ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
Fun pastime for lazy people: In your favorite Paradox game (Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Victoria, etc.), go into "observe" mode (typically with a console command obtained from the game's wiki) and just watch a "hands-off" campaign progress at maximum speed. If you feel like it, you can temporarily exit observe mode to make minor nudges (e. g., forcing an otherwise-AI-controlled country to declare certain wars, annex certain subjects, or pass certain laws) without going to the trouble of actually playing the campaign yourself. You also can make your own mods and see how they affect events.
It's my understanding that some sports games (e. g., EA's NFL series) also allow the user to watch AI-only matches.
Premise: You can use numbers (1, 2, 3), letters (a, b, c), and symbols (asterisk *, dagger †, double dagger ‡) to denote footnotes. The footnote reference in the main text normally is superscript. The footnote heading typically also is superscript, but if you're a weirdo who wants to maintain consistency with main-text and list-item headings you'll make it full-size (1, 2, 3, a, b, c, *, †, ‡).
Problem: You're a weirdo, and one of these things is not like the others. The asterisk already is superscript by default—in order to make it full-size with formatting, you have to give special treatment to it.
Solution: Instead use the "low asterisk" ⁎ ⁎, which is not pre-superscripted! Consistency has been achieved.
Problem: Annoyingly, the HTML named character reference "lowast" is misnamed and actually refers to the separate "asterisk operator" ∗ ∗, whose Unicode category is not "Punctuation/Other" like the ASCII asterisk but "Symbol/Mathematics" like the multiplication symbol.
Solution: If you're using XHTML (without any of the public identifiers listed on the linked page), you can simply repurpose "lowast" as your own custom internal entity that points to the correct character. LOL! (If you're using normal HTML or that disgusting middleware called Markdown, you've got to look up the low asterisk's hexadecimal code, "204e".)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
Two chats (Telegram and Discord) are "recommended" in the sidebar of the front page (which is not visible if your browser window is too narrow, including mobile browsers).
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
To be fair, it is a random piece of custom software, rather than something with actual tenure and documentation.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
It appears that @ZorbaTHut has been using an LLM for recent changes to this website's code. Perhaps that is the culprit. ;-)
There's a fun alternate-history series called Look to the West in which a British prince, disinherited and exiled to America as a viceroy in year 1727, overturns this norm in 1749 by having a team of rifle-armed Americans (winners of a shooting tournament organized by the prince) assassinate the rightful king (with a false-flag attack from a French-flagged fishing boat). This incident causes rifle-armed skirmishers/snipers to proliferate far earlier than historically.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
If I were less lazy/busy, I'd insert the usual OkCupid stats blogs/archives from before they were bought and cucked. They showed that female attractiveness peaked at 18, but that was their minimum age cutoff, so I suspect the actual figure is even lower at around 16. Men also showed tolerance to wider age gaps as they got older. 30-year-old and 35-year-old men showed roughly the same willingness to approach 25-year-old women.
I believe Gwern has a copy. Someone please do this in the comments, thanks, :-*
Link (doesn't quite match your assertion)
As you can see, men tend to focus on the youngest women in their already skewed preference pool, and, what's more, they spend a significant amount of energy pursuing women even younger than their stated minimum. No matter what he's telling himself on his setting page, a 30-year-old man spends as much time messaging 18- and 19-year-olds as he does women his own age. On the other hand, women only a few years older are largely neglected.
A woman's desirability peaks at 21, which ironically enough is the age that men just begin their "prime"—i. e., become more desirable than average. Following that dotted line out, you can see that a woman of 31 is already "past her prime", while a man doesn't become so until 36. As we mentioned above, after age 26, a man has more potential matches than his female counterparts, which is a drastic reversal of the proportion in young adulthood, when women are much more sought-after. Because men's dating preferences skew so young, and women's are age-equitable, men peak later, and have a longer plateau of desirability, than women.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
Recently I read that a well respected football coach—Bill Belichick—was denied admission to the Football Hall of Fame based on the fact that he is in a romantic relationship with a woman who is much younger than him.
I'm not a football fan, but it's my understanding that this is a gross oversimplification. News articles (1 2) indicate that the voters refrained from inducting Belichick for several reasons. One reason that stands out is the fact that, under the recently-updated voting system, some people are losing eligibility, so this is their last chance to be inducted (before they are relegated to a separate "senior" category, where induction is technically still possible but also harder). Another reason is his involvement in cheating scandals. Neither of the linked articles mentions anything about a scandalously young romantic partner.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
6d ago
IIRC, in last year's non-book-review contest there was some controversy regarding whether it was permissible for people to say which reviews were theirs and beg for votes on social media, as such behavior was considered by some to be a violation of the spirit of the anonymous contest even though it was not explicitly prohibited in the official rules. So you may want to avoid stating what your final decision on this topic is.
YouTube's recommendation algorithm just informed me of the existence of The End Is Nigh, a pseudo-sequel to the infamously difficult platforming game Super Meat Boy. I'm not too interested in the game itself (currently on sale for four dollars). But the game's soundtrack is composed entirely of remixes of classical music—and it's currently on sale for just one dollar!
Other video-game soundtracks that I have purchased:
Balatro
La-Mulana 1 and 2
Rogue Legacy
Shantae: Risky's Revenge and Pirate's Curse
Void Stranger
Note that all these soundtracks are DRM-free. (I've seen people complain that at least one soundtrack sold on Steam actually does have DRM, in that it's playable only through an executable file. I don't remember which game it was for.)
Some older Paradox Development Studio games also have soundtracks of classical music (licensed from Naxos), which you can copy out of the installed files.
Europa Universalis 2
Victoria 1
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