#crunchy data

[lurker-lenore]

Some Parse from Terror From Beyond. Hit 19K DPS, and got Vaulting Slash closer to Force Breach in terms of raw damage. Switched from Awakened Flame to Blade of the Elements, reducing my cooldown timer on VS, and upping its crit chance. If you take a close look at the first chart, you'll notice ALL my hits were crits.

Breakdown of the actual hits/damage - Breach hit 23 times, Vaulting hit 12 (13 if you count the one that got absorbed). In spite of hitting roughly half as often, Vaulting did about 80% as much damage. I'm keeping BotE, because WOW.

DPS suffered a bit on the final boss, due to some technical difficulties involving the giant tentacles. But ability spread is a bit see-sawed, with Breach doing 95% of Vaulting Slash's damage. Mostly due to having shorter engagements.

Still, my APM is up on both of these fights from last raid. Looks like that Alacrity is paying off!

[nymdraws]

to give an android a heart

[magpieandpossum]

older piece of TNG main cast! (+Q because he's too good not to include)

[battle-subway-ghost]

hey does paris have a reference sheet or somn

this is no one you know. yes.

// squints suspiciously…. Hmmmm

Anyways, Paris doesn’t have a specific reference sheet, I’m really bad at remembering to make those/making them in general, but here’s a few references of Paris!

[good-wine-and-cheese]

Star Trek AU thoughts percolating.....thinking about Tenma in next generation and how he would feel about the Borg. On the one hand: this is the next stage of evolution to him. Bio-machine entities that evolve by assimilating new species into their collective consciousness? Forever improving? He would be obsessed

But on the other hand: collective consciousness. I do not think he would be willing to sacrifice his individual self even if it meant becoming a "higher being"

[pierswife]

Honey bunches of oats with almonds my beloved

[3dimensionalsystem]

goofy little thing i did outta boredom a few days ago

og image from a wayneradiotv stream

text translation is in the alt text 👍

[numetaljackdog]

i made a lastfm account back in like 2019 but it took more than 20 seconds to figure out how to use it so there isn't a single play on there

[lurker-lenore]

More SWTOR numbers

So I'm going to assume that most of my followers don't play SWTOR. Let me break down some of the mechanics in a Nefra fight:

All of Nefra's damage is split, meaning it's divided evenly between all the targets the attack hits. If it's a 70K hit, and two people get hit, they each take 35K. Because of this, you run Nefra with two tanks. On Normal difficulty, you can get away with an "off tank," but on Nightmare, you need two.

And that's because Nefra targets TWO members of the raid simultaneously. The target who's 2nd on the threat table gets a stacking debuff that kills you in about 10 seconds. To get rid of the debuff, you have to either go up or down on the threat table.

Which means that when Nefra suddenly starts hitting you when you're a DPS, and you see that angry red debuff, you just kind of accept that you aren't living to the end of the fight.

I had to taunt a Nightmare Boss because the tanks weren't taunt-swapping correctly and I pulled threat. Somehow.

[reinventingaxel]

I like using airbuds because I live for the raw data

[strides-art]

Wolverine Girl + Extra Sketches

Trying to draw on paper more since I can easily just do it.

Posted using PostyBirb

[prophecyoflunarflame]

nice art time to violently eat it

scug knight designs from the other day

[senorboombastic]

Editor’s Picks: Top 50 songs of 2023 – Part Two

In classic fashion, my personal favourite record from 2023 came out a year ago. Eagle-eyed Instagram followers might’ve noticed too that when it came to the big Spotify Wrapped reveals, my number one song (and quite a few within the top five) were from an album that came out seven years ago! As our reviews man Ben Forrester likes to say though – don’t get it twisted! We bleed new music through…

[headlessgenie]

Wow the app keeps crashing :)

[cuprohastes]

See strange new worlds and pet the carnivores.

Imagine the poor, alien zoologists. They have a human on staff to pick stuff up and generally do human related things. That little encampment has made it very very safe for certain species because the automated defences will scare off many of the large predators.

The problem is, they haven’t considered the fact that they have a very large predator inside the camp, wandering around carrying stuff and doing general human related tasks. And one day they find the human petting one of the cubs of one of the more successful local predators.

Why? Because mommy pred has been watching the camp and spotted the human looking after all the crunchy little aliens, put 2 and 2 together and identified the human as Friend Shaped, and dropped off her cub for free babysitting.

And the human is just thrilled by this, because they’re weighing, tagging and grabbing all sorts of data on an infant Szilan Deathstalker (she’s been nicknamed Princess. She likes her blanket box and stalking the head of BioAssay).

And now the camp is an important part of the health and wellbeing of the local predator population who turn up and yowl until the human takes their cubs and puts them in a box for a nap.

(Based on the story of the Cheetah female who dumped her cubs with a park ranger for safety.)

[owlcafe]

The thing I really like as well, this is actually a great demonstration of how logic and emotions are actually more closely linked than we generally think. We tend to conceptualise "thinking" and "feeling" as opposites that don't interact, but they're actually very important parts of each other.

Kyubey exemplifies this really well because... the magical girl system actually does have heaps of holes in its logic. The extreme cold logic position of "enough babies are born to numerically replace the dead from witch attacks and the magical girls themselves" fails to account for - again, purely on a logical basis - that humans don't work like that. A baby born in Paris cannot adequately replace a magical girl that dies in Tokyo because the baby is in Paris. There are other social systems that are important to the structure of the Incubator's system (assuming their conceptualisation of humans is similar to humans of livestock) that they utterly fail to account for. If you magical-girl a student nurse, for instance, that has knock-on effects that are not adequately insulated for by the fact that another baby was born, somewhere. Even within the constraints of the magical girl system, this holds - there's a finite amount of magical girl candidates in amy given location, and a person being born somewhere else doesn't help that, which could set the magical girl/witch ecosystem out of balance. Enough magical girls die to a witch or witch out themselves, and then the whole area is at risk from witch attacks, which then jeopardises your supply of magical girl candidates because there's no one left to birth them. But because Kyubey is only reasoning based on the cosmic equivalent of an Excel spreadsheet, those things go completely unaccounted for. The failure to feel directly creates problems with the logical mechanisms of the system.

It is, ultimately, that exact failing that leads to their downfall at the end of the series and again in the Rebellion movie. They failed to account for completely logical contingencies, like the fact they were handing out reality-warping powers specifically to people they identified to have the least emotional stability. Perhaps most radically, they seem to have completely given up on an alternative to averting heat death - which is completely illogical. The magical girl system is fragile, and contingent on the continued existence of an exploitable species for the system to be inflicted on. The logical course of action is to utilise it as a stopgap measure while looking for a way to actually stop the heat death of the universe. While there's scope for debate about whether or not this would even work, they actually could have asked Madoka to use her extremely powerful wish to actually directly address the heat death problem - we see it's powerful enough for her to essentially become a deity- but they're so dedicated to the maintenance of what logically should only have ever been a temporary system that they only see her as a resource within its bounds, as opposed to the revolutionary she has the potential to be and indeed becomes.

The same is true of Homura - the Incubators expend some ridiculous amount of time and energy trapping her in the witch-cage-thing as a way to get to Madoka, that they completely ignore Homura as a factor. She's selected because she's the optimal target for them to be able to trap Madoka, but for the exact same reason she also poses the largest risk of any magical girl they could have done this to. It stands perfectly to reason that, if Madoka is the most important person in the world because she's the focal point of the timeline reset, Homura is the second most important because she's the one resetting the timeline. Even assuming they only entertained Homura's story as a hypothesis, the fact that she's the only one who remembers it would indicate she is now, debatably, the most important person in the new world. And if they can utilise that power to make a wish come true... why should it be impossible for Homura, who is already a magical girl with powers warping the most fundamental understanding of reality, to so the same? Their emotionless single-mindedness doesn't make them more rational, it actually makes them less rational. They take uncalculated risks and ignore new avenues, because their logic is hindered without emotions. They also appear uncapable of viewing themselves as anything other than the universe's most advanced species, an unprovable assumption that insulates their thinking against threats and makes them fail to assess risks. Sounds like a nice dose of emotion - be it shame, humility or bitterness at failure - may have actually helped them out a little.

Sorry for the ramble but I just find this stuff super interesting. The valorisation of cold logic not only fails to account for empathy and ethics, but also sets itself up to fail by its own standards. Logic doesn't function without emotion (and in fact the reverse is also true!), so a "purely logical" position is an impossible one to hold, and I think Kyubey shows off that contradiction really well.

no I actually love the fact that Kyubey is basically "facts don't care about your feelings" and "logic bro" rhetoric taken to its extreme. True, he doesn't really demonstrate the hypocrisy that these people often exhibit (where they forget that anger is also an emotion), but he shows just how dangerous it is to take "logic" to its very extreme without also taking emotion into consideration.

Kyubey justifies the objectively immoral magical girl system his kind created by pointing that, by sacrificing the lives of what amounts to a handful of young girls in the grand scheme of things (not to mention all the victims of their Witch forms), the Incubators are ensuring the continued survival of the universe and everything and everyone in it.

Kyubey is literally incapable of understanding why Madoka and the rest of the girls get so upset by the cruel system the Incubators have made. As he points out to Madoka, literally hundreds of thousands of babies are born every day- that's more than enough to not only replace every dead magical girl and Witch victim, but every other person who dies every day. So why do we get so upset whenever someone dies?

Kyubey just thinks in raw numbers, of humans being born and dying. He doesn't understand- or care- that every single person is a unique individual who can't be replaced; that every person has hopes and dreams and a future and loved ones who care about them. Every loss of human life is a tragedy. Anyone with even a shred of empathy understands this.

I really love how the emotionless, logic-driven Kyubey is pitted against magical girls, who are literally powered by their emotions- and in both climaxes (the end of the original series and Rebellion) he gets his shit rocked for underestimating how powerful emotions like hope and love are. They're literally strong enough to rewrite the universe.

(btw I'm not trying to shit on being logical!! It's good to use your brain and you should strive to be reasonable. I'm just pointing out, using Kyubey as an example, that people who scorn all emotion when it comes to decision-making and make fun of people for being emotional are usually tools)