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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • I’m glad you liked the comic.

    I read the tweet as saying “Actually learning about history, the good and the bad, is better than avoiding it to whitewash (pun intended) slavers and spare their feelings”

    How did you read it?

    This also reminds me of a separate post I saw about how social media, and tweets especially, is a really bad format for communicating. The length constraints and incentivizing being clever don’t make for fertile ground for ideas. Most people aren’t going to read an essay, sadly.


  • I also can’t imagine someone getting offended about people mentioning the Tulsa Race Massacre or the fact that the founding fathers held slaves.

    Actual racists aren’t going to be offended by those historical facts, they just might argue that they were justifiable in some way. Which is obviously super fucked up, but it’s not like racist people are going to deny the fact that slavery happened or that black people got massacred by white people in history. They literally get off on that shit.

    Many racists definitely do get offended by those facts. It’s because they’re coming at it from an emotional place, and the historical facts make them feel bad. Instead of dealing with that, they lash out. Not all racists are intentional about their racism.

    I link this a lot, but it’s worth a read https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

    Which is why the tweet seems so strange to me. Black people getting enslaved and massacred and persecuted? That slaps? I fucking hope not.

    That wasn’t the intent of the tweet and that is a bizarre misreading of it.


  • I’m reminded of the abyssal words in Elden Ring’s expansion. There are signs that tell you “Don’t let them see you!” and “You have to hide and run!”. You find an area with some tall grass and some creepy eye-monsters. And sure enough, if they see you they come running at you. They’ll knock you over, grab you, and explode your head.

    Clearly you’re supposed to sneak by them.

    But…

    spoiler

    You can also parry their attack, and then just kill them.

    Or just fucking book it and run past them, but that’s way harder.




  • Ehh. They haven’t really abused their position. They’re popular.

    It would be something else if they were buying up competitors like Facebook and Google do. Part of how they maintain their dominance is buying out anyone that competes. Notice how Google kind of sucks nowadays? They’re not really competing on merit anymore.

    But at the same time, steam could turn around tomorrow and be like “mandatory $39.99/mo subscription fee” and it would have an outsized impact on the sector.


  • I use pycharm at work for most things. Work paid for it. It has some nice stuff i like. I’m sure other editors do all of this, too, but nothing’s been causing me enough pain to switch

    • Database integration. Little side panel shows me the tables, and I can do queries, view table structure, etc, right here
    • Find usages/declaration is pretty good. Goes into library code, too.
    • The autocomplete is pretty good. I think they have newfangled AI options now, but the traditional introspection autocomplete has been doing it for me.
    • Can use the python interpreter inside the docker container
    • The refactor functions are pretty good. Rename, move, etc
    • Naive search is pretty good. Can limit it to folders, do regex, filter by file name, etc

    It does have multiple cursors but I’ve rarely needed that.

    I use sublime for quick note taking. Mostly I like that it has syntax highlighting, and it doesn’t require me to explicitly save a tab for it to stay open




  • One of the… quirks… of humans is that often we’ll feel one thing, but say another. So someone might say “I just don’t like that she’s so rich”, but what’s actually happening under the hood is they don’t like a woman having power. They might not even consciously realize this is happening.

    We all do this to some extent. We feel things, and then reach for explanations. Preferably socially acceptable justifications. Someone might say they don’t like a neighborhood, that it feels tacky and unsafe, but you’d have to do some digging to unearth “because black people live there”.

    At the same time, there are people who know their belief is socially unacceptable, so they’ll intentionally reach to reasons the other people might accept. So you’ll get someone who hates women saying things like “i just don’t think her music is good”, or “she seems bossy”, or other lightly coded phrases.

    This is all really confounding because it’s very difficult to tell the difference between that first category, the second category, and a third category of “legitimately doesn’t like her music.” Sometimes there are signs, like they’ll say “I just don’t like that she has so much money” but then never, ever, comment on similarly rich men. (I’m not saying this is you, specifically. But if it is, maybe give it a think.)

    Also most people are, frankly, fragile little cowards that can’t accept a threat to their ego. Faced with admitting “I did a sexism”, they’d rather lash out and blame everyone else instead of giving it a think and trying to be better.

    The oatmeal did a comic on this, or at least a closely related concept: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe


  • There’s some ambiguity in English here.

    I think it’s okay to be neutral on Beyonce. I think it’s okay to prefer silence over her music.

    Some people are weirdly active in their dislike of her. That seems strange to me. Like they have an active, motivating dislike of her.

    (Unless you’re coming at it via “no ultra wealthy”, then I kind of get it, but I feel like people who got wealthy from performing music are lower on my list of problems than other ultra rich)








  • Most people I talked to have refunded the game on steam. Nobody really had fun with it, except for one person that was completely new to dragon age. However, I don’t think she finished it either.

    Meanwhile, the 3 people I know who played it all enjoyed it. Anecdotes!

    I don’t think so. The writing of Taash was so bad and uncomfortable for the most part that I genuinely didn’t know if they were trying to mock trans-people with this representation. It felt like they were just looking at a terminally online twitter user and modeled the character after that. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that taash is the worst character I’ve ever experienced in a triple A production.

    Taash’s scenes seemed okay to me. The storyline with their mother is pretty close to what a friend of mine is going through now.

    I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I kind of don’t believe what people say. I mean, I think sometimes they dislike a thing for reason A, but the words that come out are reason B. They say a character is badly written (B), but really they find the queer subject matter uncomfortable (A). This may or may not be the case, but fundamentally I do not believe the average internet video game fan has the introspection and honesty to say “A” here. There’s no way to know.

    Veilguard, on the other hand, doesn’t get better. It just stays bad and even confusing at times.

    My problem with Veilguard is the difficulty fell off a cliff and never climbed back up. Other than that it was fine.


  • I thought the game was pretty okay. The romance with the detective lady was a little disappointing. The difficulty fell off a cliff pretty early on as a mage with life drain.

    The arc with whatstheirface and their mother not accepting them seemed pretty plausible to me. I’ve got a friend going through something like that now. Seeing something like that in media is meaningful to people.

    The loyalty mission prompt was kind of meh. I can see that they wanted loyalty missions, but it felt like they struggled to fit them in.

    Overall it wasn’t quite the game I wanted, but it wasn’t bad.