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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • 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.







  • 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.


  • randomsnark@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWho is the GOATest GOAT?
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    2 months ago

    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.




  • randomsnark@lemmy.mltomemes@lemmy.worldDon't get any stupid ideas
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    4 months ago

    Relevant xkcdsw (the first link in the comment): https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/2wx9ws/today_i_discovered_xkcdsw/covb60y/

    Now, why the hell would I link to a reddit comment instead of directly to the comic? Because for some reason, xkcdsw links on lemmy turn into links to a dodgy crypto site: http://xkcdsw.com/687

    No idea why this happens - I remember this happening a few months back and I assumed that somehow xkcdsw had gotten hacked in between me fetching the link and other people replying, but just now I discovered that it works fine as long as you’re not following the link from my lemmy comment. Also, judging by replies the last time it happened, the direct link from lemmy does still work for some people. I assumed those people on the previous thread got in before the site got hacked, but now I wonder if it’s instance-specific. Is my instance just redirecting certain links to a crypto site for some reason? Or my app (jerboa)?

    For those not seeing the redirect, the address bar claims it’s still xkcdsw, but the content appears to be from dogecoinaverage

    The actual xkcdsw is just a shitpost, barely worth the two words and one link in my original comment, but the redirect is weird.

    Edit: the fact that the link in the reddit comment works even via jerboa’s internal browser makes me think it’s the instance.

    Edit 2: previous occurrence of this: https://lemmy.ml/comment/5379893 - it doesn’t seem to be instance-based, as someone on Feddit.de saw the redirect, but someone else on my instance did not

    Edit 3: mystery solved(ish) - lemmy is silently changing the http to https (for some reason), which results in a different site (for some reason). I’ve alerted the xkcdsw owner to the problem via mastodon.

    Edit 4: this is gonna look really confusing now that two9a has fixed the xkcdsw https situation. Like “what is this comment even talking about?” Trust me, it made sense up until about 10 minutes ago. Oh, also I confirmed that jerboa is the what changes all http links to https.