games? I found a civilization port for the phone and it sucked up a lot of time. Turn based so you can do it for a few minutes at a time: https://yairm210.itch.io/unciv

learn a language? duolingo and other apps are out there

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Ald'ruhn#Notes

It’s the Ald’ruhn fighter’s guild. Apparently it’s not a full set, but it’s a lot of it.

This is a time of political crisis. The US government is upending decades of alliances and economics. The right wing is globally on the rise, and that means people’s lives are in danger. The environment is becoming more unpredictable and less supportive for humanity.

There’s a lot of important political shit to talk about. If we were living in a boring utopia, there’d be less, probably.

Also, what do you even consider “political”? Some people will tell you that a story about a man and a woman getting married isn’t political, but a story about two men getting married is. That’s a really low quality analysis there.

Like. Why was this bs ever illegal in the first place?

Us answer:

I believe Nixon realized they couldn’t make it illegal to be against the war and otherwise left wing, but they could make things correlated with that illegal. And thus the war on drugs was born. It also lets the state enforce white supremacy.

Recommend reading “the new Jim Crow” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Jim_Crow

Reminds me of my first big success at work. There was a weekly report that people wanted generated - it showed how much like each operator had done, how much each warehouse had shipped, how many orders we lost from stock issues, etc. it was a low tech company, so they had someone going through the limited UI, looking up each thing one at a time, copying it into excel, and making the report that way. It took hours, and was error prone from stuff like mis-pasting or accidentally skipping a user.

Took a look at it and was like you could definitely automate this. Used some very primitive scripting to pull all the info out of the system’s UI and dump it into a TSV. Took like a couple minutes to run it, import into excel, and add the colors. But it was super janky because it was manipulating the UI like a user instead of, like, directly querying whatever underlying data store it was running on.

Still, management was impressed. I later learned no one actually looked at the report most weeks, so that took some of the wind out of my sails.

This is an ancient joke but they replaced the original pigeon with a blue thing instead. :confused:

You know, I replayed it recently (with OpenMW) and for 2002 yes, but by more modern standards not really, not for me. The leveling system is really bad. The combat system is an awful mix of dice rolls and action, where neither is satisfying. Movement is glacial and it takes a long time to either level speed or get mark/recall. NPC interaction is minimal.

It certainly has a lot of cool stuff in it. Spellcrafting is cool (if janky). Enchanting was like spellcrafting, but better. Alchemy can get bonkers. The world is huge, and because it was less level-scaling and procedural-generation you sometimes could find really interesting things. Like breaking into a room in the fighter’s guild and finding a full set of glass armor. Super cool. Of course, the illusion of a believable world immediately shatters when you walk right out wearing the stolen armor and no one reacts.

So, yes and no. Amazing, for 2002. But also kind of limited, and sometimes kind of bad, and they haven’t really reached new heights in the past 23+ years. All of their games handle stealth badly. They all handle damage badly. There’s just not two decades of improvement by them.

The more I play Bethesda games the more I realize they’re not actually good. Fun sometimes, but also kind of bad.

saying he’s treated like a nazi so might as well say he’s a nazi.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/8/8/1786532/-Cartoon-You-made-me-become-a-Nazi is kind of timeless

Where is “here” out of curiosity?

I’ve read that most of the lead from leaded gasoline is still in the environment, where it does cause harm. It it’s in the soil, and that can get into people through a variety of means.

On the one hand, yes. But also, it’s mostly capitalism.

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with “I’m starting a frisbee club for fun. We’re going to meet saturdays in the park. I’m going to put up some flyers and tell my friends about it”.

But at some point that can mutate into “i put a 30 second unskippable ad for FrisbeeFranchise on youtube, and a giant billboard over the subway stop that implies if you don’t play frisbee you’ll never be happy”. That’s bad.

I think targeted ads should be illegal as a first step. I don’t think anyone except the worst sort of advertisers would go to bat for those. Old fashioned static ads where they put an ad for bike stuff by the bike lane in town is annoying, but somehow we’ve invented things so much worse than that.

I have a family member that’s similar - they get really mad at inconsequential changes on the computer. But they also refuse to learn anything, so they’re just mad all the time. They also treat their phone like a capricious deity- they’re afraid to touch anything.

On the other hand, I have another family member that spends a lot of his time tinkering with linux. Years ago I got fed up fixing his windows machine I slapped xubuntu on his machine, and he took to it. He’s done several updates and fresh installs since.

Both of them are retired, so it’s not like they’re hurting for free time.

I feel like that’s long been a trend- instead of trying to lift users up and educate them, let’s just give up and hide things.

It’s frustrating that rich scumbags just get to live a rich life. Where’s the justice in that? Saint Luigi deliver us from assholes like Huffman.

From the top of my head

• crawl stone soup. Classic traditional rogue like. Less fiddly than net hack, but very good.
• untitled story (an older game by the main person behind Celeste. Looks like Ms paint but is utterly charming)
• everything supergiant did. Hades, bastion, pyre
• binding of Isaac is a classic.

I want to like Into the Breach but it’s too stressful. Like, when I fuck up in FTL and the crew dies it sucks, but when I fuck up in Into the Breach and all those civilians die? Oof. They were counting on me!

True. Saying you got fired sounds like you fucked up. Maybe “dismissed” is more neutral without being totally PR Speak?

Anyone else dislike the phrase “let go” in this context? It sounds like you’re doing them a favor, or they were being held hostage, or giving them permission to do something. I’d prefer “fired” or “terminated”, even though those have their own connotation problems.

Meme’s relatable, though. This capitalist hellscape is awful.

Maybe the design is bad, then.