There was a rally to support Lander this afternoon. Pretty good turnout for a sudden gathering on a Tuesday.

He gave a short talk after he was released.

He should be removed from office at the very least.

Some kinds of people (often conservatives) don’t use words to convey consistent meaning. They use words for the effect it has on the audience. It’s emotions.

They see something bad, they reach into their bag of bad-thing-words, and pull out “Marxist”. That’s it.

They are in a fundamental sense stupid.

Most self described Christians don’t really follow their religion very well.

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.

NYC had good turnout despite the rain.

Classic RPG. My half orc “beat with an ugly stick” master of time magick and backstab lives on fondly in my memory.

Also my extremely pretty elf, also a master of time magick.

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.

You know how scam emails intentionally include mistakes because they want to filter out smart people? Same idea.

Reasonably smart people will see this and go “this is garbage”. The idiots will go deeper, and become loyal gop voters.

Did anything even happen to the cop that shot that journalist? Seems like everyone just accepted this instead of bringing charges or vigilanteism

I think this is one of those pearl clutching communities. Borderline collaboration, but it’s their power to enforce their rules.

Single use plastic should he illegal for most things. Yes, it might be inconvenient to have to carry your own thermos or whatever, but filling the ocean with plastic is worse than inconvenient

He was a pretty smart guy, so I’m pretty sure he understood the ramifications. This isn’t like a plumber working in a building that happens to house an evil company. This was directly working as a high ranking software developer at a shitty software company.

I’ve thought about that. But that seems like a terrible strategy, because it lets the Republicans do anything. The Republicans do a bad thing, or accuse you of doing a bad thing, and now you’re incapable of responding to it?

Palantir is pretty awful. I knew a guy who took a job there, a bunch of years ago. When he said where he was going, I asked “But what if they work on something really shitty? Like spying on people?”. He was like, “Meh”, with a big shrug.

He was friendly and kind to the people around him, but I guess he just didn’t care about anyone he didn’t know personally right now.