Zagorath
@Zagorath@aussie.zone
- Comment on Kids nowadays don't have many (if any) videogame heroes... 3 days ago:
HAHAHA! 🤣 Those character descriptions are brilliant!
- Comment on Kids nowadays don't have many (if any) videogame heroes... 3 days ago:
Weapon durability is frustrating, but it ties into what I think is so awesome about Dark Cloud. That being that its RPG mechanics are based not around your character but around your weapons. With upgrading the weapons’ different stats, doing a status break, and building them up into completely new weapons. It’s really unique and I think it’s a shame that I’ve never seen it done elsewhere.
- Comment on Kids nowadays don't have many (if any) videogame heroes... 3 days ago:
A little off topic, but if you’re interested in recs for other games from that era, I highly recommend the early PS2 title Dark Cloud. It’s not exactly a mascot game like the ones you named, but it’s kinda close; the biggest comparison it had at the time of release was the Zelda series.
- Comment on Why does Australia still have 2 major political parties despite preferential voting? 5 days ago:
It’s a phenomenon that has been studied by psephologists and political scientists. Ultimately, it’s because IRV is a single-winner system. And single-winner systems have a strong preference for 2 party systems because at the end of the day, if one person wins, it’s likely to be from one of the largest groups.
Our Senate doesn’t use a single-winner system. It uses STV, which is a proportional system. Unfortunately because we only elect 6 Senators per state, there’s not a lot of room to create proportionality, so there are still only a relatively small number of groups represented. Contrast with the MMP system used in New Zealand and Germany, or direct proportional systems like the Netherlands and Norway, and you get much better truly proportional results.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
and strangers will frequently “fill in the blanks” with their own assumptions
Yes, but a large number of strangers with different life experiences can help cancel out any one person’s personal baggage.
- Comment on How many times will i hear about the evil left if the greens loose their leader 1 week ago:
Not exactly. Everything counted on election night gets recounted later. All the counts done on the night are basically unofficial counts for the media and the convenience of the politicians. They’re a little more official than that makes it sounds, but only a little.
- Comment on Congratulations from Canada 1 week ago:
More similar to yours than one could possibly imagine.
- A centre-left incumbent that seemed on track to lose, as of February.
- Thanks in part to Trump, the incumbent saw huge swings towards them in the polls during the campaign.
- So much so that their conservative opposition lost his own seat.
- The unfortunate harm done to a real left-wing party as a by-product (in your case it was because of FPTP and strategic voting. In ours it seems likely to be an unintuitive byproduct of how IRV works).
- Your left-wing party lost his seat. We’re still counting but it looks very possible that detail could be replicated here.
- Comment on How many times will i hear about the evil left if the greens loose their leader 1 week ago:
This would just be another parallel between us and Canada. Yes, Pierre Poilievre losing his seat, and Dutton following in his footsteps, has gotten most of the attention. But New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh also lost his seat in Canada.
- Comment on How many times will i hear about the evil left if the greens loose their leader 1 week ago:
I suppose “loose” in this context could also be a much nicer euphemism for “knife”. As in “free him of the obligation of being party leader”. But that context would be if he retains his seat, but they’ve decided they no longer like his leadership.
- Comment on How many times will i hear about the evil left if the greens loose their leader 1 week ago:
It’s about time the AEC adopts a 3CP count on election night for 3-way seats.
For those unaware, on election night, AEC workers count the 1st preferences of votes, and then conduct a 2CP count to the 2 candidates the Commissioner (or the Division Returning Officer, not sure which…but it’s someone high up in the permanent AEC staff) has decided are most likely to win. This is great in most cases, but if the AEC gets it wrong it can lead to wild results where the person who was believed to have won on the night has actually lost, and either the 2CP loser on the night actually wins, or even the winner can be someone who made no appearance in the 2CP on the night.
I don’t know who the 2CP was between on election night in Melbourne (I was too busy doing that counting in Ryan—ours was between Greens and LNP), but the need to “re-throw” between Labor and Greens implies it was probably Greens/LNP? If so that seems strangely out of alignment with previous results so I don’t understand why they did that. If they did in fact 2CP between Labor and Greens I wonder why the recount would be so far off of what was declared on the night.
Doing a 3CP count on the night, only in seats where this kind of thing is considered likely, would give a much better indication. Yes, it would be more anticlimactic because you’d lose the ability to confidently declare who did win, but it would at least mean the numbers you’re seeing on the ABC (or your media source of choice) are definitely accurate and unlikely to change by large amounts over the coming week. And you can just make an estimate of how preferences will flow from the 3rd in 3CP to the other two. (Before anyone asks, it would definitely not be viable to do a 3CP and then a 2CP on the night. I didn’t leave the booth until 11:30 pm last night as it was; extending it too much more than that would be unreasonable. Besides, you couldn’t start a 2CP until every booth had done its 3CP, including the postal votes and prepolls. And that’s just not how it works. Each booth does their own thing based on guidance set out ahead of time.)
3CP would actually speed up the result, allowing workers to get home earlier and the media to get reliable answers sooner. Each ballot would take a bit longer to count, but the number of ballots to be counted is absolutely decimated (in the modern, not Roman, sense). Instead of counting nearly 700 2CPs, we’d be counting less than 250 3CPs at my booth. The disadvantage is the potentially higher error rate. (A less important disadvantage is the lack of ability to use the 3CP to find errors in the 1st preference results…but you only lose this ability in the 1 candidate that would have undergone 2CP redistribution but is now part of the 3CP…in my booth our redistribution of the Labor candidate results meant we noticed we had undercounted her 1st preference results initially by 1.)
So in summary:
- 3CP would reduce post-election-night surprises
- 3CP would give the media accurate, if incomplete, results that can be used to make informed speculation about the final result
- 3CP would speed up the count on election night, saving the AEC money, their workers sleep, and giving the media information faster
I don’t know if this would require legislative change, a directive from some Minister, or just an internal AEC policy change. But whatever it is, it needs to happen.
- Comment on How many times will i hear about the evil left if the greens loose their leader 1 week ago:
What did it originally say?
Btw it now says “loose”, when presumably you meant to say “lose”.
- Comment on Why Does Australia Have This Very Weird Time Zone??? 1 week ago:
It does? The Hopi Reservation and US/Mexico border were brought up in that Reddit thread? Discussion of the humorous origin of place names, and of how train schedules are the reason behind the time Eucla time zone happened on /r/perth earlier in the week?
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Good post.
Wrong community.
- Comment on Why Does Australia Have This Very Weird Time Zone??? 1 week ago:
A hilarious take (with some really interesting asides) on Australia’s weirdest time zone.
- Submitted 1 week ago to australia@aussie.zone | 3 comments
- Comment on If you're a broke vampire, just say that 1 week ago:
Transylvania at the time of Dracula? It was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so it would be Franz Joseph I (yes, that Emperor Franz Joseph). Romania has a very tumultuous history, having been stuck on the frontier between Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans for most of the modern era. In Vlad III “Dracula” 's life alone it switched sides multiple times, and he was made Voivode of Wallachia and deposed at least 3 times. Voivode being roughly equivalent to Prince.
- Comment on Me when I zoom past traffic on my e-scooter 1 week ago:
I’d regularly see near-militant comments to anything even remotely suggesting cars had a place
That tends to be pushback against anyone saying their specific use case requires a car, rather than saying nobody should be allowed to like cars as a hobby.
- Comment on If you're a broke vampire, just say that 1 week ago:
Who are which King/Queen? Dracula is set mostly in England in 1897, so it would be Queen Victoria. But I’m guessing that might not be what you meant?
- Comment on Me when I zoom past traffic on my e-scooter 1 week ago:
Does !dragonsfuckingcars exist here?
- Comment on Me when I zoom past traffic on my e-scooter 1 week ago:
the r*ddit fuckcars certainly took the name literally
But it didn’t? It would regularly get people who are into their project cars or whatever come in and people would be quite friendly. Because the vast majority of that subreddit understood that the point of the movement is about systemic change and car culture, not about individual cars.
- Comment on Me when I zoom past traffic on my e-scooter 1 week ago:
Well, it’s a little more than just “bike or scooter is way better downtown”. It’s that car-centric infrastructure as a whole makes biking or walking dangerous and inconvenient, and public transport expensive and inconvenient. It’s that the sharp divide between “downtown” and “the suburbs” which means that a statement like @Godric@lemmy.world’s, which sort of implies “bikes are great downtown, but cars are better elsewhere” (even if godric didn’t intend that, it’s certainly a valid way to interpret their comment) is making an allowance for cars that things should be designed for them elsewhere, when actually trams and bikes worked great in small towns before we started designing everything for cars.
- Comment on Me when I zoom past traffic on my e-scooter 1 week ago:
it’s just that they’ve taken over
Like a lot of movements, fuck cars is named partly to grab attention. If you take the name literally, you get a misleading impression. A more accurate name would be “fuck car culture” or “fuck car-centric design” or “fuck motornormativity”. But those aren’t nearly as catchy.
- Comment on Me when I zoom past traffic on my e-scooter 1 week ago:
!fuckcars@lemmy.world
- Comment on If you're a broke vampire, just say that 1 week ago:
Yeh that’s right. But if we go off the idea that Dracula is meant to be Vlad III (which, I’ll admit, is actually something Stoker tacked on right before publication), well…he was royal.
- Comment on If you're a broke vampire, just say that 1 week ago:
That’s what inspired me!
I decided to do that, and then when someone started the vampires community I thought…why not see if anyone wants to chat about it with me.
- Comment on If you're a broke vampire, just say that 1 week ago:
Before John Polidori—Lord Byron’s doctor—wrote The Vampyre (incidentally, it began at the same retreat where Mary Shelly conceived of Frankenstein), the idea of vampires as nobles who can pass among humans basically didn’t exist. They were more akin to zombies or werewolves, prior to that. Polidori’s Lord Ruthven was a British nobleman based in no small part on Lord Byron. Then a few decades later you get Carmilla, another upper class vampire, this time female. And then just a couple of decades after that, on the cusp of the 20th century, Bram Stoker writes Dracula, the first time we get a vampire who is not just noble but royal, and we get the full furnishings we associate with vampires today. The foreign accent, the castle, the wine (though interestingly, the wine Dracula serves is actually a white wine, not the blood-red we usually think of).
Also fun note: this Saturday marks the start date of Dracula. Over in !vampires@lemmy.zip I’m planning a read-through in real-time, if anyone wants to join me.
- Comment on Permanent residents who had overseas drivers licenses transferred - your license may no longer be valid 1 week ago:
for every one person using an Overseas licence who drives in a reckless manner (by Australian legal standards), there are dozens of people with Australian Licences who drive recklessly
Well said. This change might help, but not nearly as much as better education and enforcement of our existing laws, and most importantly better road design would.
- Comment on Got plans for May Day tomorrow? 1 week ago:
Double time and a half?
- Comment on Got plans for May Day tomorrow? 2 weeks ago:
May Day in Queensland isn’t until Monday. So tomorrow…nothing. Enjoy tomorrow!
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Oh I see, that’s a snowflake. I was reading it as (literal) ice. Which was weird, since I was pretty sure (the drug) ice doesn’t leave people behaving like OP’s dad in the image.