Arcanum is good shit. I played that so many times when it came out.

• straight damage dealing mage
• beat with an ugly stick orc fighter
• gun jerk
• charismatic elf girl who got everyone else to fight for her, talked the final boss down.

I think maxing out time magic and backstab might have been the wackiest. Got like 90 action points and everyone else got 4. Stab stab stab stab.

Python.

• It’s pretty easy to get going.
• the debugger is very good. Being able to put a breakpoint and interactively fuss with it is so much better than print statements and crying
• you can (and should) use type annotations, but they are optional
• it’s on most machines already, but you don’t want to fuck with the system install of it. On Linux and Mac you can use pyenv or similar if the system came with a version you can’t use. (Don’t teach anyone python 2.)
• the standard library is very good.

You could also do JavaScript, as that’ll work on any modern browser. However, JavaScript is a deeply cursed language. It’s really bad at like every level.

I don’t recommend it unless your top priority is “it is definitely available everywhere” and “these are future web developers”.

It can get pretty crowded in some places at some times. Major transit hubs like Penn station, herald square, times square, all get pretty dense.

I’ve been working from home so I don’t need to go to the busier parts at often.

Do I just get one shot or can I keep trying until I get it right?

Basically anything that reduces Republican power in the US is probably a win overall.

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.

People don’t really like change.

Think about free public libraries. They’re fairly popular, and not controversial outside of fringe libertarian types and assholes. People like that you can borrow books and other media for free. Usually there’s a bit of a backlash if there’s a movement to shut down libraries or limit their services.

Imagine if free public libraries didn’t exist, and someone tried to invent them today. People would be having screaming fits about communism. It’s stealing from the authors. it’s ruining publishing. We don’t need tax dollars for this when we have amazon. Blah blah blah.

It’s the same with other things we could socialize. health care is a privatized nightmare. If we somehow got a public option in, eventually people would start reflexively defending it.

So what I’m saying is many people don’t really have a set of internally consistent beliefs. They just don’t like change.

I’ve heard similar numbers tossed around. I’m not sure how consistently people need to be showing up for change to happen. It seems a lot of what we’re seeing now is brief protests, and then back to business as usual (pun intended)

I’m not friends with some old coworkers in large part because they just don’t go to protests or do anything. They’re comfortable just staying home and playing video games. Extremely basic bros.

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.

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.

This should be a climate crime and the management responsible forced to pick up trash or some other appropriate punishment

It’s hard to break into the mainstream when the mainstream is increasingly owned by rich assholes. They have a lot of influence over culture. Not total control , but enough that many people who might have found punk instead brain rot through their day in Spotify or tiktok or whatever.

I’ve enjoyed bandcamp’s writeups. They seem to be written by real people.

I also sometimes peruse the “who else bought my favorite album this month?” listing. Find some gems and wild cards there.

Other people have good answers already. Chiefly to ask questions and talk through your reasoning.

But also I’ve noticed the difficulty of interview questions varies wildly. Some places would give dynamic programming problems I’m terrible at. Others would give trivial "find the largest number in this array of integers, in python. Don’t worry about efficiency. " problems.

I just assume big businesses are run by idiots.

If Microsoft had their shit together, they could’ve made something like Steam. That’s just printing money.

I went back to windows for a few months on the newer desktop. I installed mint and discovered it had a lot of problems with the hardware. HDMI, Ethernet, WiFi, and various downstream things didn’t work. I fixed some of it with help from forums and such, but eventually I went back to windows.

But a couple months later, I tried Pop!_OS and that has worked perfectly out of the box. No regrets.

I decided I was done with reddit. I never used apps so I just signed out of my account and never went back.

No one would go if they weren’t getting paid.

I don’t know I’ve met some boot lickers that would work for free.

I think sometimes in an informal context it’s worthwhile to realize the other person is not a credible source arguing in good faith. The amount of effort it takes to discern and counter bullshit is way more than the effort to just make shit up. Sometimes you don’t want to spend an hour researching to refute someone’s lies.

In that case, “You’re a dishonest person arguing in bad faith” is appealing, reasonable even, despite attacking the person instead of their statements.