Apathy Tree

Name of the guy leads to name of the sister which could lead to name of the ship she’s deploying with making it clear that ship and its entire compliment will be around. Maybe that’s not the guys name, but with opsec like that there’s a solid chance it’s pretty easy to find out.

It doesn’t have to be a lot of information to you for it to be a lot of information to the intelligence wing of some other country.

It’s about the specifics, not the generalities.

Loose lips sink ships.

I’d love to see him go down because he lost some people a large sum of money. That would be -hilarious-

I have my main phone browser set to automatically request the desktop version of whatever I visit, so I haven’t run into this. Does it happen a lot?

I dunno if Roblox would even want to put on the effort

Well yeah, they clearly don’t because they haven’t done it yet, that’s why I said they should be required to do it. If your site targets kids you should be legally required to make it as safe as practically possible for said kids.

Just because some hypothetical clean record abuser could exist does not mean nothing should be done. That’s just dumb. You could make the same argument about teachers, or daycare workers, or parents. Yes it happens, that’s why lots and lots of oversight should be in place for these services. Maybe external oversight, like idk a licensing board or something. Like most other occupations that work with kids.

Teaching kids to be responsible about their online activities is good, but it can’t be the only solution. Just like teaching women to be wary of men can’t be the only solution to stop date rape. (Also, making the victims responsible for stopping their own victimization doesn’t really work anyway, particularly when it comes to kids. It just saddles them with tons of guilt if they fail to stop it, which can be used to keep the abuse going)

I don’t see why it’s such a problem to have billion-dollar sites aimed toward kids being required to hire adequate moderation if they have social services available. No age checks needed, no verifications or anything, just clear and very strict rules (because again, this is aimed at kids, if adults want to use it they can conform to the kid rules or gtfo) that get enforced across the board.

I just assume that anyone who needs to spend a lot on bothering me about their product… is either pushing a really shitty product, or offering it at a really shitty price, because so far that has been the case about 90% of the time.

If it was a good value, people would spontaneously recommend it when appropriate, with only light advertising in places where it makes sense (athletic gear advertised on sports websites, for example). Hell, it doesn’t even have to be all that good a product, just better than the alternatives. I mean look at Linux! :p

It’s so clear when you know what’s going on, but I think most people operate under the assumption that if they constantly hear about it and don’t hear bad things to the same degree, that the thing must be good. Propaganda is everywhere saying exactly that in lots of different ways, so hard to really blame them…

From 5th grade onward I didn’t spend two consecutive years in the same school district. I was perpetually the new, weird, poor, neurodivergent, easy-target kid who sucked at making friends, so they pretty much all sucked in uniquely scarring ways. The best part is my parents thought they were doing me a favor by trying to find a school that would be good with my neurospice… We didn’t actually move from the time I was 9-16. Only me.

I have no clue how to make or maintain friendships and I desperately want to move cities, or at least homes, every couple of years or I get restless. Very glad I’m well educated, though, it makes the isolation that much more profound.

It’s certainly true that the indie market is better about that stuff, but the indie market also generally isn’t considered the driver or trend-setter of the overall games market the way AAA studios are. It would be amazing if that trend shifts, don’t get me wrong, but until or unless it does, I don’t see this going well overall. It does, though, mean that people who care will still have options, and that’s good, so solid point.

I figure the digital-only consoles are a stepping stone toward this. I’d never consider one myself because if I don’t own a copy of the game that I can sell, I’m not paying for it just in principle. But a ton of people wanted the convenience over the practicality of resale. Digital-only consoles have basically killed the physical game market going forward, since it’s been basically dead on PC for ages. I see the same thing happening with the consoles themselves. I mean ps+ already has a streaming option and a substantial portion of their catalogue is only available to play that way. I’m sure Xbox has the same thing, probably with a similar portion of content locked behind streaming from their servers. I don’t even really understand why they would do this since the bandwidth to stream is far higher than to download and play offline, so I have to assume there’s something behind it like a push toward that model. Get people used to it as an option, then make it the only option.

And there’s nothing indie studios can really do about those big trends led by big studios/companies, except to quietly keep doing what they were already doing, and make a huge fuss about it when they get their 15 minutes like larian has done. Wake up as many people as you can sort of thing.

I hope you are correct, but I don’t think you are.

I don’t think game devs (or web devs or any dev really) even remember what optimization means, at this point. They sure aren’t going to start prioritizing it now, especially if major companies continue to be out of touch about what gamers actually want.

I mean we have microtransactions, we have games as service, we have single player games with online connection requirements, we have games that need logins to other services, etc etc etc. no gamers want these things, but it doesn’t matter because companies do. And companies aren’t going to care if you can’t afford to play their game on your own equipment, they’ll offer you a subscription to stream it from theirs.

I don’t think I’ve seen that, do you have a link? I’d really like to 😀

Same here, it takes a fair bit of thinking, but can be done. Some people think it’s funny/sad that it needs processing time, but I never practice the skill, because I really never need to, so who cares? It’s never been something that has made intuitive sense to me, and has always been a struggle, but there have been digital alternatives nearly my entire life which are now far more common, so why bother getting better?

I agree, frankly. I am expert qualified (former military), and inherited firearms when my mom died. I don’t have any firearms currently, as I sold those off (very very old farm weapons; we were on a farmette) nor do I ever intend to get more. All that training, and I’m still not comfortable owning something that is designed specifically to kill something.

That is to say you can hypothetically do nothing, and still end up with firearms, which is a really big problem. Zero background check on inheritance…

There’s a bullet hole in the flashing under my second floor gutters, facing the street. Doesn’t look like it came from nearby, like it’s not slanted down toward the street or anything. No idea how long it’s been there, but I found it a few years ago when cleaning the gutters. Bullet might still be lodged in there.

It’s genuinely wild to me that people just fire this shit off willy-nilly.

Depends heavily on the comedy for me. I have an entire folder of stand up specials, and I really enjoy a lot of it, but I lean heavily away from political and broad social commentary, and toward personal/anecdotal and more nuanced stuff.

I want my comedy to be silly, not offensive. If you are going to be making racial/minority stereotype jokes, they better be about your own experience as that race or minority. That’s the one and only way they even could be funny (tho most still aren’t). If you are going to punch down or across, not interested. If you hit yourself, or punch up and get a fist full of shit for doing it, it might be worth watching!

There’s a HUGE amount of really shit standup out there, though. Punching down, shock comedy (especially shit like rape jokes, sexism, etc), that sort of thing. It’s a shame really because you have to wade through it to find good stuff. There’s also an absolutely absurd amount of totally vapid brainrot comedy that could also go extinct, imo, but at least it’s not actively harming anyone, I guess.

You mean we could have seen these memes before?

Same here. Or if I have no choice, I’ll have several instances of overwhelm where I freeze and process just enough to continue, get flustered, and just skip looking at anything at all I don’t need. Tunnel vision is a major cope. And even stuff I do need, and specifically came for, often gets left behind because I just can’t.

I wish I could get groceries delivered, but there aren’t any services in my area (close by, but I’d have to get them delivered to a delivery locker site for a huge fee, and at that point I may as well just do the shopping myself). That’s the biggest instance of this for me. I genuinely hate grocery shopping.

Thanks for the info. That’s horrifying.

People can’t even drive properly with both pedals…

Wait, evs don’t have a separate brake pedal?