i still have a dumb article i could write about debunking some old cohost discourse back in that era where people just lied to make up reasons why you shouldn't use cohost but idk if it's too late or too drama to post
here is a list of every muffle or mute i use on tapestry, my rss client of choice. a lot of what i'm hiding is promotions of some sort, usually for members-only content, which i think makes sense. but what has really started crossing the line is stuff talking about ai. i follow some normal-ish publications about web dev and stuff, and the amount of ai hype i've seen on the is driving me kinda crazy, so i am now exercising my power to be the god of my own feed and silence it all. it's muffled though because obviously this hides any ai criticism from people i might care about so it's just muffling it, requiring me to click through to see it. tragic.
okay! i'm all caught up. thanks for waiting through my absence. i've been very low energy yet busy as of late. i have surgery later this week so i'll try to queue up some posts for the weekend
I go to all of these but this time I wanted to share some pictures of the games
New week new links! This one is a bit late since I was busy all weekend, but all my links are from Friday or earlier!
I never really got Commander. I had a brief period where I lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan because I ran away from home, and the person I was staying with there was a huge magic fan. He would offer to pay me to sort his cards for him, which I never really succeeded at. During this time he tried to get me to play Commander with him at his local game store, and I didn't really get what was fun about it? To be fair, I didn't know Magic cards well enough to know what was going on. (I still don't.) But I also didn't vibe with the social aspect of it. I got into card games through Hearthstone, and my favorite part of Hearthstone was carefully sequencing your actions to maximize the amount of value you could get out of a turn. This could be social if you played with a friend, but the game took a backseat to the conversation as opposed to being the vehicle that facilitates the social interaction.
I tend to treat Netrunner—my current main card game—similarly. Netrunner tends to be more of a social engine (as in, the mode of social interaction is facilitated by the game) than Hearthstone, but the fun isn't negotiating with the table politics or anything of the sort. Maybe I'm wrong about how people play Commander, but that's how it feels to me.
Anyways, this is a good piece. It's interesting to see a different angle of how Magic is slowly killing itself to make those sweet sweet quarterly earnings.
I think the other side of it all is systems that don't want you to connect with others, at least not in a meaningful way. It wants to keep you at arms length while putting themselves in between, because you're only a benefit to platforms if your money goes right back into the systems that keep you just a bit distant from others and never fully satisfied to begin with.
Speaking of quarterly earnings, Twitch is becoming worse. Thankfully, this piece is great. I wish I had more to say about the financialization of community but man it's so bleak that everything is becoming a gig. All of this is swirling around in my head with other things like the "You too can flip assets" valorization of speculation, the giggification of everything, and how our whole world is now just a big slot machine that we're not meant to win. Like, it all sucks. We know it all sucks. We're no longer at the stage where the companies are ripping the copper out of the walls. We're at the point where we're being encouraged in all facets of life to rip the copper out of the walls of our own social life so we can pay our rent.
"I'm an anxious patient," I said to Rob then.
"Good," he said. "I think that just means you're grounded in reality. Things happen all the time." We shook hands. The nurse returned with a sheath of instructions and a bag with two bath mitts and a bottle of frothy hibiclens.
A post about pain and pain tolerance.
New week new Laura Michet post going in the link hole. I hope to god everyone who follows me now follows her. Like genuinely. She puts out so many bangers. This is just her blog writing process. Still a banger.
Chefs have fragile egos and they all seem to enjoy cooking (???) so it’s obvious they’re just too attached to the food.
A nice little joke to end off on.
Years ago, I worked on a concept for a video breaking down an iceberg meme1 for Blaseball,2 a roguelike3 incremental3 management3 horror3 game with creative story prompting elements3 that I was deep into for basically its entire runtime. While this project never saw the light of day, I think it'd be fun to share some of the stories from it that I enjoyed writing. This is one of those stories.4
WhAT is the Blaseball version of a sabermetric5 statistic called wins above replacement (WAR). While I am not a baseball expert, the concept behind WAR is simple: it’s a “meta-statistic”6 of how many more games of baseball you have won having a specific player on your team compared to a hypothetical ultra-fungible average baseball player. If a player has a high WAR, you could make the assumption that firing that player would result in the team they were on losing significantly more games, and if a player has a low WAR, then replacing them would have negligible impact on the team’s overall performance
This concept is a lot harder to translate to a game like Blaseball. Nobody tracked stats during the first season and most of the second season of the game. This made it impossible to figure out what “replacement-level” player would be like in the game. The only situation where a player would be “replaced” is if they die in the game through some form or another, which would result in the game will rolling a new player to replace them.7 This is not ideal, and for many seasons, the stats nerds at the Society for Blaseball Research would not be able to find a way to recreate WAR due to lacking any sort of substantial data on the performance of baseline replacement-level players.
At the end of season 10 of Blaseball, the Baltimore Crabs won the Internet Series championship.8 With that win, they would be the first team to have 3 championship wins, which means they would “ascend” to somewhere, be removed from the game, and get replaced with a brand new team who would occupy their place, the Tokyo Lift.9 This was a freshly rolled team, and their performance on the following season would get used as the baseline for what a hypothetical replacement-level team would do in Blaseball. The Tokyo Lift would proceed to finish season 11 with a record of 28 wins and 61 losses, being both the worst team in their division and the worst team in the whole game.
While their record was unfortunate, it helped stats nerds create a WAR-like statistic to figure out approximately how good a player was by comparing how many wins that player would give you compared to the historic winrate of the season 11 Tokyo Lift. This stat would be christened the name, “Wins (historical) Above Tokyo Lift” or WhAT. This name was also a reference to the catchphrase of the official Blaseball Twitter account10, “what”.11
From Sproutella on January 29, 2021:
I have also done some work on developing a couple new statistics. One is WhAT or Wins (historical)* above Tokyo. Using the number of unweathered wins acquired by the Tokyo Lift in season 11 as a value for replacement level wins and the league wide run environment, we can calculate a players value in wins from Runs from batting, runs from stealing bases, and runs from avoiding double plays. This gives the mostly comprehensive counting statistic WhAT. This graph shows the top 10 WhAT accumulators in s11. *credit to Cuttlefishman agrīoeconomiae
Attached is a graph showing the 10 players with the highest WhAT, with first place belonging to Aldon Cashmoney, with a WhAT of 9, and in 10th place is Basilio Mason, with a WhAT of 4.
I think WhAT is an exceptionally funny stat. It checks all the boxes: it has a funny background, a funny name, it’s somehow actually useful, yet I have not seen extensive use of it across discussion of players, outside of arguments over which player is best and miscellaneous factoids. This is not a negative quality to me.
From deafhobbit on April 18th, 2022: oh my god
Lowe Forbes’ WHaT during their two underhanded seasons was 11.6 in s24 and 4.8 in s23
their next best season ever was s12x with a WHaT of 0.8
Their career pitching WHaT up til the point they became underhanded was -18.4
As a bonus little tidbit, years later, the stats nerd at SIBR have mostly finished their “Nominative Determinism” project, which aimed to comprehensively reverse-engineer the simulation running Blaseball.12 Now that they know how teams are generated and how the game itself works in code, it would be possible to generate an infinite number of replacement-level teams, simulate them all against real players, and determine a precise metric of exactly how many wins a player would have above its replacement.
While this would be exceptionally funny, I have been told that it would not actually be that much more valuable than WhAT as a stat. Somehow, the Lift was about as average as you could get.
From May: theyre historical. thats, like. not now. live int he present
From Erin on March 22nd, 2022: All wins are historical. Wins don’t happen in the present.
Which, in true Evie fashion, I also helped make. ↩
Specifically for the Society of Internet Blaseball Research, or SIBR for short. This was a community of very dedicated fans devoted to unraveling the mysteries behind the game. ↩
Specifically, this is the WAR/WhAT entry on the iceberg meme. ↩
Fancy word referring to a baseball statistics organization, and is used as a catch-all for a specific vibe of baseball statistics. ↩
Like, a stat derived from other stats used to give a big picture sense of how good a player is. ↩
In theory, this would let you figure out a player’s WAR just by seeing how much more the team lost after that player died. A little too late though. ↩
Among other things. ↩
It’s actually really relevant that they were the first to do it, since the “Book of Blaseball” only stated that a team with 3 championship titles would ascend, and did not actually say what ascending would mean. Blaseball had a lot of saying ominous things without ever explaining what it was, and this sort of Welcome to Night Vale-esque humor was a big part of the appeal of the game. ↩
This account was run by the fictional Blaseball commissioner, Prime Minister Parker MacMillan III, who was recently promoted at the start of season 11 from “intern-interim-commissioner” to “Chief Executive Officer”. ↩
This phrase would be deployed whenever the commissioner would be confused by any interaction with a fan-account or the events of the game itself, which was often. ↩
This is a story for another day. ↩
yall i made a soup recipe and it was so mid omg. never making soup again
whoops i forgot to take pictures while playing netrunner. maybe next time. i got to test a version of mercury using twinning that was total dogshit and got in its own way but i did get to access 5 cards once which is super funny.
what the fuck is up with so many isekai manga just being "in another world as a military otaku with a bunch of guns that i use to shoot those i deem to be evil"
lol that's so broken i need to fix it
