millievfence - Tumblr blog

millievfence · 6 days

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There are way more bones in the human body whose loss would necessitate >$1m in medical expenses than there are no-cost-to-loss bones. I might consider 1 if I was destitute, but after that it's clearly a bad plan.

I saw this question posed on tiktok, but I think Tumblr would really enjoy it too.

If a fae creature offered to give one million dollars for a bone chosen at random, how many bones would you allow them to take?

Light clarifications; The fae is not the one choosing the bones. The bone is taken at random. Each bone, no matter the size or importance, is worth a full million dollars. You must also declare the exact number first, you can't go bone-by-bone. You either say 2 or you say 10, you can't work your way up to a higher number. The bones are removed instantaneously, and the money is given immediately as well. You will not get in government trouble for acquiring the money.

Tell me in the tags/replies how many bones you'd let the fae take. And as always, reblog for bigger sample size.

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millievfence · 15 days

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I also see Tchaikovsky used as an example. Which is dumb because Tchaikovsky is a romanization; if you wrote out "Czajkowski" Anglos would absolutely choke.

I keep thinking of those internet-brave people who say there's no excuse for mispronouncing people's names, if white people can learn Khaleesi they can learn yours. And sure, we know those now, because we heard them a lot. But the Game of Thrones audiobook reader can't say most names the same way twice, including ones that are very close to common English names. Is Petyr pronounced Peter? Like petard without the d? Peteeeeer? Patire? Every usage is a new adventure.

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millievfence · 21 days

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I wouldn't pay for cancer treatment but I've found vets very prone to "oh well this test will be definitive" or "this treatment will definitely solve the problem" and it can be really hard to pull the plug on that process, especially if you want them to treat your other animals.

I'm a vegetarian but I don't really "get" people who get expensive medical treatments for their pets. Like. If my cat had cancer I'd be like. Bummer. Guess the humane thing to do is put her down. And I've had this cat like most of my life

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millievfence · 1 month

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More evidence that the 90s were just as shallow and Hugh Jackman was underperforming as Woliverine

From Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

(that last one being especially egregious because he was supposed to be a loser nerd)

Farscape:

Hercules, who at least is supposed to look hot

Brendan Frasier

Admittedly that picture comes from an article whose title starts with "Brendan Frasier had to starve himself..."

Gilmore Girls:

Lost World (rando 1990s syndicated tv show)

and then there was the 80s:

Best fandom history commentary ever, courtesy of @tardistara

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millievfence · 1 month

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Interesting to compare this to the "wolverine then and now" posts

Best fandom history commentary ever, courtesy of @tardistara

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millievfence · 1 month

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I was trying to figure out who netflix Katara reminded me of and it finally clicked: ember island Katara.

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millievfence · 1 month

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To clear up my past self's confusion (plus some context): both male and female reproductives in this species are produced parthenogenetically (without a father). This is normal for males in ants, bees, and wasps, but weird for daughters. It's especially weird that they do it for reproductives but not workers (maybe a disease thing?). It also means males never have grandchildren, so I'm not sure why they bother producing them.

This is absolutely wild.

Two populations of ants (Cataglyphis hispanica) in the deserts of Spain, the same species but separate genetic lineages. All workers are hybrids of both populations but in both cases, through social hybridogenesis the reproductive queens and males are only of one lineage or the other.

Queens of both species must mate out to produce workers (hybrids) but the workers never in turn reproduce.

They show it's been like this for a long long time!

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millievfence · 2 months

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True smaller phones have never been tried: the iPhone mini was not that small compared to the same-number iphone. And on Android the smaller models (which are still bigger than my previous phone that was already too big) have worse technical specs than the even more giant ones. Looks like that's not true for the iphone, but it is true for iPad.

Nothing makes me more viscerally sympathetic to the "corporations decide what products people are going to want regardless of what people actually want" argument than the fact that all phones are giant tablets with no buttons. No one is making anything else, so everyone "has" to want one of those.

Except.

I really did care about this issue, so I looked into the details, and that's exactly backwards. When Motorola killed the Droid line of phones with slide-out keyboards, I went and read an interview with the product director. And he was like "yeah, I loved that feature, I really liked those phones, but we just couldn't get people to buy them."

And similarly, I'm always upset that no one is making reasonable-sized (under five inches) phones any more. But the thing is, when they do make those they can't sell them. For a long time Apple hung on with the mini line, which was the only thing that ever tempted me to do business with Apple. But they're discontinuing it because they just can't sell enough of them to justify keeping that line open—even though they have a total monopoly on the market for "small decent-quality smartphones".

These are both cases where the corporations keep trying to create demand for exactly the products I want. And it doesn't take because people authentically, organically, do not want them.

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millievfence · 3 months

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respect for staying on task

See, I had all afternoon to work on my D&D city, and instead I spent it researching how rivers change course over time and Roman infrastructure.

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millievfence · 3 months

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Addendum: I think the rationalists are closer to correct on personal spending than much of the rest of the world, and in particular more correct than my terminally scarcity-minded dad. The encouragement to spend more money, and to spend money on things I wasn't 100% sure would work out, have been very good for me. I object to saying that rationalists don't ever do status-driven spending, because they do and it sucks, but overall I like this equilibrium.

I guess it might still be incorrect to call it positional goods because while it will hurt your status to be frugal, it doesn't hurt anyone else's status when you spend more on yourself (except maybe by moving the average and overton window- but still nothing near normal positional goods). The only time one person's spending even arguably socially hurts another is ~excludable-spending, like hosting parties on shelling dates, and maybe funding sexy projects.

Parties are still underprovided and often badly implemented so I'm not worried about wasteful competition for those. And my only objection to competition for funding sexy projects is that sexiness doesn't track usefulness as well as I'd like.

I appreciate the existence of the Rationalist Community, because the whole point of The Sequences is that if you got it right, You Should Be Winning. And these people are actually out there, testing all these ideas. And on the whole, the thing we learn is that no, this does not really improve your win percentage by a significant amount. But occasionally they find something that does work, and I suddenly have a hundred relatively solid anecdotes to reason off of. They are very useful canaries, even if I would not want to be a canary

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millievfence · 3 months

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I think this one is probably giving too much credit to rationalists.

Programmers have a fabulous ratio of salary:[social pressure for positional goods]. Bigtech parking lots look like they have genuine income diversity until you notice that while cars may be old or unglamorous, they never look unsafe.

Rationalists don't quite have positional goods, but many parts care about status a lot, and being frugal is low status. You don't need to buy any particular thing, but having a low threshold for buying things that might help you is considered virtuous.

While I'm complaining: I'm not saying everyone needs to know how to drive. But it would be nice if ability to drive was counted as kind of agency. But too many high status people never learned to drive, so they insist it's a non-factor.

I appreciate the existence of the Rationalist Community, because the whole point of The Sequences is that if you got it right, You Should Be Winning. And these people are actually out there, testing all these ideas. And on the whole, the thing we learn is that no, this does not really improve your win percentage by a significant amount. But occasionally they find something that does work, and I suddenly have a hundred relatively solid anecdotes to reason off of. They are very useful canaries, even if I would not want to be a canary

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millievfence · 3 months

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I got confused reading this, but Ryan Gosling was nominated for best supporting actor, not best actor. Not sure that's necessarily easier to get, the competition looks respectable, but I do think studies spend less money for support nominations.

Barbiegate

Ryan Gosling was nominated for "Best Actor" for his role in Barbie, but Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig were not nominated for their respective roles. It is the sort of story that would happen in the Barbie movie.

I'm going to dissect why this is no big deal once you get down to the details, but first off we have to admit how funny it is. Like, that sounds really bad! You can't deny it. You can only laugh at how broken the world is, and shock in response.

But any time a population votes, we read deeply into who won, when it's really due to some miniscule slice of voters who made the difference. Trump beats Hillary in 2016 and we are reactionary MAGA nation - but Hillary gets 1% and finally second wave feminism is what our country most deeply wants.

In this case, I imagine there was something like:

10% of the oscar voters chose Barbie for best picture, best director, best actor, and best actress.

87% of the oscar voters chose none of those.

3% of the oscar voters did choose Barbie for best picture and best actor, but not the others.

And it's not like the voters who voted someone else for best actress don't like women! They just thought another woman in another movie did an even better acting job than her. It's not like any less women got represented in the academy because they didn't think margot robbie was the best. (Though the Greta Gerwig haters have no such excuse.)

I dunno man, 3% of voters thought "I'm just Ken" was good but didn't appreciate the "I'm a real girl" plotline. That doesn't seem some objectionable will of the academy. Just a very small number of people having objective tastes.

But still, it's a joke that would happen in the Barbie movie.

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millievfence · 4 months

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Me: why doesn't your town have any vermin? Town Elders: because of the magnificent hunting prowess of our cats Me, who Spoke With Animals with the cats about this first: that's not what they said

If the DM doesn't come up with a name for an NPC quickly enough, good luck getting my party to stop calling him "No-Name Steve".

#this is so funny to me because it was organic #the DM was there for all of this but I think hadn't realized he was setting me up for this #but it's not so unbelievably funny as to break the taboo on making people listen to events from your D&D game #so it's just us 4 forever

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millievfence · 4 months

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My guesses:

people know more about each other, so you get less of a lemon problem or adverse selection death spirals.

this also means the reputational hit from a callout post is more costly, so people work harder to avoid it.

there's enough churn that you can usually find somewhere to go, if your current situation isn't working out.

there is social support for problem solving. One of the things that impressed me the most was how often people bring in mediators for disputes.

a good chunk of people have money. My understanding is if you get into the part of the subgraph where no one has money, it gets a lot worse.

The one big non-covid, bay area drama case I can think of was where multiple of these failed. There was a subsidized house for people who needed some help; so selected for people who are lower functioning and unable to leave. Some people did get regain function and left, because living with dysfunctional people sucks, which started an adverse selection death spiral. And then covid.

there was another case outside the bay area, but I don't think it's fair to call that roommate drama. AFAIK everyone in the house had agreed, but a non-roommate who chipped in a bit to use the house for community functions felt they had a right to force them to accept a guest they didn't want.

You couldn't pay me

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millievfence · 4 months

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checked the tags and realized OP did just say Poppy Wars

It’s amazing to me how many of the authors who repeatedly complain about their books being classified as YA instead of as very adult, mature, sophisticated books will absolutely not look you in the eye if you ask them “does this very mature, adult story take place inside what could be accurately interpreted as a magical boarding school? I thought so.”

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millievfence · 4 months

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It's okay, you can say Poppy Wars

It’s amazing to me how many of the authors who repeatedly complain about their books being classified as YA instead of as very adult, mature, sophisticated books will absolutely not look you in the eye if you ask them “does this very mature, adult story take place inside what could be accurately interpreted as a magical boarding school? I thought so.”

#looking forward to 50 reblogs listing 60 different books OP might be subtweeting

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millievfence · 4 months

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I love Liesel because she fulfills Scholomance's promise to have an unavoidably useful cutthroat bitch.

It's been several weeks since I read The Golden Enclaves and I occasionally still think about how Liesel looked at El and went "well, I have to seduce her, for the good of humanity, in case I need to use my wiles to pull her back from self-sacrifice and/or madness."

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