

Autumn is my favorite season. The horror genre is in the mainstream entertainment channels. The temperature is in the 60's. The pumpkin spice is in god damned everything, including my veins. The leaves are in color. The women are in yoga pants. And the wildlife - specifically the tastier speces - are in season.
be vewwy vewwy quiet. we'we hunting cwiptids.


On rare occasion I do get a tiny amount of flak for the practice of hunting. generally when I'm spending any time socializing with anyone, food is involved. So i *could* return with something like, we just ate meat, so is there a moral issue with doing more of the work myself?
But I've gone for a gentler approach with some self deprecating humor; i have never successfully harvested any animal, ever. Is it really hunting, or is it paying for a license to wake up before dawn to carry 20 lbs of crap on a glorified hike? I am not, strictly speaking, a hunter. Although capitalism is happy to say I've spent money on products and therefore have earned a sense of community.


Sitting in a blind for hours is depressing. Partially due to sleep deprivation, sure. in spite of how gorgeous the view is, I hate sitting in silence. But what's the difference doing that in a hunting blind, vs at home, out in public?
There's nothing to do but think.
I'm beginning to doubt that deer exist. I've seen them, in person, in the past. Right? I'm pretty sure that was real.
The fact that I bought my first hunting license and have ensured I will never again see a deer is a statistical anomaly, right? how do the numbers add up?
I think their definition of success is to estimate 1 permit to 1 deer. looks like they're estimating 30%. so the situation is pretty bleak.
If you go out hunting, odds are... you're coming back empty handed.
so I guess, keep the faith? the one deer walking down this one path will *tooootally* come by and intersect with the time you're there. 
Keep waiting. Your patience will be rewarded. Your efforts will pay off. Have faith.

Ok, for real. Deer exist, I know. I know because I have evidence. 
Respectively; no, no, and not entirely but maybe a tiny bit? You can only *approach* 0 faith, like an asymptote. Acknowledging that gives you a heuristic to weigh the validity of evidence. Kind of in a bayesian way.
People talking about something's existence is not evidence. but I can buy some laughably overpriced venison in the store, right now. Although, that could be false advertising. This would be the same place selling some corn syrup in some sake labeled mirin. Not just mirin, but they specifically label their aji mirin as "hon" mirin. They sell wasabi as well, which I'm sure is horseradish with green food coloring. the fact that someone would lie to everyone and argue it's ok because it makes money is... really... how the world works. caveat emptor, bitch.
All because one salesman proposes one thing via marketing material, and doesn't get interrogated.


Consider the most terrifying cryptid in my culture: the Hyperlitigator. Imagine a cold blooded reptile, emerging from a swamp, and snapping its jaws shut over a slight legal loophole. By twisting the court to its will (how hard could that be), it can extract financially ruinous judgments from poor, long-suffering job creators.

For years, retailers said the reason they don't donate food is that they're afraid of getting sued. projects to solve food insecurity
have mostly been campaigns in reducing food waste by assuring retailers that it'll be fine.
Meanwhile various meal ingredient services have marketed themselves as solving hunger by reducing food waste. which is silly, if they have any effect it's to shift food waste into packaging waste.
no one has ever sued for being saved from starvation. nevertheless the US passed the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act of 1996 to encourage donation - all it does is reassure retailers they can't be held accountable. 
Maybe it worked. I can't find anything about how much food is donated per year since the law was passed and the press releases were announced.


have you noticed that essentially every product ever has the "california proposition 65 warning"? in 1986, California voters banded together to say hey maybe it would be nice if we could avoid being poisoned a bit.
You had better believe that every. single. time. a company has to admit that their product is toxic, they frontload the state they want you to hate, and then the legal precedent they want you to scoff at. They want you to find it tedious. They want you to think it's dumb, and take their side against the threat of lawsuit.
Proposition 65 was a publicity stunt to get some politician elected. 
Meanwhile, no one has ever been held accountable for contaminating every human alive with PFAS, in california or elsewhere.


One of the inspirations for this episode was someone convinced that people dry their pets in microwaves, so those will be getting warning labels. 
never happened. It's an urban legend. if it ever did happen, it's so rare it might as well have never happened.
the myth endures, though.


the famous one that we're all up to speed with by now - some company served some literally-skin-meltingly hot coffee to Stella Liebeck, her coffee got spilled, and I cannot stress this enough: her skin. got melted. 3rd degree burns. Micky D's lost the lawsuit, and forever more tells everyone how mad they are about it with the warning on the cup. maybe one might argue she wouldn't have resorted to a lawsuit if she had socialized medicine? Still, I guess we found her, the 1 person who won a lawsuit and got a payout.


however. In 2018, Epic Systems Corp (not Epic Games) engaged in wage theft - dollar per dollar the most common crime in the united states, every year, for many years - so Jacob Lewis attempted to start a class action lawsuit, in accordance with the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.
As usual, the supreme court decided that these pesky laws need to get out of the way of a corporation harvesting wealth from the peasantry (well it was 5-4, exactly the split you would expect). So the victim of wage theft didn't get to go to real court, and of course, arbitration court agreed: stop whining about wage theft.
Ever since then, **every** user agreement has included an arbitration clause. You know. Because apparently real lawsuits are unjust, real courts are overburdened... So we'll privatize justice, that certainly won't create a kangaroo court. 
...oh.
Well that's probably why arbitration clauses in contracts tend to also include some advertisement about how waiving your right to trial "PrOtEcTs YoU, aCtUaLlY"

Justice is dead. And yet we're still afraid of this sliver of a chance of encountering a mythical, hyper-competent litigation monster.

For what it's worth, apparently the hyperlitigator stays within america. Other countries *also* think Americans can (and will) file (and reliably win) any frivolous lawsuit. 
To those people, I say go ahead and rent an apartment. Odds are your landlord will do something illegal, and probably get away with it.


ok so we're not going to find the hyperlitigator. A deer is going to walk over the hill any second tho, for sure.

you remember when cracker barrel had a redesign? It's current at time of writing. The logo got rid of both the cracker and the barrel. The interior got rid of everything.
It kicked off a discussion on the left where they made fun of the right for the fact that the left wing doesn't know what "woke" means. 
a company with a recognizable - if hokey - aesthetic has """streamlined""" to a hollow nothing that you couldn't pick out of a lineup from any of their so-called competitors. There is one culture, one aesthetic. and it is unobtrusive. noncommittal. bland. 
as usual, the soul has been sacrificed on the altar of capitalism.
this sounds much more like something I'd complain about than your stereotypical maga fascist. but then again, cracker barrel is a restaurant that has a very "country" aesthetic. if we remember the "brad's wife" fiasco, the customer base skews boomer. The kind of people who aren't worried about a deep fried steak with a side of pork sausage cutting their life expectancy - they only anticipate another few years anyway.
I searched. Article after article, most maintaining a proper level of neutrality, but eventually - finally - paydirt. I found him. The ONE GUY who thought the redesign was soulless, and... **woke**.
That's all. He's it. I have not found anyone else. As far as I know, his world also thinks he's an outlier.


I watch Woolie Vs. or, used to. He's on indefinite hiatus, or whatever you want to call it; the gig economy doesn't have paternity leave. I hope youtube deigns to inform me of his return, when (or if) he does. At present, there are no remaining channels in the LP genre who FINISH their games, and have... insightful commentary, silence during game dialog, at least 1 interlocutor -
i think so. resolving conflicting perspectives is usually more interesting. and it's surprisingly hard to carry a conversation while playing a game.

anyway. When he started his spinoff channel, he had a bizarre naming scheme for his episodes. Then he switched the order to part number, game title, episode title. Great! automatically self-sorting!
Then someone told him he archives the episodes and has some weird-ass filing system that got broken.
so woolie switched back. I forget if he explicitly stated it at the time, but obviously he's not taking a poll or switching it repeatedly. so now it's forever backward from perfection, like a european date.

all because of one guy saying one thing one time. I wouldn't have thought that would be enough.


What'd I say the odds of seeing a deer are? 30% per license? so the scenario is more specifically, if I am looking for 1 deer, and I come out here *up to* a certain number of times until I find one and stop. Sadly the data we have is estimated based on purchasing 1 license.. Let's pretend I'll automatically make a precisely average number of hikes per license.
anyway, in 4 years I guess that'd be.. hang on let me grab a shell...
```python
>>> successChance = 0.3
>>> rolls = 4
>>> failureChance = 1- successChance
>>> 1 - (failureChance ** rolls)
0.7599
```
success chance is 30%, roll 4 times... failure chance for 1 run would be 1 minus success chance. so the chance of failing all 4 years would be failure chance to the power of 4. and so the chance of any other outcome, i.e. succeeding in 1 or more year, would be 1 minus that, which would be... just under 76%.
You see how that works, warframe wiki?! 

warframe, like any freemium game, has an element of gambling. The majority of what you spend real money on is guaranteed odds. Or, more cynically, you're paying them money in order to *not* play the game. Which is why the ludicrous resource cost for cryotic for sibear ought to turn you off of that entire game.
Anyway. While we're looking at the warframe wiki... In order to sell in china, they had to publicly disclose their drop rates. (what a cool thing for China to have done for its citizens. do you think they also disallow forced arbitration? oh, no, they're on the same page as us with that, damn.) So as a result of the public drop table, we get to see charts like this.
to get Nekros, a.k.a. the best warframe 
Look, in the game about shooting stuff to get loot to build gear to more effectively shoot stuff, etc... Nekros increases the loot you get. best.
...you do the lephantis assassination. looking at the table, your inference is correct; lephantis will definitely always drop... precisely 1 of those 3 pieces. it's not "a 1 in 3 chance that lephantis will drop this piece", it's "there is a 1 in 3 chance that this is the one piece lephantis drops". there is not a 1 in 27 chance that you get all 3 in 1. there is no world where you do that mission less than 3 times. that distinction doesn't really matter in practice. You do it once, you definitely have 1 piece. You do it a second time, you probably have 2 out of the 3 pieces. once you're in that situation, you ask yourself: how many runs do I do to get the last piece? This table helpfully says you're "nearly guaranteed" at 17 ish kills. It also says it's "expected" at 3 kills. what do those words mean?
there's a link:
>  For more detailed definitions and information, visit here. 

In that one, wiki contributor Finner explains what is meant by "nearly guaranteed". it's a range, so at the lower end of that range is 99% chance, at the top of that range it's 99.99%. easy. what i have been salty about for like a decade is that his definition of "expected" is *bizarre*. It's not helped by the fact that I think he's referencing old data. 
he divides the warframe drops into 3 "types". type 1 is like nekros, where all 3 parts are on 1 drop table. type 2 is where all 3 drop from a different place. (Type 3 is just equinox, with 8 drops needed. That one's a slog.)
But if we look at his math for type 2, we can see what he actually means by expected. Assume the law of large numbers applies to small numbers. I.e., if you want to roll 1 of the 6 sides of a d6, you just throw it 6 times.
check out this page. 
occasionally you'll see links for "expected", to the wiki page for the stats concept of expected value.
That's not how expected value works. Expected value is the other side of this! so in the linked wiki article, you'll see that it's *what* the average you observe is converging *to*! So check it out, the article shows a graph:
That shows rolling a dice, averaging out. as in, "i have rolled a d6 with this number of pips showing, on average". if I roll one time, and roll a 2, my "average value" is 2. if I roll a second time, and roll a 6, now my "average value" is 4. The "expected value" is 3.5. as in, if I keep rolling many times,
*then* my average will *converge on* 3.5.
whoever it was that introduced this math is lost to the sands of time. for this game all about random drops, that person's peculiar concept of "expected" is on a massive portion of the pages across the wiki! 
What are the odds that just one guy can convince that wiki's community that this notion of expected value is weird? 

what are the odds that I, just one guy, can convince the rest of the world of any of the random things I insist on? 
Surely they're so staggeringly low as to be negligible. 

I once heard someone say deer are "crepuscular", meaning they're active around sunrise and sunset. as opposed to being nocturnal, like bats, or diurnal, like (well-behaved) humans.
I don't know what a deer considers "after" dawn.





