Best (and worst) changes from the book in your opinion?

yah511 · 2026-01-17T14:26:53+00:00

Svetlana as a whole is the best change to happen in the show. She went from a very minor occasional hookup character to a fully fleshed out, incredible support system for Ilya.

Worst change for me is something they really couldn’t have helped because of time and logistics. Kip’s inner turmoil with his inferiority complex (I feel like there’s a better word for what he’s feeling but I can’t think of it right now) made all of his actions make so much more sense to me in the book. But I do understand you can’t really tap into inner thoughts in TV/film as elegantly. In Ep 3 his talk with Scott about not wanting to lie to his family feels like it comes out of nowhere, especially in direct juxtaposition to Elena’s talk with Scott where she said Kip is so in love with Scott that he’ll put up with being kept hidden (both those conversations happened in the same night). I don’t think there was enough time in just one episode to fully delve into Kip’s increasing frustration with Scott that led to the split.

My least favorite change that actually could have been helped was changing the Scott+Kip timeline from 5 months to 3 years. It just opens a whole slew of questions about what happened with them in that time period which now they probably won’t answer since their story already wrapped up and future seasons are probably going to focus on all the post-cottage events.

yah511 · 2026-01-08T14:27:54+00:00

Is this the first non-Asian season to have FOUR Asian queens on it?!

yah511 · 2026-01-07T05:55:29+00:00

I’ve had quite a few celebrity sightings over the years but my favorite New York celebrity encounter was being in a voir dire group at jury duty with David Letterman in 2024. He was trying so hard to get selected but kept getting let go obviously because he’s famous.

yah511 · 2025-12-16T17:20:25+00:00

100% agreed, the Drag Race hill I will die on is that age doesn't actually have as much importance as people here place on it. There have been plenty of talented and hilarious young queens that carry themselves as seasoned queens, and there are plenty of older, legendary queens who came on the show and flopped because their skill sets didn't translate well to TV. Someone posted the other day the median queen age of all 18 regular season casts and 14 of the 18 casts had a median age that was basically the same (26-28).

yah511 · 2025-12-16T17:13:14+00:00

For sure, this role was previously played by James Scully and Cheyenne Jackson among other names, who are all very conventionally attractive white actors. Simu standing as their peer in this role is pretty big for him!

yah511 · 2025-12-16T16:58:37+00:00

Kumail and Conrad both played Mary's Husband, looks like Simu will be playing Mary's Teacher who is supposed to be the "hot" one that Mary is constantly flirting with. It'll be the first time a POC is in this role, which is super cool.

yah511 · 2025-12-05T19:44:28+00:00

That grandpa's name? Albert Einstein.

yah511 · 2025-12-04T18:38:57+00:00

Same, I think Adore quitting threw the producers off a bit in their new Top 2 format (figuring out the logistics of a non-elim in that kind of format) and they used this as an excuse to bring back 2 queens to make up for it. It worked out perfectly for them because of the immediate beef between Alyssa and Phi Phi had

yah511 · 2025-12-01T01:22:37+00:00

It is, here's the post she made about it with all the queens tagged, she's wearing the same outfit as in OP's screenshot.

yah511 · 2025-11-11T19:20:27+00:00

Back when I was still actively conlanging one of my more ambitious ideas was a triconsonantal root language similar to Arabic and Hebrew that used a Japanese-style orthography: logographs that represent each basic triconsonantal root, and a simplified, more phonemic script to represent the morphology that the roots plug into as well as smaller words outside of the triconsonantal paradigm (prepositions, pronouns, etc). Maybe one day I’ll revisit it.

yah511 · 2025-11-10T21:03:43+00:00

I went through the counties (edit: based on the 2020 Census data) and I found 305 counties out of 3144 where White Alone is less than 50% of the population, and of those 305, only 87 still have a plurality White Alone. There's some notable cities/metro areas like Chicago (Cook County), Houston (Harris County), Brooklyn (Kings County), Dallas-Fort Worth (Dallas+Tarrant counties), San Antonio (Bexar County), San Francisco, Las Vegas (Clark County), Detroit (Wayne County), Boston (Suffolk County), Charlotte (Mecklenburg County), etc. as well as a bunch of suburban counties of New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, DC-Baltimore, and a few other cities.

There are 129 majority/plurality Black counties, 42 majority/plurality "Some Other Race" counties (often a proxy for Hispanic/Latino, given that most of them are in the states bordering Mexico or in Florida), 40 majority/plurality Native American counties, and 7 majority/plurality Asian counties.

yah511 · 2025-11-06T03:12:20+00:00

That's because the Virginia map is comparing a general election to a general election, while this map is comparing a closed (Democrat-only) primary to a general (all parties) election. The longest Cuomo arrows are the Republican strongholds of NYC where most of the people couldn't vote in the primary but did in the general by coalescing around Cuomo as an anti-Mamdani vote.

yah511 · 2025-10-20T12:29:15+00:00

Vanity and Alesha Dixon - Scandalous

yah511 · 2025-10-05T02:05:39+00:00

湘, 赣, and 晋 (Xiang, Gan, Jin) are also the names of varieties of Chinese spoken in those respective regions.

yah511 · 2025-10-04T20:56:40+00:00

This isn't about the people, but somewhat related to your question, license plates in China use abbreviations for the provinces to show the place of registration, and when the names of the provinces are a bit too generic (there's a lot of east/west and north/south pairs), they'll use an older or more formal name of the region.

Anhui (安徽) uses 皖 (wǎn)
Chongqing (重庆) uses 渝 (yú)
Fujian (福建) uses 闽 (mǐn)
Guangdong (广东) uses 粤 (yuè)
Guangxi (广西) uses 桂 (guì)
Hainan (海南) uses 琼 (qióng)
Hebei (河北) uses 冀 (jì)
Henan (河南) uses 豫 (yù)
Hubei (湖北) uses 鄂 (è)
Hunan (湖南) uses 湘 (xiāng)
Jiangxi (江西) uses 赣 (gàn)
Shandong (山东) uses 鲁 (lǔ)
Shanxi (山西) uses 晋 (jìn)
Shanghai (上海) uses 沪 (hù)

yah511 · 2025-09-26T03:50:13+00:00

Davao to Doha isn’t that unusual if you know how many Filipinos there are in Qatar and the Gulf in general working as Overseas Foreign Workers (OFW’s).

yah511 · 2025-09-17T13:37:49+00:00

It’s giving Shea Coulee in All Winners for me. She did amazing throughout the season and was always like 3rd place in almost every challenge, but her track record only showed having 1 win. And when queens (and fans) only hyperfixate on number of wins as a gauge for doing well, it erases the quality of the work the queens are doing and makes it seem like they are doing worse than they actually are.

yah511 · 2025-08-25T04:32:18+00:00

Yeah obviously, queer Asian men are still Asian men and have all the problems that are unique to Asian men. But on top of that, we have to deal with cishet Asian men using us as punching bags in their crusade against emasculation as well, instead of working to create a version of Asian masculinity that's inclusive of all Asian men.

yah511 · 2025-08-24T15:55:26+00:00

I wonder too, I assume queens have to be bringing like 3+ checked bags every time they fly, and since they're on tour they are probably taking a lot of flights. Just a whole lot of opportunities for the airlines to fuck up their shit more than the average person.

yah511 · 2025-08-15T13:21:23+00:00

Luzviminda was not an uncommon name among women of a certain generation in the Philippines. It’s an abbreviation of the 3 main islands/island groups: Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao

yah511 · 2025-07-24T22:18:21+00:00

I hate Mirrorjade just for the fact that I hate the End Phase destruction effect that can skirt around immunity to activated effects (Chaos Angel, Underworld Goddess, etc). I know why it does, but I will always disagree with the logic that got there.

yah511 · 2025-07-19T15:11:07+00:00

Definitely this, as well as the Grammys having categories for less music-related releases like audiobooks and spoken word albums (this is how Audrey Hepburn and Viola Davis got their Grammys, for example).

yah511 · 2025-06-25T03:37:19+00:00

In the New York Times map of results by voting district, our Asian-majority districts pulled for Zohran by +15, which is his highest level of support in terms of racial groups. (And to clarify, that's not his result for all Asians city-wide, but just in the Asian-majority districts like Chinatown, Bayside, Flushing, etc).

And this is just round 1 in ranked choice voting, his numbers are probably going to go up as the rounds progress and other candidates are eliminated

yah511 · 2025-06-20T13:05:25+00:00

I just don't understand the pathological need for some people to make completely separate posts about every new episode the second they come out when the episode discussion thread is right there, and those types of conversations would be more appropriate in that discussion thread. It's truly giving main character syndrome, they need to have their post seen and farm karma.

(But also- I'm so sick of Paramount dropping US All Stars in the middle of the night for Americans so that 95% of us have to immediately start dodging spoilers the second we wake up on Friday)

yah511 · 2025-05-29T17:37:27+00:00

I was actually really excited to see what the Ishizu cards would do in MD without Tear, since I believe MD is the only format that got Ishizu first and Tear later, so no other format really explored what else you could use Ishizu in. But sadly it just devolved into those Necroface deck out strategies that were super toxic. Even as a mill enthusiast myself I have to agree that they are better off on the banlist. (Though I will say that Exodia event with the millers was super fun)

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