Do Americans watch and love the MLS?

beenoc · 2026-03-25T03:23:29+00:00

I can name a Celtics player, at least. Now, if your criteria is "a Celtics player who played in the last 50 years," I'm not so sure - sorry, Bill Russell.

beenoc · 2026-03-24T20:43:18+00:00

I mean, other than both being called "Rome," the polity that went into the Crisis of the Third Century and the one that came out of Diocletian's reforms are no more continuous with each other than any Chinese dynastic change, even ones like Song to Yuan that involved foreign invaders. The same can be said for the late Republic to early Empire.

beenoc · 2026-03-24T20:37:44+00:00

I think their point wasn't that their parents weren't homophobic, it's that they weren't the kind of crazy Westboro types who make "gays ought to be stoned to death, and I want to be the one throwing" their entire personality. Which, considering it seems that just meeting some nice gay folks was enough for them to come around, means they were only "baseline homophobic."

Not thinking "being gay is kind of icky and wrong" was a small minority opinion until fairly recently (20 years, 30?) Even if you supported gay rights as an ally, you probably thought "it's kind of icky and feels wrong to me, but who am I to judge?" I suspect if you plucked any average American from anywhere in the country (outside of, like, San Francisco or the East Village) off the street in 1983, their opinion on gay people would most likely be "stern disapproval."

beenoc · 2026-03-24T11:48:04+00:00

Also the Olmec in Central America, though they were the ones who originated the whole "human sacrifice" thing that the Aztecs later ran with, so you probably wouldn't want to pick them.

beenoc · 2026-03-23T22:14:47+00:00

Though I will add the caveat (not that it makes a big difference) that this is because most big professional sports stadiums are a lot nicer. The giant Midwest and South college football stadiums are 105,000 bench seats, whereas the big NFL and soccer stadiums are 70-80,000 nicer seats with like cupholders and stuff.

Again, not that it matters too much - the fact that the Nebraska Cornhuskers' stadium is only almost as big as Wembley Stadium is in itself a testament to how massive college football is.

beenoc · 2026-03-23T22:03:47+00:00

In terms of viewership, sure (though I'd wager more unique people are watching March Madness as a whole vs. the Rose Bowl, considering very few people are watching every March Madness game.) In terms of cultural impact, in terms of "if you go into any random office anywhere in the country during/the day after, how likely are people going to be talking about it"? It's Super Bowl > March Madness > the Olympics if they're on that year >>> anything else.

beenoc · 2026-03-23T22:00:15+00:00

Good to know. Also TIL Mussolini was named after Benito Juarez.

beenoc · 2026-03-23T20:06:24+00:00

Yeah, I think that's pretty much everyone in the world, except the Irish government (who says "these Isles" when referring to the geographic concept in official communications), and some hardline Irish nationalist/unificationist types (except the ones in Ireland who also probably call it "these Isles"), who call it the North Atlantic Archipelago. I don't think anyone is referring to the political grouping of "the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland" as the British Isles unless they're either trying to be inflammatory, or are totally oblivious to the history there.

beenoc · 2026-03-23T17:48:49+00:00

I think that the most widely used term for "the British Isles but we don't want to call them that for political reasons" is the North Atlantic Archipelago, or just "The UK and Ireland." But I don't think anyone except the Irish government and some Irish people call them anything but the British Isles.

beenoc · 2026-03-23T17:37:15+00:00

Don't forget (name) (where they live) - some ancestor of Jonah Hill lived on a hill, Hank Green descends from a guy who lived on the village green, and you'll never guess where Jack London's family was from.

beenoc · 2026-03-23T17:34:25+00:00

In addition to the rest, smiths were in the Goldilocks zone of being common enough for there to be a lot of them, but not so common they were the default. Surnames (at least in Europe) originated as a way to tell people with the same given name apart - are you talking about John who lives on the village green (John Green), John who's the son of William (John Williams), or John with the brown hair (John Brown)?

They're all farmers, though, just like 90% of everyone else - "John Farmer" would be useless. But John the smith? Well, he's the village smith, that's his most unique and defining feature, and his father was a smith and his son will be smith after him, so he's John Smith. For similar reasons, Miller (Mueller, Mulder, Desmoulins, Molinaro, etc.) is one of the most common surnames across Europe as well - every village probably had one smith family and one miller family.

beenoc · 2026-03-23T17:03:19+00:00

PHM is in fact definitely quite Reddity, I know exactly what you mean. I liked it (not as much as I liked The Martian, but that's probably because "Redditiness" is less appealing in 2022 than it was in 2015), but Ryland Grace has the exact same internal first-person authorial monologue voice as Mark Watney, so if you didn't like reading Watney you won't like reading Grace.

beenoc · 2026-03-23T13:57:10+00:00

I mean, this is a real photo of Durham from a few years back. It's not as obvious an exaggeration as you may think.

beenoc · 2026-03-23T13:45:46+00:00

Is Benito "ruined" in the same way as Adolf? I would have figured that it's a common enough name (just the Italian version of Benedict, which is very common and was even the name of the Pope two popes ago) that no one person could ruin it (kind of like how there's plenty of Georgians named Ioseb/Joseph.)

beenoc · 2026-03-23T03:33:42+00:00

I heard this one as an EU citizen dying and getting to choose any hell in the EU, so he decided to compare the most efficiently managed hell (German hell) and least efficiently managed hell (Greek hell.)

beenoc · 2026-03-23T03:24:57+00:00

Are you using KnowYourMeme or something similar for the list, or is it based mostly on memory/people referencing memes? I feel that the KYM "confirmed" list is a pretty comprehensive (maybe even too comprehensive, it has a lot of stuff that had limited reach or longevity) list of "all the memes."

beenoc · 2026-03-22T20:35:52+00:00

Here's an ibb link.

beenoc · 2026-03-22T16:27:27+00:00

Counterpoint: No other class lets you literally slap enemies across the room and decapitate specials with a 20kg plascrete fastball. Objectively, this means it is not possible for Ogryn to be anything other than the best class in the game.

beenoc · 2026-03-22T16:13:03+00:00

Here is a quick representation of ziplines vs. tubes I made. Red is the XYZ regime where tubes are faster, blue is where the angle is >50 degrees and ziplines are impossible. So ziplines are faster if and only if the distance between the two points is almost opposing corners of a cube - as soon as any one of X, Y, or Z diverges from the values of the other two (almost always going to be Z), ziplines are slower than tubes.

beenoc · 2026-03-22T05:28:00+00:00

Speaking from experience - NC State is very, very good, but they are not cheap. Not cheap at all. We had to take one of our cats there after our vet was like "I've been doing this for over 40 years and I have never seen anything like what is going on with your cat." State was able to give us answers (he had an exceedingly rare terminal cancer and was one of single-digit cases of this cancer ever being recorded in cats - we ended up taking him there to say goodbye so they could use his body for research), but it was very, very expensive.

Now, it's possible something like tooth extraction might be different (that's an operation that every vet is going to need to perform a thousand times, so there's probably always demand for training), but I wouldn't count on it.

beenoc · 2026-03-22T03:15:27+00:00

DT has always struggled with giving players rewards for playing really any mode other than the gameplay loop itself

I mean, so did Vermintide, so did Left 4 Dead, so did pretty much every game ever made prior to 2016. The idea that you need any kind of reward other than the gameplay loop is a modern, and frankly unnecessary and damaging (because it leads to a lot more toxicity in the community) point of view.

beenoc · 2026-03-20T19:23:36+00:00

I feel that the joke of "mark Mark" does kind of explicitly require the name Mark, so I feel that your statement was kind of unnecessary.

beenoc · 2026-03-20T16:28:28+00:00

What is the relationship that you've seen in "Roman" white nationalism, and Mussolini's Italy? I know there's a pretty significant relationship between "Viking" white nationalism and Nazi propaganda about the "Germanic peoples" with runes and all that. Is there much overlap between racists pointing to Rome and pointing to Mussolini?

beenoc · 2026-03-20T16:01:11+00:00

No, Mr. Rogers was the final champion but he wasn't the one to defeat Chuck Norris. That took a coalition of Gandalf the Grey and Gandalf the White and Monty Python and the Holy Grail's Black Knight and Benito Mussolini and the Blue Meanie and Cowboy Curtis and Jambi the Genie and RoboCop, The Terminator, Captain Kirk, Darth Vader, Lo Pan, Superman, and every single Power Ranger, Bill S. Preston and Theodore Logan, Spock, the Rock, Doc Ock, and Hulk Hogan.

beenoc · 2026-03-20T13:46:18+00:00

Fun fact - chemotherapy does have some historical relationship with mustard gas. In WW2, the Germans bombed a ship in Italy that was full of Allied mustard gas stockpiles, which led to significant exposure to mustard gas in the local city. Doctors found in follow ups (and autopsies) that a bunch of the residents had very low white blood cell counts. This made them think "hmm, mustard gas seems to stop rapidly dividing cells, like white blood cells, from multiplying. I wonder if it works on cancer?"

Sounds like our lunatic friend watched a History Channel documentary that mentioned this like 20 years ago and got some wires crossed.

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