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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I’m not sure I’d trust modern CA to do Med3 justice. The new style of Total War is just a different beast from the sublime RTW/Med2 era.

    Lots of little things changed, and it just ‘hits different’. Probably the biggest difference is just that every single fight after the first 20 turns will be a 20 stack vs a 20 stack, and every single battle is life or death for that army. It makes the campaign much faster paced - declare war, wipe stack, capture cities for 3 turns until the AI magics up another 20 stack.

    In the original Med2, since there wasn’t automatic replenishment, there were often battles between smaller stacks, even in late game, as they were sent from the backline to reinforce the large armies on the front. Led to some of my greatest memories trying to keep some random crossbowmen and cavalry alive against some ambushing enemy infantry they wandered into. The need for manual reinforcement led to natural pauses in wars and gave the losing side a chance to regroup without relying on the insane AI bonuses of the modern TW games - and I do mean insane; they’ll have multiple full stacks supplied from a single settlement.


  • enough men exhibit predatory behaviour to the extent that a decently large percentage of women fear the average man more than the average bear.

    Women should fear the average man far more than the average bear because they will almost certainly never encounter the average bear, but will encounter thousands of men.

    That said, the entire argument belies a deep misunderstanding of statistics. Many women, perhaps most women, have experienced trauma at the hands of men. Many men, perhaps most men, have not been perpetrators of that trauma. There is not a 1-1 relationship between victimized women and guilty men - there is a minority of men who negatively affect many women.

    The entire thing has become flamebait and it is impossible to have an actual discussion about it. The point is to start a conversation about how women feel unsafe in society - not to talk about bear attacks and incels.









  • Victoria 3 was just boring - I say this as a huge fan of Victoria 2.

    I played a few weeks after launch, and - for every one of the 4 countries I tried (Russia, Japan, Denmark, Spain), simply building all the things everywhere and ignoring money made everything trivial.

    The economic simulation was super barebones, the entire thing could be bootstrapped just by building. An entire population of illiterate farmers would become master architects overnight and send GDP to the double digit billions in a few decades.




  • With refresh rates like that, you must be talking about LED billboards.

    These are different from consumer monitors, which mostly use constant LED backlights and a liquid crystal layer to determine color.

    An LED bilboard is going to have a fuckton of singular LEDs - each of which can emit exactly one color - arranged in groups to form full pixels capable of displaying many colors. There is no extra LCD layer between your eyes and the billboard LEDs.

    The reason for the high refresh rates is because each led must be extinguished and and relit to redraw the image, and the eye is very good at picking up this strobe effect.

    The difference vs. a consumer display is that the backlight in a typical monitor is constant. Refreshes the screen involves sending updated instructions to the LCD layer, twisting the crystals and possibly changing the color they allow through.

    To make a crude concrete example:

    Imagine I am shining a white flashlight in your face. In front of the flashlight I put a colored piece of plastic so the light hitting you is colored. Then I change the plastic to one with a (slightly) different color. I do this 120 times per second. That is a typical consumer display.

    Now imagine I am shining a colored flashlight directly in your face. Then I turn it off and grab a flashlight of a different color and shine it in your face. Imagine I do that 120 times per second. That is an LED billboard.

    Which do you think is more likely to give you a headache?

    One final complication - the brightness of the LEDs is variable over time, they received a modulated signal rather than a steady voltage, so at lower refresh rates there will be a noticeable ripple across the image, similar to how early CRT screens could look.

    Increasing the refresh rate hides a lot of these problems.