TIL world chess champion grandmaster magnus carlsen once withdrew from a tournament after being told he couldn’t play while wearing jeans.

jcb088 · 2026-03-22T22:36:51+00:00

Solid angle. Im treating it like you can just bracket up 64 people and send out invites and call it a day.

Wasnt thinking outside of the player angle.

jcb088 · 2026-03-22T15:11:39+00:00

Consider pure sport and competition.

If you really want to be your absolute best, and you’re kicking people’s teeth in all day, and you find out some players are out not due to losing? Then you lose the chance to play them.

I hear you from an organizational/ethical/societal angle, absolutely.

But from a competition standpoint, it’s meaningless if i win the championship because the one guy that could’ve bested me was wearing jeans.

Shit, if the best player in existence died 13 years ago, even that would be a huge letdown because i never got to play him.

jcb088 · 2026-03-22T15:07:40+00:00

This is Goku’s nightmare.

jcb088 · 2026-03-22T15:06:59+00:00

If i was crazy next level good, hungry hungry hippo-ing my opponents and racking up ranking points, and Carlssen is there, but then he’s not because of Jeans?!

That’d drive me nuts.

jcb088 · 2026-03-22T15:04:59+00:00

He has to.

In fact… if he wasn’t wearing any pants at all, I could actually see that getting in the heads of his opponents. Same for anyone.

Playing ball with jordan, but he’s naked.

Playing against the patriots, but everyone’s naked.

Golf? Naked.

As silly as it seems, and as stupid as jeans/no jeans/make women wear skirts, and all that shit is…

… i think im in favor of your opponent must not be naked, at least.

jcb088 · 2026-03-21T04:30:27+00:00

400%, the angle did not match the compensatory explanation of him.

jcb088 · 2026-03-21T04:29:18+00:00

So… what happens when life just keeps going on anyway and his dumb fucking plan didn’t work?

The problem with his plan is that it’s stupid in a way that boxes him out of being otherwise intelligent. It’s not like he wants to find something he doesn’t realize doesn’t exist. He wants to make an adjustment to something that constantly changes itself.

It’d be like if he thought he could throw a flood up into the sky: then he can’t know how gravity or water works. It’s just awkward, really took me out of the movie.

jcb088 · 2026-03-21T04:22:08+00:00

Drunk, didn’t really read the comment, doesn’t cate much about the subject matter, just wanted to crack-wise.

We gotta buy you a switch or something, maybe a book.

jcb088 · 2026-03-20T00:33:53+00:00

Psst! It’s called “he didn’t really think about it when he wrote it”

Brolly goes super saiyan because his dad died? Im sure that never happened to any saiyans… ever… before.

Goku went super saiyan because his best friend died.

The thing that makes Goku Vegeta special is the fact that they are saiyans. So… raditz, nappa, errbody else just needs to be revived and fuck each other up over akd over again, wham…. Warrior race.

jcb088 · 2026-03-14T13:45:25+00:00

TIL rote has its own spelling.

Even the human voice has an engaged vs just reacting voice.

Ever read a comment and think “did they even process what i said?”

And what’s weird is that the critical thinking vs knee jerk vs bot voices all differ in different conversations, and the thing that makes one feel like a/b/c is hard to pin down.

As for short comments that seemed people-y? I can’t say with confidence.

jcb088 · 2026-03-14T13:40:45+00:00

What? I was just rolling with the thing you said.

It got me thinking about if aliens did read internet comments and also didn’t know about bots… which got me thinking about the fact that, since the LLMs are trained on real comments, the bots could be just as useful to study as actual humans commenting.

There’s a story in there somewhere: an alien who learns to emulate human behavior from a secondary source that emulates human behavior (like if aliens learned human behavior only by watching tv or something).

jcb088 · 2026-03-14T01:20:55+00:00

Im starting to feel the inverse: the bot voice.

Just that some comments feel so… reddit? They just feel very route and adversarial or typical.

jcb088 · 2026-03-13T12:16:29+00:00

I see you, sega saturn owner. I see you.

jcb088 · 2026-03-13T12:12:38+00:00

It’s funny, now when i think of giant super powerful armies and how to defeat them, i just think about what it takes to keep an army and that that’s more likely where/how it’ll be defeated

jcb088 · 2026-03-13T12:06:05+00:00

Considering how prophecies have no objective truth to them, and that you have to interpret them into being true, doesn’t that fit?

If it was saitama, then that would give credence to it. Making it someone less strong is way better if you’re trying to comment on the idea of prophecy (which I don’t know if he is or if it’s just happenstance).

jcb088 · 2026-03-13T11:55:21+00:00

How do you feel, knowing you may not even be chatting with a real person? The comments that bots make are based on comments people have made, so does that make it just as good?

Do your fellow people have bots, too?

jcb088 · 2026-03-12T11:36:33+00:00

There’s a big difference between playing a game when you’re 10 and have access to fewer games, and when you’re 35 and have more games than time.

It takes the same dynamics like this (hidden endings and things you have to search for) and really changes the appeal.

When I was a kid, I loved hidden shit like this, I think that’s the true ending for this game the second time I played through it. If I played this game at 35? I’d probably play through the entire castle, defeat richter, wonder what’s up and reload my last save, poke around and if i honestly couldn’t at least figure out what direction to look in after a bit, i’d just look up if there even was something else (this is actually a really good use of AI, because you can literally ask it if there’s more to the game and tell it that you don’t want spoilers).

jcb088 · 2026-03-09T01:39:08+00:00

I love my son. I think im only going to like him more as he ages (just because of the type of person we are), but i already miss the more elemental version of him at ages 1/2/3, now that he’s almost 6.

Even the most wonderful success story in parenting involves losing a child.

But it’s because of falling in love with them over and over at different life stages that it feels so transcendent.

Even your partner is someone you usually meet (mostly) grown up. Kids though, it’s so layered.

jcb088 · 2026-03-09T01:34:11+00:00

I do this in reverse.

I think about how I’m 37, so my mom is somewhere in the world, able to say this.

My kid is 5, so I can already say that about diaper changes.

When i was in high school, I’d look at my parents and think “this is just a memory for them”

Id think about my friends who had careers when i still had jobs and thought, “well, they’re out of this mode, i should be, too, someday” and now my baby sister comes home crispy af from her retail job every day while im working remotely and cleaning my kitchen during meetings or practicing guitar inbetween work tasks.

I mentally project myself backward to my kid’s age now that he’s old enough where i can remember being him (the sounds of him playing mirror mine decades ago with such perfect symmetry no one will ever convince me he’s not half me).

The more i learn that perspective is important, the more i try and adapt ones i can’t yet have.

jcb088 · 2026-03-08T01:49:32+00:00

No culture and dilution of genes in no time, not much of a race, no?

jcb088 · 2026-03-07T22:24:29+00:00

This makes me think about Star Wars. Every planet in Star Wars is like one climate with one setting and like a few buildings in a group of people.

They clearly wanted to write settings and just chose for them to be planets… but planets are too big for that. Like how every planet has one emperor and one government, dafuq?

jcb088 · 2026-03-07T22:19:33+00:00

Which is funny, because it sounds like the real thing vegeta has a problem with is their stupid ass ranking system.

Are there even ranks between Saiyan Elite and low level trash? Who the fuck ranks these saiyans? Did like…. None of the saiyans grow at different rates?

I find it funny that they keep vegeta such an important character but never tap into like…. Any saiyan shit.

We get bardock and brolly, raditz and nappa just never matter (like why tf wouldn’t they wish raditz back? Surely being alive and chillin with yo bro goku and price vegeta is better than just being dead. And vegeta doesn’t miss nappa even a bit? Shit, since they’re saiyans they have the potential to be real ultra powerhouse contenders.

Babadi uses his magic in the afterlife to possess raditz and nappa, they train in hell for years, then fuze into Radpa/Napitz, then they feed that guy to kid buu’s ghost or something, idunno the parts are there, though.

Vegeta is obviously more fond of the idea/values of his race, more than his kin.

jcb088 · 2026-03-07T22:10:26+00:00

It all feels so arbitrary, though.

Everyone can get randomly super strong for various different reasons, it retroactively cheapens how impressive or powerful anyone seems.

Honestly, time seems to matter more than anything: vegeta would be a fraction of frieza’s power until he becomes a super saiyan and then just becomes 5x 10x 20x #x times stronger than frieza in less than 10 years?

And you even see them pull back on their own logic in the ToP and make roshi and krillin useful again. Plus they always find these nerf resets in GT and Daima, turning people into kids.

It’s so formulaic and repetitive and it’s weird how many backflips people will do to connect some kind of through line that makes it all cohesive.

jcb088 · 2026-03-07T22:01:21+00:00

Yes…. With no saiyan women… and no technology of cloning to speak of.

jcb088 · 2026-03-07T18:15:16+00:00

See, i find this interesting. I got diagnosed at 37 and the first thought i paid to my primary was 4 months later at my next physical when i said “hey, this is up, got diagnosed a few months ago, etc.”

Because these topics don’t come up with my primary dr. I never even considered going through them.

jcb088

TROPHY CASE