You’re not alone. I recall getting sniped from every direction at some points, with very tough 1:1 battles and boss battles that just kinda “happen” out in the open.

That’s alarmingly low - it suggests that it doesn’t take much for any given influencing campaign. If there are fifteen discrete such campaigns in play, that’s just 1/100 of everyone. Now imagine that there’s tens of such campaigns, and the numbers look even more reasonable. Also, it’s probably cost-effective at this scale since this has been with us a while, which is terrifying.

What I want to know is: what percentage are human users that ate the onion metaphorical tequila worm¹ and are now parroting these trolls?

1. Follow me here: drink a bottle and eat the worm inside. You’re not thinking straight and did something you wouldn’t do if you had your wits about you, or maybe a friend nearby that is thinking clearly. Propaganda has a way of forcing you into a phantasm by emotional manipulation, making it easy to jam all kinds of nonsense into your head. Extending the metaphor, said propaganda also lays out how to defend your worm eating habit as though it’s totally normal to do.

Possibly? Or maybe people will think twice about deadnaming you.

I mean, maybe if you bake a stone cold potato that was in the fridge and then cook it for two hours? But even then we’re probably talking about a handful of minutes at the most.

Which car company bar did you say you work for?

A major one.

Just automatically started uploading everything on my hard drive to an account I didn’t set up

Wait, what?

Real question here: has anyone else had luck side-stepping the Live365 signup during/after install? I’ve done this, and I’m very confused that more people haven’t.

I totally get that: use the right tools and you’ll be okay. This applies to many technologies in this space.

With respect, I still take this advice like hearing “look out for rattlesnakes if you’re hiking there.” It might be safer to just hike where there are no rattlesnakes, instead.

I swear, overcoming fixed functional-ness is like a superpower when you can apply it.

I once shared a small office with a co-worker. I had the idea to move the desks away from the walls and place them back-to-back, diagonally, in the middle of the room. Other co-workers scoffed and remarked at how dumb and unconventional this looked. Then I explained that we each now had nearly full privacy from each other, much more personal space in our respective corners, no more glare from the window, and nobody could sneak up on us from the door anymore. Things got pretty quiet after that.

Useful? Not exactly. But you’d never look lazy or idle, that’s for sure.

/me goes back to get second folding chair.

Pascal went to military school.

I’m not in love with the idea, but a language that cuts out the BS has a sudden appeal when on a group/team project.

I take this as less of a “I can’t use this intuitive feature reliably” thing and more of a “the truth table will bite you in the ass when you least expect it and/or make a mistake” thing.

The worst ones are safety rules: those are (sometimes) written in blood, with stories to match.

Company: Provides amenities and services that would (technically) allow a person to live on premises. Pays you enough to retire early if you didn’t have to bother with rent or a mortgage.

Also company: “We can’t hire you without a permanent residential address.”

I also worked at multiple places that had fully decked out break-rooms: free food, game consoles, VR, and 60-inch TVs. Everyone was afraid to use them for fear of looking like they were screwing around. Except the interns. They used the hell out of that stuff.

I’ve seen this kind of thing too many times to count. First it was in high school, then the workplace.

1. Person notices there is no explicit rule for a thing, or maybe there’s a loophole somewhere
2. Does the thing
3. Annoys someone
4. Now there’s a rule for the thing

Some people just want to push the envelope. Other times, people can have a poor grasp of social norms, or they simply don’t respect others. But on the other side of the coin, people get annoyed for good and bad reasons; sometimes, no reason at all.

Bottom line: it’s a mess, so we get rules. But nobody wants to spend time writing these things and enforcing them, so there’s usually a reason/person/event why they’re there.

Hate that my government is apparently dead set on all of us driving massive trucks and SUVs spending thousands to money lenders, auto manufacturers, and dealerships over realist vehicles.

Doubly so if those parties are campaign contributors. Always follow the money.

Okay, so what we now need is a browser plugin that skips ahead 15 or 30 seconds, mapped to a hotkey.

Yes. Not enough daydreaming about winning arguments, mixed with intrusive thoughts and general self-loathing.

Never understood the appeal honestly.

Same here. I spent about 30 minutes trying to play one (DoTA I think?) and figured out:

• Each hero has a zillion upgrades and abilities
• Each hero is basically on their own roguelite style upgrade path
• The game has a dozen or more such heroes
• icons and text too small to play on livingroom TV, controller play out of the question
• at mercy of online match-making algorithm if I’m not in a league/clan/whatever

From this I could deduce:

• There’s no way in hell this is perfectly balanced - too many variables, it may as well be MttG
• Going to take 20 or more hours to dial in a personal play style
• Going to take probably 50-100 to develop a play style that can adapt to most situations
• League play will probably kick my ass, requiring another 50-100 hours of practice/training
• Causal play is out; likely can’t pick up and play immediately due to lobby, variable match times

I’m not knocking the genre as a whole, but this is not for me. It’s too far outside my typical mode of gaming and is likely to just frustrate me more than anything else. I’m familiar with hard to play online games like Quake, TF2, and even Soldat. But those have small power systems that, even with gross imbalances, were still playable because there were usually only one or two scenarios you couldn’t overcome. Adding more on every axis just sounds like a wildly unbalanced system where the skill curve isn’t steep enough, costing a lot of time invested in bad strategies before you figure it all out.