jamesmusicus

[jamesmusicus]

Been suffering through my Prozac prescription, whole time I just needed to go on a quest.

[jamesmusicus]

I have a long-running theory which is constantly vindicated that in nearly every skill-based competitive pursuit from Chess to Fencing to competitive video games to war, and anything else that could be considered "player vs player," people that have mastered said pursuit are not and will never be aware of the actual best thing to do at any given moment. Most "masterful" strategies are meant to be used against either any given opponent, or opponents who may also know them, and few people really spend a lot of time developing strategies that exploit their specific opponents weaknesses because it's difficult to think about what your opponent knows and how they think. In a repeatable environment its easier to go for statistically effective strategies and just lose quickly and move on to the next match than it is to try to win every match, every bout. Sun Tsu may have written a lot about "Keeping an Army Fed is Hard Actually You Morons" but the most universal advice he gives is about deceiving your enemies, putting them in uncomfortable positions whenever possible, and if you are good enough at this you can make them give up, because the easiest (and least costly) battle against any opponent is always going to be a battle of morale.

I strongly believe that any field where "beginner's luck" is taken seriously is a field where the best of the best are still only like 20% as skilled as its possible to be. If a rank amateur can beat you EVER you are also a rank amateur, just one that knows slightly more than nothing.

[jamesmusicus]

I just think Franziska and Gumshoe have Yzma and Kronk vibes

[jamesmusicus]

Tumblr blue through the years.

[jamesmusicus]

this is an accurate portrayal of the last four months of my life

[jamesmusicus]

I think a major issue with this idea is that you still need a search engine to find the URLs for the places you're trying to look. Like if I want to find out whether I, an American, need a visa to go to Australia, I would imagine I'd need to check with Australian Immigration about that. What's the website for Australian Immigration? Does the Australian government use .au or .gov.au URL extensions? Is the domain name immigration.gov.au? visas.gov.au? doi.gov.au? Nope: immi.homeaffairs.gov.au. Do they have any aliases redirecting to the right place I could take advantage of? Search engines are the face of the entire internet because you can't just psychically know the right URL for a given establishment. To reach your destination you either need to know the URL, already be on a page with Link to the right place, or use a search engine, and in any world where for-profit search engines are allowed to exist they will always be incentivized to act like google is.

[jamesmusicus]

[jamesmusicus]

Yeah I think the more true statement about talent is that nobody who is indescribably incredibly good at something is JUST talented. They may or may not have had talent, and either way they put in a huge amount of time and effort to get to where they are.

When you're just starting out at something, there are really like 3 things that will kick your ass, each countered by a certain uncontrollable factor: Discouragement/Initial Challenge by "Talent" (read: transferable skills from other parts of your life), Time Required/Commitment by Habits, Circumstance (like a regular class time), or Interest (hyperfixations go brr), and Lack of Information by Education (whether by tutor, community resources, or worst case solo-exploration). I think these are the 3 main things that have ruined hobbies for me, and finding ways to deal with them has been the deciding factor on whether or not I stick with a hobby. And to clarify, you don't need Talent, Interest, and a Tutor to be successful at something, but the more you have the easier it is to get from a rank beginner to feeling at home in the hobby with an intermediate level of skill, and everyone has a different threshold of resistance they're willing/capable of fighting against.

I think a lot of why people have started talking about Talent as not being a real thing is that in a lot of cases its treated as a prerequisite for participation, and people who lack the talent but have interest can get excluded from sources of information they need. This is of course pretty toxic and so backlash against the idea arises. I for one was always praised for my talents but never got any help learning how to deal with the phase where talent stops helping you get better and you just have to put the hours in, so I kind of came to resent talent myself.

I know everybody always says "talent isn't real, it's all just hard work" and that's important but. man. it was really fucking nice hearing a teacher just say "hey in my expert opinion you clearly have talent for this. i can tell because X Y and Z. I can't wait to teach you." that's new

[jamesmusicus]

really just an excuse to draw medieval kyubey

[jamesmusicus]

I've been playing Stellaris for 8 years and this is absolutely the wildest fucking galaxy I've ever seen

I'll try to explain this so people who don't know the game will understand it.

my empire, the Fen, spawned in a totally isolated part of the galaxy, sandwiched between, on one side, an ancient empire with technology centuries ahead of mine and no interest in letting me through their borders, and on the other, a "devouring swarm" species that kept trying to eat me. so I basically hunkered down behind a whole bunch of defense platforms and didn't meet anyone else until halfway through the game.

that situation lured me into a false sense of calm.

about an hour into the game, another ancient empire from the other side of the galaxy "awakened", slaughtered the devouring swarm in less than five minutes, and started closing in on my borders right around the time a violent warlord popped into the middle of my territory through a wormhole.

shortly after this I accidentally imploded my home planet into a black hole.

then, because apparently I had accidentally set the "crisis" option to "ALL", the galaxy was attacked by:

ghost invaders from the dimension where telepathy happens

a rogue AI that made half the robots in the galaxy turn evil

a "scourge" from outside the galaxy intent on consuming everything, including my ships

another rogue AI that wants to erase all consciousness from the universe

in response to this I leaned hard on my bioengineering technology and created a sort of space Godzilla the size of a planet. the entire galactic community then decided that makes me the real problem, and every single civilisation declared war on me.

I evolved my space Godzilla until it got big enough to eat planets, at which point a sort of space Cthulhu emerged and started rampaging through the galaxy trying to challenge it for dominance.

so now, I'm just running around eating planet after planet trying to make my space Godzilla strong enough to fight space Cthulhu, basically doing ranked competitive genocide with the other remaining crisis factions. the galactic population has dropped by like 70%. a dozen empires have fallen. my economy is crashing because apparently this situation is bad for trade and general citizen morale. somewhere there's a planet that keeps sending me notifications because the indigenous species is about to achieve FTL travel and I'm just like. oh buddy. pal. you do not want to be out here.

[jamesmusicus]

in wigan, sufficiently advanced pey wet is indistinguishable from gravy

[jamesmusicus]

Okay but seriously… China gagged the whole world with this everybody else just pack it up it’s over

[jamesmusicus]

i’m sick and tired of people pretending that burger isn’t delicious just to clown on americans. america deserves the ridicule, but why’s burger catching strays? burger did nothing wrong

[jamesmusicus]

[jamesmusicus]

People who talk about what population density is necessary to "justify" a rail system are wrong but they're wrong in the opposite way from how they think. Even in Japan which has more than twice the population density of China the rail system is not profitable. JR makes most of its profit by operating malls and collecting rent from vendors. If you blindly follow profit instead of considering the broader social benefits the result will always be putting your rail system into a death spiral of rationalization. Stop expecting public transport to turn a profit that's not what it exists for.

[jamesmusicus]

it was worth a try

[jamesmusicus]

Dude.