• 1 Post
  • 47 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle
  • VoxAdActa@kbin.socialtoMemes@lemmy.mlOMG
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    I’m glad you are very considerate and have never made a mistake when excited about something before. Good for you friend.

    I’m serious, though. How do you make that “mistake”? How do you get so excited that you completely tunnel-vision out the simultaneous existence of hundreds of people? That’s absolutely in no way neurotypical.


  • VoxAdActa@kbin.socialtoMemes@lemmy.mlOMG
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    It’s not just me. If I was literally the only other person in the store, sure, I could understand that, they thought they were alone, they weren’t expecting to encounter anyone else.

    How the fuck do you just stop being aware of an entire seething mass of other humans flowing around you?


  • VoxAdActa@kbin.socialtoMemes@lemmy.mlOMG
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Yes, I am incredibly unfriendly when I’m trying to get my shit done. I want to be out of that place as fast as fucking possible. I don’t want to linger, I don’t want to chat, and I sure as fuck have never in my life been so distracted that a hundred other moving, talking people just vanished completely from my awareness. Is that some kind of ADHD thing? Some manifestation of executive dysfunction, like always being late and never letting anyone else talk in a conversation if they can’t actively shout over you?


  • VoxAdActa@kbin.socialtoMemes@lemmy.mlOMG
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    What mental disorder does this fall into?

    This is totally bouncing off of me. How can a person, in a public space, surrounded at all times by other people, just forget they exist for any amount of time, for any reason? They’re fucking everywhere. They’re breathing, they’re talking, their cart wheels are squeaking, the footsteps from their rubber-soled shoes are echoing off the hard tile floors, how do your senses just stop registering any of that?


  • VoxAdActa@kbin.socialtoMemes@lemmy.mlOMG
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Hey man if you want to read every interaction in the worst possible light that’s on you.

    Please suggest to me a better way to read an interaction in which someone in a very crowded public place just happens to forget that the possibility exists that another human might also need to get down that aisle. “Oopsie doodle! I forgot I was surrounded by a hundred people who would really rather get this chore done as fast as possible! Again! Silly me!”

    Give me a charitable interpretation of that person who doesn’t take even a split second to consider anyone else in their environment without having to be verbally admonished.


  • VoxAdActa@kbin.socialtoMemes@lemmy.mlOMG
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    People aren’t mind readers and they aren’t purposely trying to make your life harder.

    Oh, now I get it. They just don’t even notice or acknowledge the existence of other people unless someone reminds them that such mythical beings exist.

    Yeah, you’re right, I’m much more sympathetic to them now. They’re not mean, they’re just amazingly self-centered and oblivious!


  • VoxAdActa@kbin.socialtoMemes@lemmy.mlOMG
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    You’re totally right, that makes me feel so much better about having to wait idly for the next 19 minutes rather than get my shopping done. They’re not in my way, they’re connecting! I should try to connect with them, too!

    Wow, they left. Why don’t they want to connect anymore?






  • I know at least one is getting frustrated with combat because he can’t roll to save his life.

    Yeah, that’s a feature of 5e combat, not a bug. It’s what makes me despise combat. I miss three times, wait 20 minutes for my turn to come back around, miss three more times, wait 18 minutes, and then combat is over.

    Some of us are just cursed. The only workarounds I’ve found so far are:

    1. Specialize in making the DM roll saving throws, rather than me rolling attack rolls. A spellcaster who focuses on save-for-half spells feels so much better (because even when the monsters pass the save, the player still get to feel useful).

    2. Specialize in party buffs and reaction spells. They don’t have to roll anything to Enlarge or Dragon’s Breath their friends, and they get to feel like they helped. Also, never underestimate how good it can feel to make a Counterspell bot. Even if the bad guys start upcasting their spells and your player always fails the check, they still made them waste a higher-level spell slot than they’d have used otherwise.

    3. Halfling Divination Wizard with the Lucky feat. Three re-rolls, two portent dice, and rerolling all 1s once really helps brute force one’s way through being cursed. And it’s not broken when people like us play it, because we end up finally managing to get around the same number of successes that non-cursed people get normally.

    Notice that none of these solutions are possible with pure martial classes. Steer your player away from those, maybe even let him make a new character. Martials are totally at the mercy of the dice.

    My ultimate solution was to switch systems and play FATE instead. But that’s an extreme reaction to an extreme level of frustration.



  • In August, for the first time in my adult life, I’ll be living in a solid blue city in a reasonably blue state. I’m super excited that I can have a pride bumper sticker finally. I’ve always wanted one, but I’ve never lived anywhere it was even reasonably safe to have one. I’m not a coward; I just can’t afford to replace slashed tires or broken-off side mirrors.




  • How do you make that undeniably clear with no ambiguity? Give me a sentence, written with no other words in the way I did above, that is unambiguous about the names of the strippers.

    You can’t. Because in a world where the comma is optional the sentence with no comma is always ambiguous. The comma solves nothing.

    I think we both agree that the comma being optional is the mother of ten thousand confusions, we just disagree on what should be done about that.

    If the Oxford comma was required, the sentence naming the strippers as JFK and Stalin no longer has any ambiguity whatsoever; it can only mean one thing.

    If the Oxford comma was banned, the sentence naming the strippers would have to be rearranged entirely to avoid ambiguity. Instead of being able to clarify the relationship with a single keypress or tiny jot, we have to edit the entire sentence (the simplest way I can think of would be to say “JFK and Stalin are the strippers I invited.”)

    As for the bit about speech, you’ve lost me. I’ve never had a conversation with another native English speaker (and I’ve lived in 10 different US states, from Texas to Connecticut) where a list of three or more things was spoken without a pause before the “and”. Maybe it’s different in other English-speaking countries? I also used to have regular conversations with an Australian, and I never noticed any confusion, but that was some 20ish years ago now, so my memory might not be reliable.


  • I think the problem is that not everyone translates text in their brain the same way.

    I translate it as if I were speaking it. So when I see “We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin,” I read it exactly as I’d say it, which is, the strippers were JFK and Stalin. When I read “We invited the strippers, JFK, and Stalin”, the comma pause is not rendered as text in my brain, but like a quarter-rest in a musical score, and that pause is what allows my brain to separate JFK and Stalin from each other.

    Other people translate text more visually, I guess, and that problem doesn’t exist there? I wouldn’t know, I can’t even begin to fathom how “JFK and Stalin” could be read in any way that doesn’t mean they’re the strippers.

    I mean, if you were trying on purpose to say JFK and Stalin were the names of the strippers, and not the dead historical figures, how would you punctuate that sentence? Without the Oxford comma, the clause is clearly an appositive, not a list.

    And then when you get into longer lists, it becomes even more of a pain in the ass. “Some suggested treatments for this condition are patella surgery, physical therapy and exercise, plate insertion, bone fusing and bedrest, among others.” Is “bone fusing and bedrest” one item? We have another item in the list that’s a combination treatment with “and”, is this also one? Or are they two separate treatments? Did the author omit the Oxford comma, or did they omit the Oxford “and”? It’s very common for academic authors, particularly, to make that kind of typo. They drop articles and conjunctions all the time. Now I have to e-mail the author and ask “What did you mean here?” because, as the editor, I can’t just assume “oh, they don’t like the Oxford comma, so this sentence is fine”. There are a lot of places where a small typo like missing “and” will make or break the intended meaning and the scientific veracity of an academic paper.

    So yeah, I guess if all your writing is stylistic fiction where precision isn’t important, and your reading style is visual rather than auditory, an Oxford comma might “look ugly” and it could be safely ignored. But for anything technical, it’s kind of important.



  • I gotta imagine much of them weren’t actually successful.

    You’re right. Any individual person going in for these scams is almost guaranteed to lose their lunch money. But from Etsy’s perspective (and I assume Imgur’s), they only need a tiny fraction of their sellers to get the jackpot in order to keep the money train rolling. If they can get a single dollar a month out of 20% of their users, that’s still a baby dragon’s worth of a horde every 30 days. And I’m sure they have other fees and hedges to ensure that even if you never make a penny in sales, Etsy still comes out ahead on you.