Conservatism, probably. It’s cruel and often self destructive.
That humans (all of us) are such emotional creatures and that we do often can’t rise above it. You tell someone a fact they don’t like and the brain just shuts that down.
These feel related somehow
I think you can do // prettier-ignore, because I remember facing that exact situation.
I’m sure there are companies that are at least more good than bad. Teachers pay teachers. Meetup. Bandcamp before they sold. That’s all I have off the top of my head. But even so capitalism invites cruelty, and the best intentions can easily wither under the pressure to make more money.
I work for a very large company involved in medicine. They make machines to do like blood work. That’s fine. People need that. But they treat many of their workers like trash. I don’t get paid for holidays and get the legal minimum sick leave per year. Their mission isn’t especially evil , but their behavior sucks.
I’m still good friends with two of the people I dated non monogamously. They’re good people. Not all the matches were strictly better- there are a lot of theater kids and burning-man types, and that’s almost never my type. A lot of lawyers too, surprisingly, but I think some kinds of lawyers are super hot so that worked out.
100% agree that people aren’t taught how to be clear about their needs, and the common problems of guesswork and assumptions. Non-monogamy practically requires you actually talk about what you’re aiming for.
Monogamy also often imports some unhealthy behaviors, like just assuming you have full access to your partner all the time. With non monogamy you typically have to be more intentional about plans and time together, and I think that makes for a better relationship.
I got some people really angry at me when I suggested writing some math expression with parenthesis so it would be clearer. I think someone told me that order of operations is like a natural law and not a convention, and thus everyone should know it or be able to figure it out.
I was in a monogamous relationship and had feelings for someone else. I didn’t want to cheat, but it felt wrong I couldn’t do anything with this other person that I felt chemistry with. I knew I wouldn’t be upset if my partner had other people so long as she also spent time with me. After that relationship ended (for other reasons) I decided not to put myself in the same situation.
Ironically, pursuing non monogamy means there are far fewer people to date. I was getting a viable match like once a month or so, maybe less. When I switched back to monogamy as an option, it was like 1d4-1 a week.
I think a good step would be if people could admit the companies they work for are making the world worse. I’ve met some people who work for Google who do some backflips about how no the company is good and definitely they’re good people and it’s not the $300k salary talking.
Difficulty settings are, first and foremost, accessibility settings.
I’m not opposed to more options but I think this tactic is distracting and generates more pushback than it wins converts.
Are games art? I’d say so, usually. Some are more like toys than art, but many have creative expression
If they are are, must all art be accessible to all people? Well, what does accessible mean exactly? To understand it completely? Then I’d say trivially no, because there are many books that are incomprehensible to many people. No one is going to say “House of Leaves” is inaccessible and the author did a gatekeeping by writing it as such. No one is going to say Finnegans Wake is ableist because it’s hard to understand.
Must all aspects of all art be completable by all people? I’d also say trivially no. You might have a segment in French that doesn’t translate well. You can dub it or subtitle it, but the original experience will remain inaccessible unless the audience spends years mastering French.
I bring that up because some games will have within the game, not a metagame menu setting, easier or harder routes. For example, Elden Ring with a big shield and spirit ashes is significantly easier than a naked parry build. Is the expectation that everyone should be able to finish in both styles? If there’s a hard mode, must everyone be able to finish it?
Should everyone be able to trivially 100% every game?
Personally I think the floor is everyone should be able to interface with the game. Change inputs. Add subtitles.
I don’t really think “I can’t party this spear guy” is an accessibility problem the same way “I’m color blind and can’t read the text” is.
But again, I don’t care if someone wants a god-mode with auto-parry. It just feels like it’s bundling some unrelated ideas together. You’re not necessarily disabled if you’re bad at parrying in dark souls.
I get my clothes from the thrift store. Sadly, even that’s getting more expensive. Used to be could get jeans for $5 and now it’s more like $20
It’s debt in the sense of obligation, not literal finance. If we get more volume, we’re going to be obligated to change this so it does something smarter than dumping output to a csv on disk. For now it’s fine, even if it’s annoying to scp and parse the files every time you want to see something.
I don’t think there’s less stuff. I think there’s more slop and trash, so the percent of good stuff is lower.
When we’re constantly ‘killing time’ on our phones/screens
Reminded me of that quote from House of Leaves
Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.
After a particularly potent evening of farts, someone whose identity I will protect had their ass dubbed “the gates of hell”. I can imagine this hanging in their bathroom.
Forums were cool. They often had their own culture and in-jokes. People would become well-known on the forum. There’s a couple names I recognize on here, but it’s mostly transient. (On the other hand, I’ve probably had a vicious argument with someone and then a nice chat with them later, without realizing it was the same person).
Most internet users seem bland, and just congeal onto youtube, discord, twitch, and other nightmares.
People don’t really like change.
Think about free public libraries. They’re fairly popular, and not controversial outside of fringe libertarian types and assholes. People like that you can borrow books and other media for free. Usually there’s a bit of a backlash if there’s a movement to shut down libraries or limit their services.
Imagine if free public libraries didn’t exist, and someone tried to invent them today. People would be having screaming fits about communism. It’s stealing from the authors. it’s ruining publishing. We don’t need tax dollars for this when we have amazon. Blah blah blah.
It’s the same with other things we could socialize. health care is a privatized nightmare. If we somehow got a public option in, eventually people would start reflexively defending it.
So what I’m saying is many people don’t really have a set of internally consistent beliefs. They just don’t like change.
There was a website where users could request something or other, like a PDF report. Users had a limited number of tokens per month.
The client would make a call to the backend and say how many tokens it was spending. The backend would then update their total, make the PDF, and send it.
Except this is stupid. First of all, if you told it you were spending -1 tokens, it would happily accept this and give you a free token along with your report.
Second of all, why is the client sending that at all? The client should just ask and the backend should figure out if they have enough credit or not.
I thought it was widely accepted that you shouldn’t use this word outside of, like, quoting old medical diagnosis from when the word was used in that context. It is not an okay insult.
Maybe I just hang out with nicer people.
Buying power is down. If they want me to spend more, capital has to pay me more.
Yeah I just… Don’t need that much stuff. Most of my money goes to food and shelter.