christian

I have never played Mario 64 outside of a couple five-minute sessions on a Toys-R-Us demo when I was maybe 10, but the Watch for Rolling Rocks half-A-press video - a speedrun with the added condition that a longer time will trump a shorter time if the player presses 'A' (jump) less than in the faster run - is almost unquestionably my favorite youtube video ever. It's a hilariously silly niche thing, but beyond that it's like watching someone try to explain their doctoral dissertation, making their best attempt while knowing full-well both that they won't be able to get their audience to follow every piece and also that no one else is as engaged in the topic as they are. As long aa I don't feel like a captive audience, I can find a real joy in exposure to that sort of enthusiasm. Laying that on top of something that's just a little funny hits the spot for me so much.

Now, you're probably wondering what I'm gonna need all this speed for. After all, I do build up speed for twelve hours. But to answer that, we need to talk about parallel universes, and if you thought my other tangents were complicated, just you wait. Okay, so Mario's position is a floating point number, but it's converted to a short when the game uses it to test for collision with floor triangles...

This hurts a lot to watch, but I really appreciate the conclusion she draws at the end about showing gratitude for positive impacts even if the experience isn't great as a whole. A few times I have gotten thank-you emails after a semester that have remained extremely meaningful to me many years later. I wish I could let them know the impact it had, but I'm not going to hunt down old students. I would say don't feel any need to send something if you don't fully mean it though, platitudes after a student sees their grade are not the same. They're not insulting but if it feels like a template the student could send to all their professors with a couple changes it just comes across as networking.

The "thank you for caring" note resonates with me a lot too. About a year ago after I started breaking down I had a lecture where I really didn't have my shit together and it was embarrassing. I knew I was half-assing my prep for that day but I just needed to show up. I was kind of caught off-guard when three students stayed after, but it meant a lot to me that they phrased it as "are you okay" rather than as a complaint. I opened up more than I should, definitely more than the teacher in that video, I knew better but I was too broken at the time. I think support from an unexpected place was helpful. So many of the people I have come across in my life have been exceptionally kind to me, that's really why I haven't ended up like that woman.

I felt like I had to double up because she was already late on vaccines and it was very unlikely I'd have another opportunity soon to get her to the vet.

Knew we were moving months in advance so about six months before the move I was trying to get her comfortable going in the cage by giving her wet food in there. I thought after a couple months I would try shutting the door quietly and opening it right back up and then gradually get her used to the door being closed for longer durations, but the very first time she was very unhappy and the next couple months she basically said fuck you I'm eating the dry food in protest right in front of you when you're doing this. When she finally started going back in I felt like I can't play with getting her accustomed again, I've got to just do it on the day, and I was pretty confident that if I didn't get her vaccines then it would be a very long time.

Our little lady had some trauma in her youth and was extremely resistant to being picked up and would absolutly not take direction to go into a crate. After a few years of her getting more comfortable I knew I could probably get her in again one time by tricking her, but I should save that for an emergency and nothing else. Eventually that was needed when we had to move. Of course, knowing I had to make the most of that I scheduled a vet appointment for that day.

It was somehow much worse than I had anticipated, starting as soon as I shut her in. She was so scared, throwing her full body with as much force as she could against the walls of the crate over and over and over, keeping that up while I was carrying her to the car and the first few minutes of the drive before she finally started to calm down. Watching that shook me, emotionally painful and just building anxiety about the appointment.

She actually was very submissive for the vet, who seemed to think I was crazy because at that point I was visibly a lot more terrified and upset than the cat.

Awful day in general, I have never seen an animal more depressed than she was after finishing that appointment and getting to the new place, it was horrific. She was normally extremely skittish about potentially being touched, but would invite pets sometimes. In that first day though, she was just do whatever you want I don't care. I had to pick her up body basically limp out of the crate, she had never let me pick her up. She didn't move from where I had placed her for hours, zero reaction to any action from me. She got back to her old self after a few weeks, but that day is still very painful to think back to I feel like I'm about to cry just from writing this.

I think we can all agree that Trump should respond to this baseless libel by unsealing every inch of dirt he has on Elon.

I too was naïve enough to think that since my girl was shy around people I needed to solve that by getting her a companion. I wasn't aware growling was something cats did until making that mistake. It's especially weird because I don't think I ever heard her hiss. Her growl was very intimidating to me, but not to the kitten. Okay little man, I'm not sure she wants to play today.

I think she was mad about that decision for a long time.

And an AOC candidacy would really, really excite me if I didn't know that Democrats rig their primaries.

Yeah at this point I think you could take a person from my own life that I have literal love and respect for and I would still be more inclined to interpret surviving a primary as a character indictment than as reason for optimism.

It is kind of depressing to be honest. I'm antifascist, I just happen to also be a loser.

When in a healthy relationship it doesn't bother me, but now that I'm single again and will be looking at revisiting the whole dating thing at some point it's uncomfortable to think too much about.

A couple people here have suggested wet food to lure the cat down, but when mine found a spot abouve the cabinets that was much easier to get up than down that solution crossed my mind for only an instant before I realized it would probably only take one more go for him to realize there's a huge incentive to risking injury.

He would do this thing when he was angry where he would howl like a dog to make sure everyone within earshot understood the severity of whatever great injustice had taken place, and not taking him down when he wanted to be was definitely one of those cases. I'd give him maybe an hour to get his screaming in before getting around to helping him.

Completely missed their opportunity to start the headline with "Proud New Dad" and having the reveal at the end be that he was no less proud of this before fatherhood.

Yeah, I think someone deciding they don't want to take a review seriously if it's by someone who gave up on it quickly is fair. Especially if you're poor and paying for games, you can't get something new every day so you'd often prefer something that takes a lot of time to fully understand and appreciate, even if that comes at the expense of being a slog for the early hours.

I also imagine that declaring a specific review invalid for this reason will more often than not just be sour grapes over someone trashing a game they love. It's still not justified, but to some degree I get it. Maybe I'm visiting the wrong crowds but I think painting all of this as universally-applied mindless elitism, rather than as someone's knee-jerk reaction to criticism for their specific passion, is itself overly dismissive. You can still call that out without presenting it as a caricature.

I still remember like twenty years ago undergrad probability theory a professor posed some question to the class and even though this prof was normally very thorough with being helpful and walking through answers with students, this one guy answered so wildly off-the-mark the prof paused a bit and then just said "no" and moved on.

We were doing final exam review for earlier semester material and the question was about the probability of randomly drawing some hand of cards, something like a hand of five cards with exactly three jacks. Guy answered very confidently "it's 1 minus the null set". I remember this because I immediately asked the kid next to me what was said and just heard the same thing repeated.

So many things wrong. A "null set" is a concept from measure theory, which was not used in this second-year-undergrad course. Since using "the" here implies there's just one, he almost certainly meant the empty set. That's whatever. But we're not in a set theory class, 1 is a number, not a set, so we're not in a context where it makes any sense to subtract sets from numbers. But if we just push all of that aside and say okay fine, represent 1 as a set however you want and subtract the empty set, taking any set A and subtracting the empty set just gives A back, meaning he's given an extremely roundabout way of saying the probability is 1, a 100% chance of randomly drawing that specific hand of cards.

Situation where it's would be one thing if we're early on and he'll discover he's in over his head, but right before the final is such a wild time to sound fully confident in an answer that wrong.

Moral of the story: sometimes having that much confidence behind an awful understanding will give bystanders enough secondhand embarrassment that they'll still think of you from time to time twenty years later.