Parts of it remain indecipherable without the social context, however, as the writer explicitly assumes a mutual knowledge of some set of unspecified rules.

No idea about the movie, but I wonder if figuring out the exact quote would be a useful step in the right direction (making it easier to google, ask about, etc). The closest I’ve found so far is “The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far”, from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals.

I assume that the movie used a correct quote, so it should be possible to find the quote without knowing the movie. If the movie invented a brand new quote, then the idea of using the original quote as a stepping stone towards finding the movie won’t work.

It’s always good to support the original publisher and encourage local libraries by reading a hard copy, so I could never endorse piracy, even for people who can’t get their hands on a physical copy. Even though it’s true that both libgen and annas-archive have ebook copies of this particular book (and can easily be found via google), I could never in good conscience direct anyone to such a site.

Every time I hear this observation, I automatically hear Jim Carrey’s voice in my head saying “It’s dead people laughing! Those people are dead!”

I guess he said it in the 1999 movie Man On The Moon and the line has somehow been permanently lodged in the back of my brain for the last 25 years

It means the overall death rate in the sample group was decreased substantially. The number of people who survived because they didn’t get lung cancer or blood clots was so large that it had a noticeable impact on the number of total survivors, even when you include death by bus. This is a useful measure for a couple of reasons. One, it accounts for the prevalence of the disease being prevented - cutting all pork from your diet prevents 100% of deaths by trichinosis, which accounts for like 0.00001% of deaths from all causes (completely made up numbers and example, without consulting any sources). Two, it could account for net change in survival, for a treatment or behavior that has both positive and negative effects - giving radiation therapy indiscriminately to everyone with any kind of lump might decrease rate of dying from breast cancer, but increase death “from all causes” because it causes more problems than it solves.

I guess an additional way it might be useful is if we don’t yet have data on the exact mechanisms by which the treatment helps or what exactly its preventing - all we know is that we gave group A the treatment and not group B, and after 20 years there were a lot more people alive in group A, but we haven’t yet found a pattern in which causes of death were most affected and how.

She looks great. And powerful.

This has been pretty widely discussed under the name “the double empathy problem”, although as always it’s good to have more actual data. The general gist in the existing discussion is that autistic people and allistic people have trouble with each other’s communication styles, but this is treated as a communication deficit in autistic people rather than two different styles that have difficulty understanding each other. An analogy might be a minority that (poorly) speaks the language of the majority, and then is considered stupid despite the fact that they are bilingual and none of the people they’re speaking to have made an effort to learn the minority language.

I wasn’t sure to what extent this was autistic community in-group jargon, so I spent time trying to loosely explain it, when it turns out that a quick Google to check whether I’m crazy indicates it’s pretty well established and I could probably have just linked the Wikipedia page.

Tl;Dr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_empathy_problem

For anyone else who was curious about lichens covering “a not insignificant amount” of the earth’s surface, a quick google tells me it’s about 7% (according to e.g. new york times, scientific american, etc)

Edit: oh and estimating the age of an exposed surface by lichen diameter is called lichenometry. I’m seeing stuff about it being used in geological contexts but it makes sense that it could work for old buildings too

in my experience, most things will mobilize the squirrels to hide

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apparently not

that phrase is to biology as “donde esta la biblioteca” is to spanish

The linked article mentions that one of the predator types merged into the dragon is raptors (as in birds of prey, not velociraptors)

You might enjoy crpgaddict, a blog that is playing through every computer roleplaying game in chronological order, providing scores for each one on various metrics. The reason I bring him up is that he doesn’t rate on a curve, or give things marks for being “good for its time” - if pool of radiance scores higher than skyrim, it’s not because it was influential or good for its time, but because he thinks it’s outright better regardless of age (just an example - I’m not saying he would actually rate those two games that way, and he has not rated skyrim). There are early 80s games that he remembers fondly and had a huge impact on the industry that he rates as like 23/100 or whatever, because the scale leaves room for the Witcher 3.

It takes a long time to get through all those games, so he’s currently up to the early 90s, having updated his blog regularly for over a decade. But his list of highest rated games might be a good place to start.

Oh, and while we’re talking about old-ish RPGs that would score well on his scale, I might as well mention Morrowind and the Baldur’s Gate series (before 3, obviously), which he won’t reach for a long time but has been known to hold up as solid examples of the genre. Personally I still think Baldur’s Gate 2 is great. I’m also a big fan of the quest for glory series, which crpgaddict has rated, but might not make his list of top scoring RPGs, because they’re a hybrid adventure/RPG, so not all of their strengths appear on a scale designed for pure RPGs.

As someone who didn’t play them back in the day, I feel like SotN holds up but Super Metroid doesn’t. Just as another opinion. I couldn’t really get into metroid fusion either. To me it feels like the moment-to-moment action gameplay is too clunky in the early metroid games I’ve played, even if the exploration element is neat. I did enjoy playing SotN for the first time a couple of years ago though. It’s been a while since I played either, so they’re not totally fresh in my memory - I guess it’s possible that I’m just more forgiving of clunky melee combat than clunky shooting.

Tangentially related, always amuses me how “metroidvania” has become the genre name, when originally it was just a way that reviewers poked fun at the big change between SotN and earlier castlevanias. They were like “this isn’t what I expect from a castlevania, it’s a great game but maybe they should have named it metroidvania”, and the name stuck. Another odd fact about that terminology is that according to interviews, the SotN designer never played metroid - they were inspired by the non-linear exploration with different routes opened up by items/upgrades in Zelda games (although obviously adding that to castlevania’s platformer gameplay makes it more closely resemble metroid). So it should probably be considered a zeldavania.

Large language models (chatgpt etc, basically any of the AIs you’ve seen recent headlines about) aren’t especially good at distinguishing true from false claims. It’s one of the biggest weaknesses that AI researchers are actively trying to find solutions for.

part of the appeal is how bad I am at both the gameplay and the lore

Probably Wayne Gretzky? I don’t even know anything about ice hockey and I know he’s supposed to be the most dominant player of any sport. Like he and his brother have the record for highest combined goals of any pair of brothers: 2,857 by Wayne, 4 by Brent. If you take away all his goals, he’d be the highest scoring player of all time on assists alone. There have been 13 times when a player has scored over 100 goals in a season in NHL history: Lemieux (once), Orr (once), and Gretzy (eleven times in a row). He retired last century and still holds 57 records. I’m not gonna keep picking out examples but there’s a bunch more facts like this that sound like the old “chuck norris facts” meme but are actually true.

“If you don’t know anything about ice hockey why do you have all these facts on hand?” - I remembered seeing this kind of list before so I did a quick Google.

Edit: I’m seeing some different exact figures for some of these, but the general principle stands and I’m not invested enough in hockey facts to nail down which numbers are exactly right.

you mean jumping the stark

I came to the comments looking for context, but since nobody has provided it yet, did some googling. I believe this is the reference: https://news.sky.com/story/tyrannosaurus-rex-could-have-been-even-bigger-than-previously-thought-study-suggests-13184470