Each time I show up to post the relevant XKCD it’s already here. Truly an efficient service

…is there an XKCD for that?

I don’t know if I’m capable of playing a serious character, so there’s a rich tapestry to pull from here:

For a Christmas one-shot I played a Santa Claus impersonator with a warhammer. He was my Maul Santa.

The most whimsical was a gnome alchemist (I think he was a wizard, but we like styling up our spells). He owned a soda pop empire and was adventuring for rare ingredients. Basically he was a Willy Wonka type and I called him Dr Pibb

Silliest was probably my short, swarthy, greased-up masked wrestler. Glorious indeed were the bouts of El Cabron the Luchadwarf

I’m not the person you were replying to, but I read that as when you witness suffering.

Watching a news report about ongoing genocide is suffering I don’t like. Watching a trillionaire get flensed is the sort of suffering I can get behind.

Although maybe it could be personal experience. Going to the gym can be a rather mild form of suffering, but it’s probably something you would choose to do and learn to enjoy.

Honestly I’m for it. I hope all the major players adopt this so we can watch the pillars of the gaming industry collapse.

From the wreckage will be a renaissance of developers whose priority in making games is that they’re good.

I’ve been a long time fan of the series and never took the time to learn this. I also never knew it was ported to the Saturn, so doubly neat. We’re having a two-for-one special on the fun facts today.

For a long time I held the belief that it was renamed for american audiences to play up the haunted house aspect (The RESIDENT of this abode of the damned is EVIL). Which made it all more amusing when the franchise immediately pivoted away from exploring mansions by the time the second game came out.

Most of the time people just vote how it’s already going. If it’s -5 then it’s basically already decided that this is a comment everyone is going to downvote and they dogpile. Quite often it’s an audience problem; as in, the content is completely fine, but people have decided to take it the wrong way

Do you think people can’t think for themselves and just vote the way other people are voting? I’m inclined to be insulted, but then again I live in a first-past-the-post “democracy” so you might be onto something there.

If there’s truly nothing wrong with your message, then downvotes are a badge of honour. When you catch downvotes for saying “everyone deserves food” or “don’t be so hard on the gays” then other people are telling on themselves when they downvote.

However, I definitely believe people are out there saying indefensible things and then blaming their audience for disagreeing with them. “I’m not racist, but…” can lead to a “Well you people are just too sensitive”

I believe on some front ends, a comment that collects a certain amount of downvotes is automatically collapsed. So it actually spreads less negativity, although you could probably see how brigading by trolls could abuse this.

I don’t really have a dog in this fight though, I can’t downvote from my instance.

You can probably look it up by your region, but I think most places actually have more vacant housing than homeless people. It’s unaffordable by design because it’s an investment in real estate. This may also be an american phenomenon, but it happens here in Canada too

So the real problem eating housing resources is human greed - which I suppose isn’t that far off from the reason data centers are being built

When I was in school, they taught us the Tongue Map

For the uninitiated: the theory is that only certain sections of the tongue taste certain things, such as sweetness, sourness, bitterness, etc. It’s also total bullshit.

I have heard of schools teaching this as a caution against blindly trusting authority. It’s easily disprovable with a simple experiment, and we even did that in class. Simple stuff, like placing sugar on different parts of your tongue to see if you can only taste sweets in the sweet zone.

I told my teacher that I didn’t taste any difference, it was all the same. She told me I must be wrong because that’s not what it says in the book. That itself could have been a lesson about trusting authority, and I think that at the end of the day you could tell your class it was all an experiment. But that never happened and is a pretty heavy thing to lay on a six-year old.

Either way though, it’s a valuable lesson in critical thought and blind trust.

You’ve got a lot of replies already advising you to play this game because you’ve already paid for it. I’ll add on to it.

I completely understand how you feel about contributing to their power. I have my own struggle with blizz because while I despise them, they make the only game that all of my friends want to get together to play. It’s infuriating.

You are correct that they get something out of you playing the game after you’ve paid for it. A video game company basically trades on sales, market presence, and monthly active users (MAU). The first two are essential to their success, but MAU is a bit trickier for them to extract value from. The strategy is that MAU is a metric by which they can curry favour with investors, or it gives them an idea how much they could earn from continuing to support the game or creating a sequel, or the potential value of crossover events.

However, MAU also comes with direct costs to the company. As you say, the game runs on their servers even when played against no human players. You cost blizz money every time you play it. That cost, honestly, is pretty negligible. But, the benefit that they get from one single active user is also negligible.

Something I think about is how difficult it can be to protest a game. The saying goes is that even bad publicity is still publicity, and this is true of games. For instance, when people talk about boycotting a game, the name of the game ends up in the news where it will have a wider reach - potentially to people who don’t care about a boycott and are hearing about a game that everyone’s talking about.

This is something that comes up in the piracy community too. A common defense of piracy is that it’s actually good for the company: people who weren’t going to pay for your game are still playing your game and talking about it. They inspire their friends and strangers to play this game, and if they really like it then they become potential customers when they can afford to do so.

My belief is that the two best ways to support a game are through purchase and word-of-mouth. You already paid for the game, so there’s nothing you can do about that. However, if you don’t want to feed the beast, the best way to deprive them would be to simply not talk about the game. Don’t name it, even to shame it

This is a rare case where keeping quiet can ease your conscience.

Is the game you’re thinking about a famous real-time strategy game? They have a few that I’m nostalgic for but I’ve never been able to get running on my computer in recent years. Modern RTS games tend to be a bit different, and they just don’t scratch the same itch. Happy to be proven wrong if someone knows some indie darling though.

Liquor stores being closed on the weekend always bothered me. It sounds like a minor inconvenience, but if you’re a hardcore alcoholic then being cut off from your supply for a weekend can kill you.

It feels like a thorny thing too, because like, I get their mission. Drunk driving kills people, so campaigning to stop people from getting killed feels noble. But banning substances has been proven time and time again to cause more harm than good because if people can’t get their fix safely, then they’ll get it unsafely.

A bit of a tangent, but I think about people who campaign against needle exchange programs and injection sites. They probably believe they’re doing good because it’s very easy to see how drugs can ruin lives. I think it’s also a natural but naive outlook to think that if your city is facing a drug problem then these programs can be seen as encouraging drug use.

But shutting down these programs doesn’t fix the reasons why people struggle with addiction. A person will continue to get their fix, even if that means they have to share needles, even if it means injecting in a public bathroom or at the library. Shutting down those programs makes the drug problems more visible, more dangerous, and can lead to a public health crisis. Not to mention being away from medical staff makes overdoses deadlier.

Back to booze, you can look at the Temperance movement and the Prohibition era as a fine example of when things go too far. There you had people who thought they were doing the right thing - but their actions indirectly (and sometimes directly) lead to more deaths.

Do I think MADD is going down the same road? Today, probably not. But if they keep shifting the goalposts, then who knows where their future leads?

You must be in different communities as I am, because for me the opposite holds true.

But even if it did do a decent job at anything (I’m still not convinced it does, but maybe in another decade), the state of the technology today that’s being heavily invested in is an environmental catastrophe.

Also regarding consciousness: that’s neither a technological nor political element of AI usage. Anybody claiming that a matrix is conscious is either lying in order to sell AI or grossly misinformed.

I don’t believe a rock has more consciousness than AI - they’re equally inert. But I find more value in a rock.

You have nothing to apologize for, my guy

I’m just watching the language I grew up with shift while my bones turn to dust

it bombs pretty well

This threw me off because when I think of something that bombs it means it didn’t go over well. Unless it’s “the bomb” which means it’s “the shit” which means it’s the opposite of shit

Your mom’s soup sounds pretty sick (the good sick)

The truth is, you’ll never know why somebody downvoted you.

• Maybe they downvote every post they interact with
• Maybe they reached for the upvote and clicked on the downvote
• Maybe somebody else is stalking your posts and downvoting you
• Maybe it’s a bot action targeting users of your instance
• Maybe they’re telling you “fuck you”

Time spent thinking about it is time spent not having a good time - is time being wasted

Also from Canada. I feel like we’re US-lite and moving in that direction every day. If I could find the means to do so I’d probably move somewhere in Europe too. The Netherlands sound pretty dope, I like me some stroopwafel.

Sometimes I see people rolling coal in their lifted pavement princesses, with political stickers like the Blue Lives Matter flag. It makes me wonder what the fuck is wrong with my neighbours.

I remember a time when the West Edmonton mall had more submarines than the navy

A Jackie Brown meme? In my feed!?

I’m here for it

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy was made for pretty much this exact reason. But if that’s too open-ended, here’s a specific technique that’s worked for me:

The Technique

Identify a specific recurring bad thought. Each day keep a running count of each time that thought pops in your head. Do that for a few weeks and compare trends.

You have to keep an accurate count of the thoughts for this to work. I use a daily index card, but you could do a journal or an app or something. Do not try to keep running count in your head.

Example: Every time I think “Nobody will ever enjoy my art” I make a mark on an index card. At the end of the week, I add them up and compare to the previous week.

Why Bother?

Over a long term, you’ll probably notice that your daily count decreases. Over the short term, it may increase for a few days because you’re starting a new technique that specifically looks at the thought.

Keeping a count like this works for negative thoughts, bad habits, and probably a bunch of other behaviours. For instance, if you’re trying to eat better then counting calories has been shown to decrease your over-consumption even if you don’t intend to change your diet. It’s like a magic trick.

Next Steps

If this worked for you, this is an awesome and easy way to help with your mental health. If it doesn’t vibe with you, that’s okay, there’s going to be something else out there you can try.

This technique is also a gateway towards the broader lessons of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. While it’s recommended that you start with a therapist, CBT is largely self-directed - you can begin with little or no cost using online resources. If you’re in distress, especially about recurring thoughts, I strongly encourage you to learn more about it. I believe it has literally saved my life.

A lot of the time, people feel bad and they don’t know why they feel bad. A technique like this helps people learn to be more introspective, and mindful of what’s actually going on in your head.

Wishing you the best - I hope something works for you

I see basically two nefarious reasons for bots to pretend to be people on lemmy. I can’t think of a good reason why you’d want them.

A company shilling it’s product by appearing like a regular person. Bots have already ruined user reviews for products in basically every consumer industry. The best way to discover decent products now is word-of-mouth, so I could see a bot that pretends to be a user so it can show up in recommendation threads, like in Ask Lemmy or Buy It For Life.

The propaganda potential for bot users is tremendous. Kind of like the company shilling its product but on a grander scale. This could be orchestrated by those with economic interests, like promoting car-centric culture or climate change denialism which is of great interest to the oil industry. Or it could be as grand as foreign or domestic influence interfering with elections.

The fediverse isn’t a huge place, but it’s not nothing either. Operating costs are technically lower because you wouldn’t need to use as many bots to infiltrate communities. You could even spin up your own instances so that your own bots don’t get banned. I’m not really sure how you’d go about countering this sort of problem.

You could give the extra food to someone who needs it and wasn’t being a hugely entitled bitch.

The reason would be that the rudely impatient person has to wait in line again. Unfortunately the punishment will be lost on them, and they’ll take it out on the employees that don’t get paid a living wage.