Wario Is The Best Mario Kart Character, And Other Facts
Welcome to What We Learned This Week, a digest of the most curiously important facts from the past few days. This week: Wario is number one, there are too many push notifications and it's okay to not like your partner's tweets.
Wario Is The Best Character In Mario Kart
For those who have not played a new Mario Kart game since "Mario Kart 64" a lot has changed. No longer is character selection a matter of personal preference, with the try-hards picking some combination of Mario/Luigi/Toad and the True Gamers picking Bowser/Donkey Kong/Wario. With the introduction of customizable cars in 2011's "Mario Kart 7," and the continuation of it in "Mario Kart 8," picking a character now seems more like a fraught process where there are thousands of options and almost all of them are certainly wrong.
Thankfully, Henry Hinnefeld did the math and found that, yes, there are 149,760 potential combinations of character, chassis and car. And if you're trying to optimize for either speed or acceleration, only 15 of those are actually good. The big winner out of these 15 optimal setups? Wario and Donkey Kong.
So the next time you head over to a friend's to play a friendly game of "Mario Kart 8" remember this combination: Wario, Sports Bike, Roller. Crush them. It's what Wario would have wanted.
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There Are Too Many Notifications
A downside to having a portable device connected to the infinite knowledge of the internet is that it the companies who make the apps that run on it know that you keep this device on you at all times. This has led to a never-ending quest for more and more of your attention.
Today, Motherboard's Ashwin Rodrigues points out, this manifests as an absolute deluge of push notifications. In the past, push notifications were for things that were urgent: A phone call, a text, a retweet, someone posting something on your wall, and so on. Now, by default, we're getting push notifications for someone posting something for the first time in awhile, urges to come back after prolonged periods of inactivity or just that someone you know has expressed interest in something that someone else posted. It's exhausting!
It's pretty great that our phones let us do amazing things like figure out how old Sandra Bullock is, present an idealized image to our lives to hundreds of strangers for shallow validation or keep us up to date with every single micro-update to our current political moment. But is it worth having our phones constantly scream at us to notice them in exchange? Most definitely. I love internet points.
It's OK To Mute Your Partner On Twitter
Thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones and the ability to post online no matter where you are or when you are, our online selves are beginning to merge with who we are offline. The notion of logging in and posting is a bit antiquated now that we're all logged in all the time. Which is good, probably.
Where things get tricky is when you've managed to develop an affection for someone in real life. Sure, you can spend the first few dates pretending that neither of you exist online, but once things get serious enough you will have to follow each other, watch each other's stories, tag them in photos and like their status updates. It's a fun way to show affection in the year 2018! It's fine!
When things get decidedly Not Fine is when you just don't really care about what that person posts about. For Lifehacker, Rebecca Fishbein describes one relationship where a partner would just post nothing but stuff about bicycles. Fishbein doesn't care much for bicycles, which, as you can imagine, put her in an awkward situation. How does one navigate this?
Sure you could talk to them about their posts. Maybe try and understand why they are posting so much about something you don't care about. Alternatively, you could just mute them. Then you wouldn't see their posts. The only posts you would see would be them, in person, which, assumedly, you're attracted do. If you start to not like those IRL posts, well, you know what to do.
