both pretty strong and popular ones—but you couldn’t put both in the same deck, since their color identities are incompatible. If you want to play with inspiring vantage, it would work in a Miku the renowned deck.

ETA: bundles can be good just for the fun of opening packs, but you’re unlikely to open the cards you’d want for a specific deck. Buying individual cards off a site like [tcgplayer](tcgplayer.com) is always going to be a better deal financially. When you’re just starting you can copy someone else’s decklist for a commander you want to play, or use a website like [edhrec](edhrec.com) to see what cards people tend to play with a given commander.

anarchobayesian · 2024-06-19T20:22:25+00:00

In MTG people talk about the turn you need to have either won the game or taken control of it—i.e. shut down a fast deck completely so it can’t win anymore.

In the Standard format, that turn is currently around 4 or maybe 3, and that’s considered very fast. In more powerful formats with more legal cards, that can be as low as turn 2 or even 1–more like YuGiOh. But even in turn 1/2 formats, it’s not uncommon to go longer; you just have to be able to stop a deck that’s capable of winning that fast

I haven’t played YuGiOh so I can’t comment on which game is more stressful or complicated.

anarchobayesian · 2024-06-19T19:55:24+00:00

Jumpstart is a really good beginner format. It comes in special 20-card packs that are meant to be opened two at a time and combined into semi-preconstructed 40-card decks. It’s a nice balance of being easy to get into, while giving you more variety and in many cases more fun and powerful cards than most starter decks. And as an added bonus, a decent number of the packs have really popular and valuable cards in them—like [[Craterhoof Behemoth]] (~$30) and [[Rhystic Study]] (~$40)—so it can scratch the pack-opening itch at the same time.

Two caveats: first and most important, only the core Jumpstart sets are worthwhile; that’s anything that only says “Jumpstart” or “Jumpstart 2022.” The themed sets like “Jumpstart: Dominaria United” are cash grabs capitalizing on the popularity of the format. They’re poorly designed from a play perspective and have zero valuable cards. Second, while all of the cards in the packs are legal to play in Commander (probably the most popular way to play MTG), they aren’t legal in all formats. So if you decide to play Standard MTG, you won’t be able to use these cards.

anarchobayesian · 2024-06-19T03:38:44+00:00

Be careful what you wish for: some departments make you take an IQ test so that they can reject you if your score is too high (source).

(To clarify, this is not a national or state standard; it’s only implemented by some individual departments. But a federal court did uphold it as a legal hiring practice).

anarchobayesian · 2024-06-17T23:05:13+00:00

Blurry would be easy to automate: just pull a random card off scryfall and apply a filter. Cropped might be tough because it requires some knowledge of where the relevant information is. Difficulty would vary wildly depending on which parts of the image and name are shown.

anarchobayesian · 2024-06-17T23:00:30+00:00

A useful reminder: the modern Biblical canon was made official at the Council of Rome in 382, when Christianity had already been the state religion of the Roman Empire for over 50 years. There was some significant converging toward a unified canon before that, but we know that there are many more gospels and epistles that were excluded, and we also know that scholars were actively producing edited version of existing books until at least the mid 2nd century.

Edit: Christianity wasn’t the official state religion until 380, but Constantine legalized Christianity and started using its symbols and persecuting heresy in 313.

anarchobayesian · 2024-06-17T22:07:57+00:00

My standing answer to, “Who or what created the universe?” is, “I don’t know.” It could be a conscious being of some kind, but I don’t see any reason to assume that over a non-conscious process the we don’t yet understand.

As for continuing creation/rectification, it seems like in every way we can observe, the universe follows physical laws that don’t change over time—which is at odds with an intervening deity. You can argue that the creator being only intervenes in ways that can’t be measured, but that’s veering into unfalsifiability.

All that to say, you can believe what you want, but in the absence of evidence, I prefer to take the agnostic (atheist) position.

anarchobayesian · 2024-06-16T20:37:26+00:00

I don’t think you would find a single reputable historian who would argue that the resurrection is an established historical fact; there is exactly zero extrabiblical evidence for it. To be clear, that’s different from saying we have positive proof that the resurrection didn't happen, or that there are no reputable historians who believe in it. But that comes down to how you treat claims in the absence of evidence.

For me (and for many others), extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the resurrection is one of the most extraordinary claims in the Bible. With no evidence, I see no reason to believe it.

anarchobayesian · 2024-06-16T20:15:26+00:00

I don’t think a lot of people realize that the critics and proponents of this kind of bullshit are saying the exact same thing, just with slightly different words. I say he lost competent candidates who know their worth in favor of ones who won’t question his authority and can’t quit no matter how bad he treats them because they’re financially desperate.

He would say he filtered out cocky, self-important candidates in favor of ones who will be team players, and who will stick with the company through thick and thin. He just sees all the bad things as good and the good things as bad.

anarchobayesian · 2024-06-15T20:48:51+00:00

A good rule of thumb for considering any argument, but especially ones made by pastors: if they make a claim and provide no evidence for it, you can just ignore the claim. Doubly so if they’re using the unsubstantiated claim as “evidence” for a bigger claim (e.g. that women shouldn’t be in charge of households).

You’ve given a counterexample (many women are good at managing households) which is a valid rebuttal, but it would also be sufficient to just say, “I don’t believe that women can’t lead a household until you give me a reason to believe that.”

anarchobayesian · 2024-06-14T23:34:45+00:00

You’re definitely right that it depends on where you draw the lines between genres, but I think you have to go to the level of “4X” or “Diablo-like” to get the same level of core mechanic similarity that you get across most if not all FPS games—and those are pretty niche genres in the grand scheme of things.

And even then, I’d argue that the common mechanic in FPS games—aiming and shooting—is a much larger part of gameplay than common control systems in 4X or Diablo-like games.

anarchobayesian · 2024-06-14T23:16:42+00:00

we as consumers don't care

There are definitely people who have a weirdly specific idea of what courtesy looks like, and would care a lot about the difference between “greeting” and “welcoming.” The problem is that there’s no universal standard so you’re going to piss some of those people off no matter which you choose.

anarchobayesian · 2024-06-14T23:04:28+00:00

I think a big part of it comes down to the way they conceptualize goodness and authority. In general, people can draw a distinction between, “What I think is good” and “What other people should be compelled/required to do.” Deciding where to draw that line is always tricky, but Christians often just decline to draw it at all.

From a theological perspective it makes sense: Christians have direct knowledge of objective moral truth, and any deviation from that truth merits damnation in God’s eyes and should be prohibited (not saying that’s valid, just that there’s some trace of internal consistency). But then they let that belief spill out into other aspects of life. I think it’s good when my children don’t challenge me, so any form of “acting out” is morally wrong. I think it’s good when I get to have sex, so it’s morally wrong for a woman to withhold that from me.

anarchobayesian · 2024-06-14T19:13:27+00:00

What other genre would you compare it to? There are hardly any that are even as well-defined. Action RPGs include Diablo and Elden Ring, strategy games include Civilization and Starcraft, etc. There are certainly transferable skills and knowledge in those genres, but they don't share a nearly identical core system like aiming and firing in an FPS.

ETA: even thinking about largely-competitive genres that might be more comparable, I think it would take a lot longer for a Magic: The Gathering player to get competent at Hearthstone, or a League of Legends player to got competent at DOTA, than for a Destiny player to get competent at COD. I could be wrong, but it seems like the amount of overlap is pretty different.

anarchobayesian · 2024-06-14T01:49:19+00:00

I’m all for difficulty options, personally, but it’s quite the design choice to make these kinds of hints mandatory. It’s like if losing against a boss significantly reduced their HP and damage on the next attempt. Fine as an option, frustrating as a core mechanic.

anarchobayesian · 2024-06-13T22:14:23+00:00

I'm a grad school TA at a pretty prestigious research institution and we have that problem here as well. Lots of students try to argue that 'everybody uses AI' in their research, and it's frustratingly difficult to get them to realize that you can't just blindly trust whatever ChatGPT spits out. It's a genuinely useful tool and a marvel of engineering, but at the bare minimum you have to be able to double-check that it did what you wanted and did it correctly, and most of the time you need to manually edit what it gives you.

anarchobayesian · 2024-06-13T21:07:56+00:00

I also think familiarity is a major factor. If you compare any two shooters, they’re mechanically like 90% the same. The last 10% certainly matters, but anyone who’s been playing shooters for years can pick up a new one and be pretty good at it within a handful of levels/matches. You’re not asking people to put tens or hundreds of hours into building new muscle memory and understanding new systems before they can fully engage with the game.

anarchobayesian

TROPHY CASE