it is 2016 and we are still talking about the whitelist
it is 2021 and we are still talking about the whitelist
it is 2026 and we are still talking about the whitelist

you cannot escape the cycle of samsara

(good vid)

I think for NA clear choices would probably be b4nny, jay, kobe, yomps, and habib. Botmode is probably also in this tier. After that it's dicier but I actually think yight as an example is a pretty good choice after those 6. Something like branslam/highfive/yight/lolguy (?), though I'm sure I'm missing some.

I think this probably is too restrictive to be interesting IMO. Also I think there's a universe where 6 b4nny's lose to stacked froyo cause they all ego each other lol.

Not everything I read in 2025, but some highlights:

Pale Fire, Nabokov: Reread, but it still holds up and is probably my personal favorite Nabokov. Kinbote's larger-than-life presence mixed in with the pseudo academia-style writing really clicks for me. The amusement park comment in the intro immediately sets the tone and many of the quips he drops ("undeodorized French woman, secondary homosexual implications, etc.) I find hilarious. One of a kind, absolutely beautiful prose.

Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon: I could see why somebody would really enjoy this, but it doesn't work for me personally. I can't say this definitively but my sense is that it hasn't aged particularly well. May reread at some point though. Certainly unique if nothing else. I've heard that Pynchon himself doesn't regard it very highly.

Babel, Kuang: This book is fucking terrible.

Reads like leftist "Atlas Shrugged"; the characters are less people and more vehicles for the author to show why their beliefs are ontologically correct and any other viewpoint is dumb and stupid. The characters are so black and white that you almost can't help but feel a sense of endearment towards the author - how could a veritable adult be so sheltered in their upbringing that they come to view the world in this way. Unfortunately this reverie is quickly broken for two main reasons.

One is that the book that has already explicitly painted "these are the good guys. Anything they do is good. These are the bad guys. Anything they do is bad" somehow still needs to go out of the way to mention "colonialism bad" ad nauseam. I genuinely cannot tell if this decision is because R.F. Kuang thinks all her readers have severe CTE or if it's some weird virtue-signaling maneuver to make explicitly clear that she holds [correct opinion], which in it of itself also speaks to the "quality" (so to speak) of the people she is trying to appease. Both positions are affirmed because Kuang's diatribe on "colonialism bad" is literally just that, there's no in-depth argumentation, perspective shift, nothing even approaching substance at all. She seems deathly afraid of adding anything interesting beyond "colonialism bad" because of...why? I can't say for certain. Regardless, the end product is just sanctimonious mind-numbing drivel, the absolute worse any didactic literature has to offer.

Second main reason is that because the characters are split into either upholders of virtue or pure unadulterated evil, any "bad thing" that happens to anyone in the latter camp cannot actually be a "bad thing" because "bad things" don't happen to bad people, only "deserved things". Obviously. This leads to some borderline sociopathic moments by the "good characters"; prime example is when one of the "bad" characters nearly (very minor spoilers)

A position which, by the way, is also explicitly affirmed by the narrator. Just in case you thought Kuang could threaten you with any modicum of character complexity. Truly an insane viewpoint to have, one that I sort of doubt are Kuang's true feelings on this subject (well, I certainly hope anyway) but I suspect are a byproduct of the aforementioned [suspected] crippling fear of any dilution of the "colonialism bad" messaging.

By the way this is a fantasy novel. Probably not abundantly obvious based on what I wrote above. But also it's a book about how British colonialism succeeded because they had magic that intrinsically ties with a fundamental aspect of the human experience (language) but somehow the only difference this has led to from real life is that characters in the 1800s speak with 21st century lingo. I could keep on going on this point and the fantasy world-building elements in general (it's shit) but I am already a little ashamed as to how much easier it is to write about something I loathe rather than something I enjoy.

Truly detestable novel.

fyg u probably deserve to be put on trial yourself for some of the TL stuff u pulled on drama alert nation.

Anyway, own anecdote. One of my first hl teams that I was going to play on died in preseason. Can't remember what happened, roster issues probably, but I stopped talking to the team leader after that.

Some years later I see him make a truly baffling thread on tftv. Maybe some people remember this: the OP of that thread had an ingame screenshot on I think metalworks but his game was heavily modified. Keep in mind this was pre vtf crosshairs/transparent viewmodels etc., so a lot of the customization stuff in game was unknown. Had like left handed viewmodels that were cut off in some way, weird text on the hud, and I distinctly remember people clowning on him for all the extra modifications and his pink heart shaped crosshair lmao. I don't even remember the exact point of the thread, to show off his mods? Escapes me now.

Years later I hear his name again and apparently somehow he became maybe the most prolific ddoser this game has ever known, at the very least for highlander. Probably ddosed 6s matches too though lmao. May have also developed cheats.

Sometimes I wonder if that team just lived in 2013 would things have turned out differently.

beyond parody

Feel like trying dictate fairness by estimating who gets screwed over harder by the times is mostly a pointless endeavor. Like brody said I'm sure plenty of west coasters get filtered because it's literally not possible for them to work and play tf2. But this is mostly, if not entirely, a concern for the adults; for people still in high school (or god forbid below) the early times are probably strictly beneficial compared to east coast. So while some west coast adults are barricaded they had the opportunity earlier to play a significant amount - you can note that of the invite players Slicerogue listed most (maybe all) started in high school. By contrast on the east coast you can never really escape the sleep deprivation no matter your age with the exception of not having morning classes in college or something. Trying to rank who is the more tragic soul - the battle-hardened west coaster invite player who wants to relive the glory days vs. east coaster high school player who has the passion and skill to be the next big invite player but has to wake up at 6 AM to go to geometry class is kind of funny but probably has no real use.

Think it just makes sense to cater to the existing playerbase while trying to completely screw over as little people as possible.

I would just call ppl who do this shit and cringe.

Also iirc bootie time and bombinomicon are banned not just cause they are annoying but also cause they omega break spy (disguises have no feet with the former and i think latter just breaks DR or something).

Sometimes u can only convince your parents to download one game on the family pc

pov u step into mexico

I would 1 million times people do this and blatantly lie then send in more chatgpt slop please god.

Granted I'm not a humanities TA (or anybody that needs to read actual essays) gotta be way worse for them

Is there an objective pre-set cutoff needed for an unlock to be banned (or unbanned for that matter)? For anything on the extreme it probably doesn't matter but for anything contentious in the future adjusting the threshold post-hoc after looking at the data would obviously be pretty bad. Not trying to claim that this has happened before or anything, just wondering.

As an example for Smogon (unofficial pokemon singles) the threshold for ban is 60%+ among people who make the requirements to vote. It's harsh in the sense that people who do not make recs do not get any say (though this is def a necessary evil for a game like pokemon); a "smoothed" out version would just be to weight votes by division but the choice of weight, like the cutoff itself, is arbitrary. But at the very least pre-specifying something is better than doing it afterwards.

Yeah HL 8:30 I've always wondered how the west coasters make it work; if you're a 9-5er with an average 30 minute commute you make it back just on time with no time to eat/relax a bit after job or w/e. God forbid you have longer commute, hit traffic, boss doesn't let you clock out exactly at five, work different hours etc. etc.

My only guess is (besides historical inertia) that it works because:
1. Not that many west coast HL players
2. Most players are in school or are NEETs (HL I believe skews younger?)
3. You only have to deal with it once a week on Monday since scrims are on weekends.

But for 6's point #3 no longer holds and possibly #1 and #2 are less true.

Genuinely impressive they managed to fix it so fast.

https://ozfstats.com/about/

Idk if you've seen this before but may be of interest. Log analyzer seems most analogous.

If you're willing to explain more about technical details of your modeling I'd certainly be interested. OP is a little vague (understandably) but I think enough ppl here would be curious about the technical side also.

Unlike the other posters I think like you reece I have a full blown fully progressed version of The Virus. As an example for persona 4 I literally did what you described for p5 on my first run, constantly reloading saves while doing so, because I have extreme mental illness. This was blind also for reference. There's basically no point in doing this (especially since there is also ng+ content lmao) but it would legitimately bother me if I did not optimize my days correctly.

That being said my experience is not exactly the same.

For me I think I'm too far gone because I don't see it as a downside outside of wasting a ridiculous amount of time; tbf this is a pretty fucking bad downside. But in terms of enjoyment it has not diminished for me; I don't really find it stressful and it serves the same purpose as I imagine casual gaming does for others.

I think roguelikes are far and away the best game to play if you have The Virus though. It avoids the problem of "by the time you are done optimizing, the game is over" that you described with minecraft, avoids pacing problems that hyperoptimization can cause for story games like jrpgs, and you can make an argument that optimizing your runs to increase win rate is sort of the "point" of a roguelike and thus preserving the spirit of the game. IME it's also best if you try to optimize a bit on your own first completely blind; get a sense of the game and develop intuitions for what's optimal. From there you can look at other resources/players and if there's differences in what they view and what you view as optimal you can sort of reevaluate why you came to your own conclusion and why they came to a different one.

In unrelated news I have recently gotten addicted to a certain horse girl roguelike so I may need to be euthanized.