Nope! My company is private after getting bought last year and they are definitely fucking it up with “ai all the things” and “ai makes us more human” and strip mining out our actual work culture and replacing it with an even more soulless grind

my company’s ceo went from seemingly a down to earth founder of the company who supported queer rights to an exploitatively rich board director who describes his employees as “loyal human capital”

it’s about control and power and wealth and it sucks how good some of them are at seeming ok before they get it

it is simultaneously overrated yet exactly deserving of all the praise it gets

the way it encourages cooperation with a stranger is staggeringly rare in games and i wish there were more things like it

i have complicated feelings. on one hand: yes, people deserve to be able to, but also:

how much is this just going to be used by the state to coerce people into killing themselves?

there are so many underlying factors that go into treating mental health beyond just “therapy and medication”, and from what my canadian friends tell me, mental healthcare is about as bad or worse in canada as it is in the usa. it’s not properly covered by standard healthcare from what i have learned, so if you are too poor to get treatment, this will probably be used to just. expunge poor people from existence.

my mom would tell me this a lot and did this weekend but this is the first time ive felt like i will not pass properly unscathed any more. but it will pass.

i will never not simp for shiv silent. easily my favorite way to play. wonderful game.

i like to play what I call A20EZ cuz I’m not the best at the game: play A20 on custom, with sealed draft, vintage and the ending modifiers. it’s very fun to just start with a strong deck and get tons of relics!

it also feels like it teaches me what is actually strong in terms of raw card synergy, which has been very nice for learning how to get better at the game without suffering through being bad at the game as much.

with how hard tech has rallied against remote work this is 100% aimed at justifying return to office

Yeah, here to say, as bad as my childhood bullying was, the adults are worse.

They’re the ones who, in the background, were creating the circumstances for this by talking shit about you or instilling within their kids a bloodthirsty competitiveness that only lets them see others as targets.

And in the foreground, letting the kids who instigate the bullying, especially when it gets physical, get away as the victims - by equally enforcing punishment & loudly saying that you’re both at fault, or just punishing the kid being bullied only for fighting back.

In K-12 in the US? Yeah. I’ve been bullied past that too, but K-12 was the worst of it.

• I had to leave my kindergarten class due to someone who was acting out. We became good friends in school bc we ended up being into the same nerdy things, but he had bullied me a ton until about 6th grade when it became just joking instead of bullying. He credibly threatened to kill his wife a few couple years ago, whom we both grew up with. I’m still processing this in therapy.
• I remember once one of the people who hated my guts growing up, I accidentally walked into him because our class was crowding and I mistook how much space I had. He pushed me to the ground and said, “stay away from me, faggot”. I’ve brought this up in therapy more than once.
• Everyone in my class picked up I was gay before I did. I had to fight it a lot, because when I wasn’t fighting against the bullying from it, it was worse. I even went as far as starting a rumor that the guy I was sleeping with was sexually assaulting me, because he was a giant piece of shit to me & bullied me a lot too and it was socially convenient. He wasn’t really affected because he’s mostly straight and was just using me to get his dick sucked, while I thought I had romantic feelings for him (and didn’t realize they were that). I’m still processing this in therapy.
• At some point someone started a rumor that I was a pedophile in 10th grade. Being a minor myself, I didn’t understand this, but I think it was a rumor from my work with middle schoolers cub scout group. I haven’t discussed this in therapy.
• In college, I had my ability to trust people on the basis of religion shattered in a Bible study. I got brought into a group that I thought was good, but as I started developing relationships, we had a session where the leader of the group singled me out during a “share your favorite passages” section and just completely railed into me, saying things that invalidated my choice and trying to put me in my place by arguing against my interpretation of its meaning. I’m agnostic now, even though I have a great relationship with my childhood church. I’m still processing this in therapy, it comes up quite often.

This is all just top of my mind, and there’s a lot more, but hopefully it gets across - being bullied is something that can affect you for your whole life. I’m in my mid 30s now. I’ve been treated for depression, and gone in and out of therapy since I was 20. It’s pretty easy to say being bullied fucked me up a lot.

At least I’m better than I was before starting therapy. That’s all I can really say.

Played League since open beta… got into HotS and never looked back until it crashed and burned. Don’t think I could get into a moba again.

…unless HotS makes a comeback… i do miss my baby abathur…

that’s the one i settled on!

work has sucked ASS this week, in a capitalists-are-looting sense, but i finally made some new music again and i really like how it sounds so im riding that high

I’ll check em out, thanks

If you like old adventure games, ps_garak on twitch often streams with his friends

two minutes, wow

i am so sorry you had to see that kind of thing.

i knew a director of eng from axon for a while. he tried to exploit my husband’s stalled career to get him to work on racial profiling ai. last i heard he got divorced (due to his abuse), tried to hide money from her, and ran away to vietnam to set up an office. used to brag being related to famous mafia people. weird company, weird leaders.

I got sick of the constant quick travel back to merchants in BG3 and decided to just install the mod that multiplies my encumbrance by 9000x. the item management in that game is a giant pain and the gold economy plus encumbrance is an artificial barrier to getting them from merchants that simply adds playtime for no actual benefit.

Realistically speaking, if you want a useful encumbrance system, you should be thinking: what is the goal of an encumbrance system in the context of this game?

In BG3, it serves a few purposes:

1. physical consequences. reduced movement speed, damage from jumping, etc are all part of D&D rules, which is useful when you’re in a kind of situation where, say, you need to get a giant boulder across a huge gap and put it on top of a button that opens the gate while in combat. but outside the context of combat, doing this is meaningless, as the player can simply overcome this problem with time, which is annoying more than fun.
2. limit access to the number of options a character has when confronting an encounter. it’s not feasible to carry 99 potions of greater healing on you, and encumbrance is a general strategy that prevents this from being as effective. at the end of the day it does not solve this problem
3. express limitations on what a character can do with their environment. encumbrance affects how much else you can carry, such as throwing a big rock at an enemy to do a lot of damage. this is irrelevant in the context of inventory vs. how much you can affect your environment; it can easily exist independently of an encumbrance system.

I don’t like encumbrance in games in general. It makes games more fiddly, and forces the player to engage the system with no real addition to the fun of it. Limited inventory slots are similarly frustrating in games to the scale of Baldur’s Gate. BG2 solved both of these problems by giving the player a billion bags of holding, which also had the added benefit of making inventory organization easier in a system that was largely left the same from its predecessor since it probably was built on the same codebase. BG3 had no such codebase restriction, and its type sort system sucks (the search bar is a lifesaver). Encumbrance very much feels like a “This is how it works RAW in 5e, so we’re going to do it this way” decision, which is funny because in plenty of other situations the devs decided to stray away from RAW to make the game a lot more approachable.

I don’t know if the goal of encumbrance is to prevent players from taking everything as much as possible or not - but if it is, it utterly fails at that goal

It’s all good

So if you’re worried about that, shouldn’t you rather just not post that stuff to the public?

To me this feels like the same logic as “If you have nothing to hide, why do you care?”

I mean, you’re right, people shouldn’t post stuff publicly if they truly don’t want it to be indexed, but that doesn’t mean that whatever we want to say or do publicly can’t be used against us in some way even if we think that what we say and do is ok. Like existing while being queer online, for instance

If someone wants the ability to control how their data is used, it should be their right.

Who gets to survey the data? There are companies and governments who stand to profit of our existence being thrown into their machines.

There is a violence in that I still haven’t figured out how to describe, but people lose their lives over this stuff. That should be enough to warrant such a right