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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • It depends

    how they did it. If they did the entire roll twice (crowd all rolls, pick most common, crowd all rolls again, pick most common again) and picked the best result out of those two, it would not be different than rolling normally with advantage (since it would effectively just be a very fancy and complicated way of rolling a d20 twice and taking the better result). This is almost certainly what happened (if not for the below reasons, then because it would be much less complicated technically to perform than anything else).

    But suppose they just gave each individual person advantage, and then picked the most popular roll out of all those advantage’d rolls. (That is, if I rolled an 8 and a 15 on my phone, only the 15 would get compared with everyone else’s advantaged roll.)

    Out of 400 ordered pairs of 2d20 rolls, the number of combinations which occur for each roll are 2n-1. For example, to roll a 15 with advantage there are 2(15)-1 = 29 possible ways to do so: a 15 on the first die, and anything from 1-15 on the second, or a 15 on the second die and anything from 1-15 on the first for what seems like 30 combinations, but we’ve double counted the case where we rolled 15 on both tries, so we subtract one to get 29.

    Notice that the sum of (2n-1) for n=1…20 (that is 1 + 3 + 5 + … + 37 + 39) is exactly 400, the total number of combinations we expect.

    So the probability of a nat 20 with advantage is 39/400. So what we’re actually asking is when 20,000 people roll with advantage, what are the odds that any of the other numbers, like 19 which has a 37/400 chance each time, still somehow get rolled more often than a nat 20?

    I do not know how to actually compute that - it’s complicated beyond my skill - but the law of large numbers suggests that as the crowd gets bigger that number should get very, very small indeed, and in fact the probability of not rolling a nat 20 would converge to 0 as crowd size went to infinity.

    I tried tossing together some python to experiment: out of 10,000 attempts using this method, and presuming a crowd of 20,000 who all rolled. Out of 10,000 trials, a nat 20 was rolled 9454 times, a 19 was rolled 545 times, and an 18 was rolled 1 time. It never rolled below 18 using this method in 10k attempts. So, I’m guessing that’s not what they went with.


  • Gastronauts has done a casting call for season 2 already, and I think the loss of PIBE had less to do with other shows taking its spot, and is more just on its own merits. It either wasn’t successful enough on Dropout (where so much of the marketing is things like insta/yt shorts/etc.), or Zach and Jess are prioritizing other things, or some combination of both. I don’t think anyone official has really said. (I’m not even sure we officially know there won’t eventually be a season 3.)

    I definitely miss PIBE personally. I thought season 1 was pretty decent even though it got pretty badly panned in general, and season 2 was incredible. For what it’s worth Zach and Jess did a 300 episode podcast called “Off Book” which is similar vibes.





  • It varies within the genre. Some games try hard to take steps to minimize the ability to sit around and grind, such as by a food clock or lack of respawns. Sil, which is a *band game that tries to be closer to the original style has an XP system that grants XP for seeing an enemy the first time, and the same for killing it, and then 1/n times that XP the nth time you see that same kind of enemy thereafter. Sixth orc you see is worth 1/6 the XP, so it’s not worth farming an area hard, and still rewards exploring a lot. It also eventually just forces you deeper as the desire for a silmaril becomes more irresistible as you become stronger. Seeing 6 orcs and killing 2 is worth 3.95x an orc’s stated XP, seeing 30 and killing them all gets up to almost 8x the stated XP.

    Others like most Angband variants or Tales of Maj’eyal made the decision to just let the player grind. Many of the games in that style have more open-ended progression and aren’t necessarily trying to force the player into constantly dangerous situations. The very popular Caves of Qud would fit this category.



  • Currently in a sci fi “Consider Phlebas” by Iain Banks, after seeing a recommendation for his books involving an optimism for the future. This was the one book available at my local library. Not far enough in to make a judgment on it, but enjoying it so far.

    I have Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez also out from the library as a next up.

    Recently read Rewitched by Lucy Jane Wood, which was a fun cozy urban fantasy. I think if I were to recommend such a book, I’d recommend The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches above it, or recommend Legends & Lattes or The Spellshop for cozy high fantasy choices, but if you’ve read all the popular ones and are looking for more it’s a great choice.





  • …I really did not expect to see Christy Clark on that list, even if at only 4%. If I’d seen her running as a Con, that would not have surprised me so much. Responsible in BC for legislating striking teachers back to work with the argument that they could not legally bargain on topics like class size, something that much later finally got thrown out by the supreme court. She was a member of the BC Liberals, which were really the right-wing party in BC at the time.

    I’d wager both left- and right-leaning people in BC have some bad memories of that one for differing reasons. I certainly have to imagine she’d be a quick way to lose the existing liberal voters here.


  • I’m personally skipping because I already have what I’d want from this one, but I will say P4G is my favorite of the Persona series, and one of the few long JRPGs I’ve actually finished in the last several years. (P5R is also great, but 4’s more grounded story and characters, relatively speaking, give it the edge for me.)

    And Cassette Beasts is a truly great Pokemon-like that has so much going for it. If you feel out of love with the Pokemon franchise, or if you still enjoy it but would want more, this is a really fun game with its own take on a lot of the mechanics. Lots of depth combined with customizable difficulty.



  • I believe the point is that the speaker typically doesn’t vote unless needed to break a tie. So if the NDP select one of their own as the speaker, they would have 46 votes, to the 44 Con and 2 Green votes, an exact tie. Of course, they would still have the speaker as tiebreaker, so it doesn’t really make a huge difference, but it’s seen as a bit more tenuous than actually having the 47 votes in the typical fashion, which they could accomplish if a conservative or green MLA takes the role of speaker.

    To be honest, I’m not 100% sure on why the tiebreaker is seen as worse exactly. I understand there’s an expectation for the speaker to act neutrally, so maybe it’s just an unpleasant look if the speaker is regularly voting in favour of the NDP to break ties.

    Regardless, it wouldn’t technically be a minority government as I understand it. It’s not as though the NDP couldn’t rely on their own speaker in matters of confidence. It just would give Rustad something else to rant about.