A former partner’s family lived in upstate New York, North of Albany, and we’d visit occasionally. The neighbor flew a Confederate flag. Strange, for upstate New York.

Not technically, literally, a Nazi, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy was into that shit, too.

Most people are kind of stuck in their own messy heads, and it’s a feat they get out of the house fully dresssed.

I don’t expect most people to listen to music I recommend or talk about.

I do enjoy what I call “the song game” for sharing music. It’s kind of a thing that can just happen but I formalized it a little. One person plays a song. Then the other person plays a song with some link to the first one. So if you play the velvet underground’s “Sunday Morning” I can respond with Nirvana’s “lithium” because it has the line “Sunday morning is every day for all I care”.

One of the reasons I like this is it forces the other person to engage with your song, at least a little, because they have to listen closely enough to find something to link to. The default mode, without this structure, is just to wait for their shit to finish so you can play your cool thing. That kind of sucks.

A year or so ago I was cutting through the park after dark and I heard strange flutes and music coming from deeper inside. Was probably just buskers or whatever, but I wonder if it was the fay and I should’ve gone to check it out.

The boss is slightly harder than that, but it’s not like the sekiro tutorial where you’re supposed to lose. It has a giant slow attack where he lights up, and you have to move out of the way. It’s simple if you’re familiar with this kind of game. Musk just is shit.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a serious discussion about how a game didn’t do well because of how sexually appealing the characters in it are? Not like you’re describing. What sort of weird sludge people are you hanging out with?

At one of my old jobs, we had a suite of browser tests that would run on PR. It’d stand up the application, open headless chrome, and click through stuff. This was the final end-to-end test suite to make sure that yes, you can still log in and everything plays nicely together.

Developers were constantly pinging slack about “why is this test broken??”. Most of the time, the error message would be like “Never found an element matching css selector #whatever” or “Element with css selector #loading-spinner never went away”. There’d be screenshots and logs, and usually when you’d look you’d see like the loading spinner was stuck, and the client had gotten a 400 back from the server because someone broke something.

We put a giant red box on the CI/CD page explaining what to do. Where to read the traces, reminding them there’s a screenshot, etc. Still got questions.

I put a giant ascii cat in the test output, right before the error trace, with instructions in a word bubble. People would ping me, “why is this test broken?”. I’d say “What did the cat say?” They’d say “What cat?” And I’d know they hadn’t even looked at the error message.

There’s a kind of learned helplessness with some developers and tests. It’s weird.

Try not to think too hard about how most of the evidence points to shorter work weeks being better on pretty much every metric.

Or that most of the “return to office” mandates are counter productive cruelty.

I think I saw an article that claimed most office workers in the UK do like 3 hours of work a day, and the rest is puttering and looking busy.

Our system is stupid and it’s stuck stupid because of people. It’s not physics. It’s not biology. Like there’s not much you can do to fix like humans need to eat and sleep, but the workday is just made up.

There some “main quest” stuff too, but you can mostly ignore it.

I have 200 hours in the game. I just started a new save this week where I’m trying to stay on topic. It’s been pretty okay so far!

Oh I forgot: there are also Expeditions. Those are much more guided modes of play, but time limited.

The resource mining is faster than Minecraft I think. And once you get going with credits you can just buy a lot of stuff.

I like the game but it’s not terribly deep or directed. Like a sandbox, you have to bring some of your own initiative into it.

You can build a big base. The part placing stuff is very good (much better than fallout4). But you don’t really need to. It’s fun if you enjoy it.

Same with running a freighter. You can customize the layout as you want. But there’s not much of an extrinsic reward. Doing it is its own fun, if you like it.

You can fly around and scout new planets, but most of them don’t change much. Different visuals, but basically the same. If you enjoy that, and scanning all the creatures and minerals and plants, it’s fun.

You can fight sentinels, and that’s probably the most traditional game like part. Third person shooter, maybe ten different enemy types, they drop upgrade components. That’s a very standard game loop, but it’s also only like a couple hours of content.

You can collect different space ships, but even the most basic C-grade can do all the content. It’s fun if you want to have a cool ship, but that’s it.

You can pretty quickly amass millions of credits and nanites, but there’s not that much to do with them.

Do you see the trend? It’s all fun if you get intrinsic joy, but it’s not like, say, dark souls where there’s a big challenge to overcome.

It’s kind of annoying and distracting. It makes me think they have some emotional damage (don’t we all?) and then I start wondering what else is going to break under stress.

A sincere apology and owning fault is a power move. Apologizing four times because the chair made a weird sound when you adjusted it makes you look sad and impotent.

I’ve long said that if these gamer duds put their energy into fighting capitalism we’d be better off.

As more people are laid off, “I gotta go to work” becomes less compelling.

Meanwhile, the US is trying to go to 60 hour workweeks and 6-day workweeks.

Labor needs to organize, and the rich need to be broken.

I enjoyed the simplicity of old video game RPGs where the price of the item directly scaled with the value of the item. Armor for 1000gp was just straight out better than the one for 300gp.

If we were all in the room, we could strangle Sam Altman or whatever other capitalist dog was calling the shots.

I used to use RPG.net a lot. They have pretty strict moderation, which keeps the place from turning into some kinds of shit holes. But you also can’t tell someone they’re a fool, or all Republicans are traitors. Takes some getting used to, but is probably worth it.

No. Your reading of it is unusual, in most contexts. It almost always means “agreement, and I have nothing of substance to add”.

It can be rude if the thing you’ve said should warrant a substantial response. Like if you wrote “my brother just died in a car wreck”, a thumbs up (or probably any emoji) would be an inappropriate response. Heavier stuff warrants whole words.

But if it’s like “Can you get cat food at the store? The kind we always get” then a thumbs up is an acceptable shorthand for "yes, I understand and commit to this request "

Maybe was thinking of https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/ ?

true, though sometimes i find the more verbose style easier to read, and more maintainable (eg: you want to do something else in the block, you can just add a line instead of changing your ternary / etc). Small things

Depends on how it’s set up. If the setting is going into the env it’s a string, so I’d expect some sort of

if os.getenv("this_variable", "false").lower() == "true":   # or maybe "in true, yes, on, 1" if you want to be weird like yaml
  this_variable = True
else:
  this_variable = False

Except maybe a little more elegant and not typed on my phone.

But if the instructions are telling the user to edit the settings directly, like where I wrote this_variable=True, they’d need to case it correctly there.