Vormithrax is basically the Lobos of Cataclysm. He plays the game with challenges that'd make it impossible for other people to survive even for a few minutes.

While his challenge runs are stunning, it is annoying that there *is* a meta.

In each, "normally I'd ___ but I can't do it so easily now, so ___"
What usually happens is someone watches a Cataclysm video, gets it, and then dies.

Then dies and dies and dies, having tons of fun in the process.
And then they learn the meta.

Grind slings to level crafting, search bushes to level survival. Make a knife spear. Stop making a knife spear, they nerfed it.
And before you know it, every game starts the same way. Like a video game, not an apocalypse simulator, or a story generator.
Cataclysm, like Dwarf Fortress or Crusader Kings, is a story generator. It pumps out narrative.

The existence of a meta, an optimal way to minmax munchkin it, removes that narrative generation unless done carefully.
Vorm gets around that, still generating stories, by constraining himself in weird ways.

He has to *work* to avoid falling into that meta.
In Cataclysm, or Project Zomboid, there's an established meta for the zombie apocalypse. Almost a chess opening or joseki, a formal series of tasks to do for optimal results.
This bothers me, the encroachment of video gamey mechanics on narrative generation.
It's not a technical problem with a technical solution. Like DPS in dark souls, there's an objective, knowably optimal strategy governed by the game mechanics, even if it makes little sense from the story perspective.
It's almost like a generalization of ludonarrative dissonance.

"Oh yeah I'm gonna help you find your father. First wait a sec while I take my sweet time looting everything in here not nailed down"
"Oh no the princess is in danger!"

*calmly loots every single broken rake in the village before leaving to find her*
But in this case, it's the inescapable dissonance of video game mechanics themselves inevitably hampering narrative generation.

More from Anosognosiogenesis

An interesting thing about carp is that they can go into anoxic hibernation and switch to an anaerobic metabolism based on converting glycogen to ethanol.

The waste ethanol is diffused out the gills

https://t.co/V3D1umHf04

Carp can switch over to an anaerobic metabolism and quietly exhale booze until the situation gets better.

They basically evolved the same metabolic pathway as yeast, independently.

In theory, if you spent a few thousand years breeding carp for it, you could use them to make booze.

They'd be enormous, almost entirely glycogen deposits with a fish added as an afterthought.

The really interesting thing about anaerobic carp, is that they can go 4-5 months without oxygen by relying on liver glycogen.

You, a human, have only about 100 grams of glycogen in your liver, about 400 more grams in your skeletal muscles. Call it 500 grams total.

In humans, glycogen is also burned for energy. This is where the marathon runner's bonk comes from: you only have about 2,000 calories worth, and running a marathon burns those 2,000 calories.
So I've mentioned the sharpie test and the tueller drill.

Another reason you are dead within 1.5 seconds of encountering your first fast zombie, is adrenaline.


Most people who get attacked with a knife and survive to talk about it, say they never even knew a knife was there.

Or that they'd been stabbed, until after the fact.

In many cases, they think they'd just been punched, and are completely surprised

One reason the adage is "the winner is the one who dies in the ambulance, not the gutter," is because it's entirely possible to receive a fatal wound, not realize it, and then inflict a fatal wound on the other guy without *him* realizing it.

A dozen times within 30 seconds.

The marker drill teaches how you *will* get cut, fatally, without realizing it.

In full adrenaline freakout, this is even more pronounced.
The US immigration act of 1907 signed by Teddy Roosevelt: ableist as hell. https://t.co/ficeXOImo5


One theory for why the Spanish flu was so unusually lethal for young people:

They hadn't lived through the previous flu pandemic of 1889-1890 (https://t.co/OiDZYtdbWx) that killed about 1 million people. And thus had no carryover immunity.

It's suspected that the 1889 pandemic was not influenza, but a coronavirus.

The 1889 virus spread rapidly, killing mostly the elderly.

The 1889 virus was the first truly modern pandemic: people knew about germs, it spread via trains, it spread at the speed of modern transportation and commerce

More from For later read

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THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)