The most important thing for people, and by people I mean all of us at times, is in-group belonging. None of us are immune to that. We look to our peers for cues on how to behave and what to believe.

Some people consider like scientists and experts in-group, and trust them. Some don’t.

This need for in-group cohesion is more important than facts and figures. It’s more important than the text of some book.

So when all your friends and family are saying that Christianity means one thing, it’s unlikely you’re going to disagree.

Oblivion? One of the best RPGs ever made? This is a joke, right? It’s not even the best Bethesda game.

edit: fixing autocorrect mistakes

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.

CEO seems like an idiot and/or coward.

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.

I was hoping you would explain what you meant by “There’s not a reason to fight most enemies in most video games to be honest”. I don’t think that’s a true statement. I think most games do give reasons to fight enemies.

I haven’t played enough BotW to really weigh in on it, specifically.

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. )

There’s not a reason to fight most enemies in most video games to be honest.

Hmmmm… that’s a thinker.

In the older zeldas, you didn’t especially need to fight stuff on the overworld. I’d usually just run by, or kill the ones that were in my way.

In most FromSoft games, you can run past enemies but that can quickly spiral out of control. Killing them gives you time to explore safely, on top of the XP rewarded.

In shooters like Doom, you could probably run past most enemies, but they’ll keep attacking. Clearing them makes you safer.

Monster hunter it’s the whole point of the game.

What games are you thinking of where fighting is pointless? I don’t think it’s “most” games.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve already posted this a few times, but Ed Zitron wrote a long article about what he calls “Business Idiots”. Basically, people in decision making positions who are out of touch with their users and their products. They make bad decisions, and that’s a big factor in why everything kind of sucks now.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/ (it’s long)

I think a lot of us have this illusion that higher ranking people are smarter, more visionary, or whatever. But I think no. I think a lot of people are just kind of stupid, surrounded by other stupid people, cushioned from real, personal, consequences. On top of that, for many enterprises, the incentives don’t line up with the users. At least wikipedia isn’t profit driven, but you can probably think of some things you’ve used that got more annoying with updates. Like google putting more ads up top, or any website that does a redesign that yields more ad space, worse navigation.

I’m so tired of “AI”. I’m tired of people who don’t understand it expecting it to be magical and error free. I’m tired of grifters trying to sell it like snake oil. I’m tired of capitalist assholes drooling over the idea of firing all that pesky labor and replacing them with machines. (You can be twice as productive with AI! But you will neither get paid twice as much nor work half as many hours. I’ll keep all the gains.). I’m tired of the industrial scale theft that apologists want to give a pass to while individuals who torrent can still get in trouble, and libraries are chronically under funded.

It’s just all bad, and I’m so tired of feeling like so many people are just not getting it.

I hope wikipedia never adopts this stupid AI Summary project.

Just remember that good relationships never end in breakups.

lol what. I’ve had several relationships that were good, and then we broke up. We’re still friends, but it became apparent that we were no longer good for each other as partners. People grow and change. That doesn’t invalidate the time we spent together.

I think I remember some doge goon asking online about using an LLM to parse JSON. Many people don’t understand things.

You have a lot of life ahead of you. The feelings will fade. Don’t wallow. You’ll be fine.

When I was a youth I had a lot of big feelings about relationships and crushes and friends. The feelings were real. They certainly took up a lot of space in my head, but they weren’t really proportionate to what was happening. Everything felt big because it was new to me. I barely talk to anyone from that time in my life anymore. I live in a new city with new friends.

You’ll be fine.