ToaKraka
Dislikes you
User ID: 108
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
6hr ago
The users of 4chan's /v/ (video-game) board often post titillating images (both official and unofficial) of characters from various gacha games—Goddess of Victory: Nikke, Blue Archive, Senran Kagura: New Wave, etc. Occasionally, they also post videos (both official and unofficial) making fun of the rather pitiful-looking gameplay in Goddess of Victory: Nikke. However, it recently occurred to me that I had never seen any gameplay of other gacha games.1 Therefore, I investigated Blue Archive (source of such prominent sex symbols as Ichinose Asuna, Izayoi Nonomi, and Hanekawa Hasumi), and found it more of a game than I was expecting it to be.
The gameplay is mostly, but not completely, auto-battling. You set up a unit of six characters (girls wielding guns), of whom four are "strikers" who traverse the 3D battle map and two are "specials" on the sidelines. (On the battle map, the strikers are represented with chibi/SD 3D models, significantly different from the 2D art that you see in the menus.) The characters have both passive skills that activate automatically and active skills that must be activated by the player.
Each character is a tank, a damage dealer, a buffer, or a healer. Enemies include grunts (rifle infantry, small flying robots, etc.), snipers (they hide in the back and attack the player's damage dealers, encouraging the player to counter-snipe them with his damage dealers' active skills), minibosses (large humanoid robots, tanks, etc.), giant bosses (in certain game modes), and even duplicate playable characters with their own active and passive skills.
Characters and enemies also have weapons and armor (two separate characteristics) in a simple rock-paper-scissors system. Prior to each mission (which, in the main story mode, comprises multiple separate battles on a very simple strategic map—there are several other modes), you get to see what enemies you will be fighting, and must assemble your unit in order to take advantage of this system accordingly.
Outside of gameplay, the interface is surprisingly good for something that obviously was designed for phones. There's no right-click, but left-clicking on any item reveals a drop-down menu listing all the places where that item can be obtained—not just "you can get this item by completing missions", but "you can get this item by completing Mission 4-3; click this button to go to that mission"! Keyboard shortcuts, including use of the Escape key to cancel, also have been implemented.
This game has been accused of catering to pedophiles and ephebophiles. If you care about that:
-
Nearly all the playable characters explicitly are listed in their biographies as being under 18.4 As mentioned above, during actual gameplay the characters are represented, not with sexy 2D art, but with unsexy chibi 3D models.5 However:
-
Each active skill plays a fancy animation when you use it. When performed by characters who wear miniskirts, these animations often include suggestive camera angles, all the way up to (non-blatant) panty shots. Additionally:
-
Some enemies are delinquent students, presumably in the same age range as the playable characters. In that capacity, they show up in battle maps (again, as unsexy chibi 3D models) wearing miniskirts, with (blatant) panty shots in the dozens when they are knocked unconscious.
After 20 hours of play, the game seems reasonably fun to me. But my new-player bonuses haven't yet run out, so I haven't yet had to deal with the stamina system.
1Other than Gundam Battle Operation 2, whose praises I have sung before. Unfortunately, however, that game is PVP-focused, and in that context has so few players on PC that queue times for matches on that platform are absolutely intolerable.2,3 As determined from my multiple terabytes of recorded footage, I played it from 2023-05 (the PC launch) to 2024-08 (when a bug was causing the game to repeatedly crash during matches and then give me a penalty for leaving the matches early), and from 2025-02 to 2026-01. RIP.
2Unless you go out of your way to play only during the narrow daily peaks in player count. And, even if you go to all that trouble, the other players may be filling the queues for frantic high-cost matches (e. g., Unicorn Gundam vs. Kshatriya) and leaving empty the queues for slower-paced lower-cost matches (Zeta Gundam vs. Gundam Mk-II).
3The game also is available on PS4 and PS5, where it allegedly has more players. But I definitely have no interest in buying one of those.
4According to the wiki, the ages of the playable characters (including variant forms of the same character) are as follows.
| Age | Count | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 18 | 7 | |
| 17 | 80 | |
| 16 | 95 | |
| 15 | 77 | |
| 14 | 2 | Guests from A Certain Scientific Railgun |
| 13 | 0 | |
| 12 | 1 | Another Railgun guest |
| 11 | 3 | |
| Unknown | 6 | Young-looking |
| Top secret | 4 | One character with four variant forms, two older and two younger |
| Total | 275 |
Therefore:
| Age | Count | Proportion (%) |
|---|---|---|
| Definitely at least 18 | 7 | 2.5 |
| Unknown | 10 | 3.5 |
| Definitely less than 18 | 258 | 94 |
| Total | 275 | 100 |
Or, alternatively:
| Age | Count | Proportion (%) |
|---|---|---|
| Definitely at least 16 | 182 | 66 |
| Unknown | 10 | 4 |
| Definitely less than 16 | 83 | 30 |
| Total | 275 | 100 |
5Insert obligatory link to community of people who find chibi characters sexy. I hear Lalafells are pretty popular lately among the sexual roleplayers of Final Fantasy 14… Slightly more (but still not very) seriously, see the artistically impressive Deformed 48 Positions (also loosely translated as Chibi Kama Sutra, but actually referring to a separate Japanese concept).
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
6hr ago
Item 1 of 5
-
A New Jersey legislator has submitted a bill that would ban sex in state, county, and municipal "government facilities", with fines of up to 10 k$. (You may recall the controversy that took place a few years ago regarding the production of sexual videos in a building of the federal senate.) "Any person who engages in sexual activity in a government facility shall be subject to a civil penalty between $1,000 and $5,000 for a first offense and up to $10,000 for a second or subsequent offense."
-
However, according to a lawyer, the bill's definition of "government facility" is so poorly worded that it would include government-owned apartment buildings! "'Government facility' includes but is not limited to any State, county, or municipal government building or office; legislative office; court room; Board of Education facility; or other building or facility owned or leased by a State, county, or government entity."
Item 2 of 5
Humorous image (source): At what point does a character design become unreasonably overcomplicated?
The original image points to developer Mihoyo as a prime culprit for overcomplicated designs. An edited version popular on 4chan replaces "detailed" with "slop-adjacent" and "complex" with "Genshittification", referring to the popular Mihoyo game Genshin Impact. On the more historical side, I think I have seen at least one online comment pointing out that it would take a very long time for a belt-laden Final Fantasy character to get dressed in the morning.
Are you cool enough to wear an overcomplicated outfit casually? ;-)
See also criticism of overcomplicated mecha. Compare the Unicorn Gundam of year 2010 to the Gundam Mk-II of year 1985. (To be fair, though, 1985's Zeta Gundam also is rather complicated, to the point that its transformation sequence had to be simplified in order to be implemented in an early model kit.)
Item 3 of 5
-
Police dogs are not trained to recognize officers other than their handlers. Rather: First, the handler announces three times with a loudspeaker that, if the suspect does not surrender, then he will be bitten; then, non-handler officers evacuate the area; and, finally, the dog is let loose to find and bite the suspect.
-
Following that standard procedure, a dog-handling officer lets loose his 90-pound police dog to find a suspect hidden in a garage. However, upon stepping into the garage, the handler realizes that another officer failed to heed the warning to evacuate the area, and the dog is about to bite the other officer rather than finding the suspect. The dog is 25 feet away from the other officer, is charging forward at full speed of 25 miles per hour, and is not trained to heed verbal commands while on the verge of hitting the target. In order to save the other officer from possible severe injury (and to save the dog from possibly being shot by the other officer), the handler yanks hard on the dog's 15-foot leash, rather than leaving it slack. This maneuver stops the dog a few feet from the other officer, but also tears a tendon in the handler's elbow. (The dog does not have its neck broken, but is "confused and harmed", and "its apprehension intensity subsequently drops".)
-
The handler's elbow injury is career-ending, so he applies for accidental-disability retirement benefits (73 percent of salary). However, the retirement board finds that the injury was not "undesigned and unexpected". (1) Recalling a dog is specifically part of the handler's training. (2) The handler already knew that he was working with multiple departments of police officers in searching for this suspect, so he should have expected to see some of them in his path. The handler gets only ordinary-disability benefits (44 percent of salary).
-
The appeals panel reverses. (1) The handling officer is trained to recall his dog in completely different circumstances—with verbal commands in an open field while the dog is 75 feet from the target, not with a leash in a garage while the dog is 25 feet from the target. (2) After previously encountering other officers while searching for the same suspect, the handler gathered those officers together and explicitly reminded them that, for their own safety, they should not get ahead of him and his dog, so it was completely reasonable for him to not expect any officers to be in front of him.
Item 4 of 5
Funny footnote from a judicial opinion:
[At Phillips's probation-violation hearing,] Phillips's mother testified that her son's 20-year record as a scofflaw, despite his receiving both family support and social-services support during the relevant time, had left her resigned to the opinion that he should be incarcerated.
Item 5 of 5
The Volokh Conspiracy shines a light on some drama in the US checkers (draughts) community.
-
2002: ICAONA (International Checkers Association of North America) is the only major checkers organization in the US.
-
2005: ICAONA becomes a member of FMJD (Fédération Mondiale du Jeu de Dames, World Draughts Federation), which conducts global checkers tournaments.
-
2024: Alexander Rudnitsky, five-time US checkers champion and former vice president of ICAONA, sets up NDF (National Draughts Federation of the USA) as a separate organization.
-
2024, later: ICAONA claims that NDF forged the signature of ICAONA's president in applying for an NDF tournament to be FMJD-certified, and accuses NDF of trying to supplant ICAONA as the US member of FMJD. NDF denies both accusations. FMJD temporarily removes the NDF tournament from its calendar, but later adds it back after ICAONA withdraws its objection.
-
2025: Rudnitsky sues ICAONA on ten different counts. He alleges that, in addition to defaming him regarding the forgery, ICAONA conducted an illegal secret vote, changing its bylaws to force all US checkers players to be ICAONA members in order to be eligible for FMJD tournaments (which is a violation of FMJD bylaws).
-
2026: The judge dismisses one count (breach of contract), but says Rudnitsky wins summarily on six counts (including defamation, tortious interference, and antitrust)—not on the merits, but merely because ICAONA failed to substantively respond to them. Three counts (including infliction of emotional distress) remain to be decided at trial.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
18hr ago
Text of von der Leyen's speech
Honourable Members,
These partnerships are a strategic choice for Europe. But they also respond to the fracture in the international rules-based system.
For some, the answer is to go it alone. But this is not an option for us. Europe will always lead when it comes to defending the rules-based system. But we can no longer rely on it as the only way to secure our interests. Or assume that its rules will shelter us from the complex threats that we face.
In this new world, we must urgently reimagine our partnerships. And build global coalitions for our resilience and democracies.
And here too only Europe—with its size and power—can take the lead.
And this is why I have invited Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada to be here today.
Mark, your presence here is a symbol of the enduring friendship between our people. Our cultural, historical and personal links run deep within the fabric of our societies.
And thanks to CETA, our trade in goods has grown by 75 % in less than a decade.
This shows the power of our trade agreements. We see the world with the same eyes: from AI to climate change, from the Arctic to geopolitics. And we have stood together: on Ukraine, on defence, on raw materials and on supply chains.
But above all, dear Mark, Europe and Canada believe in democracy.
We believe that power does not belong to the strongest, the richest or the loudest—but to all of us. That democracies have the freedom to choose with whom to work.
So, we are joining forces voluntarily. We will move from CETA to an Alliance for the Future to create a common prosperity and economic security space. We will work on intelligent manufacturing. We will create a tech alliance. We will integrate defence industrial bases. We will make the Arctic a flagship joint project. We will work on energy, critical minerals and batteries. On AI, quantum, cyber and economic security.
This is a partnership not against anyone else, but for our common strength.
In short, we want to bring the relationship with Canada to the highest level possible.
Dear Mark,
I said we must urgently reimagine our partnerships. So, I would like to work with you on opening the door for Canada to be the first associate member of the EU.
We share one ocean, one set of values, one way of seeing the world. And we will now build our shared future as well—thank you for being here.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
22hr ago
his counsel may have been ineffective
Quote from the judge's opinion, summarizing the prosecutors' testimony:
On May 13, the Four and Mason met to prepare for the hearing I had ordered, dividing various responsibilities. Ernst reviewed the record and analyzed all eleven of Johnson's Section 2254 claims in a memorandum she sent to Mason and the other supervisors. Ernst concluded that most of the claims were “flat-out losers”, but that the ineffectiveness claim might be plausible. Ernst subsequently determined, however, that the ineffectiveness claim “was not a winning claim”, and that the Concession Brief included “very significant errors”. Wildberger also concluded that the errors were significant, and that the DAO had a duty to correct them.
So even prosecutors motivated to get the defendant's conviction overturned don't think that his lawyer was ineffective.
What's the likelihood Johnson is guilty? Any other suspects in the Smith murder?
I have no idea. See somebody else's comment for some more information.
Remember this comment I made about Philadelphia prosecutor (district attorney) Larry Krasner back in June? The situation has escalated.
-
A person is charged with a 2007 murder. In 2009 he is convicted, and in 2010 he is sentenced to life in prison. In 2015, his state habeas petition is rejected.
-
Also in 2015, he files a federal habeas petition. The Philadelphia prosecutor's office resists the petition in 2017, but in 2018 Krasner is elected as prosecutor, and in 2019 the prosecutor's office stops resisting. However, the federal proceedings are stayed until the defendant's second state habeas petition has finished being digested by the state judicial system.
-
In 2022, the federal proceedings finally start up again. Krasner's office concedes that the defendant's trial lawyer was ineffective for failing to object to a detective's hearsay statement (that a non-testifying witness told the detective that the defendant was the shooter). Since the proceeding no longer is adversarial, the judge invites the state prosecutor (attorney general) to intervene as amicus curiae.
-
In 2026, Krasner's office moves to withdraw its concession because the document contains "material misstatements". The judge investigates. I'm not sure that I'm summarizing the sequence of events correctly, but I think it's something like this:
-
(1) Matthew Stiegler, chief of the office's Conviction Integrity Unit (so presumably a direct subordinate of Krasner), looks at the case with the aid of the Innocence Project and the Defender Association of Philadelphia, and decides that it should be conceded.
-
(2) He intentionally assigns the job of "writing" the concession—in reality, just copying-and-pasting whatever Innocence Project and Defender Association say, and not bothering to talk with the relevant witnesses—to inexperienced assistant prosecutor Jaclyn Mason.
-
(3) After reading the concession document, the judge doesn't just swallow it, but instead demands a hearing to get sworn testimony from the relevant witnesses. This prompts a "panic" in the prosecutor's office.
-
(4) Four assistant prosecutors go over the concession document again and find many "misstatements" (lies) in it. The four recognize that this is all Stiegler's/Krasner's fault, but Mason misinterprets them as assigning the blame to her, and submits her resignation to Krasner.
-
(5) Krasner's chief of staff Jennifer Lin directs Mason to stop working immediately rather than staying until the end of the month, in order to make her resignation seem inculpatory to the judge.
-
(6) Judge-written heading: "Stiegler Schemes to Blame Mason". However, the four assistant prosecutors refuse to do this, and insist that this misconduct be referred to the state prosecutor. Krasner wants to "protect the office".
-
(7) The four assistant prosecutors finally submit to the judge a document stating that Krasner, along with the entire prosecutor's office, has a conflict of interest and should be disqualified from participating in the case.
-
The credible evidence is tantamount to a prima facie showing of conduct that may constitute false statements, false declarations made under oath, perjury, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy.
I have thus reluctantly concluded that Philadelphia's highest law enforcement official and one of his top assistants may have violated the law. In these circumstances, with the issuance of this Memorandum, I refer the DAO, Mr. Krasner, and Stiegler to this District's United States Attorney's Office for investigation and other appropriate action.
It appears that in attempting to impede the Court's hearing and inquiry into the DAO’s conduct in Johnson, Mr. Krasner, aided by Stiegler, put the Law Division supervisors in an impossible situation that might jeopardize them professionally and may have violated the law. Mr. Krasner and Stiegler have thus created a basis for their disqualification from Johnson and their referral to the Department of Justice.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
Chevrolet or Nissan
Note that both of these manufacturers offer powertrain warranties of only 60,000 miles. Other manufacturers (Hyundai, Kia, and Mitsubishi) offer 100,000-mile powertrain warranties.
Pros for the Sentra: Higher MPG (34 vs. 30)
Those combined fuel-economy numbers assume that your driving is 45 percent on highways and 55 percent in cities. Use the noncombined numbers to calculate the difference in terms of money spent on gasoline, based on your actual driving habits.
Most stadium deals are something like "the government spends 1 gazillion dollars building it and then leases it to the local sports team for $1 a year".
Until the early 1950s, most professional sports stadiums were privately built. That changed in 1953 when the Boston Braves were lured to Milwaukee by a new stadium built with public money. Since then, public funding of stadiums has been the norm.
We examine the size of the subsidy and the federal tax expenditure for all professional sports stadiums newly constructed, majorly renovated, or currently under construction in the United States since the year 2000 for the four largest American sports leagues: Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Football League (NFL), the National Basketball Association (NBA), and the National Hockey League (NHL). Of the 45 stadiums that fit this description, 36 of them were funded, at least in part, with federal tax expenditures in the form of tax-exempt municipal bonds. We estimate that the total tax-exempt bond principal issued to fund these stadiums [i. e., spent by municipal govts.] was approximately $13.0 billion, the present value subsidy to the bond issuers was $3.2 billion (assuming a 3 percent discount rate) or $2.6 billion (assuming a 5 percent discount rate), and the present value federal tax revenue loss was $3.7 billion (3 percent discount rate) or $3.0 billion (5 percent discount rate), with all terms in 2014 dollars. We conclude the paper with suggested reforms to reduce or eliminate this inefficient subsidy for local sports stadiums.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
The pseudo-friendships were terminated in the 2015–2016 period (shortly before I graduated from college). I did not begin to suffer from depression until 2022. And the "physiological effects" of forcing yourself to associate with people whom you have grown to strongly dislike cannot be ignored.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
the decision to automatically change all Reddit links
It's a setting in your account, not something forced by the administrator.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
This child was born very prematurely, at only 26 weeks of gestation. It quickly became apparent that the child had suffered severe brain damage, resulting in severe cerebral palsy and a visual impairment. This was compounded by frequent and severe epileptic seizures, which were largely unresponsive to medication. This left the child restless and unable to sleep for long periods. The child also had mucus in its lungs, which made breathing and swallowing very difficult.
Given the cumulative effect of these conditions, it was clear that the child would not live to adulthood. The doctor also determined that the child's suffering could not be alleviated through medical treatment. The doctor and parents, therefore, decided to actively end the child’s life.
The committee concluded that the doctor acted with due care and made the right assessment. “All facets of ‘being human’—regarding motor skills, behavior, and personality—were severely impaired and were not going to improve,” the committee said. “Despite all medical and non-medical interventions, the parents and the doctor observed no improvement in the child’s condition and were convinced that the child was suffering unbearably and without prospect of relief.” It added that the doctor strictly adhered to all due-care requirements.
The Netherlands changed its euthanasia law in 2024 to allow for euthanasia on children between the ages of 1 and 12 under very strict conditions. These include that the child must be experiencing hopeless and unbearable suffering, there must be no other reasonable solution, and the doctor must have at least one other independent physician assess the case.
The original report mentions further (via Google Translate):
The epilepsy caused coughing fits and a swallowing disorder. In the months preceding the death, the seizures during mealtimes increased significantly.
The extensive brain damage had severe consequences for the child's functioning. There was a very severe developmental delay with an estimated developmental age of six weeks, while the child was nearly two years old. There was no verbal development whatsoever, and the cerebral visual impairment further limited the possibilities for any contact. Due to the combination of these conditions, only minimal communication with the child was possible. The child was severely multiply (intellectually and motorically) disabled, and the prognosis was that the child would remain dependent on care for life for all activities of daily living.
The extensive brain damage had severe consequences for the child's functioning. The child had sputum clearance issues, meaning that loosening and coughing up mucus from the lungs and airways was difficult, which, in addition to shortness of breath, poses a significantly increased risk of respiratory infections. The child's rattling breathing was clearly audible, and increasing shortness of breath was visible. Furthermore, the respiratory problems could worsen over time due to scoliosis. The doctor stated that the child exhibited an unsafe swallowing pattern, making it easy for the child to aspirate and for food or stomach contents to enter the airways, posing a risk of aspiration pneumonia (lung infection caused by aspiration). The likelihood of death at a very young age due to complications was considered very high.
The BBCode markup language used by most forum software (XenForo, phpBB, etc.) does not create paragraphs, and instead renders everything with line breaks, as you describe. The same is true for imageboard software and WYSIWYG email software. But that is bad formatting. In contrast, the Markdown markup language used by Reddit and by this website enables proper paragraphs to be typed.
Wikipedia:
A paragraph is a self-contained unit of discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea. Though not required by the orthographic conventions of any language with a writing system, paragraphs are a conventional means of organizing extended segments of prose.
The stanza in poetry is analogous with the paragraph in prose: related thoughts are grouped into units.
The standard formatting for paragraphs in print is a horizontal space (indent) at the start of the first line, though default CSS on the Internet instead uses a vertical space between paragraphs (like stanzas in print).
A newline is a control character or sequence of control characters in character encoding specifications such as ASCII, EBCDIC, Unicode, etc. A newline is used to signify the end of a line of text and the start of a new one.
The individual lines in a poetic stanza are not separate paragraphs. Rather, they are lines within a paragraph, intentionally created with line breaks rather than being generated automatically by the text-layout algorithm.
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
That's two stanzas/paragraphs, each composed of four lines that were created by inserting three line breaks. This is completely different in meaning from eight separate stanzas/paragraphs, or from eight separate lines in a single stanza/paragraph.
HTML specification:
The
pelement represents a paragraph.
A paragraph, in HTML terms, is not a logical concept, but a structural one.
The
brelement represents a line break.
CommonMark specification:
A sequence of non-blank lines that cannot be interpreted as other kinds of blocks forms a paragraph.
A line ending (not in a code span or HTML tag) that is preceded by two or more spaces and does not occur at the end of a block is parsed as a hard line break (rendered in HTML as a
<br />tag).
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
now
It's always done this. Reddit allegedly used to do the same many years ago, but removed the feature.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
I believe that the answer given to that problem in past discussions on this website⁎ is: a previously-conscious child has a future expectation of consciousness (barring an unrecoverable coma), while a never-previously-conscious fetus has no such future expectation.
⁎Which I failed to find in a few minutes of searching, so I unfortunately am forced to write this comment instead of just giving a terse "previous discussion" link.
Marketing article from the developer
At its core, Cuties! is a community-based user directory. It allows people to find each other and vouch for friends.
Cuties! is for intellectually-curious, open-minded, and embodied communities. Someone described it as “intellectual hippies”. I would add people who have a creative online presence, such as a Substack or twitter.
It’s a 2∶1∶1 gender ratio of men∶women∶nonbinary.
Metrics: 28K page views/mo, 4.6K visitors/mo, 2K sign ups, 1.1K published profiles, 660 monthly active users, 115 self-reported met ups, dozens of friends + relationships, 2 engagements, 1 baby.
In comparison, Duolicious has 16,000 active users—male∶female∶nonbinary 5.4∶1∶1.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
It's a dating service that uses questions to determine compatibility. If you're looking for "the smartest possible matches", its search function lets you run filters on the answers to specific questions: e. g., "Do you enjoy engaging in deep, intellectual conversations with a partner: Yes", "Is it crucial for your partner to enjoy a good debate or intellectual discussion: Yes", and "Is the only thing worse than a landlord, a landlord who invests in multiple properties, and is that such a bad thing that it should be illegal: No".
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
Previous discussion of Duolicious: 1 2 3
I think multiple "rationalists" have started dating and matchmaking services, but I don't recall any off the top of my head.
tl;dr: A child is a person in possession of the right of self-ownership but not yet competent to exercise that right, so it is placed under the pseudo-ownership/trusteeship of its parents. (The parents are not allowed to harm the child through action, but are allowed to let it come to harm through inaction, and are allowed to sell the trusteeship to others.) The child can assert its right of self-ownership and end the trusteeship once it is competent to do so (e. g., by leaving the parents' household).
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
Think about what they look like when you delete the narration and consider only what's inside the quotation marks. In option 2, the Grandmaster's speech is missing a period, while in option 4 the period is retained.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
I remember deciding at a fairly young age that many punctuation rules around quotation marks were indefensible, but especially the rule about placing the period inside closing quote.
To be fair, the quotation-mark rigmarole is slightly more complicated than it seems at first glance. Unraveling it may be more trouble than it's worth, when the customary format is so ingrained into depictions of speech in literature.
-
"The Temple is ancient, Kai Lian," the Grandmaster lectured. "Things remain much as they were during the Wei Dynasty."
-
"The Temple is ancient, Kai Lian", the Grandmaster lectured. "Things remain much as they were during the Wei Dynasty."
-
The Temple is ancient, Kai Lian, the Grandmaster lectured. Things remain much as they were during the Wei Dynasty.
-
"The Temple is ancient, Kai Lian [the Grandmaster lectured]. Things remain much as they were during the Wei Dynasty."
Of these options, I am inclined to think that the fourth one is the least bad, but I still hesitate to actually implement it.
Anyway, regarding non-speech-related quotation marks: I don't recall whether I started paying attention to quotation-mark rigmarole before or after seeing a few online comments about "programmer quotation". But, once I did start paying attention to the issue, it was obvious to me that the standard format was execrably ambiguous. (It wasn't until years after coming to this conclusion that I started noticing the insane number of square brackets that judges are forced to use because they insist on keeping the standard format.)
How do you decide when it's acceptable for your personal style to deviate from normal formatting conventions?
It's all about avoiding ambiguity and confusion.
-
While I have noticed the difference between "professionally edited" and "professionally-edited", I haven't paid much attention to it. I think I've seen situations where the adverb is sandwiched between two adjectives, or between a verb and an adjective, and not preceded by a comma, so omitting the hyphen would lead to ambiguity regarding which word the adverb is intended to modify, but I cannot recall a specific example off the top of my head.
-
I occasionally make explicit differentiation between "you (singular)" and "you (plural)", in situations where the number is not totally obvious.
-
I have a habit of saying "year 2026" instead of "2026". Is it really necessary? Probably not.
-
While I was working as a civil engineer, people would get annoyed at me for differentiating between "I-295", "US 130", "NJ 42", and "CR 514" even though my employer's official style guide prescribed "Route 295", "Route 130", "Route 42", and "Route 514". To be fair to them, it is at least arguable that the differentiation is unnecessary in my state, because there are no duplicated highway numbers there (though I'm pretty sure there is at least one state in the US that does have such overlapping highway numbers). But IMO it is useful to know what kind of road you're talking about without having to look it up.
Et cetera.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
I have not yet come to a firm conclusion regarding whether I agree with this particular rule. But I do appreciate your drawing attention to it.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
I find it hard to believe you are being serious here
Every person who has been reading professionally-edited books for a decade or two should have absorbed normal formatting conventions. Every person who has been using the Internet for a decade or two should understand why using paragraphs rather than line breaks is important (semantic markup—HTML = meaning and CSS = presentation; writing good HTML creates the proper affordances/hooks for CSS stylesheets and screen-reading programs to latch onto). Every person who is sane should understand that avoiding misnumbering people is more important than avoiding misgendering people.
Maybe most people find that disagreements on these topics merit only distrust, rather than dislike. But, after seeing hundreds of authors on ArchiveOfOurOwn and RoyalRoad use line breaks as improper substitutes for paragraphs (and use paragraphs with nonbreaking spaces as an improper method of increasing paragraph spacing), and after seeing dozens of appeals judges use hyphens in wacky ways, I have reached the limits of my patience.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
6d ago
Previous discussion (buried in a culture-war thread rather than top-level)
Much of the imagery and audio in this game has noticeably lower resolution/fidelity than one would expect in a PC game, presumably because it was just copied from the original mobile version.
More options
Context Copy link