I assumed they meant in the “build vs maintain” sense. Builders add to the conversation by telling their own stories. Maintainers instead focus more on “wow what was that like for you?”

https://haileymagee.substack.com/p/these-three-communication-differences

But that’s a guess.

Mostly specific to online dating, but: People who dead end a conversation. Like, their profile says they love the author NK Jemisen. I write, “oh, I love her books! Did you read The City We Became? It’s a total love letter to the city”.

They response with, “no”.

Friend, that’s not an effective way to play this game.

If you are not interested in dating, just unmatch. Maybe you swiped by accident or when drunk. I don’t care. I’m not going to remember.

If you are interested in dating, you should put some effort in. If you don’t throw the ball back, you look like you’re either uninterested or incapable. I don’t want to date someone who’s not interested, nor someone who can’t carry a conversation.

You might be thinking, “Well they asked a yes/no question and I answered as such”. Technically true, but not productive. What do you expect them to do? Ask another first-message-tier question? This isn’t supposed to be a one sided interview like you’re applying for a job. You’re supposed to be a full participant. Ask a question (preferably related to the topic). Or, if you’re not interested anymore, unmatch.

You might also be thinking, “well I don’t have time for a whole conversation right now”. Ok. Do you ever have time? If not, delete the app because you don’t have time to date. If you do, answer when you have time. These things are asynchronous. If you’re afraid you’re going to forget, I don’t know man write yourself a note. That’s a life management problem outside the scope of dating advice.

This whole thing peeves me because it feels like people want “banter” and witty conversation, but they don’t want to do their half of it. They want to be passively entertained, but this isn’t some podcast you can listen to when dozing. These are (hopefully) real people looking for connection.

My therapist told me that people have different styles of communication and that’s okay. Maybe some people would be happy where their conversations are no deeper than “Did you hear the new slothrust album?” “No”. Doesn’t seem like an effective way to get to know someone to me.

Mint is fine. I went with pop!_os because at the time mint didn’t play well with my hardware.

Make sure you test things from the install live disk before you commit. Internet access, displays, audio should all work.

Saint Luigi preserve us.

Yeah I just… Don’t need that much stuff. Most of my money goes to food and shelter.

I’m sure there are companies that are at least more good than bad. Teachers pay teachers. Meetup. Bandcamp before they sold. That’s all I have off the top of my head. But even so capitalism invites cruelty, and the best intentions can easily wither under the pressure to make more money.

I work for a very large company involved in medicine. They make machines to do like blood work. That’s fine. People need that. But they treat many of their workers like trash. I don’t get paid for holidays and get the legal minimum sick leave per year. Their mission isn’t especially evil , but their behavior sucks.

I think a good step would be if people could admit the companies they work for are making the world worse. I’ve met some people who work for Google who do some backflips about how no the company is good and definitely they’re good people and it’s not the $300k salary talking.

Difficulty settings are, first and foremost, accessibility settings.

I’m not opposed to more options but I think this tactic is distracting and generates more pushback than it wins converts.

Are games art? I’d say so, usually. Some are more like toys than art, but many have creative expression

If they are are, must all art be accessible to all people? Well, what does accessible mean exactly? To understand it completely? Then I’d say trivially no, because there are many books that are incomprehensible to many people. No one is going to say “House of Leaves” is inaccessible and the author did a gatekeeping by writing it as such. No one is going to say Finnegans Wake is ableist because it’s hard to understand.

Must all aspects of all art be completable by all people? I’d also say trivially no. You might have a segment in French that doesn’t translate well. You can dub it or subtitle it, but the original experience will remain inaccessible unless the audience spends years mastering French.

I bring that up because some games will have within the game, not a metagame menu setting, easier or harder routes. For example, Elden Ring with a big shield and spirit ashes is significantly easier than a naked parry build. Is the expectation that everyone should be able to finish in both styles? If there’s a hard mode, must everyone be able to finish it?

Should everyone be able to trivially 100% every game?

Personally I think the floor is everyone should be able to interface with the game. Change inputs. Add subtitles.

I don’t really think “I can’t party this spear guy” is an accessibility problem the same way “I’m color blind and can’t read the text” is.

But again, I don’t care if someone wants a god-mode with auto-parry. It just feels like it’s bundling some unrelated ideas together. You’re not necessarily disabled if you’re bad at parrying in dark souls.

It’s debt in the sense of obligation, not literal finance. If we get more volume, we’re going to be obligated to change this so it does something smarter than dumping output to a csv on disk. For now it’s fine, even if it’s annoying to scp and parse the files every time you want to see something.

Buying power is down. If they want me to spend more, capital has to pay me more.

The other day I accidentally looked at YouTube without adblock, without history off, and it was a nightmare. Just AI slop and rage bait. Absolute trash.

I pretty much only use YouTube for music and very specific clips. It’s a bad place.

[mode="snob] read more books. [/mode]

This is very heteronormative and gender binaried. Queer people exist and date.

That said, anecdotally, from the handful of women I’ve talked about this with: many don’t like making first moves on these apps.

Using dating apps is a skill, and if you haven’t been practicing sending messages you’re going to be bad at it. The vast majority of first messages I got from women were “hey”. Trash tier. Probably because they just haven’t done it very often.

Any time I realize the optimal path is really boring or tedious.

Like, imagine you could sell junk to vendors for money, but for some reason you get more money if you sell them one at a time. Spending five minutes splitting inventory stacks sucks, but it’s 30% more gold and that’s the difference between the cool sword or the basic sword.

A made up example, but hopefully gets the point across.

Related: long travel times with nothing interesting or challenging happening. I remember playing some shitty MMO and you had to like run through a building, go up an elevator, and down a long hallway every time you wanted to learn skills. Just five minutes of nothing. Gotta juice those playtime stats, I guess.

It’s different if there’s stuff to do en route. Monsters to fight or whatever. But when it’s just jogging? Very disappointing.

The problem is most people are lazy and don’t understand anything. They just use the app they know, even if it sucks.

If you got it to be popular it could work , but I don’t see how you could.

I feel like most people don’t buy software anymore. Everything runs in the browser.

Like, nerds and enthusiasts and game playing people sure. But most people? Nah. It’s all Instagram, Facebook, tiktok, Reddit, YouTube. Maybe like roll20 if they’re a dnd nerd. Most people aren’t doing Photoshop or blender.

Managers are often idiots in over their heads. AI is really aggravating that problem.

“I’m a Grok guy,” said Vance. “I think it’s the best. It’s also the least woke!”

What a fucking idiot. Really wants everyone to go back to sleep

I did have a coworker that was both a picky eater and didn’t cook. She’d order seamless (GrubHub) for most meals. That’s got to be like… $30/meal, two meals a day so $60, seven days a week, ~$400/week? My monthly food budget is like $200. Plus she’d go out drinking. Guess that adds up. That’s like $100k over five years.

She also had an expensive gym membership she didn’t use and was too shy to cancel.

Some of my peers should be rich enough to retire, but fell victim to lifestyle inflation. Sure they’re making $250k/year, but they moved into a $5k/mo apartment, go on expensive vacations, and just do whatever in their day to day. I don’t know where their money goes. Maybe they are secretly investing.

Meanwhile I live like a goblin on less

Good. The more people switch, the more support there will be.