It’s like…the solution is right in front of their noses. Just treat people better/not like robots

I’ve been saying this in response to a lot of things lately, but… people are emotional. It’s an emotional problem. Management feels a way, mostly contempt, and any studies about how treating people better would be cost-effective don’t matter. Studies show that a 4-day workweek is good for productivity and profits? Nope, feels wrong, can’t be true.

Essentially, people are stupid and I don’t know how to fix it. Can’t just bop a CEO on the nose with a newspaper when he’s being bad, unfortunately.

Mergers and acquisitions should be a lot harder than they are. Maybe even prohibited in nearly all cases.

What constitutes a hobby?

I was encouraged from a young age to read books. I still do. I enjoy it. Are books a hobby?

My parents are both music fans. Had a big music collection, went to a lot of concerts. I’m the same. I enjoy it.

It’s a short leap from books (eg: lotr) and some music (eg: some metal, some prog rock) to DND and similar games. It looked cool so I got into it.

Bikes are pretty ecologically friendly and the exercise is good. I’ve only dipped my toes into biking but it wouldn’t be a big leap to buy my own bike, find s meetup, or whatever.

A friend of mine learned about weaving… somewhere. I don’t know where actually. But they said "that looks cool’ and looked into it. Now they weave and knit and such. Read about it online, watched some videos, signed up for a class.

A guy I know saw some photos online and went “that’s cool. I could do that” and I think took a beginner class in it. Bought an entry level camera and just has fun taking pictures of stuff.

The common thread here is it’s all stuff people enjoy.

Maybe delete more of your social media. That stuff is bad for you. A friend of mine started tracking how much time they spent on it, and realized it was like 4 hours a day doing nothing on Instagram. It’s mostly trash. You don’t need it.

Some guys at work are getting into chess. Not sure where it started but now they’re playing and reading about strategy and stuff.

Don’t beat yourself up over being bad at things.

Those people aren’t a good match for you (or maybe anyone).

My work uses python and it hasn’t been bad for new code that has tests and types. Old code we inherited from contractors and “yolo startup” types is less good, but we’ve generally be improving that as we touch it.

Some people probably know them in real life. Like, you might have a friend who’s like “Yeah this [slur] wouldn’t update her mod so i posted [hateful thing] on her insta”. You could talk to them. People listen to their in-group more than randoms online.

But then again, the worst sort of people probably mostly have the worst sort of friends, and reinforce their bad behavior.

My favorite is “I knew a poly couple and they broke up (but nevermind all the monogamous people who broke up)”

Monogamy vs non-monogamy is another axis of this, where people often find their unexamined assumptions challenged.

Video Games are a broad medium, akin to reading. Asking “should I get into books?” would be similarly difficult to answer.

Also, be mindful of sturgeon’s law. 90% of everything is crap. For every “Taylor Swift” that was widely popular and successful, there’s 9 meh bands no one remembers.

All of that said, it’s a wide and deep medium with a lot of experiences.

If you like card games, there’re related genres. Deck builders are popular. Slay the Spire is popular. Cobalt Core is fun and not as hard. Monster Train is pretty good.

Those are all also “rogue lites”, so you could make the leap from there to something like FTL.

Lots of options.

Probably don’t spend a lot of money up front. Stuff goes on sale on Steam pretty often.

Probably avoid “gacha” games that are free to play or have “loot box” stuff. Those tend to be exploitive and bad.

I get the impression that some people have such decision fatigue, asking them to do something seemingly trivial is akin to asking someone without limbs to pick up a spoon.

People’s brains don’t work good.

Most people don’t know much, and don’t care that they don’t know much. Half of US adults can’t read at a 6th grade level. They don’t care about and probably do not understand complex topics.

That’s it. They just want cat gifs, and that’s the end of the thought.

I knew someone who was smart and successful and politically aware. She didn’t care about any of this. She was tired from work and just wanted the familiar ease or twitter. Trying to figure out which server to sign up for and finding content was too much work.

A lot of people have executive dysfunction. Making a choice is hard.

“would you rather have nothing to eat, or poison?”

If you eat nothing, maybe you can figure out a better solution with your remaining time. If you eat poison, you’re probably going to be too sick (or dead) to improve things.

Trump is poison.

Also Biden did improve some things, so it’s less “nothing” and more “some crackers”. Sure, a full meal would be better.

t’s not stupidity, it was a clear option between something the American people know does not work, and something that might work.

There is no reasonable expectation that Trump would “work” for anyone outside of some very wealthy and grifters. So, yes, voting for Trump is stupid.

Accelerationists can fuck off.

Satire is dead. Unfortunately, this guy somehow survives despite his best efforts to get sick.

Never used Facebook much. Nor Myspace before it. Seemed like it had some obvious pitfalls that everyone else was ignoring.

Used Twitter for a little while, but it was just making me mad. Then horrible guy bought it, so I deleted the already abandoned account.

Instagram also seemed like a source of feeling bad, so I never used it much.

I left reddit recently. It had some good content but the ownership sucks. With general Internet search getting bad, losing reddit sucks. Like, I searched yesterday for how to disable a setting in some app, and landed on some AI slop website that told me to write a letter to my local news station.

So this is all that’s left for me. It’s frustrating that most people don’t give a shit and will just move on to the next private platform. I had a friend who was generally smart and successful, but she just didn’t give a shit about this kind of thing. She wanted her easy entertainment, so she was on all the major platforms. Mastodon “didn’t have good content” so she didn’t use it.

I believed it was because right wing groups are more authoritarian, and thus more likely to simply fall in behind the leader. Like all the Republicans that said bad things about trump, but when it came to votes they went along with him. Personal beliefs are less important than group cohesion.

I believed left wing people are more likely to value things like truth, accuracy, fairness, over group cohesion. Thus when there’s a disagreement or problematic leader, the group fractures instead of the majority going along with whoever’s perceived to be the leader. Personal values are primary.

Also I guess the surface area for problems in left wing spaces is bigger. If a right wing guy makes a racist joke, the right wing probably won’t care. Nor if they do something sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or whatever. They just have to swim with the current of all that bad stuff conservatives believe/accept. But a left wing person, who is just as steeped in the shitty dominant culture, will be held to a standard if they fuck up. They have to go against the current of the dominant culture. And if they fuck up and some internalized racism bubbles up, that’s a whole problem in a way right wing folks don’t have. They don’t have internalized communism or feminism to grapple with.

I don’t know if this is actually true, though.

Sorry for the kind of stream of consciousness post, heh. Think I’m mostly following what you’re saying

One of the reasons I enjoy games with metagame currencies like Fate points or Willpower. I just don’t find it fun or interesting to lose due to bad dice most of the time. Especially if the bad dice just delay things instead of resolving them, like one time a D&D fight against some ghouls took like 45 minutes because no one rolled well. No tension or stakes. Just dice for an extra ten rounds. Absolutely flubbing a roll can be interesting, but I like when there’s more choice involved.

“I rolled a 0 to grab the thief? No, that’s stupid. I’m a Royal Bodyguard I’m used to acting fast. I spend a fate point and bump that up”

More generally “succeed at a cost” is just missing from D&D as a concept.

Yeah I don’t think anything will change until disruptive protests happen. Like, republicans resigning from office because they’re afraid.

Unfortunately, the far-right has almost all the money and guns, and a lot of bootlickers. And no one wants to throw their life away by shooting some red hats senators or billionaires.

It’s federated with my lemmy instance. I neither seek it out nor avoid it.

I’m waiting for it to go on sale/get an ultimate edition*, but my understanding is a lot of turds don’t like it for usual turd reasons.

It’s probably for the better there’s no reverse review bombing that happens. But it’s the usual thing: hateful people are focused and dedicated, everyone else is not so much.

*Though I did read no dlc/expansions are planned