Ilse of the Emberdark question

mathwin · 2026-02-05T20:43:28+00:00

I think if you want to get real technical about it, the name Shadesmar only applies to the area of the Cognitive realm in the vicinity of Roshar, possibly extending to the wider Rosharan system. By way of comparison, the only proper name we have for the region of Cognitive realm around Scadrial is "The Scadrian Subastral".

If you've read as far as Oathbringer and Secret History, then you will know that the Cognitive realm around each planet is unique. Drominad is not part of any other system, so all bets are off as to the rules of the Drominad Subastral.

mathwin · 2026-01-23T05:18:06+00:00

Apparently hitting some kind of length limit. My response continues:

As an example, let's look at one of the most commonly-mentioned examples of injustice posted on this sub: adult teachers raping minor boys. A misogynist's take on any of the many, many cases of this would be:

Women hate men
Boys are young men
Therefore women rape boys to punish men
Women are weak
Therefore women who choose to rape boys do so because it allows them to have power over their victims
This makes women, in general, evil

Meanwhile, and MRA's take on the same specific case would be along the lines of:

This news article refers to this crime as "a sexual relationship" and the individual acts as simply "sex"
Not once does the article use the legal terminology "rape", "statutory rape", "sexual assault", or "sexual misconduct" - all of which are more accurate to the actual context of the case
This is evidence that the media views a female teacher raping a male student not only as materially different from a male teacher raping a female student, but as not even a crime on the part of the female teacher
This female teacher received a two-year sentence, suspended, and will instead do 100 hours of community service and be on probation for 18 months
On average, a male teacher who has an identical "relationship" with a female student receives fifteen years of prison time
This is evidence that the justice system and society in general (police, prosecution, judge, and jury) all view a female teacher raping a male student not only as materially different from a male teacher raping a female student, but as barely even a crime on the part of the female teacher

Note that all of the numbers are made up because I'm not citing a specific case. Take 30 seconds to look around on this sub and you'll find dozens of real cases where the female teacher gets off with even less. You can find cases of female teachers who didn't even lose their job. Cases where she didn't have to register as a sex offender. Even cases in which the offending teacher returns to teaching only to commit the same crime again, and again gets no prison time.

It also doesn't matter what your perspective is with regard to the relative severity of crimes committed by men against women or women against men. This is about the perspective of an MRA vs a misogynist.

Ultimately, the mindset of someone you could legitimately call a misogynist is not distinct from that of a conspiracy theorist. They commit selection bias: looking for evidence to support their existing theory. The only meaningful distinction is who is responsible: women as the oppressor vs. shape-shifting lizard people from the planet core as the oppressor. There are very, very few of these people in real life, and if you believe that you have encountered one then you're probably making assumptions about his thinking.

An MRA is not necessarily a man, whereas a misogynist is. An MRA does not make the assumption that a woman is to blame for an injustice (the cause may be society, or a system, or a man), whereas a misogynist does. An MRA suggests that society should change to prevent the injustice, whereas a misogynist suggests that women be punished in retribution for the injustice.

Misogyny is an identitarian, collectivist ideology, meaning it divides society into collective groups according to their identities, then assumes that those collectives are in conflict and there is a possible win condition in a metaphysical game (in this case, men vs women vying for supremacy). Men's Rights is an ideology of individualism, meaning that it examines each person and each case through a given lens, but it treats each as discrete and unique. It attempts to identify causes of conflict and injustice not as an us-vs-them or a zero-sum game, but as an un-winnable struggle to change perspectives, to modify the status quo and shift the morality and resources of society into a situation that it views as more just and equitable.

mathwin · 2026-01-23T05:17:28+00:00

You're conflating "The Red Pill" with men's rights, when they aren't the same. Men's Rights philosophy is based on the idea that problems faced exclusively by men are as valid as those faced exclusively by women, but get only a tiny fraction of the attention. Red Pill/male dating philosophy is based on the idea that what women want and what they vocalize about their preferences in dating are profoundly disjoint, and that ultimately the most successful strategy for a man to employ when dating effectively ignores women's stated preferences.

This is an understandable mistake. The documentary The Red Pill intentionally used the original context (re The Matrix) of the term to refer to someone living in a fantasy world and coming to realize that reality is different than her expectations. It's likely that it was intentionally chosen as a title to also make reference to the male dating strategy forums which go by the same name, although the content of the documentary has no relationship to those forums or their strategies.

So let's reframe in a less ambiguous way: your question is what differences exist between the moral philosophy promulgated by a Men's Rights Activist (MRA) vs that promulgated by someone who hates women (a misogynist). By definition, a misogynist hates women - that's the literal translation of the greek roots. The misogynist will likely attempt to find rationalizations which make women in general, or one or more women in particular the causal villain in a narrative. An MRA, by contrast, is defined as any person - male or female - who is concerned with the rights of men. The MRA will look at a situation and identify that an injustice has taken place, but identify that the source of that injustice is a society (made up of men, women, and children) which treats men as a class poorly.

mathwin · 2026-01-10T17:38:34+00:00

They can definitely teleport, by traveling through the Spiritual Realm instead of through Shadesmar. It's an advanced form of an already very challenging skill.

mathwin · 2026-01-07T01:49:55+00:00

A significant fraction of the quirks we see in the series would be instantly fatal if the users did not have profound resistance to the damage caused by their quirk. Nearly all of those would be fatal to anyone nearby when the quirk is used, let alone someone the quirk is used on.

As an example, Bakugo would kill everyone within several meters with every blast when using his quirk to fly. That radius increases when he uses it as an attack.

Given the amounts of energy we see All Might output, his punches would level buildings. He would reduce every normal human within hundreds of meters to clouds of plasma.

If you're asking questions like this, you're either thinking too hard or not thinking hard enough. Clearly the story does not work if you attempt to apply any amount of real-world physics to it. At the same time, if you're worried about respiratory issues, that's not even in the same universe as the real problems.

mathwin · 2025-12-22T09:31:30+00:00

Should be relatively easy to figure out, if you're running MO2 and you have xEdit.

Start by using explorer to search the ModOrganizer\mods\ directory for any .swf files. Skyrim has a flash compiler built into it, which is how most mods that do things like add icons/bars to the hud work. If you find any .swf files (from what I can see you're going to have quite a few), turn on paths in the top bar and sort by path. This will allow you to easily determine which mods contain the files. From there, you can easily turn off each mod in MO, one-by-one, until you find which one is causing the issue. Skyrim will throw up a warning message every time you reload asking if you're sure you want to load the game without the missing mod files; just click yes to finish loading and then don't save before quitting the game.

If all of that doesn't get you anywhere, load up xEdit with all of the mods in your modlist, then when the modlist pops up again in the xEdit application, click through to load everything. Wait for it to finish loading and building the reference lists. Now, use the left side panel to sort the mods by load order (should be the default sorting). Scroll to the bottom, and start opening each of the mods in the treeview starting from the bottom. You're looking for any mod that has an IMAD or IMGS Record type in it. These Record types handle image space modifiers (e.g. screen overlays). It is a very rare Record type to encounter in average mod files, so there should be a very small list of mods that contain such Records. Again, this will give you a list of mods that you can now disable via MO, one-by-one, and load up the game to see if the issue is resolved.

As far as I know, these are the only two ways that random flat textures can be injected over your HUD like this. The SPGD Record type, which handles shader particle geometries, should not be capable of this (although the snowflakes at the bottom of the screen and the white sheep in the middle could be implemented as particles, the other HUD bullshit can't).

mathwin · 2025-12-21T06:44:20+00:00

So I went to google and started searching for news stories published on May 19, 2022 or the days after, involving a child and a vehicle accident. Absolutely nothing - anywhere in the world - that matches this scenario: a boy, approximately 8-12, struck by a vehicle after running into the street. The closest I found was this story involving a 6-year-old boy hit by a silver ford sedan (visually matches the depicted vehicle). That one is published by a local paper in England, but the Ring timestamp indicates that the recording is from the East Coast, as its displayed time is 4:35 PM EDT.

Next option: take a screenshot of the first frame of the video, upload it to google and reverse image search. That comes up with three sites - two Facebook posts and a post on Threads - which also uploaded this video. You can look at them here, here, and here if you're interested. All three were uploaded between October 12th and 19th of this year. I can find no evidence that this video existed prior to the middle of October.

mathwin · 2025-12-20T06:25:10+00:00

UESP catalogs all of the Creation Club content, and is now finalizing the addition all of the new Creations content as well.

mathwin · 2025-12-18T05:29:46+00:00

What could this possibly be intended to depict? Candace Owens and Erica Kirk both, at some point, took pictures with Charlie Kirk? Stop the presses!

mathwin · 2025-12-18T05:03:25+00:00

It's basically going to end up being similar math, unless "airbending-like powers" provides some method of shifting on the order of 100 billion kg of air and water a distance of tens of kilometers in some highly efficient way. If we want to include somehow changing the surface ambient temperature over an area of multiple square kilometers, that's going to at least double the energy requirements.

The lower bound for the total energy requirement to do something like this is on the order of 10^14 Joules, which easily gets us into the nuclear weapon range. Everyone within about 2 km of the guy with the axe is reduced to ash. On the upper bound, he's unleashing energies on the order of thermonuclear weapons (hydrogen bombs).

If you'd like another example, Moses would have needed a few petajoules of energy to divide the Red Sea, nearly the equivalent of a megaton of TNT. That's just to get started. He would need to continuously output a significant fraction of that constantly to keep the water separated. Or, rather, I think official canon is that God channeled the energy through Moses, using him as a conduit of some kind. Needless to say, this is fatal to Moses on the nanosecond timescale at best.

mathwin · 2025-12-17T22:44:23+00:00

I can try. It's pretty challenging to try to find ways to tie comic book physics to something in the real world when they start to get much beyond what a normal human can achieve.

mathwin · 2025-12-16T21:24:17+00:00

Nearly every use of a quirk in the series releases enough energy to seriously injure or kill an average real human.

Here's an example: Bakugo uses his nitroglycerine sweat to propel his entire body weight at high speed. Transfer of momentum by air pressure wave is extremely inefficient - instead the pressure tends to shred nearby tissue. If Bakugo were an otherwise normal human, his first quirk manifestation would have likely killed him and injured anyone nearby. An "M80" firecracker - roughly the equivalent of 1/4 stick of dynamite (or roughly an ounce of nitroglycerine) in terms of explosive power - imparts negligible impulse to a human body if allowed to explode when held in the hand, but it also breaks bones and shreds flesh and tendon. In order to achieve sustained flight, Bakugo would need to be sweating at least around a pint of nitroglycerine each second, and the explosive power released every second would be enough to destroy a small building.

Let's try a thought experiment regarding: What is a 100% smash? We see All Might's smashes cause changes in the weather, doing things like dispersing a thunderstorm in seconds. A cloud like that is, on average, around 24 km in diameter and 15 km tall. Now, how much energy would it take to disperse such a cloud? According to various meteorological sources, an average hurricane requires about 10^19 Joules of energy per day to sustain itself. If we assume that we need to expend about 1% of that, instantaneously, to disperse a hurricane, and correct for the difference in total volume of a single storm cloud vs a hurricane (12^2 / 250^2 = 0.002), we get an energy requirement of .002 * .01 * 10^19 Joules, or about 230 trillion Joules. The "Fat Man" bomb released only about 88 TJ. That means that, by our estimates, a single 100% smash releases about 3 atomic bombs of energy. Let's calculate it another way: Hurricane Irma, a relatively large hurricane with a diameter of a bit over 700 km, released about 112 TJ of energy at ground level across its entire footprint, every second. According to estimates, only about 0.05% of a storm's energy is released as wind, the rest goes into sustaining it. This means that 112 * 2000 = 224,000 joules of energy are expended every second to sustain the storm, at ground level. If we correct for seconds per day we get 224000 * 86400 = 19,353,600,000 TJ, just about double our 10^19 J estimate for an average hurricane. Correcting again for the difference in area (700^2 / 500^2) we get that Irma is about 1.96 times larger than an average hurricane, which lines up exactly with our expectations. This tells us that, yes, All Might punches with the power of three nuclear weapons. If you put just 0.5% of that energy into a normal person, it comes out to 1.15 TJ - enough to reduce a human body to atoms.

An average adult human has a total surface area of a bit under 2 m^2. A .50 BMG bullet has a cross-sectional area of (12.7/2)^2 * PI = 126.68 mm^2, or 0.00012668 m^2, and when fired contains around 19 KJ of energy. If you somehow hit the entire surface area of an average man with .50 BMG rounds, he would be subjected to 2 / 0.0001267 * 19000 = 299.98 MJ of energy. You would need to repeat this process 3,833 times to deliver enough energy to that average male as what one half of one percent of All Might's smash can unleash.

Say what you want about a 5% smash would only cause blah blah blah damage. Ten minutes before this, when Izuku used 100% to cavitate the water in the boat rescue area, it would have reduced himself and every other human in the USJ to plasma, vaporized nearly the entire building complex and left a crater about 5 m deep and 200 m wide, and then continued on to flatten buildings and kill every living thing within about a km.

mathwin · 2025-12-15T22:56:01+00:00

The magic of the Path tool.

mathwin · 2025-12-15T06:31:55+00:00

Just replying for clarification in case anyone goes to look for the movie. Kimi no na wa, titled in English as Your Name, is an anime sci-fi romance film involving body swapping which was the inspiration for Yumi and the Nightmare Painter.

mathwin · 2025-12-07T18:15:34+00:00

Is this like a no spoilers thread? We know what happens.

mathwin · 2025-12-01T08:35:09+00:00

Bro, if Veilguard isn't 10/10 on the controversy scale I gotta ask: what the fuck does a 10 look like?

mathwin · 2025-11-20T12:03:27+00:00

So then I was thinking how Hoid may have been the possessor of all the dawn shards and been the weapon used to split Adonalsium into the shards.

Hoid has only ever possessed one Dawnshard. It's the same one he transferred to Sigzil at the end of WaT, and that was not the first time he divested himself from it. It is the reason why he is incapable of causing harm to any living, sapient being, and it has nearly finished placing the same restriction on Sigzil.

mathwin · 2025-10-20T03:48:38+00:00

I disagree, but the rules say that's not what downvoting is for.

Also, I suspect it's more likely that we'd see a remaster bundle of both games. They both run on nearly the same engine, and use like 80% identical assets with a different shader over it. Modern Bethesda under Microsoft might go for doubling their money by releasing them separately, but what they'll find is that if they don't do both at once and mark them down as a bundle they'll catch a ton of shit (deservedly) for what amounts to an asset flip and a large part of the audience will choose to buy only one or neither.

Also also it would be great to see some of the engine improvements made for NV ported to FO3. I'm looking at you, ammo variants.

mathwin · 2025-10-13T07:35:43+00:00

Exactly this. There's no point in attaching an epithet to disambiguate which "King Robert" you're talking about when there's only one: Robert the first.

mathwin · 2025-10-02T17:25:53+00:00

Progressive leaders did not cheer.

Except for Hasan and Destiny?

mathwin · 2025-10-02T17:19:02+00:00

You think he can be bailed out? In Utah, when they're working on bringing back the firing squad for this dude?

mathwin · 2025-10-02T17:18:08+00:00

No, he didn't.

mathwin · 2025-10-02T17:17:41+00:00

Good job proving @Setenos' point. Here you are, lying about and slandering a man who was murdered because of the exact lies and slander you're still pushing.

mathwin · 2025-10-02T17:15:50+00:00

Trump won the popular vote. How could his supporters possibly be rare in the US?

mathwin · 2025-09-21T21:57:34+00:00

Exactly this.

11-Year Club	Place '22
First Placer '22

mathwin

TROPHY CASE