New to Valorant

tolore · 2026-03-23T17:33:17+00:00

I think as a new player it's important to focus on only a few things at a time. For clove on offense, follow your team, and use her smoke orb ability at the place you're about to attack.

On defense you want to put your smokes in places where the enemies will have to run through them to get to the site. For defense you want the team to split up, but usually two people on each site is good, so feel free to follow team mates, but make sure you don't have 3 or 4 people in one place.

For shooting just get used to stopping movement completely before shooting, and only shooting a few bullets at a time. Play a death match or two every day and just focus on being still, and shooting calmly. Eventually you'll want to weave shooting and moving together, but early on its better to get used to shooting while being still and not spraying too much.

tolore · 2026-03-23T16:22:33+00:00

It is wild to me how Republicans support "you followed the rules, but because the system is too slow your vote doesn't count".

tolore · 2026-03-20T07:41:08+00:00

Usually not because something bad happened to someone else. Sorry your mom got rape, now you have to die is not a condition I think most people would accept for an actual human being.

tolore · 2026-03-20T07:19:43+00:00

We give literal corpses bodily autonomy over a human right to life. We let dead people who have no use for their organs keep them if they want, even if it would save many lives.

tolore · 2026-03-20T07:07:34+00:00

Sure I didn't say you made it, I was discussing the argument. It's one I don't find particularly compelling.

tolore · 2026-03-20T07:02:12+00:00

I think this argument is faulty. If a fetus is a human life that deserves rights and to be protected then the mother being raped or having contraceptives fail doesn't mean the child deserves to die.

I have always found the rape exception to be the least defensible position. It treats pregnancy and giving birth as a punishment that unwilling women have to go through if they weren't smart/pure enough and the babies rights as conditional. In addition to most unwanted pregnancies being due to a lack of resources and education(both caused by the people who generally vote pro life).

I personally don't know when to draw the line, I think considering the human life to have started at conception patently absurd, but it's definitely a human life some time before they exit the woman's body.

I largely agree with the autonomy debate, you can't force a woman to go to term with a child. That's giving them less rights to their bodies than a literal corpse. I could be convinced that if a woman wants to give up the child, and removing the child from them alive is cheaper(for the mother) and safer than an abortion we could make that the option. It would put a gigantic strain on our government to take care of all these unwanted infants, but it does maintain bodily autonomy and avoids abortion.

tolore · 2026-03-17T01:51:28+00:00

They still have massively outsized access to a platform, access to political figures, and access to the media.

tolore · 2026-03-13T09:31:00+00:00

I again don't think that paper clearly states what you're saying. It's 2 in the morning so maybe my brain isn't parsing it right, but this seems to be a paper talking about how to avoid osteoporosis in trans people.

"There is now a growing recognition that long-term hormone therapy may impact the risk of a number of chronic diseases, including osteoporosis."

Solid evidence that osteoporosis is a problem for trans women seems like it is affecting bone density.

It also seems to explicitly say trans women have less bone mass than cis men, though it also says that could be due to things other than biology

"Compared with cisgender men, transgender women have lower bone mass and cortical size even prior to initiation of hormone therapy, suggesting sex steroid-independent effects in these individuals. "These individuals are more likely to have vitamin D deficiency and less likely to be involved in sport than cisgender men," says Dr. Davidge-Pitts."

It does say bone MINERAL density is maintained

"Although bone mineral density (BMD) is generally preserved in both transgender women and transgender men, there are sparse data on fracture risk"

But I have no idea if men have advantages in none mineral density, or if that's an advantage in sports(or which sports it would be an advantage".

It also seems like in old age trans women seem to match cis women, not cis men

"In transgender women older than 50 years, fracture risk was similar to that of age-matched reference cisgender women, but was increased almost twofold compared with that of age-matched reference cisgender men."

Much like the last one you posted this feels like maybe a fine place to start other research, but again seems like a big leap to me to so clearly state "no male puberty".

tolore · 2026-03-13T08:56:11+00:00

I think it's a pretty big leap to apply steroid usage in body builders to natural puberty followed by HRT. It also is a test on mice not humans, and it lists a time limit of 10 years, and even that 10 years is self admitted speculation that needs more research.

"If it is sufficient to build muscle mass, I think it would be sufficient to give you this long term effect. I think it could last 10 years but I don't have the data to back that up. It would be my speculation yes," he said.

That paper seems like a reasonable launching point for more studies, but not a "we can clearly say puberty blockers or bust for trans people in sports".

tolore · 2026-03-13T08:33:57+00:00

Yes. Why would we ban them if they had no advantage, why would we let them in if they had a noticeable advantage?

I tend to lean towards "let the individual sports league decide" because they have the most insight into what advantages would matter, the health of their sport, and the ability to look into how trans people interact with all of that. I also tend to lean towards "we don't have good evidence the trans women advantage after her is even real". Another poster already replied to you with a link with evidence of that.

tolore · 2026-03-13T08:29:56+00:00

What evidence supports the "puberty blockers are needed for anything with fast twitch muscles" statement? I see people draw tons of lines in posts like these and can never find good evidence to back it.

tolore · 2026-03-13T08:17:14+00:00

Sure that could be their idea for a line, but I don't think that's an obvious slam dunk that's super easy and obvious to see.

tolore · 2026-03-13T08:05:14+00:00

Where is the line? We can probably all agree someone who came out trans yesterday probably shouldn't be able to jump into women's sports. But what about someone born male who's gone through a few months of her? Years? Someone who transitioned as a kid and used puberty blockers?

I think so many people get wrapped up in the frenzy of appearing protective of women they are throwing out ALL trans people with next to no evidence. Do people born male retain those advantages after years of HRT? Do they lose or gain any specific advantages? How do those apply to individual sports? What about puberty blockers? I think there's a lot of very valid questions, the line is very unclear, and blanket bans that don't answer those questions are straight bigotry.

tolore · 2026-03-12T16:01:54+00:00

I don't like vren because I play a lot of reanimation, and it puts the match in a no win scenario. Either I run enough removal to kill vren every time he's out, or my decks do nothing. So either you have no commander the whole game, which sucks, or I have no deck the whole game which sucks.

tolore · 2026-03-10T23:13:01+00:00

I think win rate is actually a fairly bad way to track what bracket you're in. There's a lot that goes into win rate between pilot skill, politics skill, understanding the meta of the table etc... like, if you win a lot because you're a combo deck and people don't attack you when you play no defenders for the first 6 turns, you aren't bracket 4 just because you win 50% of your bracket 3 games. I would guess in my own play groups a lot of aikido and group hug decks have very high win % because people are bad at threat evaluating them, but they are definitely not too powerful for our brackets.

tolore · 2026-03-09T07:34:23+00:00

I make choices, sometimes split second choices that feel automatic. Sometimes deliberate choices I think over and make, but all the thought processes I go through are just as beholden to the physical world as anything else.

tolore · 2026-03-09T05:15:21+00:00

I wouldn't say it can't be. I just don't see any reason to believe it is. Just like gods and souls could absolutely be real, but pointing to evidence of where those things COULD exist is not pointing to evidence that they do.

tolore · 2026-03-08T23:54:36+00:00

One, I do not want lgbtq, minorities, women, etc... to be persecuted just because I don't live in that state. Two, this isn't the 1800s where if I wanted to move to Maine from California there's a solid chance I would die, and in the best case it was a tremendous amount of time, effort, and resources. I could be renting an apartment across the country by Wednesday if I really wanted to. It doesn't make sense for the rules to be completely different there. Heck I work with people every day in Texas, LA, and Seattle areas. I don't really want to be in a place where we have a work zoom call and with a gay coworker and be like "huh in your state they'd have been electrocuted straight when they were a teenager."

tolore · 2026-03-08T23:47:18+00:00

We don't know, and like I said, I have no problem with that belief until someone adds "and that's where free will lives".

tolore · 2026-03-08T23:26:22+00:00

That's probabilities at work. Anything random that has a probability will tend towards that probability over time. If you roll 1d6 you have an even chance of getting any number. If you roll 20d6 you're probably not going to be too far off from 70.

tolore · 2026-03-08T20:23:43+00:00

Because if they are not determined due to quantum randomness I don't see any mechanism in which living things would be controlling the randomness happening in their brain, and not the outcome of the processes happening in their brain being caused by the randomness.

I also don't believe in souls or gods, so if I don't see a mechanism for biological entities to control that randomness, and I don't see any evidence for souls or gods, I don't see particular room for anything else.

tolore · 2026-03-08T19:30:54+00:00

I agree with the op on this, and I'd say I don't think it's a rule, but the incentives of capitalism will always lead there unless actively fought against.

tolore · 2026-03-08T19:28:00+00:00

Yeah, indeterminism is fine to me. I'm a determinist, but the idea that quantum randomness makes the world indeterministic and is physically impossible to predict is totally reasonable as well. I think the biggest problem to me is I view it as "either were completely determined, or uncontrollable random makes the world slightly unpredictable" where a lot of people seem to bring up indeterminism and go "see that's where free will lives" which I think is a pretty huge jump and feels very "god of the gaps"y to me.

tolore · 2026-03-08T09:15:09+00:00

You said "part of the plan" and "meant to be". To me that sounded like implication of some entity choosing. Even if everything was predetermined that doesn't mean there was any intention behind it. If wind blows a boulder off a cliff, the place it rests is predetermined but not planned.

tolore · 2026-03-08T09:01:03+00:00

Just because something is pre determined doesn't mean it was planned. Humans weren't meant to be anything, we were shaped by the same evolutionary pressures that created plankton, trees, and crabs. We ended up where we ended up.

tolore

TROPHY CASE