I wouldn’t. Have to remember that a core component of trolling is making things up, so you should not take for granted that any mental illness is actually present. Imagine the troll as a 13 year old, smirking or giggling to themselves while they type. That’s the spirit these things are done in.

Anyway, bringing mental illness into it just insults people with actual mental illness, who generally behave much more maturely.

If you want to actually engage in any sort of positive way with a troll, you need to stoop to their level and draw out more engagement from them, without making it fun. We used to call this counter-trolling. Trolls trolling trolls trolling trolls trolling trolls … ad infinitum. This eats up some of their energy without giving them anything in return, as the time they spend engaging with you is time they can’t spend trolling other people, who might feed them more.

Or save yourself the time and just block and move on. That’s definitely the most mature thing to do.

The worst thing you can do is a short engagement that results in you acting like you’ve gotten upset and then disengaging. This is feeding them more things to giggle about. If you engage, you need to be willing to stay in it for as long as it takes to deprive them of that satisfaction. This can go for multiple days. I don’t really recommend it unless you also find the bantering process amusing.

Yeah, every once in awhile I check my starred pages just to see what random things got fat fingered onto it. It’s mildly amusing.

When the Generative Agents system was evaluated for how “believably human” the agents acted, researchers found the AI versions scored higher than actual human actors.

That’s a neat finding. I feel like there’s a lot to unpack there around how our expectations are formed.

discuss these real scenarios

People are entirely too gullible.

If there is no barrier to posting fiction pretending to be factual, then large numbers of people will do it just for shits and giggles. Add dopamine inducing upvotes to the mix, and you’ve added an extra incentive on top of that for people to produce compelling fiction.

The only prudent default position is to take every single firsthand account you encounter online with a grain of salt. In truth, this should be done irl as well. “The fish was thiiiiis big!” was a meme before internet memes existed, for good reason. Firsthand accounts are naturally highly, highly problematic, with numerous subtle incentives to lie and exaggerate, and that’s before we add anonymity to the mix.

A reporter should know better.

Did a FNV run for the first time in maybe 10ish years? I had never played modded, was feeling like some fpv shooter arpg hybrid with a dose of nonsense, so figured I’d give it a replay.

Holds up remarkably well. Played it with the Viva New Vegas modpack as a base to simplify things a little bit for myself, added on a few extras for cool features, and it did significantly improve the experience. I remember crashes used to be very frequent, but even with a bunch of mods, this was actually more stable than I remember. Multiple companions mod made the difficulty completely trivial, so felt more like a power romp than an immersive game, but still fun as it sped the playthrough up enormously, with this posse I’m running around with just gunning down absolutely everything in the wasteland.

On the whole, good stuff, modded replay is recommended.

Thinking about hammering in a screw puts a very serious frown on my face…

Upvote for creativity though.

Modern war planners mostly know better than to count on everything going well.

To add to this, N Korea also has a huge conventional army, and is a very mountainous country. Lots of soldiers+mountains=very bloody to invade.

This is also why Iran is fairly safe from ground invasion. It’s like a gigantic Switzerland, which if you’re familiar with WW2 history, even Hitler left Switzerland alone despite kinda wanting to occupy the place. The cost was just too high compared to the benefits, so, y’know, may as well skip it and invade the USSR instead.

This works, but the quicker method for me was to hold the book over my head, out of my line of sight while I focused my eyes on something a little farther away (a few feet away is fine). Then you can simply move the book downward into your field of vision while refusing to let your eyes refocus. It should be blurry, because you’re still focusing past it, despite it being right in front of your face. Then just relax and let your brain do the work.

This method got by far the quickest and most reliable results for me, most pop suddenly into view in just a couple seconds.

I think this method works best because you’re using established muscle memory to focus your eyes on an object at a measurable, consistent distance, and then just not letting them change. Removes several variables from the equation.

Not exactly a showerthought, maybe better off in a TIL, mildly interesting or history sub. This community is not for real information, though, showerthought communities are for more light-hearted and silly stuff.

Even when I see Elrond in LotR, that’s actually just Agent Smith in a funny costume.

We found them.

I was just gonna say, a squash that I cut in half, hollow out and dry is pretty low-tech stuff. Could probably use a coconut if you were in a pinch… Lot of options.

Then you should hopefully already understand the multiple reasons anecdotal evidence is a poor way of trying to understand large groups of people, which is why we use statistical studies.

The people specifically in your community, engaging with welfare resources, are in no way an accurately representative sample of a larger social class in all areas. Your specific region likely has unique cultural factors at play. The subset of people engaging with welfare have unique economic factors.

That’s really nice. Looks like charcoal?

If you want to start an irl group, yeah. If you’re joining an existing group, no though. Fully online is obviously the easiest place to find groups looking for players, but you can also head down to your local gaming store. I’ve seen bulletin boards before with flyers looking for players, but can probably just ask the people working there if they know of any.

Could also check online forums for your local community, maybe even make a post asking if any gaming groups have openings for irl players.

Dungeons & Dragons is one, for the sufficiently geeky.

If that’s really true, you could easily have copy/pasted your evidence. The only reason you wouldn’t is if you can’t. Which is why you just keep saying the same things like that will somehow change something.

Really? Then prove this:

remember how you pretended the documented, verified US government sources weren’t real

Unless you just made it up out of the blue, of course. You do that a lot. You just keep chanting how right you are, but never copy anything to actually prove it. Very weak, when anyone can chant anything.

You really do like making claims you can’t back up. If I was wrong and you could prove it, it’d be a win for you. Unless you actually just can’t, though.