I feel like if Musk’s company is found guilty, it can’t just be “okay pay a little fine”. It needs to be like, “Undo the damage you did, and also pay a fine to help people deal with the damage.” And if it’s impossible for them to fix the damage they did, they can get fucked. We put people in jail for decades for smoking weed, we can put some corporate grade polluters in a cell.

will humanity ever learn to stop acting like dumb angry monkeys?

Seems unlikely.

As to your broader point about the tools themselves not being bad, the root problem remains capitalism, or “a few people have unaccountable power over many”

People should keep right except to pass, typically.

Over short distances, the difference between going 40 and 30 or even 20 are miniscule. I’ve still had people lose their shit when I wouldn’t blaze through a school zone. Just chill out bro, the fast food will be there all day.

But I live somewhere I don’t need to drive anymore, and I’m happy with it.

I feel like the current AI stuff has been net negative. It prompted layoffs and hiring freezes, but then didn’t produce quality results.

Probably any game with a story. Voiced might be better, but written has advantages, too.

Might not want games with a lot of fictional words or idiosyncrasies. Like Baldur’s Gate 3 is really good and well acted, but you’d pick up a lot of less useful fantasy words.

Just looking at what I’ve played lately.

Guild Wars 2 is a great game. Lots of content. Most of it voiced. There’s also other players you can talk to, and some might speak your native language. It has some fantasy jargon.

Grand Theft Auto 5 would probably teach you swear words and other stuff you shouldn’t casually say. Be careful with that one.

My time at Sandrock was fun. That probably would give you some vocabulary.

Adams is trash.

I hope zohran wins the election.

I haven’t! Seems similar to Falling Down

A friend and I were talking about what’s wrong with the world, and one of the things we discussed was there aren’t any consequences for minor infractions. We’re all too polite. Someone does something shitty, like this person in their car, or someone taking up 4 seats on the bus, or throwing their trash on the street, and no one does anything. No one wants to start a fight or make a scene.

Many people operate at a very basic level of moral reasoning: avoid punishment. Some people, some of the time, achieve higher levels of reasoning like “I should follow the rules” or even “I should do what’s good for society.” But many people chill out at the toddler level of “I don’t want to be punished.” So it follows that when these oversized toddlers never get punished, they think they’re doing just fine.

But concurrently, the institution we have to enforce laws and norms, the police, sucks dog shit. Racist, corrupt, no accountability, and lazy. If I see a guy littering, I’m not going to call the cops. They wouldn’t even come, for one thing, but I also don’t want to bring a bunch of armed assholes into the scene.

I don’t know what the best way forward is. My friend suggested local “guardian angel” volunteers that patrol and “Deal with” people who are shitty, but that feels like it could just turn into the police-but-worse. But I really want people who shit up the world to stop, and it feels like they don’t have enough empathy to understand anything more complex than “you took up four seats on the bus and were blasting youtube out of your phone, so we threw you out. Enjoy walking home, asshole.”

Ownership will abuse labor as much as it can. Sometimes to make more profit. Sometimes for murkier reasons. I think some management are just stupid and they’d hurt the company to follow their unfounded feelings.

Labor should organize.

Yeah it bothers me when the community for a game is like “{skill} is TRASH never use it” and when you do some digging you find it’s like 2% less damage per second. Or it doesn’t work well in NG+7. Some people are really obsessive about this stuff.

There was a post recently saying the total sum of wage theft, including conventional theft and the results of suppressed wages, totals to like $50 trillion over the past few decades.

Shit’s bad. But other than the rich, people in the US have like no class consciousness.

DND is tricky to recommend. On the one hand, as far as RPGs go it’s mega popular. On the other, it’s a very specific kind of game and rather finicky.

Many people who don’t want to play fantasy dungeon crawling tactical combat would enjoy other genres, but finding those groups can be harder. One of my friends has no real interest in fantasy, but immediately was like “LET’S DO IT” when I mentioned a game of Vampire.

The tabletop game meetup I know of (in New York) is explicitly friendly to new players. One of the hosts said their first game ever was at the meetup many years ago.

On the one hand, yes. On the other, I don’t want them to stick around doing evil for a long time. Maybe something immediately debilitating that takes a long time to finish?

One of the reasons I prefer playing on PC over other platforms is there’s usually fan made mods / cheats. Like, yeah, I could do something really tedious for four hours, or I could get a mod to skip it. This is my leisure activity, not an exam.

I try to be mindful that too much cheating can water down the experience. Like, if I was playing BG3 and just set everyone to max level from the start, I would probably have less fun, personally. But if someone just wants to do the story and have fun with exploding barrels? Not for me to judge.

(I do draw the line at multiplayer. Cheating against other people is rude as heck. )

Yeah. Often when I talk to people who say they “don’t have time” I wonder where their time is going. Often to watching TV. Sometimes podcasts. Social media is a big time suck.

But like if you have time to watch all of the office again this year, you had time to play video games.

A friend of mine realized they were just losing hours a day to Instagram. Delete that, and you have time for better hobbies. Play a game. Read a book.

Having children seems like a bigger factor. The only couple I know that has kids still has time. One spends it on DND, and other on TV and simple phone games.

Oh I remember this post. I remember being surprised to see The Courtneys on the list. They’re a fun band. Did a nice live show when I saw them, once.

Right, humans are bad about that kind of thing. I think it has to do with Dunbar’s number? The monkeysphere? It’s hard for us to model a lot of people as full people in our head, especially as they’re more removed from us.

Like you probably don’t really think about the garbage man as a fully fleshed out guy with hopes, dreams, a favorite band, a love that got away, and all that. When you have some absolutely rancid trash, you probably just throw it in the can and forget about it. But if it was your mother or best friend that was going to have to deal with it, maybe you’d be more careful. Wouldn’t want the bag to rip and spray maggots all over Mom.

That’s fine. That’s all of us.

But I think there’s degrees. Shades. Like you mentioned cell phones. Most of us accept the out of sight horrors that go with them. But, like, some people are absolute assholes to wait staff. Just treat the waiter like shit, are rude to the coffee shop people, whatever. I think most of us recognize that as bad.

Somewhere between those two points I think is “I’m going to build software to spy on people”. Personally, I think that should be ok the far side of the line. The not okay side. Why? A bit of self preservation, a bit of ethics, and a helping of “I don’t want to contribute to bad things happening to people, even ones I don’t know”.

This post is getting long. I think you’re right that it’s not as simple as “doesn’t care about other people” but I think that’s a factor.

The original or the remake? I think the original is more solid overall, but the remake has some fun stuff.

Did you know in the original, you can get more than one support effect on a spell if you have more than one copy? I only learned this like last year, despite playing the game when it was new. So you can do like

[ Ultima + MP Absorb ] [ Ultima + HP Absorb ] [ Ultima + Quad Magic ] in your armor, and when you cast ultima it’ll Absorb HP, MP, and cast four times.

Also that will freeze the game on the 2nd to last boss.

this is a question I often want to ask the pearl clutchers.

I think some of them don’t have an answer because they actually support the regime, and they’re going hard on “non violence” because they don’t want people to fight back

Some probably haven’t thought it through, and don’t have an answer.

Some probably have an answer that’s a variation of “too late”. You know, after they came for the unionists, the jews, the catholics, the mexicans, and there’s no one left to stand with them.