Is it just me or is Julia Roberts an odd choice for a voiceover-only ad? She's got an iconic smile, of course, but her voice isn't particularly recognizable--if you hadn't told me it was her, I wouldn't have even realized it was a celebrity. Danny DeVito, she is not.
In India they have poll workers trekking into the mountains so that people can vote but apparently some US states can't even manage postage, world's greatest democracy folks
WTF, your mail-in ballot doesn't have prepaid postage? Does that not constitute a poll tax?
I didn't watch Dungeon Meshi as it aired--only caught the first few episodes and while it seemed good, it didn't quite grab me. I was busy marveling at Frieren, but I did continue to download Dungeon Meshi episodes since everyone was singing its praises, even saying it was better than Frieren. I was skeptical, since I absolutely adored Frieren and Dungeon Meshi seemed prosaic by comparison, but...now that I'm about halfway through, I completely get it. Even though both stories are about parties of adventurers in a magical land, they're pretty different tonally but more importantly in how their stories unfold. I think Dungeon Meshi's strength that may ultimately give it the edge over Frieren for me is how tightly focused it is on the main story, with no timeskips or anything else to distract from it—each episode picks up right where the last one left off. Now, part of the point of Frieren is how different the titular character experiences time compared to her shorter-lived compatriot, but even so there are things like the testing arc which did feel sort of disjointed from the overall plot and vibe.
Idk, I'm not really good at articulating why I like things, but all that I know is that I am absolutely loving Dungeon Meshi and it's taking all of my willpower to savor an episode or two per day instead of just bingeing it all. Watching it has made me realize that I've gotten too comfortable with watching seasonal slop just out of reflex...there are so many great shows out there that there's no reason to shovel down garbage just because it's new garbage.
Oh, and one aspect where it is objectively superior to Frieren is
Spoilers for both Dungeon Meshi and Frieren--I think within the first 1/2 of the first seasons of both?
how it doesn't take a hard right turn into weird fashy vibes when it comes to an "evil" race. That mini-arc where Frieren talks about how demons (or whatever they're called), a sapient race, are all biologically predestined to be pure evil and must be eradicated (and is shown to be completely right after receiving pushback from the bleeding-hearts) was jarring as hell. Thankfully it's only a small part of the show, so it didn't totally put me off it, but I was pleasantly surprised when the orcs in Dungeon Meshi were shown to be worthy of empathy and have their own motivations beyond blind bloodthirst. Sure, the part where an elf and an orc make peace was a little afterschool-special, but I'll take that over regurgitating justifications for genocide any day of the week.
Enough gushing about Dungeon Meshi, though! The only two seasonal shows I'm watching are Dandadan and Ao no Hako. The former is incredibly stylish and high octane. Definitely some problematic aspects, especially that first episode (seriously, WTF was the director thinking...), but after the first episode it hasn't been anything that's majorly impacted my enjoyment. Ao no Hako is a fairly conventional romance show, I suppose, but it's executed well and so far has avoided a lot of the things that tend to annoy me (unlikeable/incel MC, creepy fanservice, agonizing misunderstandings). It's my weekly dose of fluff.
She's not enough of a 
to post here
Thanks for all the recs! I knew a few of these, but most of them are new to me. Especially excited to check out that Hobbit one--those one-off videos can be some of the best, since there's no element of trying to play the algorithm or get something out the door to pay the bills or whatever, just a pure desire to share something cool with the world.
Only other recs I'd toss in are Lowest Percent (haven't posted in a while, but it's all high quality stuff) and bad_boot's one-off commentated video on Enter the Secret Aquarium in 0x A Presses. Oh, and perhaps it's as obvious as SummoningSalt, but I'd be remiss not to mention Pannenkoek as well.
Oh yeah, gotta plug MartSnack. They've only put out two videos in two years and they're both masterpieces (not exactly speedrunning, but if you're the kind of nerd who likes speedrunning you'll probably like their videos).
He's got some longer videos on his YouTube channel, so maybe those?
More Puerto Rican soldiers died in the Vietnam War as part of the United States military than soldiers from any state of the United States.
Is that actually true? Certainly doesn't comport with this data from the National Archives unless there's some weird technicality I'm not understanding. Also I know they just say "as part of the United States military" for emphasis but I can't help but think of the alternative "as part of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam".
Either way, funny thing to cite to a guy who dodged the draft (which, to be clear, is one of the few good things he ever did)
Ever since I got introduced to the joys of Minesweeper by Girl_DM_ I've been having a lot of fun playing it as a little timewaster. I'm specifically playing the version from Simon Tatham's lovely Portable Puzzle Collection (more specifically the Android port via F-Droid) which unlike the original Minesweeper does NOT require guessing. Most of the time, I'm well-versed enough in patterns and testing candidate solutions that I'm able to clear a 16x16 board with 99 mines in about 3-5 minutes. But on a fairly regular basis I'll run into situations where I get stuck and it seems like I'd either have to calculate an inordinate amount of possible solutions or just make a random guess, neither of which are appealing. Here's one such example:
with annotations
without annotations
There's probably some cool Minesweeper shorthand I could use to describe the constraints, but what I tried to show with my annotations is how I understand that, for each of the annotated squares, there is a mutually-exclusive binary choice (or in the case of the 3, two choices) for where a mine could be located. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, while the choices are internally mutually exclusive, it doesn't seem like there's any permutation of those choices that is invalid so I can't eliminate any possibilities. My usual strategy is to fix one choice and see if it results in a contradiction. For instance, if the other mine for the 2 is the upper choice, we can clear the lower square. That means the lower square for the 1 must be a mine, and this still leaves either of the two bottom choices as valid for the 3 (so this is a possible configuration based on these constraints).
The only remaining sections have a lot of freedom which makes them daunting to analyze. Of the remaining unanalyzed squares, from top to bottom they have 2, 2, and 3 mines remaining, respectively, which is quite a lot of options to fully check, and I can only eliminate a few heuristically (e.g. the top 3 must have at least one mine in either the east or southeast space, since otherwise the 4 to the south can't be fulfilled; the 4 must not have the remaining mines all in the east column because otherwise the 2 and 1 can't be fulfilled). I'm sure if I went through them methodically I would eventually arrive at an answer, but that's pretty tedious, so I usually just give up and generate a new board in this kind of situation.
TL;DR: am I missing some neat heuristic(s) that will allow me to either slash the possible solutions to a more manageable number or eliminate individual solutions very quickly, or is this kind of difficult spot just an inevitable outcome for some boards?
Holy crap it's real, how have I never heard of this