williams_482's recent activity
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Comment on The epicenter of conspiracy belief: the economically left-leaning and culturally regressive spot in the political landscape in ~humanities
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Comment on Minecraft’s problems aren’t just the new features in ~games
williams_482 Link ParentIt does look really cool, and priced very reasonably as well ($22). Now I know where I'll go next time I have the urge for this sort of thing.It does look really cool, and priced very reasonably as well ($22). Now I know where I'll go next time I have the urge for this sort of thing.
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Comment on Minecraft’s problems aren’t just the new features in ~games
williams_482 Link ParentIt's 8:1, but yeah it's a major time saver for traveling. And there are ways to get up onto the roof of the nether, which is completely safe from the usual nether dangers and completely...It's 8:1, but yeah it's a major time saver for traveling. And there are ways to get up onto the roof of the nether, which is completely safe from the usual nether dangers and completely featureless, easy to mark paths between portals however you please.
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Comment on What's an atypical thing you do that you'd recommend to others? in ~talk
williams_482 Link ParentApparently imgur doesn't like hotlinks any more. It goes to a Calvin and Hobbes comic, which I am otherwise unable to link. That is excellent.Apparently imgur doesn't like hotlinks any more. It goes to a Calvin and Hobbes comic, which I am otherwise unable to link.
I learned this from a story my father, who was a captain in the army at the time, tells about doing it once to avoid sneezing on the Colonel's wife.
That is excellent.
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Comment on Help me understand how half of USA is on board with the idea of creating "short term pain" in ~society
williams_482 Link ParentUnfortunately there's more than "a bit" of toxic masculinity to this one. It is also, historically speaking, bogus, drawing heavily from some wildly incorrect things people believe about the fall...Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.
Unfortunately there's more than "a bit" of toxic masculinity to this one. It is also, historically speaking, bogus, drawing heavily from some wildly incorrect things people believe about the fall of the Roman empire.
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Comment on What's an atypical thing you do that you'd recommend to others? in ~talk
williams_482 Link ParentDo you live close to the equator? In the Northeastern United States, I'd be waking up to 90 minutes of darkness for a decent chunk of the year. That part sounds miserable.Do you live close to the equator?
In the Northeastern United States, I'd be waking up to 90 minutes of darkness for a decent chunk of the year. That part sounds miserable.
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Comment on What's an atypical thing you do that you'd recommend to others? in ~talk
williams_482 Link ParentThis seems simultaneously practical and really gross. Do you ever have problems with snot getting stuck under your shirt?Sometimes if I am in very close quarters, I will sneeze down the neck opening of my undershirt.
This seems simultaneously practical and really gross. Do you ever have problems with snot getting stuck under your shirt?
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Comment on What's an atypical thing you do that you'd recommend to others? in ~talk
williams_482 Link ParentI remember that too, from health class in probably 7th grade. It certainly made an impression, and instilled the clearly correct way to sneeze.(...a formal party of well-dressed people with "sneezing sleeves" on one arm).
I remember that too, from health class in probably 7th grade. It certainly made an impression, and instilled the clearly correct way to sneeze.
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Comment on Megathread: April Fools' Day 2025 on the internet in ~talk
williams_482 Link ParentI enjoyed the section below the article as well:I enjoyed the section below the article as well:
Congratulations, and thank you for reading the whole article; this is just an April Fools Day joke. The article above is not true, and if anyone is sharing it after April 1st, please remind them of that fact.
The purpose of this article, aside from our usual April Fool’s Day joke, is to make the point that reading beyond the headline should be the norm every day, not just on the 1st of April. There’s a large volume of misinformation online. Make sure you don’t add to it by sharing articles without reading them. Finally, be careful of the person sharing this article after the 1st of April as they very clearly don’t read what they share.
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Comment on Steam Spring Sale suggestions in ~games
williams_482 Link ParentPeople seem to have a very wide range of opinions on what qualifies as "micromanagement" and how much of it is desired. You're not alone in having this complaint, but it also does not match my...People seem to have a very wide range of opinions on what qualifies as "micromanagement" and how much of it is desired. You're not alone in having this complaint, but it also does not match my experience.
The game was designed with "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game" very much in mind (that article is by it's lead designer, a decade before Old World came out). I find it does a very good job avoiding giving any incentive for really tedious stuff that dominates high level play in the various civ games, like tile swapping and careful production overflow management, but it still gives me direct control over all the decisions that matter. Mostly this is accomplished by making the player commit to investing stuff to get other stuff (e.g. 20 iron and four orders to build a quarry, which will produce stone every turn), with the understanding that having made that initial investment, they will continue to get that stuff unless they find a really compelling reason to pay yet more stuff to change it.
Contrast this with Civ VI (or V, IV, III, and I believe the prior games as well), where you are putting down tile improvements, but you also have to think about which citizens are going to work those tiles and when. Building a third mine in a pop 2 city is useless until that city grows to pop 3, and you probably want it to be working a tile with more food in order to get to pop 3, so even the second mine might not have been a good choice to build just yet. But also there's no cost to flip flopping a citizen between a mine and a farm as needed for whatever you are prioritizing right now, so maybe you do want those improvements down even if you're only going to benefit from them on some turns but not others. Etc, etc. Of course if you're just playing casually and not really thinking about this stuff then of it won't bother you anyway. And there's nothing wrong with that!
Old World also has a fair amount of mid- to late-game automation that one can turn on if one is so inclined. I've just never been so inclined, so I can't comment on how much it would reduce your overhead.
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Comment on Steam Spring Sale suggestions in ~games
williams_482 LinkIn the historical Turn-Based Strategy genre, I've hugely enjoyed Old World. I've been frustrated with many of the choices that the Civilization series has made since Civ IV, and Old World neatly...In the historical Turn-Based Strategy genre, I've hugely enjoyed Old World.
I've been frustrated with many of the choices that the Civilization series has made since Civ IV, and Old World neatly avoids just about all of my complaints while still being a unique and clearly modern game. It's also from a small studio, still under active development despite releasing in 2022, and the developers are very responsive to questions and suggestions on Reddit.
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Comment on A baseball discussion thread, 2025 spring training edition in ~sports.baseball
williams_482 Link ParentI love going to my local Vermont Lake Monsters games. We're one of the regions that got shafted by minor league downsizing a couple years ago, but were fortunate enough to come out of that with a...I love going to my local Vermont Lake Monsters games.
We're one of the regions that got shafted by minor league downsizing a couple years ago, but were fortunate enough to come out of that with a collegiate summer league team that is actually trying to win (and thus draw fans), instead of just being a low level development platform for guys who might some day play for (or be traded by) a parent club. It's really striking how much of a difference that makes for the viewing experience, despite the quality of play being another notch lower.
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Comment on Swearing and automatic captions in ~tech
williams_482 Link ParentI'm reminded of a classic in the garbled subtitle genre, The Backstroke of the West. Which, counter to the examples in the OP, definitely was not crafted to conform to an obscenity filter.So, CrunchyRoll cheaps out on this and uses automated captions for dubs. Which does not work well at all, with often bizarre and amusing results. Not only does the system have no concept of different people speaking, so dialogue going back and forth results in weird sentences based on wherever it decided to end them, but it completely butchers names. Watching the Re:Zero dub, you'll be treated to such gems as "mabeasts" (creatures in the show) being referred to as "lobbyists," Subaru occasionally being "super," and an inability to distinguish between the characters Rem, Ram and Rom. When it doesn't concoct more bizarre sentences.
I'm reminded of a classic in the garbled subtitle genre, The Backstroke of the West. Which, counter to the examples in the OP, definitely was not crafted to conform to an obscenity filter.
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Comment on Norway on the verge of abolishing Video Assistant Referee from domestic football league after clubs in the country's top two divisions recommended formally that it should be discontinued in ~sports.football
williams_482 Link ParentWell, it is that popular, and yet here we are. Sure, the average decision is less important. Frankly the average decision is meaningless in the end, like nearly everything else that happens over...Also I don't think football would be anywhere near as popular as it is if a few judgement calls could tip a match one way or the other with any regularity. Because that would make it a bad sport to both watch and play, and for all the nonsense that surrounds the professional game, it's not a bad sport.
Well, it is that popular, and yet here we are.
If anything, the scale of a football match renders individual ref's decisions even less important than in a shorter 1-on-1 sport like fencing. The maths of that is pretty obvious, surely?
Sure, the average decision is less important. Frankly the average decision is meaningless in the end, like nearly everything else that happens over the course of a football match. But referee decisions in which a goal or a penalty hang in the balance are still massively influential, because however long the players are playing actual scoring events are vanishingly rare, and only barely influenced by whatever happened even a couple minutes earlier.
I don't know much about squash and I don't really understand the 54-1 example from earlier in this thread. I also agree with the spirit of your comments about "the only person who can make you lose is you", the importance of accepting that referee judgement is an intrinsic part of sport and you have to live with it, etc. That's good life advice and a helpful thing to tell oneself when something doesn't go your way, no matter how high- or low-event the sport you watch or play is.
It would remain good advice to follow if one were playing squash matches confined to a tight time limit in which most games can only fit in 2-3 points, and matches with no score at all are common. But it does, in those conditions, become much easier to encounter situations where a little thing that causes an "undeserved" point can completely swing the result even if one side has clearly outplayed the other.
That's high level professional football for you, just stretched out on a few dimensions.
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Comment on Norway on the verge of abolishing Video Assistant Referee from domestic football league after clubs in the country's top two divisions recommended formally that it should be discontinued in ~sports.football
williams_482 (edited )Link ParentI actually very strongly prefer the "eye in the sky can weigh in on stuff" concept behind VAR more than the challenge system that most American sports use, the problem is that referees don't...I actually very strongly prefer the "eye in the sky can weigh in on stuff" concept behind VAR more than the challenge system that most American sports use, the problem is that referees don't really like it and (relatedly) tend to be bad at using it.
I'd like to see a lot more of referees doing things like asking VAR "hey, I didn't see how this guy's shoe came off, did he actually get fouled?", and getting a near immediate "yeah he got stepped on" or "no, he kicked it off himself, card him". Or "It's not obvious, stick with your call" if they aren't certain after five seconds of slo-mo footage. Those replays can be shown to the TV audience extremely quickly, there's no technical reason what the VAR ref can't see them and render judgement just as quickly as we all do (often fast enough not to delay restarts). It's just that the on-field ref very rarely asks for that kind of help, and the replay guys themselves are shockingly sluggish about rendering it.
Then there's the handful of extremely clear cut and technologically solvable ones, like offsides (and "did the ball go in the goal", which as best as I can tell is definitively solved with current implementation). UEFA has plenty of reffing problems, but their semi-auto offsides has worked really well and much quicker than the more manual process the Premier League is still stuck with. They can even show graphics to fans that can be frustratingly close, but wholly unambiguous: Yup, there's his knee, sticking out past the defenders foot, he was off, end of story.
Football is full of judgement calls and getting all of them "right", at least from the perspective of a random angry guy at the pub who thinks there's a grand referee conspiracy against his local club, is impossible. But things could be so much better without americanized gamification of the process in the form of coaching challenges, which become a strategic tool as much as any actual help for getting calls right.
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Comment on Norway on the verge of abolishing Video Assistant Referee from domestic football league after clubs in the country's top two divisions recommended formally that it should be discontinued in ~sports.football
williams_482 Link ParentIf I may add on... The amount of win equity that a single event can have in football is truly enormous. This is core to the appeal of the sport: Nearly everything that happens is ultimately...- Exemplary
If I may add on...
The amount of win equity that a single event can have in football is truly enormous. This is core to the appeal of the sport: Nearly everything that happens is ultimately meaningless, but carried a small chance of being enormously important. This covers referee choices just as much as player actions: mostly they are ultimately irrelevant, except for the handful with an entire goal (or the "mere" 79% shot of a goal of a penalty) of swing value in a score state (most of them) where that goal is overwhelmingly likely to decide the final result.
So although goals mostly don't "just come out of nowhere," they really kinda do. This is one of the things that becomes very clear if you try to dig into football analytically: we've got a very good idea of how likely a shot is to score (in the vast majority of cases, not very likely), and an increasingly shaky idea of how likely an action is to lead to a shot the further back you go. Footballers are constantly doing good and impressive things which made their team slightly more likely to score, and nearly always someone makes a tiny mistake or an opponent a great play or (far more often than anyone likes to think about) the ball just bounces kinda funny, and this elaborate chain of difficult accomplishments collapses into nothing before it can turn into a goal and you're basically back to square one.
Or just as easily, three really big things can go very right in sequence and a team which has been anemic all day suddenly has a 1-0 lead.
Football is chaos, and key referee choices are among the handful of things that can reach through that chaos and just add or remove most of a goal. To blame a team that gets screwed over in one of those unplanned, unexpected pivotal moments for not just winning more is ridiculous.
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Comment on What fictional world would you live in, if you could pick any one? in ~talk
williams_482 Link ParentI'm pretty sure more people die in car crashes in a random year on modern Earth than died in any one of those attacks. Never mind all the other ways people die today that Star Trek characters can...I'm pretty sure more people die in car crashes in a random year on modern Earth than died in any one of those attacks. Never mind all the other ways people die today that Star Trek characters can fix by waving a light over it or politely telling people to chill out.
The worst from before Discovery's far-future nonsense is probably what, the Whale Probe? Or maybe the Xindi from Enterprise cutting a trench through Florida? The Borg never made planetfall in any of their attacks, nor did Discovery's Klingons. The Breen bombing was pretty small scale and directed at Starfleet headquarters, nothing else in the Dominion war got that far. What am I missing?
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Comment on <deleted topic> in ~tech
williams_482 Link ParentVermont has similar laws about billboard advertisements, likely for the same reason (old pro-tourism legislation). It's always a bit of a shock going out of state and seeing how much of this...Vermont has similar laws about billboard advertisements, likely for the same reason (old pro-tourism legislation). It's always a bit of a shock going out of state and seeing how much of this garbage everyone else has to deal with.
Nothing in Vermont law stops gas pumps from yapping at you, unfortunately.
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Comment on Tenant unions are coming. US landlords aren't ready. in ~life
williams_482 Link ParentSeems like the landlord has one way out: accept low margins, and be good enough at running an apartment complex that people don't feel the need to put the screws to them. This also puts a...Seems like the landlord has one way out: accept low margins, and be good enough at running an apartment complex that people don't feel the need to put the screws to them.
This also puts a counterbalance to one of the problematic incentives from rent control: landlords who decide that because they can only charge X, the way to maximize the margins is to do as little as possible to maintain the units.
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Comment on Inside the war against excessive headlight brightness in ~transport
williams_482 Link ParentI know a couple people who have blue light filter sunglasses for this exact purpose. It's definitely a thing.I know a couple people who have blue light filter sunglasses for this exact purpose. It's definitely a thing.
One of the things that struck me watching the original Twilight Zone (1959-1964) episodes is that when they wanted to harken back to "the good old days", they tended to show a heavily whitewashed version of the post-reconstruction era south. One of the more blatant examples is A Stop at Willoughby, featuring the following description of an imaginary town:
This stuck out to me because that usage of the 1880s to fill in as the idyllic past is extremely similar to the way modern Americans tend to look back at the 1950s and 60s, the same period in which those Twilight Zone episodes were originally created. Both the 1960s and 1880s were roughly two decades after the end of a horrifically destructive war; they are also ~70 years from "the present", a time the vast majority of living adults did not experience but likely heard charming stories about from their own parents or grandparents. And they are periods in which major societal changes were happening, but which can in retelling be easily pushed up to the later years in which their effects became more obvious.