#It's margin for error would be significant | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

didyougaming · 10 months ago

Text

Hi, gamers. I know the results of the Sandwich Poll have been gnawing at you. So many people wondering whether they answered correctly, which as a reminder is a very important factor in determining which afterlife you end up in when you die. Please understand that I needed a lot of time to internally process these poll results and also that I've been kinda busy/tired. But the people need to know, so here we go.

In total, we received 372 responses. I also spent a lot of my weekend annoying anyone who would listen to me in person about these questions, but I didn't write those answers down.

Question 1 was fairly non-controversial, as it should be. It is worth noting that 3.2% of respondents chose to write-in an answer, and most of these write-in answers were what scientists would call "bad" and "not really useful." So you can assume a 3.2% margin of error on everything in this survey. That's how statistics works.

Question 2 is where we see a real divide. Most respondents consider a sandwich cut into two separate but equal pieces to be one sandwich. This is a real shame, because it's the wrong answer. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Question 3 considers whether one piece of bread cut in half and used for sandwich-making results in a sandwich, and surprisingly the majority of respondents do consider this to be one sandwich. This is really interesting, because despite ending up with functionally and aesthetically the same result as one of the pieces of the sandwich from question 2, a significant number of respondents believe the results to be inherently different. I wish there was a way to better track how much overlap there was for those two seemingly contradictory answers, but the big Sheets page Google Docs is daunting and I don't feel like figuring out how to parse that data, so we just need to accept that we'll never have that exact number. That's how statistics works.

Question 4 mostly just cements the findings of the previous two questions. I do want to point out the one person who answered "who the fuck does this". Sandwich shops do this. Go to a sandwich shop for once in your life and really watch them do their work. Open your eyes.

Question 5 did not get me a lot of useful data, as it turns out having a question that only allowed for write-in answers was a bad idea. However, there are more or less two camps for people who really took these questions seriously and gave it their all. The first school of thought suggests that intent is the most important factor, and if you deem what you've made to be a sandwich, it's a sandwich. While I appreciate the critical thinking on display here, I believe in the other school of thought, which is that when you put ingredients between two breads that's a sandwich, baby. There is a sub-school of thought here that requires those two pieces to be whole pieces, but that's wrong.

One question that I should have included in the survey I think proves my point. If you order a sandwich platter from a deli and they use a single really long piece of bread (think like a several foot long hero) into multiple sections, you would say that you have sandwiches, plural. If you wanted to grab one, you wouldn't say "I'm going to grab a 64th of a sandwich" because you would sound deranged. Despite being parts of a larger whole, they are still ingredients between pieces of bread, and thus fit the definition of "sandwich."

Anyway, thank you for coming on this non-gaming detour with me. It was extremely important that I prove a friend wrong on this topic, and even though I don't think I did that and I think he's choosing to double down on his incorrect opinions, I'm still choosing to spin this as a personal and moral victory. New actual DidYouGamings will come out as soon as I discover any new facts about video games (right now there's only a couple hundred facts about video games at all and I've basically covered all of them.)

#sandwich #the afterlife #results #video games #if you got any of the questions wrong just think really hard until you believe in the correct thing instead!

193 notes · View notes

lilacxquartz · 2 months ago

Text

THE LIFE YOU LIVED

kenjaku x future vessel f!reader

plot: being the daughter of an important public figure, you were already used to unwanted attention. however, nothing could have prepared you for this.

themes: yandere, unrequited feelings, angst, some horror, reader is not a sorcerer, pre-canon — a/n: so, this isn’t with geto as a vessel but it isn’t kaori either, think of it as an in between time.

part 1 of 7 • next chapter • chapter directory • masterlist • on ao3

Chapter 1: First Impressions

For Kenjaku, being involved with politics was either a prospect that he thrived in or one that he couldn’t wait to get out of, but for the most part, he simply disliked the interactions he had to endure. Unless something exciting was happening from the result of his meddling, he seldom cared, let alone invested himself in the trivial aspects of the ordinary world.

Having to dive into such an affair soon, though, there was a certain degree of apprehension that he felt. In his recent years, any attempt to dissolve the next holder of the six-eyes technique had failed, so he had to maintain his distance from the Gojo clan to avoid being found out a second time—while at the same time keeping close enough to remain vigilant of any significant developments.

This meant straying away from the tight-knit circle of Jujutsu for a while and instead seeking out an alternative means, such as infiltrating the clan from a distance, through the cover of a non-sorcerer.

The current holder of the six-eyes technique was still young, just a mere boy. From his current knowledge of the fact, the kid was strong enough to understand the basics of his technique, but not enough to fully grasp it. If he could therefore infiltrate the clan by phasing through a series of intricate connections, then that’s the route he would take.

This was where you come in.

You were the first step into accomplishing such a feat, and also quite possibly, the easiest role that he had to assume. From the surface, you were just another trust-fund socialite to him, likely spoiled too. He could probably have all sorts of fun in your body when he got his hands on it, since being both loaded and favoured in the eyes of the media meant that he could get away with a great deal of trouble before people started to point their fingers.

An amusing thought, indeed.

His primary target in mind was technically someone close to the current Prime Minister. On paper, this man’s role was purely ceremonial, though, but important enough that just knowing him would open up all sorts of doors. Kenjaku had it in mind, therefore, to infiltrate that clan and steadily gain access to the investors directly involved with the Gojo clan, because that was the easiest way in if from a non-sorcerer standpoint.

Kenjaku already had his eyes on you, too. You were flicking through the pages of some glossy magazine that had your face on the cover, with your brow furrowed at something written inside. You supposedly ‘worked’ in this building, but he had yet to see you do anything at all beyond lounging around, which to him painted an easily accessible front in his mind.

You were somewhere in your twenties, but he wasn’t entirely sure just how old you actually were. Surprisingly, the media coverage on your personal life was lacking. He supposed that if you were wealthy enough to consider what most thought to be a break as ‘working’, then you had the means to wipe clean any sort of database that might store any information on you—or at least make it difficult to find. He had you pinned at maybe twenty-three or twenty-four, given that you had graduated from university not too long ago. He remembered some coverage a while ago concerning a gap year, but he didn’t care enough to investigate further than he had to. That much wasn’t necessary just yet.

The only problem with his whole plan was, however, that it was surely risky to transfer his brain over to a non-sorcerer. For one, the margin for error was much higher, and any retaining techniques aside from his innate one had a risk of not passing through. The gravity technique that he adopted from Kaori would be significant to lose. He would mourn that. His reverse cursed technique, too, would be a hefty loss. He liked having that one, if only just for pain management and sealing away the scar quicker.

Those thoughts aside, Kenjaku grew somewhat impatient from watching you. All that he realistically had to do today was to gain an audience with you and make his first impression count. He considered what he knew about you before approaching you, forming a script in his mind. To just about everyone, your father was the frontman for Kabutocho—or as those overseas knew it better—Japan’s Wall Street. He was one of the most famous names who frequented the headlines for any such news relating to it.

Had the man in question been a couple of decades younger, he would have gone for that body instead, but at sixty-odd years old, he didn’t quite trust his chances in a body that was beginning to decline. It was always simpler to assimilate someone in their prime, such as someone in their twenties, thirties, or even forties.

Meanwhile, on your end, it didn’t take too long for you to notice the pair of eyes that were staring directly towards you, but you didn’t pay the guy any mind. It was somehow still a better deal than what awaited you up in the higher floors, where someone that you truly detested lurked. Indeed, you hated this place, secretly loathing having to keep up such a pristine appearance to the prying eyes of the world all so that your father could get away with the shit that he continiously pulled. God. Everything was so exhausting, and now, you had a potential not-so-secret admirer on top of everything else.

You wondered if you could get away with calling out his insistent staring, or if you would receive an earful from something so petty later on. You were caught up in something that was beyond complicated, after all, what with having to uphold the role of a pushover. You couldn’t stand a single second more of it. The pretending was draining; all of those dinners you had to endure with people twice your age who were always a little too handsy as they pretended to find you interesting.

You supposed that this made you sound ungrateful, or perhaps more brattier than you would have liked, because on the surface of everything, your luxurious life wasn’t all too bad. It was just that sometimes you wished that you could swap it around for something simpler—something normal—something private. It was never your choice, after all, to grow up under the prying lens of the camera just because your father involved himself in every venture he could.

So, you simply went with the flow for now, quietly keeping your opinions contained, even if you thought that they were entirely valid. Indeed, you begrudgingly succumbed to playing the part, attending all of those extravagant galas, shaking the hands of all of the old creeps in power just to keep your father happy. You did your part. You posed and smiled for the camera, you attended those daytime shows, and you laughed on the screen, maintaining a semblance of that happy-go-lucky woman you were forced to play the role of.

Kenjaku continued to watch you from that carefully measured distance all the while, completely unaware that you had long ago caught onto his staring. He let his mind wander already, ultimately deciding that you were the shortcut he needed to take to infiltrate the world he needed to get into. Or perhaps, if you weren’t a shortcut, then you were more so a decisive path of sorts. Power existed in all forms, after all, so social influence could be just as good; your face could get him into all of the right places.

For that to be be a success, however, just all those many times before—he had to be patient and remember to back off on occasion, to let you breathe if you needed to. Maybe he fumbled that much already, given that you were glaring daggers at him. Shit. Had you noticed him? He supposed that he wasn’t being exactly suble. Deciding to roll with it, he slipped on the mask of sweetness, eager to exploit the sheltered and spoiled—to utilise you for all that you were worth.

Indeed, he’d slip into your life as someone new but not unknown. His current cover was a a rising financier, though, perhaps not a successful one. He jumped the guy a couple of years ago under the allure of Kaori when she was making her way out of Jin’s life and back into the open. He didn’t mind playing the role of this guy; his face was forgettable enough which gave him the perfect opportunity to slip in between the cracks if need be.

“Reading anything interesting?” Kenjaku tried to open with, taking note that you seemed bored at what the page was open to. In his mind, you were looking for gossip about yourself which struck him as a little vein. He could likely play his cards right and flatter you if needed. Given that he was in the lobby without an issue, you should recognise him as someone who belonged.

You stiffened up slightly at the approach of the mystery man, already dreading the confrontation. You just knew that he was going to try and talk to you eventually—you had a sixth sense for people like that. You didn’t even look up, turning the page as you replied to him in a flat tone. “Let me stop you right there,” you said, not bothering sweetening up your voice in your place of work, “I don’t know who you are and how you got in here, but I’m not interested.”

Kenjaku blinked, momentarily stunned into silence. He expected you to greet him with the predetermined response that he had already scripted into his head. You were supposed to be lively and outgoing, or at the very least feign interest. Had he misread you? He supposed that it was a possibility; sometimes people presented as one thing but were very different in reality. Just like him—ah. So it might have been like that. He wasn’t the only one wearing a mask.

“What are you, really?” you continued. “An undercover reporter? Someone after my father’s money? Maybe you just want to get laid? Whatever it is you’re on, take a number like everyone else. The time I spare isn’t free.”

“You’re making an awful lot of assumptions for someone you’ve just met,” Kenjaku replied, quickly regaining his composure once more. You caught him off guard, sure, but he had his ways of recovering. “What if I’m someone important?”

“Then I’d say you’re delusional,” you scoffed, taking a sip of your coffee and scrunching up your nose at the drink now being cold. “If you were someone important, then I would have known about you before you even got here.”

Kenjaku bit back a laugh, letting a half-smile curl on his lips instead. So he got his initial assessment on your personality wrong, but he fully understood it now, he really did. The world of both business and politics, especially combined, were a ruthless affair and you were a young woman who was caught up in the middle of it. No wonder you adopted the personality you did behind the closed doors of the public eye. Hell, he even respected it.

“Fair enough,” he shrugged, relaxing his shoulders. “Would you say that my presence is bothering you then?” he asked with a smile that came across as more creepy than curious.

You didn’t reply to him right away but you packed up your things quickly, shoving everything back into your bag. You then sat up and swung your purse strap over your shoulders, ready to leave. “Well, I’m not sticking around to talk to a time waster – does that answer your question?”

He laughed audibly that time. Ah, and here he thought that this would be easy, but it seemed that he had you all wrong. You weren’t as approachable as he thought, you weren’t the polite ‘princess of the stock market’ as you were nicknamed to be in the news. It was refreshing, if he had to be honest and now that you weren’t as easily accessible as he thought, he found himself utterly intrigued.

So much, that he found himself slipping up and staring again, undoubtedly likely triggering the defensive barrier of your creep radar the longer the seconds ticked by. Judging by the slight grimace you wore on your face, it was clear that you didn’t appreciate his company at all and before he could process what just happened, he found himself suddenly drenched in cold coffee, too. A small price to pay, he supposed, because now he could later snake his way back into your life in the future as that one asshole who you threw your drink on—which hopefully for his sake, didn’t happen too often—he had to stand out somehow.

Kenjaku watched as you stormed away, allowing a much more sinister smile to wash over his face. He stood there, drenched but thrilled, before excusing himself out of the crowded prying eyes of everyone else to go wash up and then he would do some digging on you.

God, though. You surprised him with the way you were; it was so rare for people to catch his eye, because after a while, everyone isn’t too different from one another.

But you were.

And now, he couldn’t help but want to know more.

this has been part 5 of lilac’s jjk yandere nightmares

62 notes · View notes

fatalism-and-villainy · 8 days ago

Text

One major overlap between Julian Bashir and Seven of Nine is the way they both have heightened, extra-human awareness of their own bodies and cognitive functioning - Seven runs self-diagnostics, Bashir is capable of raising his blood pressure at will - and yet they are both susceptible to human error, in ways that are deeply frustrating to them.

Seven’s initial struggle was in adjusting to being severed from the hive mind and thus reduced and weakened in her perception and capabilities; furthermore, she grew up in an environment where she was only a cog in a machine and any significant physical damage would result in termination. By extension, she is very unwilling to acknowledge physical weakness or vulnerability (as seen in episodes like Imperfection). And much of her arc revolves around her making mistakes despite her assurance of the efficacy and superiority of her methods, and learning to cope with her fallibility.

Bashir, as seen in episodes like The Quickening and Chrysalis, has enormous amounts of trouble dealing with failure, and the former episode makes it clear that his arrogance is wrapped up in his desperate fear of not measuring up (similar to how underneath Seven’s arrogance, she still has traces of the frightened, vulnerable child she once was). The augmentation reveal with Bashir gives a lot of context for that inferiority-superiority complex, and once his genetic enhancements are made public, he seems to feel pressure to make his abilities uniquely useful despite the socially marginalized position in which his enhancements threaten to place him. In Statistical Probabilities, one of his motivations in getting the other enhanced people involved in the statistically generated prognostication is his desire to prove that they can “contribute to society.”

With this in mind, there are some significant threads connecting Statistical Probabilities to The Voyager Conspiracy. Both episodes involve Bashir (along with the other augments) and Seven, respectively, undertaking massively complex cognitive processes in order to synthesize vast amounts of data into speculative conclusions - for potential outcomes of the Dominion War, and for theories regarding how Voyager came to the Delta Quadrant. Both are motivated by the desire to make their unique abilities useful to the institutional structures of which they are a part. And both episodes follow a structure in which each character is able to uncover something true and small-scale - with Bashir and the augments, it’s that the Dominion wants to acquire a planet that will allow them to produce ketracel-white, and with Seven, it’s that there is a photonic flea infestation - only to then have their speculations become much broader in scope and threaten to undermine either the ideals or the cooperative structures surrounding them.

There are significant differences between the episodes. Seven’s speculations are revealed to be straight-up false, and a result of her trying to assimilate more information than she can handle. With Bashir, the veracity of his observations is left ambiguous, and his putting a stop to the other augments’ plan to leak confidential information to the Dominion is largely spurred by political necessity (though the war does unfold differently from anticipated, in large part because of variables no one could have known about at that point). Seven’s failure is more directly linked to human limitations kneecapping her attempt to use her heightened cognitive abilities. But in both cases, their attempts to use mathematical precision in mapping out broad-scale events and systems of cause and effect, in ways that only their minds are capable of, ultimately cannot fulfill the social function they intend for them.

#i do think there is something gendered in the difference between these episodes too #specifically in how seven's failure is one of individual pathology #but i've seen people pooh-pooh the conclusion of statistical probabilities with #'the only reason he's wrong is because no one knew about the founders' disease' like yeah that's exactly it.#there will always be variables no one will know to account for. or think to account for. sometimes because of personal bias #i've seen people cast bashir as unilaterally correct and i think he's obviously driven by personal motives #julian bashir #seven of nine #would love more interrogation of both of these characters from a radical disability angle tbh #ds9 #voyager #my meta #statistical probabilities #the voyager conspiracy #ds9 talk #trek talk #queue

41 notes · View notes

anghraine · 7 months ago

Text

I'm trying to redirect my political thoughts from my fandom escape blog again, but I found something interesting enough that I thought I'd talk a little about it.

Occasionally I choose suffering (looking at the more granular 2024 exit poll breakdowns rather than the summaries that I mostly don't trust much at this point). Anyway, I did find something intriguing, if not particularly surprising, in the CNN exit polls, which were done in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin with a sample size of 22,914 voters.

(I mention the specific states forming the sample because this pretty notably excludes any blue states while including some reliably Republican ones.)

Anyway, most exit polls including CNN's let respondents identify their place on the US political spectrum: conservative, moderate, or liberal (reminder that "liberal" in US usage can be a pejorative for "less leftist than me" but also a shorthand for "radical leftist" but also for "anyone who doesn't seek a cishet white Christian ethnostate", but also can be a more neutral synonym for progressives and/or leftists and is often used that way, as here). So you can look at the election results for each of these ideological factions and what share of the overall sample size they represent.

The interesting thing: this "liberal" category accounted for very similar proportions to 2020 of the overall vote in the sample (24% in 2020, 23% in 2024—a difference well within the margin of error of exit polling). There is no need to explain liberals/leftists staying home in 2024: at least in terms of proportions of the overall electorate, they didn't. Just under 1/4 of voters in 2024 were liberals or leftists, just as in 2020.

Okay, if the most leftwards faction of the US political spectrum actually formed a similar proportion of the electorate, then who did they vote for?

Harris. In CNN's own exit polls from 2020, 89% of this faction voted for Biden, and (surprisingly!) a full 10% voted for Trump. God knows what motivated that 10% Trump share after four years of his hellscape of an administration at the height of COVID, but in any case, that support cratered in 2024. 91% of this group voted for Harris and only 4% for Trump. It's an estimate, but it looks like these very peculiar Trump voters had enough of him in 2024 and around half either voted third party this time or for Harris.

So which faction is Trump's victory coming from? Further consolidation of the far right?

In part, yes! 90% of conservatives voted for Trump in 2024, vs 85% in 2020—likely, some conservatives who voted third party or even for Biden in 2020 came "home" this year. However, conservative turnout was actually a little down in 2024, proportionally speaking: conservatives dropped from 38% of the sample in 2020 to 34% in 2024.

But there's one more major faction in all this: "moderates" or centrists. To be clear, we're talking about the US version of centrism, given that this is a US organization polling US voters about US politicians, not "Bernie would be center-right in Denmark" or whatever. This moderate faction jumped from 38% of the overall sample in 2020 to 42% in 2024, and they swung hard towards Trump, though Harris still won a plurality of them. In 2020, 64% of moderates voted for Biden vs 34% for Trump. In 2024, 57% of them voted for Harris vs 40% for Trump—that is, the Democratic lead among centrists dropped precipitously from +30 to +17.

Tl;dr—ideologically speaking, this data suggests that Trump owes his victory to gains among both right-wing and centrist voters rather than some faction of would-be leftists or progressives apathetically staying home or voting third-party or otherwise deserting Democrats (because they're insufficiently radical or for any other reason).

Oh, and if you're curious as to how this compares to CNN's 2016 exit polls, I also checked those! Harris's 84-point lead among the most leftwards faction is a significant improvement from HRC's 74-point lead in 2016. Trump also got 10% of that group in 2016, as in 2020, so it's this campaign—not Hillary's or Biden's—that managed to eat into whatever the hell is going on with that group.

Harris's +17 with moderates is actually a slight improvement on Hillary's +12 in 2016. Biden's jump to a +30 lead among centrists in 2020 represented either a backlash against Trump from centrists, or Biden's own rapport with that group, or some mysterious issue some of those voters had with both HRC and Harris (I wonder what it could be!!), or some combination thereof. Regardless, there are a lot of actual ideologically centrist voters in the USA and not just would-be leftists who haven't heard the good news of Marx yet. And Trump has an iron grip on the right wing at this point: he beat Hillary with conservatives by +65 in 2016, then beat Biden with an even larger margin of +71, then leapt to a 81-point lead over Harris with right-wing voters this year.

#at some point the usa's left (which includes me! to be clear) is going to have engage with the basic reality #that centrists and conservatives really truly exist and vastly outnumber us and genuinely hold socioeconomic beliefs #that are largely antithetical to our own #voters who listed economic concerns as their top priority voted 80-19 for trump #some /are/ persuadable and others will swing against whoever the incumbent is regardless of policy #but fundamentally they don't agree with us. they really truly think republican policies are good for the economy #we need to stop pretending that we're dealing with different and more psychologically comforting problems than we actually have #maybe it's bc i have to endure a lot of centrist nonsense irl that the way a lot of other progressives talk about them frustrates me #but so many refuse to believe that we're not a silent majority. the flat refusal to leave that fantasyland is exhausting tbh #anghraine babbles #long post #cw politics #us american blogging #election night hell 2024 #anghraine rants #mostly for the tags

60 notes · View notes

gawrkin · 5 months ago

Text

(Source: Life of Saint Efflam)

So I found this is a rather eye-opening statement from the hagiography of Saint Efflam, that 450 A.D. is the time of Arthur's crowning.

By that logic, Arthur was born in 435 A.D., since traditionally Arthur assumes power when he's around 15 years old.

But going further, there are two significant points in the story of Arthur's life: the Battle of Badon Hill, where Arthur decisively subdues the Saxons, and the Battle of Camlann, the final battle with Mordred.

To start: Annales Cambriae, where the earliest mention of Arthur and Mordred is found, actually dates the Battle of Camlann to the year 537 A.D. (other manuscripts say 539 A.D.).

This would mean Arthur lives to a ripe old age of 102 years old.

The thing is... it makes a kind of sense. Because in Vulgate Cycle -Mort Artu, we get a statement of Arthur, Gawain and Lancelot's ages:

(Source: Vulgate Cycle - Mort Artu)

It is off by 10 years but, damn, it is close, so margin of error. Then again, this statement was made during the War against Lancelot. Vulgate narrates that following this, the War against Lucius Tiberius and Mordred's Rebellion ensue right afterward, so that may account for the missing ten years?

Also, this info from Mort reveals the relative age gap between Arthur, Gawain and Lancelot. Gawain being 76 y/o means he was born roughly a year (or so) after Arthur's coronation, ~451 A.D. onwards.

This leads into a bit of weirdness regarding Vulgate Canon, since the Orkney Brothers (sans Mordred) in Vulgate Cycle start their Knightly Careers and defend Camelot while Arthur is on an expedition to Cameliard, defeating King Rions and courting Guinevere. Arthur's critical battle with King Rions - which is just after his shotgun wedding with Guinevere - is said to happen when Arthur is 28 years old:

This also means, while Arthur married Guinevere and defeated King Rion for Leodegrance in around 463 A.D., it leads into a very weird conclusion that Gawain was around 12 years old around this time, when he started fighting the Saxons (with his even younger little brothers!) in Arthur's absence. If we add 10 years to that number (adjusting for the statements in both Efflam and Annales), it becomes the more believable 22 years old for Gawain.

Moving on to Lancelot, the age gap between him and Gawain is 21 years while the age gap between Gawain and Arthur is 16 years.

This means Lancelot's birth was around Arthur's 37th year. Extrapolating this to Efflam's statement, Lancelot's birth year would be 472 A.D. around 22 years after Arthur's coronation and 9 years after marrying Guinevere.

Vulgate Cycle states that Lancelot goes to Camelot and knighted when he is around 15-18 years old (it's inconsistent), which would reasonably be the age of maturity. This means Lancelot begins his knightly career in the 490 A.D. at earliest and would meet a 55 year old King Arthur.

The last consequence that Life of Efflam's line implies is the timing of the Battle of Badon Hill, Arthur's decisive victory over the Saxon encroachment. Multiple scholars have speculated when Badon supposedly took place, with estimates going from as early as 482 A.D. to as late as 516 A.D.

If we presume, for the Big Battle of Arthur's entire career, is around 500 A.D., Arthur is 65 years old, Gawain 49 years old and Lancelot 28 years old.

The amusing and romantic conclusion about all of this, is that young freshly knighted Lancelot meets the Great King Arthur for the first time, at the midpoint of Arthur's life, just right before Arthur's biggest military achievement, one that secured Britain's peace for a couple of decades. (With Lancelot maybe even making his big debut in Badon!)

And as a result, the next 20-30 years or so afterward, would be everything in Lancelot's adventures - Galehaut, Morgan, False Guinevere, Meleagant, Galahad and the Grail Quest, etc.

Of course, the BIG problem with both Vulgate and Efflam's statements is that, according to Bede, Vortigern's entire drama with Hengist and the Saxons takes place around that 450's time period. Dates given in Bede's chronicle state the Saxons began arriving anywhere 446 A.D. to 449 A.D.

This makes Arthur's coronation at 450 A.D. impossible, as traditionally, the entire story of Aurelius Ambrosius and Uther Pendragon needs to unfold, especially the magic conception of Arthur as well as the fact that Arthur never meets Vortigern.

Even if we adjust to saying 92 is the oldest Arthur ever got with the Annales 537 A.D. date, that still leaves us with Arthur being born at around 445 A.D. and coronated at 460 A.D. - still far too close to Vortigern's era.

#phew #rabbit hole #a BIG post for an offhand comment made in a Hagiography of an obscure Saint #character ages #saint efflam #king arthur #lives of the saints #welsh saints #welsh folklore #arthuriana #arthurian mythology #arthurian legends #arthurian literature #vulgate cycle #life of st. efflam

24 notes · View notes

triguncookbook · 18 days ago

Text

🍩 Zine Update 🍩

Hi all! We have an update on the reprint situation. As you know, we've been waiting for a zine reprint due to mis-trimming on a significant number of zines. We got a confirmation of the reprint's approval in late March, but have since discovered that we were not in fact added to the printer's production queue. We've been pressing the printer for answers, and they've now offered 2 other options to resolve this in lieu of a reprint — we assume that current events have affected their ability and/or willingness to reprint. These options are:

Sending the books back to the printer to retrim if the mis-trimmings fall outside their allowable error margins — we believe some do and some do not, or,

A partial refund.

To better decide next steps, Mod Rad is re-grading the zines we currently have and setting aside any that are essentially A grade (i.e., no physical damage, minimal mis-trimming), and Mod Lion is in negotiations with our printer to determine what the final refund would be. While it's not the solution we've been expecting, the mod team believes the refund is the best option presented for the following reasons:

increases our charitable donation

allows us to ship our remaining orders immediately (after giving time for address updates)

This isn't a decision we're making lightly, and we want everyone to be fully informed. We're of course happy to discuss any concerns or questions! Below are examples of books we would allow to pass as A grade and ship out:

Additionally, if you need to update your address, please let us know ASAP! We'll post again with a deadline for address updates as well as shipping information soon.

.・。.・゜✭・.・・。゜✭・✫.

Carrd || Twitter || Bluesky || Info Doc || BigCartel (digital sales only)

#trigun cookbook #trigun zine #donut panic!#cookbook zine #trigun fanzine #updates

10 notes · View notes

uboat53 · 7 months ago

Text

All right, the votes are now almost entirely in, so let's take a look at the most recent election, shall we? LONG RANT (TM) time.

THE MANDATE

As you may have already heard, Donald Trump won the election and is already claiming that it was an overwhelming victory which gives him a powerful mandate to govern as he wills.

As with most things he says, you should take all of that with a heaping spoonful of salt. Now that almost every vote is in (CA and WA still have about 3% of their votes left to count, but the rest is pretty much final) we can clearly see that, though he did get more of the popular vote than Kamala Harris, he still fell short of 50% for the third election in a row and he only led Harris by about 1.5%. Not only that, but with the full results we can see that more than 4.5 million fewer people voted in 2024 than voted in 2020, meaning that a good amount of the increase he saw from 2020 wasn't a result of more people favoring him.

(Fun fact, Kamala Harris may have gotten as many votes in 2024 as Donald Trump did in 2020 depending on the last few votes left to count.)

More to the point, Trump's electoral college victory, 312 to 226, is also far more fragile than he would have you believe. As in 2016, his margin of victory rested on the so-called "Blue Wall" states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. In those states, a total shift of 232,580 votes, or less than 1.5% of the total votes cast in those states, OR just over 0.15% of the total votes cast nation-wide, would have produced a Harris presidency instead of a Trump one.

(I would note that Biden's margin of victory in 2020 was similarly slim, 1.65% of the votes cast it the blue wall states and just over 0.16% of the nation-wide total. His popular vote victory, though, was significantly larger, he won 51.3% of the popular vote, just about 4.5% more than Trump. I'd say there's a fair case to be made that he didn't have a powerful mandate either, but he had a better claim to one that Trump does now.)

In other words, Trump won, but it's a razor thin victory by any standard. That seems to be par for the course for the last few elections, the last significant victory, one with a margin of greater than 5% in the key states AND where the winner won the national popular vote by more than 2% (admittedly somewhat arbitrary markers, but ones that put the outside the margins of error for recounts or other likelihoods), was when Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 and the last one before that was Clinton's victory in 1996 or even Bush Sr.'s victory in 1988 if you are looking for one that wasn't confused by the presence of a significant third-party candidate.

THE CAUSES

So why did Trump win/Harris lose? Knowing the answer will allow us to determine both what the winner can/should do once in office and also what the losing candidate/party should adjust in order to do better next time.

One thing you have to know is that there's still not definitive answers on this from the last several dozen elections, so it's unlikely we'll get a quick answer this time around. There's good academic research to show that people respond to the specific messages of the candidates, but there's also good research showing that vote share can shift based on things as unrelated to the candidates as the number of shark attacks in a region in a given year.

A big caution I would give to anyone who is looking to argue that a specific issue, candidate statement, candidate quality, or policy proposal is responsible for the current result is that we've actually seen a very odd thing in elections around the world this year. For the first time in the last 120 years, every single incumbent party that faced election in the developed world lost vote share. In fact, of those incumbent parties facing election, the US Democrats actually had among the lowest decline. As to why, there are a few commonalities; every single developed country that held elections this year saw significant increases in both immigration and inflation in the past two years, for example, but it's hard to make conclusive statements without quite a bit more study.

My point is simply this: before trumpeting this thing or that thing as the definitive answer for why Trump won/Harris lost, be sure that you're not actually just looking at something that's larger than our country or statistical noise. I know we like to ascribe outcomes to definitive and controllable circumstances, but complex events tend to have multiple interrelated causes that can interact in unpredictable ways and one of the lessons of history is that sometimes we're subject to powerful forces that are beyond the ability of one country or its leadership to dictate.

THE PUNDITRY

Of course, by now you're probably seeing dozens of articles and tons of episodes of news programs on TV and radio that are saying a lot more than I am. Just in the last few days I've seen dozens of them ranging from arguing that the election was decided by young men of Gen Z who have been radicalized by right-wing manfluencers, that Democrats didn't do enough to reach out to Latinos in Spanish, that RFK Jr. turned out key demographics for Trump, or that Republican laws and policies in key states depressed voter turnout.

I cannot say loudly enough that we do not have enough data to actually make any of these kinds of arguments. If we're fortunate, we'll start getting the first real results of voter intent studies sometime around next summer, but even then a binary choice like a presidential election based on thousands of shifting variables is far too complex to ever allow us to do anything than note large-scale trends. Detail may eventually be impossible to find an, in an election as close as the one we just had (see above), it's possible to say that just about any small factor may have been the critical one.

My advice is simple, if you don't know what to do or think now, take some time and consider it. Don't overreact and don't be swayed by whoever speaks the most passionately. If you do know what you want to do, start doing it. Don't wait for results that may never come; do your best to make what you want come about. The methods of activism should be shaped by data, but the goals must be set by your own conscience and, if you're already an activist, hopefully you've already figured that part out. Finally, if all of this is affecting your mental health, step away from it. The election is over and there is nothing more that you, as a voter, can do to change anything. There will be time for more voting and activism later.

As for the pundits on TV, radio, and in print; I'm planning to ignore them for the next few months. Yes, even me, who consumes way more political media than is probably good for a person, is going to step away. Over the last few months in particular I've become more and more convinced that quality political coverage has largely disappeared (or been removed) from the American media landscape. I'm going to take some time and figure out where I can still find it.

CONCLUSION

Look, I know the election was a wild ride for everyone and it likely settled nothing as far as the major issues that continue to roil American politics, but if you're looking for a reason why things turned out the way they did, I don't have anything definitive to provide. It was close, about as close as it's possible to get, and there's a hundred possible reasons why. Take care of yourself, figure out where you stand, what you believe, and what you want to/are willing to do and start planning for that.

This is the world now, probably for the foreseeable future. Your job isn't to fix every problem, your job is to do what you can for as long as you can and pass it down to the next generation in as good a shape as you can manage. That's the same job every generation has had, let's do our part.

#politics #us politics #2024 elections #kamala harris #donald trump #2024 presidential election #long rant (tm)#political analysis

19 notes · View notes

tavolgisvist · 8 months ago

Text

Paul once reminded me, ‘Don’t forget, you’re not very good, any of you, you know that, don’t you?’ I had forgotten, I had. It had gotten to the point where I was really believing in myself, you know, really having a good time being me. Apple was in its (comparatively) early days. I had been back from America three months, this was summer 1968. It was design time for stationery and advertisements and logos, we were building our image by being and that was trouble, being. Being was sticking your neck out and getting bites all over it. I don’t think I ever hated anyone as much as I hated Paul in the summer of 1968. Postcards would arrive at my house from America or Scotland or wherever, some outright nasty ones, some with no meaning that I could see, one with a postage stamp torn in half and pasted neatly showing the gap between the two halves. Joan received one bearing the words: ‘Tell your boy to obey the schoolmasters,’ and signed: ‘Patron.’ Far out. Lots of people were getting postcards in those days; Christ, you know it wasn’t easy. These were the days long before Klein came to town. These were the days when Neil Aspinall as Managing Director would come to my room in Apple in the middle of the day and collapse on the sofa and sit, staring and staring. He tells me now it was fear. I knew then it was fear. We were all frightened. We were frightened of Them and we were frightened of each other and we were frightened of the press. At about this time Paul wrote ‘Hey Jude’. Remember: make a sad song better.

...

Something happened last week which was most significant – I signed my name with a flourish and it was a legible signature and it said: Derek Taylor. In the ordinary way I dare say this would mean very little – but it was fantastic how good it felt at the time. I blame no one but myself and I mention it only because it happened and it was wonderful. As I said, it was three years ago this month that Paul said to us: ‘Remember, you’re not really any good, any of you, you know that, don’t you?’ My God, it had been a long fight uphill most of the way, learning how to be and I credit the Beatles with astonishingly generous support for my efforts. My job in journalism was going very well indeed when we met, if you regard the Beaverbrook Press as something of value – and I did then, don’t now, hate its attitudes and stinking bigotry with fierce passion – then I was making some good time for myself but then I met the Beatles and that was the something else that millions of us were to pick up on and feed off and feed and feed off in one great seven-year feast. They broadened my vision and narrowed my margins of error, they straightened my path, loosened my tie, and they taught me to stand up and speak out. They hastened my classlessness, turned me on and inside out, literally put acid in my tea and in Joan’s, gave me presents, took my word for a lot of things, took my views on other things, my praise when it was offered free, bought my labour when it was offered for money and in the end, and in the end, by December 1970, I suffered an identity loss so crucial that when Richard DiLello returned to the Apple he had joined as an office boy and left as an apathetic wreck, returned as photographer and designer of the last Apple Christmas card which was to feature all our tense, cautious faces, I walked like a robot to a white expensively designed hollow white plastic rhomboid, placed it over my head, sat in the Director’s chair and posed faceless as one of the 365 arses Yoko once filmed. It was time to leave, I guess, and I went. It was New Year’s Eve 1970. You have read about the early part of that year, when George had sent me home: ‘Write,’ he said, ‘you have a lot to say.’ Dear George. I have nothing to say about George that isn’t loving and warm, and elder brotherly. Considering everything, he is a saint. He sent me home because there was nothing left for me to save at Apple – I don’t think I knew the half, not a quarter, not a tiny fraction of the background to staff movements in the last days of Pompeii, when the boiling shit hit the fan and sprayed over leaders and followers alike, leaving us all feeling grubby and ugly and useless. Was it true then, like Paul had said, and John was later to say and say and say again, that we were all of us, the inner clique, worthless, talentless? No, it was not true. We’re alive … and to prove it, we’re here.

...

I guess everything got too big, too bloody vast for human beings, frail, ill-prepared human beings, to cope, whether Beatles (and we had to concede it in the end, oh yes we did, they were human, should have realised that when Ringo had his tonsils out with the bidding at $10,000 for them), or us, nervous at their feet. We couldn’t take it. So … so … in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make. We weren’t making much love in the late sixties, not any of us. All the bold gold promises of heaven on earth for all artists everywhere, they went out the window by summer of 68 and by 1969 even Magic Alex was unmagicked. Came 1970 and even going to the pictures to see Let It Be was cause for guilt and shame? Christ! The manner of the ending of the Beatles is a shame, a real bad bummer. Maybe one day it will seem easier, I trust so. But had they continued, they and all of us who gave them their fixes and got our own in return, we would not have survived to tell the tale. I say now, it didn’t end a day too soon.

(As Time Goes by Derek Taylor)

(Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, Part X, Part XI)

Btw, about ‘Don’t forget, you’re not very good, any of you, you know that, don’t you?’ from John:

Q: How do you feel towards the Beatle people? All of them who used to – some still do – work at Apple, who’ve been around during those years. Neil Aspinal, Mal Evans . . . JOHN: I didn’t mention Mal. I said Neil, Peter Brown and Derek. They live in a dream of Beatle past, and everything they do is oriented to that. They also have a warped view of what was happening. I suppose we all do. Q: They must feel now that their lives are inextricably bound up in yours. JOHN: Well, they have to grow up then. They’ve only had half their life, and they’ve got another whole half to go; and they can’t go on pretending to be Beatles. That’s where it’s at, I mean when they read this, they’ll think it’s “cracked John,” if it’s in the article, but that’s where it’s at, they live in the past. You see, I presumed that I would just be able to carry on, and bring Yoko into our life, but it seemed that I had to either be married to them or Yoko, and I chose Yoko, and I was right.

(John Lennon, December 1970, interview with Jann Wenner for Rolling Stone)

#derek taylor #as time goes #the beatles #john lennon #paul mccartney #george harrison #ringo starr #i'm reading

20 notes · View notes

spidermanifested · 1 year ago

Text

so back in january @waitineedaname did the incredible public service of cataloguing the majority of fma characters by appearances in fmab per episode. and its only with the help of their data that i was able to make this graph

it contrasts episode count by the amount of fanfiction tagged with their name*. theres a break in the y-axis because the ed, al, mustang, hawkeye and winry tags were so much more prolific, so note the change in scale. also note that the x-axis goes from right to left.

theres only a very weak positive correlation between the two factors.

ive gone into the enormous gap between ed and al in the past but reminder that not only is eds count over double als, but only 8% of fics tagged with alphonse elric on ao3 do not also include ed.

havoc and hughes are the biggest outliers outside the "main 5", with envy as a close third place.

ling also boasts a considerable score for his middling episode count but given the central role he takes in what episodes he appears in, i feel like a more minute-count-based analysis would put him more on track with the average, however if i ever decide to sit down and time every fma character by Minutes Onscreen please shoot me

chris mustang has more fic to her name than wrath, pride or even father himself despite being in 10 or more times fewer the episodes, which i would normally congratulate her for but suspect she achieved via nepotism.

greed is on top of the remainder of the cast but he has not left the main cloud out of solidarity with the proletariat.

the worst number of episodes you can be in is 13-16 i guess.

looking at scar. looking at the fma fandom.

*both ao3 and ff.net were counted towards the total. given how ff.net only counts fics to the closest hundred or thousand after a point, theres a significant margin of error there, but i dont think it really affects the data because "theyre popular enough to reach that amount" is all we need to know.

tag ambiguity re: sloth, wrath and pride on ff.net meant i had to go through and sift out the 03-original characters manually and there may also be a slight margin of error there because of that. aside from those instances i did not discriminate between 03- and manga/brotherhood-based fics. it would be interesting to see a similar graph in regards to 03 episode count.

#fullmetal alchemist (fullmetal alchemist)#fma #fmab #fullmetal alchemist

67 notes · View notes

justinspoliticalcorner · 2 months ago

Text

Mehdi Hasan at Zeteo:

While the 2028 Democratic primary is several years away, Democratic candidates are already laying the groundwork for their potential campaigns. Recent Data for Progress polling has found deep discontent among the Democratic base, with Democrats wanting a younger generation of leadership who will do more to fight against Donald Trump and the MAGA agenda. The political figures who are best able to tap into that resistance energy may be able to gain significant support for a presidential run in 2028. In collaboration with Zeteo, Data for Progress conducted a poll of likely Democratic primary voters to analyze the current state of the 2028 field. While many polls of the 2028 Democratic presidential primary survey registered or likely voters who identify as Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents, this survey specifically focused on voters who are likely to participate in Democratic primaries, better capturing a sample more closely aligned with the electorate that will actually decide the nomination in 2028. As the most recent Democratic nominee, former Vice President Kamala Harris remains one of the most well-known Democratic figures. However, Harris is not certain to run for president in 2028 – she is currently considering a run for California governor, where recent polls have shown her to be the clear frontrunner. In a hypothetical Democratic primary for president, including the 2024 nominee, Harris leads with just 18% of the vote, followed by former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (14%), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (12%), and Sen. Cory Booker (12%). However, when Harris is taken out of the equation – and respondents who chose Harris have their vote redistributed to their second choice – Buttigieg leads the pack with a plurality of 17%, followed closely by Booker and Ocasio-Cortez with 14% each, and Governor Gavin Newsom with 10%. None of the other potential candidates tested break into double-digits.

It’s important to note that presidential primary polling this far out is generally a contest of name recognition. However, to further gauge Democratic primary voters’ perceptions of the potential candidates, the survey asked whether they would consider voting for each of the potential candidates.

According to a new 2028 Democratic Primary poll from Data For Progress/Zeteo conducted between April 9th and 14th with a 4% margin for error, Kamala Harris narrowly leads with 18%, then Pete Buttigieg comes in close at 14%, and AOC and Cory Booker with 12% each. With Harris removed, Buttigieg leads at 17%, and AOC and Booker tie at 14%.