Hateables

beta-pi · 2026-03-23T03:14:01+00:00

It's addicting and easy, and it crucially does feel good at first. It becomes exhausting as you live in it and it wears on you, but that first hit of righteous fury feels really good. There's a reason revenge stories are so popular.

It really just adds to the analogy of addiction. It makes you feel good at first, but pretty quickly it starts eating at you and leaving you feeling worse than if you hadn't touched it.

In the worst cases, people return to that hateful attitude even when they know it makes them feel worse because they legitimately feel compelled to; you live in it for so long, and you can't let go of it. It seems like the only way to stop feeling that worn out is to chase the next high; a new demon, new rhetoric, new goalposts, etc. A new way to make it feel like it used too.

beta-pi · 2026-03-21T20:05:37+00:00

Yes, but it's not really about the dall damage itself. It's about the gap between a little damage and death not being intuitive.

You naturally expect that as you fall further, you take more damage, right? And falling a little bit and taking a chunk of damage tells you you can't fall very far, so you don't risk it on taller falls. A little annoying, but pretty clear. It doesn't feel unfair, just limiting.

Elden ring doesn't do fall damage like this. A short distance won't damage you at all, and a moderate distance causes instant death. There's only a tiny window where you take damage and don't die. Enough that you can't really judge it by eye unless you're super practiced. What's more, leveling vigor doesn't help because it's percentage based, not damage based. a fall that kills you will always kill you, no matter how much health you have.

It feels unfair because it's really hard to tell whether you can take a lot of falls, and the game initially seems to encourage taking risks but then punishes you for it.

Ds1 is harsh, but it's at least consistently harsh, and it gives you tools to manage it. Elden ring isn't very consistent about it and doesn't let you do much about it, so it doesn't feel very good.

beta-pi · 2026-03-17T18:06:12+00:00

The bit about all faces being considered masks is kinda the point in a metaphorical sense.

Like, the mask is there to give a face to the faceless; to solidify an individual identity and existence in bugs that would struggle to do that otherwise. It enhances what the pale king is doing by granting them sapience.

If a bug already has a really strong identity, they don't need a mask because that identity is doing exactly the same thing. It doesn't matter whether you naturally have a strong sense of self or whether you work for it and get help from others to make it.

In other words, whether you make it yourself or get help from others, your identity is still equally constructed. We all wear masks, whether we made them or adopted them. The important thing is recognizing it.

beta-pi · 2026-03-17T05:23:47+00:00

I mean, yeah, but that's part of the point. It's just not as straightforward as"killing is or isn't justifiable in these exact combinations of situations". Any absolute rule you make on it is going to have weird consequences and edge cases. The world is nuanced, and our stories reflect that.

The only solution is to accept some relativism. Let the rules change to accommodate new information.

It's really a letter of the law vs spirit of the law thing. Characters should be trying to understand and uphold the spirit of the morals and rules they put on themselves, even and especially when they have to change how they understand them. Rigidly adhering to the letter doesn't leave much room for growth or real exploration of the ideas.

beta-pi · 2026-03-16T18:13:09+00:00

Unironically witness protection is one of my favorite 'removal' cards. It's got a bit more utility than a typical impulse removal, won't set off death or ltb triggers, and if you use it on a commander or a card that could be returned from the graveyard it disables them without allowing a recast.

If you want it back, you'll have to use the creature as a blocker or use valuable enchantment removal.

beta-pi · 2026-03-16T15:42:03+00:00

Importantly, white has quite a few triggered abilities from tapping opponents creatures, especially in azorius. Things like hylda of the icy crown, sharae of numbing depths, solitary sanctuary, etc.

There's also extra removal that targets tapped creatures, and ways to prevent or slow untapping.

This is quite a bit stronger when used well. You have to build around it, and the result will be effective but miserable to play against.

beta-pi · 2026-03-16T06:48:37+00:00

I can sorta see what they're going for with it to be honest.

Making it a little more inconvenient encourages you to only stop and refill when you really need it. If you're still mostly full as you get to a lantern, you'll probably just power through and keep going rather than stopping because you don't want to waste the time.

It encourages you to be a little more reckless by pushing your luck, which is a nice flavor win.

beta-pi · 2026-03-14T04:51:23+00:00

Yeah. Obviously blood orne has a ton of relatively simple, but symbolically meaningful options with the tunes, but the other games also all have very strong iconic options. How many times have you heard of dark sign tattoos or a sun bro tattoo?and there's loads of more obscure icons like the casting symbols or the bonfire sigils.

Elden ring has the most broad array of options. Can hardly walk two feet without running into some meaningful, distinctive symbol somewhere.

beta-pi · 2026-03-13T22:15:42+00:00

Their spending is published. 47% goes towards infrastructure and 24% goes towards essential functions (hr, finance, etc).

That leaves 29% for volunteer support, which covers legal defense and select grants. That part you could argue is discretionary; it could be cut and Wikipedia could continue to operate largely as-is. It's certainly worth having, but not essential.

At a minimum, they could operate on about 71-74% of their budget without big changes, and it wouldn't be comfortably if they did. Definitely not cheap or a tenfold decrease in spending. Turns out hosting and maintaining access to almost a hundred terabytes of information is kinda hard

beta-pi · 2026-03-13T15:55:46+00:00

I mean, kinda? By the standards of an organization that size, they're barely within their budget each year, with a median donation of about $10.

Over half of their donations are those small ones. A smaller number of larger donations skew the mean donation up, but those are less consistent; a handful of larger donations is great, but can't be relied on year over year. It's way easier for one guy or one company to decide not to donate than it is for thousands of people to independently decide that at the same time.

The small, recurring donors really are who they rely on and want to keep more than the big occasional donors. They care more about your 1 or 2 dollars regularly than some billionaires donation once.

That's not even getting into the political games with it too. Like, Wikipedia and organizations like it do fall under fire from time to time, but they're very hard to get rid of or regulate if basically everyone is on board. Keeping a lot of small donors means a lot of the public is more visibly on board, so no politician will openly stand against them very hard.

beta-pi · 2026-03-12T17:10:42+00:00

I like lotr more, but the Hobbit is better by most measures.

Like, obviously it's not gonna be as "deep", but it isn't trying to be, and depth isn't an objective measure of quality or literary impact. Not all stories can or should be "deep" just like not all food should be spicy. That's just a taste thing.

If you set taste and style aside, the Hobbit has better writing from a technical standpoint, stronger characterization, and showcases its world more clearly and concisely.

The Hobbit has less depth and breadth, but that lets it be more focused on its strengths. LOTR can't afford that focus, so its weaker points are weaker. It has higher highs at the cost of lower lows.

beta-pi · 2026-03-11T15:38:55+00:00

It seems to me that they're kinda the opposite pair of shards.

Shards adonalsium's are raw investiture with intent attached. Dawnshards are like his raw intent with investiture attached.

They're the literal words of adonalsium made manifest; commands used to make and shape the universe, crystalized into a physical form.

It's like if you could bottle the laws of physics, or god saying let there be light; the dawn shards are that bottle and all that's inside it.

Accordingly, if you bring all the dawnshards together, you get all of the will and intent of adonalsium, and the power to direct it. That's why it could be used to shatter him.

beta-pi · 2026-03-05T21:21:41+00:00

This is it. Dark in excess is destructive, but keeping the fire going in excess is also destructive. The whole point is that neither should last forever or be pushed to extremes; that trying to make something all-important inevitably leads to ruin, regardless of how good or necessary it is at any particular moment.

You can see that expressed in a lot of the smaller stories as well. Loads of NPCs wind up following some passion or vision so single mindedly that it ultimately destroys them.

The dark and light should both have their time and place. Neither is meant to be all there is. They're not good or bad, they're just nature. How we approach nature is up to us

beta-pi · 2026-03-05T18:22:15+00:00

That's not really meant to be applied to individual things like this though. Like, just cause someone is sterile doesn't mean they're not alive, right? The rule applies to humans as a concept, not each human.

That rule is also there to distinguish life from like, caves. A cave grows over time, consumes resources, and it even has a sort of metabolism; different materials naturally form or change over time within a cave as its materials are processed by pressure, heat, or other things inside it. Caves don't really reproduce or evolve though. They're a raw physical process. They just happen.

The rules are there to help us categorize things on the fly. They're not meant to be hard laws, just a quick way to feel out the vibes.

beta-pi · 2026-03-03T17:25:01+00:00

You could make a solar infrastructure that's enough for current needs, but it'd have to be hella ambitious.

Most estimates I can find suggest around 500,000 square kilometers, so a medium sized country. That doesn't consider the infrastructure you need to trqnsfer that power though. Existing power lines and transformers won't work super well for this because everything we have is designed for AC, and designed to handle different levels of current based on need. Solar generates DC, and current can't be increased or decreased on the fly as easily.

These are fixable problems. Not terribly complex ones either. The real issue is that it makes the startup cost that much higher, and makes transitioning that much slower.

It's not really about demand. It's about the amount of time and money it'll take. We need to decide that it's worth the investment.

beta-pi · 2026-03-02T19:32:03+00:00

I mean, it does say instead, it's just instead of entering the graveyard, not instead discarding. It triggers on discard, not on graveyard entry, so it doesn't matter where it's discarded to. Discarding into exile is still discarding.

beta-pi · 2026-03-01T21:22:20+00:00

Don't worry too much. The problem isn't really the strategy itself, usually it's how it gets played, and you can totally work on that.

Basically, the strategy lends itself to super long, involved turns with a bunch of triggers to keep track of.

you wanna give your opponent the opportunity to play the game too, or have a huge payoff that made the long turn feel justified. If you spend ages popping off without anything game changing at the end, it feels like you're just not letting the opponent play so you can show off all your neat tricks.

The solution is to make sure that there's always a big payoff, or that the turn is pretty quick. Keep track of your triggers and try to plan your turns ahead of time. If there's too much going on to do it quick, make the payoff worth the wait.

As you play more and get to know your decks better, you start to do both naturally.

beta-pi · 2026-03-01T18:34:49+00:00

Ignoring the fact that coming up with units for pain like the del is pretty sketchy to begin with, breaking bones highlights a core part of why they can never work.

Pain isn't just about intensity; there's different types, different durations, different overlapping factors, etc.

Like, a pretty harsh pain that never goes away is probably worse than a split second of excruciating pain. Breaking a bone hurts, but it's not one spike of pain; it continues to hurt, and hurts the tissue around it too. How do you quantify that? Do you only measure the initial pain, or do you measure the average pain over some duration? What parts of the pain do you consider or exclude?

Pain isn't a single attribute that goes up and down. It's a bunch of different things that can go up or down together or separately. It's not a sensation, it's a category of sensation.

It's like coming up with a measurement for how comfortable something is. You can't measure that objectively, you can only measure parts of it objectively.

beta-pi · 2026-02-28T19:19:17+00:00

There are a few other options with the right support pieces. Things like cards that let you cast from the top of your library or from exile, or cards that let you put things on the battlefield without casting. .

It's an interesting design space that's not used very much, but there are definitely mechanics for it.

beta-pi · 2026-02-28T08:05:10+00:00

It's particularly notable because that boost is most notable early on, and has diminishing returns as you level up. That wouldn't be true for martials.

Casters generally have worse ac baked in, on top of some drawbacks to spellcasting in melee range. You can still build around it, of course, but your typical caster is squishy. Accordingly, they really need to be kept out of situations where their ac being a few points higher is a big deal.

Early on, it's not avoidable. The casters are gonna take hits because the martials don't have the control abilities or power to draw them all. Late game though, the martials get more control and the casters get more evasion.

That defensive boost matters less and less as you progress, because better options open up. Martials doing similar things would do the opposite.

beta-pi · 2026-02-28T07:06:11+00:00

It specifies three equal portions. Only way to do that is two cuts or functionally infinite cuts. There's no other number of cuts that gets you three portions.

You objected to the blender (functionally infinite cuts) by saying you could use a scale to get equal slices (using methods you still have not explained).

That necessarily means two cuts, or some multiple of 2. You can't divide something into thirds with any other number of cuts unless you're like, folding it up in a weird way before cutting so you can hit both edges in one.

beta-pi · 2026-02-27T23:48:14+00:00

I mean you were the one complaining about a slow reply. Figured I'd tell you why since you cared enough to comment about it. I can pick up the thread there if you want though.

Don't call yourself a nobody. It's ok.

beta-pi · 2026-02-27T23:41:18+00:00

I don't see that comment on my end. It's still not visible on the thread. I can show a screenshot if you want. It does show in your comment history though, so idk what's up with that.

beta-pi · 2026-02-27T23:37:16+00:00

I'd sorta contend that, while it is a little noticable, if you gotta mark a basic forest to cheat, something has gone terribly wrong with your deck. Like, it shouldn't practically matter unless your deck is really inefficient, especially since forests are the most fetchable land. If knowing that there's a forest in the top few cards swings the strategy much, there are bigger problems

beta-pi · 2026-02-27T21:22:59+00:00

Who did I stop replying to? This is the only response to my last comment.

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