Paul

Man, this reminded me that I always forget to tell you how much I love/use your year-end recommendations - I listen to every one of them and find music I don't see anywhere else. (bonus fact: I'm currently listening to Langzamer, which is only on my top of 2024 list because I saw it here first).

Thank you.

Jim Cummings is such an oddball that I have a sneaking regard for Wolf of Snow Hollow. It's also Robert Forster's last full-length movie.

Bart Simpson saying I understood that reference

Imagine some analyst trying to explain that (x=170, y=470) data point to their bosses. Someone was giddy!

This is exactly the kind of joke that made me groan in despair, but I would have made it myself if I'd thought of it first.

I tried this in Copilot, and after repeated pressing I ended up with this, which even at the end is the AI trying to please me by confessing.

You can see why some tech billionaires have fallen in love with AI - part plutocracy, part praise machine. “Great idea, Sam!” “Very perceptive, Elon!”

(me going from house of leaves to S. and searching bluesky to see if anyone is talking about them)

I'm going to try to figure out the code wheel without help, but I suspect I'll be searching Reddit for it soon. 🙂

I did the DiCaprio point and yell when I first spotted him.But definitely same on the age.

bsky.app/profile/paul...

Watching David Luiz get rinsed is quite the flashback.

Yes

Germany hugely underperforming what the hell.

a cartoon of a man talking on a telephone with the word humming below him Alt: a cartoon of Gil from the Simpsons talking on a telephone with the word humming below him

Every Dem politician at this point.

Les Pyrénées - 1956
📸 Justin Lock

Hey #boardgamesky!

I'm looking for examples of /weird/ board games. Games that do something you don't expect games to do, whether theme, mechanic, player experience/emotion, or other surprises.

Bonus points for being cheap, recent and/or quick to play, but none of these are essential.

The Bloody Inn - where your goal is to murder your inn's guests, rob them, and bury their corpses - does cause some 'this is really weird' pauses, especially when you realize that you're desperately trying to kill that one last person and bury them before the game ends.

point on Azul, and I can't control for that mix.

W/respect to game plays on BGA, I dropped Go for that reason - famously an expert game, but there are so few plays on BGA that you get a huge rating spread at the top & very little mathematical credibility.

I definitely appreciate the comments!

I believe we're thinking similarly.
- by player count I did mean players at the table; I was thinking of Race for the Galaxy, where all the top-rated players are in 2-player advanced in Arena, and that's where I reached 500 as well. I believe there's more luck in 3- and 4-player exactly to your

I've favorited on BGA (yes, that's a verb).

The rankings fell about where I expected, though Ark Nova's gap is interesting.

The usual caveats - player count and expansions may affect outcomes, top 10 average is a proxy for a concept, not an easily-defined quantity, etc. (etc. etc.)

A selection of board games and their average top 10 player ratings on BGA: No Thanks, 360; Flip 7, 393; Can't Stop, 397; 7 Wonders, 531; Potion Explosion, 633; Earth and Race for the Galaxy, 636; Wingspan, 664; Forest Shuffle, 678; Agricola, 721; Railroad Ink, 730; Terraforming Mars, 748; Ark Nova, 833.

I've been thinking about the idea that the top player ELO ratings for a #boardgame on #BoardGameArena might reflect the amount of the game's "luck" - that is, measuring the extent to which expert players (or bots) can arbitrage away randomness through their play. The games below happen to be ones

What's important about this battle of ascendancy at Guinness isn't a fight amongst the plutocrats, it's that under the chairmanship of the winner the company hired a lot of bright science grads, including William Sealy Gosset, who would go on to invent a sampling test under the pseudonym 'Student'.

Really enjoying watching him today.

Gnabry with a coiffure change, usually means he'll be on.

Thanks. There's only one female on the chart, the amazing Judit Polgar (who was #8 in 2005), but if you meant you'd like to see the same movement in the top 100 women across 20 years, so far I haven't been able to track down the 2005 list. Still looking though.

Alluvial chart shows the flow of the top chess players by federation (a proxy for nationality), 2005-2025. Russia and Ukraine shrink, India and US grow.

It's my first #tidytuesday ever, and I'm already cheating by grabbing extra data (2005 FIDE ratings)...but I wanted to learn ggalluvial and also see the growth in the top 100 players from India.

No mention of this dude watching nude scenes from a Jackie Chan movie during a meeting?

Vibe Coding Cleanup as a Service donado.co/en/articles/...

100% flashback to when I was trying to learn how to use APIs in #rstats.