ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
ToaKraka
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3d ago
the DC–Boston Corridor
That's under the looser US definition of "urban". Under the stricter UN definition, there is no continuous urban corridor, so in my comment I was referring only to New York City (along with Newark, Long Island, etc.).
ToaKraka
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3d ago
This is somewhat addressed in my mega-city comment.
From a glance at the downloadable dataset, using the very-roughly-equivalent criterion "density ≥ 7500 per km2 and area ≥ 67 km2" (which is all that I feel like figuring out in QGIS—I used the "reclassify by table" and "polygonize" tools):
Mega-City One (393 km2) is the only US mega-city. Los Angeles (60) is not yet worthy of the title Mega-City Two.
Mega-Ciudad Mexico is gigantic, at 673 km2. Guadalajara (152) and León (72) also qualify, but Monterrey (56) does not.
If you keep going south, Tegucigalpa (92 km2) and Managua (86) qualify as mega-cities, but Panama City (53) does not.
London, 316 km2; Paris, 344; Brussels, 67; Berlin, 88; Istanbul, 230; Cairo, 593; Beijing, 537; Tokyo, 1498; Jakarta, 1865; Lagos, 463; et cetera.
A stray comment on the culture-war thread from two weeks ago reminds me that, IMO, people on this website have been talking very loosely when they compare "urban", "suburban", and "rural" living.
The definitions endorsed by the United Nations are roughly as follows.
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Urban: ≥ 1500 people per km2 (6.1 people per acre)
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Suburban: ≥ 300 people per km2 (1.2 people per acre)
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Rural: < 300 people per km2 (1.2 people per acre)
However, six people per acre actually isn't that dense. The US's IZC (International Zoning Code) is not necessarily authoritative, but in its single-family and two-family residential zones it permits density of up to six dwelling units per acre, implying 15 people per acre at 2.5 people per household.⁎
Likewise, a representative comment describes suburbs as follows:
Most suburbanites are not fleeing urban disorder; they're chasing suburbia. No amount of urban green space can ever replace a private backyard where you can grill and watch the kids and dog run around and plant a personal garden. No amount of smart planning can replace not sharing walls, floors, and ceilings with strangers. No high-quality public transit system can ever replace the freedom provided by American car culture.
Yet, if you look at a random US "city" in Google Maps, you will see lots of single-family houses with their own backyards and limited access to mass transit.
So, what do you actually mean when you say "urban", "suburban", and "rural" living? Maybe it's something like this.
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Urban living: Row houses and apartment buildings, with incidental retail
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Suburban living: Single-family and two-family houses, and nothing else
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Rural living: Incidental single-family houses in land that is largely agricultural or undeveloped
⁎With tongue significantly less than halfway in cheek, I previously suggested that the threshold for a fourth "mega-city" category in the UN's framework might be set at 7500 people per km2 (30 people per acre). This matches the IZC's upper bound for multifamily residential zones (12 dwelling units per acre), past which commercial/residential zones with unlimited dwelling-unit density must be used instead.
ToaKraka
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3d ago
ToaKraka
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4d ago
Testosterone is a hormone. Even Wikipedia files non-transgender applications under the main "hormone replacement therapy" page, and relegates transgender applications to a separate "gender-affirming hormone therapy" page.
ToaKraka
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4d ago
Scott Alexander's official response
Thanks to people who chimed in with concerns about the most recent book review finalist, This Is Going To Hurt, being partially AI-written. In the comments of the contest rules, I said that “You may use AI for research and to help you with small writing tasks, but the large majority must be written by you.” This was in the comments and not the formal rules, but I think there’s a general understanding that using AI in what is at least partly a writing contest is against the spirit of the exercise. On the other hand, this was a joint entry by two contributors, and one of them didn’t use AI. My splitting-the-difference decision is that I won’t disqualify this entry, I’ll let its many detractors vote against it organically at the final vote, and the various finalist perks (free subscription, right to pitch me pieces, prize money if it wins) will go only to the contributor who didn’t use AI. Next contest, I’ll try to have a firmer policy, something like “any entry with a greater than 5% AI-written Pangram score is disqualified, and everyone in a joint entry is responsible for making sure their co-contributor doesn’t bring them over this limit”.
ToaKraka
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4d ago
Sparkling apple juice is available as well.
I don't think it would make sense to put a carbonated drink in a punch bowl.
ToaKraka
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4d ago
Is the carbonated grape juice in the US typically bought as something other than a non-alcoholic alternative to a wine-drinking event?
It does always seem to be dressed up in a fancy glass bottle with foil on top, so I guess not.
ToaKraka
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4d ago
ToaKraka
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4d ago
using monospaced text to simulate a table
what_year_is_it.jpg
| London, England | Kazan, Tatarstan | |
|---|---|---|
| Expectation | White people drinking tea | Bearded Muslims glaring at you |
| Reality | Bearded Muslims glaring at you | White people drinking tea |
ToaKraka
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4d ago
The people who claim they've always loved to use em dashes before can go suckstart a shotgun.
That's a very harsh statement. I have been using em dashes on Reddit and on this website ever since I realized that Markdown allows users to type the HTML named character reference "&m dash;" (without the space) rather than forcing them to copy-and-paste the character from an external program.
ToaKraka
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4d ago
ToaKraka
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5d ago
Page with several hundred fun LLM prompts
For images and videos, see 4chan (/g/, /gif/, /aco/, /trash/, etc.).
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Carbonated grape juice, USA (sparkling grape juice): 6.7 $/L
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Grape juice and seltzer water: 1.6 $/L
Very interesting.
ToaKraka
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5d ago
My parents were telling me to drink grape juice diluted with seltzer water before it was cool.
Animal Crossing, Pokémon Snap, and Firewatch come to mind as fairly chill experiences where the slow pace is part of the appeal.
More relevant in the context of long-distance travel are Death Stranding and American Truck Simulator. Note that American Truck Simulator's map is scaled down from real life by a factor of 20, and the largest of Death Stranding's three maps (across which you literally walk) is only about 2.5 miles × 2.5 miles.
ToaKraka
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6d ago
Possibly-relevant video: Can You Play Daggerfall Without Fast Travel?
ToaKraka
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7d ago
Note that she has used AI-generated images in the past, so some of the images here may be AI-generated as well.
I got a bunch of photos, some AI and some real (including a few of myself and friends across different ages)
I collected ∽260 images of men’s faces, most of them AI generated. I tried to mostly get images of men who looked like they could be 25-40yo, but with a few outside of this. I collected the AI images from both midjourney (which looked more professional/stylized), and also ‘thisfacedoesnotexist’, which looks more like your uncle’s profile photo on facebook. I also included a few submitted by male friends who wanted to know how hot they were.
I collected ∽240 images of women’s faces, most of them AI generated. I just default scraped a bunch of them, with the only stipulation being that they had to look reasonably above 18, and had to be plausibly fertile (with only a few exceptions).
Some of the non-AI generated ones I took from a public directory of images; a few were submitted by some of my female friends.
ToaKraka
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7d ago
Relevant Wikipedia pages:
ToaKraka
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7d ago
Much of the imagery and audio in this game has noticeably lower resolution/fidelity than one would expect in a PC game, presumably because it was just copied from the original mobile version.
ToaKraka
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7d ago
The users of 4chan's /v/ (video-game) board often post titillating images (both official and unofficial) of characters from various gacha games—Goddess of Victory: Nikke, Blue Archive, Senran Kagura: New Wave, etc. Occasionally, they also post videos (both official and unofficial) making fun of the rather pitiful-looking gameplay in Goddess of Victory: Nikke. However, it recently occurred to me that I had never seen any gameplay of other gacha games.1 Therefore, I investigated Blue Archive (source of such prominent sex symbols as Ichinose Asuna, Izayoi Nonomi, and Hanekawa Hasumi), and found it more of a game than I was expecting it to be.
The gameplay is mostly, but not completely, auto-battling. You set up a unit of six characters (girls wielding guns), of whom four are "strikers" who traverse the 3D battle map and two are "specials" on the sidelines. (On the battle map, the strikers are represented with chibi/SD 3D models, significantly different from the 2D art that you see in the menus.) The characters have both passive skills that activate automatically and active skills that must be activated by the player.
Each character is a tank, a damage dealer, a buffer, or a healer. Enemies include grunts (rifle infantry, small flying robots, etc.), snipers (they hide in the back and attack the player's damage dealers, encouraging the player to counter-snipe them with his damage dealers' active skills), minibosses (large humanoid robots, tanks, etc.), giant bosses (in certain game modes), and even duplicate playable characters with their own active and passive skills.
Characters and enemies also have weapons and armor (two separate characteristics) in a simple rock-paper-scissors system. Prior to each mission (which, in the main story mode, comprises multiple separate battles on a very simple strategic map—there are several other modes), you get to see what enemies you will be fighting, and must assemble your unit in order to take advantage of this system accordingly.
Outside of gameplay, the interface is surprisingly good for something that obviously was designed for phones. There's no right-click, but left-clicking on any item reveals a drop-down menu listing all the places where that item can be obtained—not just "you can get this item by completing missions", but "you can get this item by completing Mission 4-3; click this button to go to that mission"! Keyboard shortcuts, including use of the Escape key to cancel, also have been implemented.
This game has been accused of catering to pedophiles and ephebophiles. If you care about that:
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Nearly all the playable characters explicitly are listed in their biographies as being under 18.4 As mentioned above, during actual gameplay the characters are represented, not with sexy 2D art, but with unsexy chibi 3D models.5 However:
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Each active skill plays a fancy animation when you use it. When performed by characters who wear miniskirts, these animations often include suggestive camera angles, all the way up to (non-blatant) panty shots. Additionally:
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Some enemies are delinquent students, presumably in the same age range as the playable characters. In that capacity, they show up in battle maps (again, as unsexy chibi 3D models) wearing miniskirts, with (blatant) panty shots in the dozens when they are knocked unconscious.
After 20 hours of play, the game seems reasonably fun to me. But my new-player bonuses haven't yet run out, so I haven't yet had to deal with the stamina system.
1Other than Gundam Battle Operation 2, whose praises I have sung before. Unfortunately, however, that game is PVP-focused, and in that context has so few players on PC that queue times for matches on that platform are absolutely intolerable.2,3 As determined from my multiple terabytes of recorded footage, I played it from 2023-05 (the PC launch) to 2024-08 (when a bug was causing the game to repeatedly crash during matches and then give me a penalty for leaving the matches early), and from 2025-02 to 2026-01. RIP.
2Unless you go out of your way to play only during the narrow daily peaks in player count. And, even if you go to all that trouble, the other players may be filling the queues for frantic high-cost matches (e. g., Unicorn Gundam vs. Kshatriya) and leaving empty the queues for slower-paced lower-cost matches (Zeta Gundam vs. Gundam Mk-II).
3The game also is available on PS4 and PS5, where it allegedly has more players. But I definitely have no interest in buying one of those.
4According to the wiki, the ages of the playable characters (including variant forms of the same character) are as follows.
| Age | Count | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 18 | 7 | |
| 17 | 80 | |
| 16 | 95 | |
| 15 | 77 | |
| 14 | 2 | Guests from A Certain Scientific Railgun |
| 13 | 0 | |
| 12 | 1 | Another Railgun guest |
| 11 | 3 | |
| Unknown | 6 | Young-looking |
| Top secret | 4 | One character with four variant forms, two older and two younger |
| Total | 275 |
Therefore:
| Age | Count | Proportion (%) |
|---|---|---|
| Definitely at least 18 | 7 | 2.5 |
| Unknown | 10 | 3.5 |
| Definitely less than 18 | 258 | 94 |
| Total | 275 | 100 |
Or, alternatively:
| Age | Count | Proportion (%) |
|---|---|---|
| Definitely at least 16 | 182 | 66 |
| Unknown | 10 | 4 |
| Definitely less than 16 | 83 | 30 |
| Total | 275 | 100 |
5Insert obligatory link to community of people who find chibi characters sexy. I hear Lalafells are pretty popular lately among the sexual roleplayers of Final Fantasy 14… Slightly more (but still not very) seriously, see the artistically impressive Deformed 48 Positions (also loosely translated as Chibi Kama Sutra, but actually referring to a separate Japanese concept).
Yes in the context of rigorous density-based definitions, but no in the context of employment and surroundings. Literally just yesterday, I attended a municipal council meeting where somebody referred to the municipality as part of "rural Pennsylvania" even though it's suburban under the UN definition and urban under the US definition.
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