It’s just my opinion, man ¯_(ツ)_/¯

It’s the element of randomness as opposed to the applicant’s accumen that makes me question it.

I’ve done FAANG interview processes and I have friends/colleagues who have done them before too. Often the people who get jobs with them apply every year (or as often as allowed) with roughly the same CV, and do roughly as well in the practical tests, but they can end up being weeded out at different stages of the process seemingly at random.

It depends on factors like the mood of the interviewer, or the standard of the other applicants, etc. The whole thing is just so hard to reach the final stage of that I am having difficulty imagining that there are many people who have been in the position of being in the final stages for more than one role.

Edit: I have an extremely talented colleague at the moment who used to work for Meta and he had to apply an insane amount of times despite the fact he is technically extremely proficient.

Dungeon Keeper 2 is good in its own way but definitely lost some of its original magic.

There was an indie series called Overlord (I think, can’t quite recall) which tried to be a Cities: Skyline type homage to Dungeon Keeper. I played it many years ago and it did scratch the same itch so you might be interested.

Ok, I feel like we’ve both explained our positions here. Let’s agree to disagree.

It’s pretty much the 2025 equivalent of a Che Guevara t-shirt/poster

Was going to comment something like imagine being GenZ and growing up with Mike Adriano and Trevor from GTA as your role models.

Actually as a millenial I remember spending my time getting Tommy Vercetti to use prostitutes in Vice City while the free porn sites were far less moderated and contained extremely questionable content.

Maybe these external influences are less of an issue if people realise they are “entertainment” and not reality. I could picture a kid who struggles to separate the two but they’d be a minority.

IMO parents/caregivers need to step up to ensure kids are raised properly but I think that’s the main point Southgate is making.

There is something satisfying about going back and cranking Far Cry 2 or some other older game to max settings / 4k with an extremely modest GPU.

I think the power curve of the 2nd one really hits when you started off with your character in the first game killing rats in a basement.

As an aside I started Seige Of Dragonspear reecently because it was really cheap on Android and I was stuck on a long bus journey. I think it’s actually pretty decent and potentially would be a good starting point if BG1 was too slow. So far the writing has been similar to the other two games albeit not quite on par. There is no tutorial on the mechanics or anything like that though.

Edit: One thing about BG1 is that it can be absolutely fucking brutal in an old school way. I was in Chapter 5 in the eponymous Baldurs Gate and a sidequest triggered where an NPC told me they had poisoned my entire party and I needed to follow them to an alleyway to get the cure. I assumed this was a ruse and my party was going to get mugged/jumped in the alley.

Fast-forward to 4 hours of gameplay later, 2 weeks of in-game time. I was on Chapter 7 on my way to confront Saverok and my entire party keeled over and died. Turned out they actually had been poisoned and none of my stacked saves went far enough back to go and complete the sidequest to avoid the poisoning. So I was totally soft-locked with no way to complete the game by conventional means.

I wonder if this would work with my RX580 if I put a 30 FPS framecap.

It is quite easy to go slackware -> gentoo from what I remember but minimalist distros might be cheating

Both have extremely long and moderately random interview processes. You need to be extremely bright and extremely lucky to get to stage 8 or 9 of the interview process with either of them.

I remember my friend being really upset that her long term relationship failed with her partner leaving for another woman. I remember trying to empathise saying something along the lines of, “You can’t ever really trust anyone no matter how long you know them.”

I still kinda believe that however it was 100% the wrong thing to say in terms of being reassuring since it implied they’d been naive which was not the case. Their ex had all the responsibility for their relationship ending.

The more immoral the business the better the perks tend to be. Working at a gambling company had the best benefits of anywhere I’d ever been.

I don’t want to mass respond to all the replies but what I meant was:

• The UK healthcare system is not as predatory as the US one
• This is a crime (arguable justifiable) which has taken place in another country
• We shouldn’t transpose politics from other countries onto our own where they don’t fit. A lot of the moral intricacies of this case are idiosyncratic to USA’s crazy system.

Edit: missed the word “not” from my first point

How is this related to the UK?

I suppose my point was that phenotypes are real regardless of what you call them. Totally agree that the normative sense of the word “race” is a social construct.

All of the places listed so far sound cool and I could feasibly relocate IRL. At the moment I don’t want to live too far from my aging parents though. They are in their mid-70s and might need me soon.

Scientifically race does exist in the sense that humans with certain genotypes can present certain phenotypes but we are all the same species. I don’t think you can really quantify it at the individual human level though without ending up with all this old fashioned racist concepts coming into play, i.e. someone with 1/8 asian hertiage is “still asian” or whatever.

Race seems to be a bigger deal in the states because it is more politicised in terms of voting blocs. That’s not to say we are immune to it in Europe like people with south asian heritage often vote for particular candidates in the UK for example.

I think one major factor in perceived differences is that our larger cities in Europe tend to be more genuine melting pots with fewer segregated areas. There are probably other reasons like having a stronger sense of civil society too.

tl;dr: race is real in a fuzzy sense but not particularly important. Europe has a different culture to the USA in some key senses.

Mixture of old and new - at least Gangstarr are still in there!

Novels

Stephen King is very hit and miss but I loved Salem’s Lot.

Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula series is kind of alternative universe history themed where the premise is that the events of Bram Stokers Dracula actually happened but the main characters failed to kill Dracula so he takes over Victorian Britain. Popcorn stuff but fun if you like hypotheticals like “what if Oscar Wilde was a vampire?”

Short stories

Classics like Borges and Poe have a few existential horror stories like The Aleph by Borges. Borges is more consistent than Poe. Lovecraft is similar to Poe but not quite as good for me.

More modern short stories I’d definitely recommend some Ted Chiang for sci-fi horror (some lean more towards pure sci-fi but many are horror). It’s a shame Neil Gaiman is allegedly such a monster because he had some good horror short story collections.

Manga

Junji Ito manga are well worth reading. Often you can find scanlations of the best stories through web searching but the books are also cheap on kindle; and look good with e-ink since it’s all black and white.