Viewing profile — alisonatwork

TBH I never really got the point of those "video game score played by a real orchestra" things, although to be fair most of them seemed to be for games from the console world so as…

In 1993 I thought the OPL2 version sounded better and still do now. But my broader point was that comparing this old game music to "real" guitar music kinda takes away from what it…

It's amazing how much better all these sound to me in OPL2. When CD-ROM soundtracks because the norm it really ruined a lot of game music for me, because all that chip music perhap…

Fifty Plus One kinda does that now: https://fiftyplusone.news/methodology

You might enjoy some of the projects here, including a presidential approval map: https://projects.gelliottmorris.com Maps for elections generally don't come out till a few months …

I highly recommend G Elliott Morris' blog Strength in Numbers. He exists more in conversation with political science researchers and commercial polling professionals which makes hi…

538 had some decent years through its various sellout phases and imo hit its peak after Nate Silver left - he'd long since exposed himself more as a contrarian than a serious analy…

Thanks for posting this. I feel like for years we've been getting gaslit by the Markdown guys who inexplicably decided that stars should make text go italic instead of bold. I get …

Sorry, that wasn't really what I was getting at. The thing I find interesting with orientalism is that it has a mirror in chauvinism from the other direction, both sides reinforcin…

I feel like a lot of this is culture and class specific. I can't speak for Japan, but in China there are at least as many different levels of chopstick-using skill as anywhere in t…

I have the same issue now. It's especially annoying when it happens while reading a "serious" publication like a newspaper or long form magazine. Whether it was because an AI wrote…

How do you do this in the modern era where websites demand a unique phone number for each account? I couldn't even set up one Discord account due to the phone number requirement, w…

The power grid problems islands have is a really interesting topic. Just the other day I read an interview discussing Taiwan's energy situation[0] and even though I am familiar wit…

$1 is far too low to discourage abuse. Spammers and scammers will still make exponential returns. PR agencies are paid tens of thousands to craft narratives for their clients. With…

This kind of thing already existed for a long time, but not as a scam. The people selling these products were selling their ability as "tastemakers". They knew about all the variou…

This doesn't make sense to me. I mean, the term "remix" literally comes from the music scene. Artists are constantly getting inspiration from one another, referencing one another, …

Eh, Aphex fans and IDM more broadly has always been pretentious AF. I think there's a kayfabe effect going on where both the artists and the fans lean so far into the earnestness o…

From what I've heard from people who insist on using Substack even though it's American, VC-funded and full of dark patterns, they are trying to make money from their writing and a…

I can't speak for this one, but I've stayed in a bunch of these over the years and they're exactly as quoted in the article - better than a hostel, worse than a hotel. Because the …

What platform are you on? I use Ungoogled Chromium on desktop (uBlock Origin still works if you install it from GitHub) and Cromite on mobile (some AdBlock built-in), mainly becaus…

I agree that mainstream games tend to feel more predictable in their mechanics than what we got in the 8-bit era, but I'm not sure that that means they're more boring. There were a…

I think I just don't really vibe with roleplaying in realtime with other humans, to be honest. I grew up trying to play tabletop RPGs (my dad was a DM and used D&D mechanics as a w…

I never got deep into it, but I remember reading magazine articles back in the 90s that that's exactly what the new generation of MUDs were. Wiki has pages on MOO, TinyMUCK, MUSH e…