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I think there's a decent case to be made that the ideal sport is competitive pokemon or similar. Has branching strategies, a significant prediction element, and minions; has a large enough pool of options and strategies that you can extend the metaphor to cover a broad set of situations; has some degree of personal expression if you're willing to fudge things. Admittedly totally lacks the snobby aristocratic aesthetic, but not moreso than volleyball coaching.

Please note that chess is a terrible metaphor for a plot or a heist or a caper or whatever, and a self-aware mastermind should probably be into fencing or something instead.

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Hey guys, my opponent just fused their entire side of the board into a gestalt entity, which is currently dissecting and calcifying my pieces such that they fit into its twisted vision of an eternal, perfect state of the universe. What's the best counter in this situation?

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tumblr is doing the same thing to my little pony as it did to breaking bad but in the opposite direction

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Women get 63% of all master's degrees overall (https://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=72), so the fact that they get only about 50% of master's degrees in history is somewhat surprising.

i don't understand the recent "how often do men think of the roman empire" trend. one of the most well-known recent academic and popular historians of the roman empire is a woman, mary beard. why do this? it isn't cute or funny if you think about the implications for more than five seconds

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That strikes me as a much stronger claim than is defensible. Nobody says getting married is only justified because it raises household income or talks about a going to church hobby; most people agree it's legitimate to not take the highest-paying job available to you because you value company culture or the mission or the like.

Even in the context of education specifically, I don't think it's a particularly strong explanation. Education majors, for instance, have much lower expected career earnings than liberal arts majors (see https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/The-Economic-Value-of-College-Majors-Full-Report-web-FINAL.pdf), but also account for a greater share of college graduates, and at least anecdotally I see a lot fewer objections to education majors than to lit crit in online discussions of this stuff (I have seen pretty substantial criticism of graduate programs in education, but it's of a pretty different type - most of what I've seen in that sphere is people who pursued or considered graduate degrees in education saying that the programs were of poor quality, rather than the outside criticisms that characterize stem vs humanities arguments).

I think the straightforward truth is that literary criticism has value for the same reason video games or DnD or whatever have value: people enjoy them and that's enough. I don't buy the argument that lit crit is really vitally important for making the world a better place (except insofar as people want to do lit crit, so them getting to do it makes their lives better) or solving political problems or whatever.

Yes, you can complain that society spending its resources on lit crit is therefore immoral, because there are hungry people to feed instead. But of course if you were going to make this argument you would also have to complain about the immorality of spending our societal resources on video games and so on, which STEM nerd lit crit dislikers rarely seem to do, otherwise I think you're being hypocritical.

For my part I think that probably convincing people to give up all their worldly pleasures to help the poor is not feasible, and in light of that it's cool that lit crit and video games and so on exist, because people like those things. And ideally enough progress can be made in uplifting the poor (either within or without our current economic system) that these kinds of trade-offs become a memory of the distant past, and I'll be able to endorse frivolous public funding of the humanities or million dollar blockbuster video games or whatever with no caveats. Because I'm not that worried about optimization, and as long as all the mouths are fed I don't care so much about society "wasting money" on fun.

At present I can probably only endorse these things provisionally and selfishly: first off I like video games, and I like reading media analysis, so I'm glad they exist. And second off, it's not like the money that goes to humanities departments would be going to feed the global poor anyway, it would be going somewhere else which I'd naively wager would be either equally frivolous in this narrow sense (pure math, econ, paleontology) or actively harmful (weapons development). Maybe not, who knows. Anyway I'm not terribly aggrieved that it's going to the humanities instead. If the alternative really was feeding starving people I would support that in a heartbeat, but it isn't.

And, as I said, hopefully in the socialist future we'll be able to waste all the money on humanities and non-essential sciences and cool video games that we want. One can dream.

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That’s not the motivation for Turing machines.  Turing was working on Hilbert’s decision problem, which asked whether there could exist an algorithm for proving whether an arbitrary statement was necessarily implied by a given set of axioms.  An answer to this problem requires a formal notion of what an algorithm is, which Turing argued was ‘anything implementable by a Turing machine’ - the only reason it had to work without human involvement is that having no ambiguous states lets the initial configuration and input uniquely define all future behavior.  In fact, Turing machines as originally presented can’t be physically implemented because they’re permitted to have infinitely long tapes to read from and write to. 

🌻

"whatever the fuck i want"

jokes aside, i learned yesterday that is a common take that modern, electronic, transistor-based computers are not interesting (at least primarily) because they do the things they do automatically, on their own, without the aid of humans, but because of something something algorithms.

even though that was precisely WHY turing laid all this down in the first place, figuring out how to algorithmize reasoning in order to breakdown the problem and figure out how to implement it in a machine that could do it on its own. but sure, that is like whatever i guess.

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From what I’ve seen, it usually plays fine for a couple of moves, then starts trying to play illegal moves in the midgame.  Inclines me to think it’s memorized a bunch of the common openings, but doesn’t actually understand the rules.

Hey. What the fuck

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never say with eleven words what you could with ten. do not use nine words where ten words will do. only ever write sentences that are exactly ten words long.

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Reblog and write the opposite of your URL

thatwasnotveryravenofyou → itisextremelypigeonofthem

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Fetchlands have a lot of impact outside of giving you perfect mana - they give you easy access to shuffle effects (powering up cantrips like ponder and brainstorm, and also slowing down in person gameplay), stock your graveyard for thing like delve, escape, and death-rite shaman, generate card advantage when paired with cards like wrenn and six or ramunap excavator, and so forth.  Back when arcum’s astrolabe was legal, plenty of modern decks ran prismatic vista, even though it could only fetch basics, and it still sees fringe play in legacy.  If shocklands were banned, I expect fetches would still be the best lands in modern.

Separately, I think the shockland downside is fitting - the normal tradeoff for playing more colors is that you’re better in the late game (because you have higher card quality and more flexible interaction than a mono-color deck), but worse in the early game (because you have a harder time using all your mana and casting spells on curve), so your midrange and control matchups get better and your aggro matchups get worse.  Shocklands maintain essentially that tradeoff, except instead of having limited early game options, you have more flexibility at the cost of giving your opponent a faster clock (fetch-shock manabases are still way too good, but at least conceptually the shockland design seems well-thought out to me). 

the problem with fetchlands is not the fetchlands, it’s the lands they can fetch. in this regard I find the shocklands to be worse than the alpha duals: they power equally degenerate manabases, except the shocks cause you to start somewhere between 14 and 20 at random

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You’re thinking of Rockman - geodude is the superhero from a nineties environmentalism cartoon.  Easy to get them confused, since they’re both blue guys.

really enjoying the show about the emo embodiment of sleep. what's it called... Geodude?

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Feelings on boxing?  Honest bloodsport with no spheres and multiple notable Acadian practicioners.

Today someone at work asked me if I’d been watching the world cup, and I told them, semi-reflexively, that I hadn’t, because I belonged to an obscure sect with a religious injunction against visual depictions of spherical objects in the media. Then they asked me if I was into American Football since no part of that game is spherical, and I told them no, I don’t watch that out of annoyance at the structural hypocrisy of functionally being a bloodsport in terms of downstream human suffering, but not having the integrity to admit to this by letting the players attack each other with weapons during play. 

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This one? https://imgflip.com/memetemplate/140653238/grim-reaper-knocking-door

Okay, sorry to break Kayfabe for a while, but y’all know that Goncharov isn’t real, right? It’s fictional. Katya never betrayed Andrey because “Katya” and “Andrey” aren’t real people, they were made up in Matteo JWHJ 0715’s script. “Naples” is just a rename of Genoa (one of the deviations from the aforesaid script) so no one would get sued; you can’t actually go there. Please please PLEASE stop this Mandela effect nonsense and learn to distinguish fiction from reality!

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Terra Ignota fic, X-TREME spoilers for the entire series, warnings in notes. There’s one chapter left to be posted; it’s saved as a draft now, and I’ll post it tomorrow. :) Su-Hyeong’s draft messages to 9A (unsent).

I’m supposed to write to you. My sensayer said it would help with the guilt, but I don’t know if I want help with it, or if this counts as guilt, really.

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what’s everyone’s favorite starter trio in pokemon? like not the one with just your favorite starter in it (though ofc they usually overlap) but one where you like every single pokemon in the trio a lot and think they compliment each other really well or you just really like the games theyre from, etc. for me its the unova starters, i have so much nostalgia for every one of them and theyre all pretty special to me

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Just read the new Scholomance book, spoilers below:

Mechanically, everything in the book works (with the caveat that the principle of balance is horribly inconsistent, but the principle of balance was also the single dumbest piece of worldbuilding in the series, so I’m not too bothered by that), but thematically it’s kind of baffling.  For one, free will turns out to be a lie, and El was destined to be a force for good from the beginning, which in retrospect makes her an incredibly funny character (relatedly, ‘prophecy of doom and destruction is actually just the prophet bluffing everyone’ is quite a way to handle that plot point).  For another, literally everything in this book vindicates Ophelia - El’s power is just as derived from her maw-mouth plot as Orion’s, and El’s end-of-book plan is the exact same ‘intimidate the enclavers into doing better’ thing Ophelia was going for; the only difference between the two is that El didn’t have to create a maw-mouth herself, but the series takes a pretty consistent stance that indirectly benefitting from evil is also morally wrong, so it feels hard to take that distinction seriously.  

The maw-mouth enclave thing feels really lazy to me - like, there’s a decently interesting dynamic where the enclavers are buying safety for their children at cost to all the non-enclave wizards, and replacing that dynamic with ‘actually, they’re creating horrible torture-monsters to make their enclaves slightly more luxurious, and if they were better people they could get their safety goals for free’ is very disappointing.  

Feels like the setting would be much better without El (although she is a very fun viewpoint character); she kind of just brute forces past a lot of the more interesting dilemmas.