Most of the friends that I have that are into DnD are in at least two games. Some people like doing it more than one night a week and it's hard to find two days out of every week that everybody in the group is cool spending on it.

I think it's a frame of mind. Generally, people are not trained to view media as art, nor to interact with art in any meaningful sense. If you see a video game and subconsciously think "this exists solely for my gratification" then yeah, you're not gonna be thinking about it much.

This is one guy, one single guy, has made a statement as powerful as a protest of thousands. You can say it's suicide, but not that it's meaningless. You can say martyrdom is not something to aspire to, but cannot say that it did not take an incredibly rare level of devotion towards a cause that is just. Writing him off as out of his mind is an insult to his determination. I don't think self-immolating is the most productive thing he could have done, but at the end of the day, if it was, I know I wouldn't have the guts to follow through on it.

Understanding video games or not, you'd hope they'd at least understand the basic economic reality that addictive products make more money than non-addictive products. That's why it was banned: it encourages unhealthy usage habits.

My copium take is that there's no way that the government wouldn't understand banning """player retention mechanics""" would cause a big divestment. They're used because they make shittons of reliable money! Did they think it was just because devs are too lazy to come up with actual games? That seems like a pretty basic idea that would come across with even cursory investigation into what's being regulated. Under this hopeful line of thought, it'd probably be a firing for messaging failure rather than a lack of will to follow through.

I feel safe on this website. I know there's no point to all of you being feds because they already have microphones in my walls.

The Dark Age, a time of backwardness, illiteracy, and decline. Also, when books were invented.

If there's arguments that solar is better, sure, I'm sympathetic to those. I can understand if nuclear technology is not safe enough yet for widespread use. I think that arguments about nuclear being inherently unsafe are not convincing, though. As long as each reactor is safer than the last, we can minimize that inherent unsafeness. To take an example from programming: the only bug-free program you'll ever write is a hello world program. Introducing complexity naturally increases the amount of unaccounted for states. Cutting-edge medical technology is invariably going to have an astronomical amount of unaccounted for states and the bugs that come with them. That doesn't mean computing has nothing to offer medicine, only that its use must be weighed against alternatives. Fusion might be less inherently unsafe but AFAIK it's not on the table right now, and we need energy today. China's investing in nuclear technology, but it hasn't been neglecting wind and solar, either. Putting feelers around each solution just seems like the no-brainer thing to do.

Adding on to this: why is there not some sort of QC on postings at most job sites? I tick the box on Indeed that says "entry level" and the first three positions that pop up are fucking senior dev/team lead positions.

I will finally save scum hard enough to pass the 782,469 consecutive skill checks required to instantiate True Communism™, of which this is roll #8.

I watched it when it was first getting big, so my memory might be kind of fuzzy, but my copium thought-deeper-than-thought reading of it was:

This story is David's happy ending under capitalism. It sucks a fuckton, but that's because every other ending sucks a fuckton. One guy on his own was not going to start the revolution. But you know what he got? He didn't have to bow his head as deeply to the shitty and abusive system as everybody else. He got to hit it back, even. He got to keep his humanity right up until the end. He got to live as part of a (small) community in a real and meaningful way. He got friends who put their lives on the line for him and who he put his life on the line for. The dream he wanted to grant to Lucy was essentially what she convinced herself she wanted rather than what she actually wanted, marketing having told her it would fill the hole in her self. That doesn't matter to David, though. He got to give the 10/10 knockout girl he was crazy over her dream. Compare his life to most anybody else around him. You think the guy hooked up to the vacuum blowjob fleshlight drooling out of his slacked jaw next to the train station has a better life? The rich corpo kids who will live without ever feeling a genuine connection to something greater than themselves in their whole lives, driven insane by the unjustified violence their class position demands that they inflict? David died a painful, awful death. So did most of his friends. But it's the only real end that could come from a life lived to the fullest under his circumstances.

I think it's like this: there's multiple layers to the process of seeing something. Light enters the eyes, it's converted to an electrical signal in the nervous system, that signal is formatted into the "video feed" in our brain, and that picture is matched with existing patterns we know. Visualizing something is working backwards from the resultant pattern to produce possible inputs that would match. It doesn't go to the video feed level, but it goes to the intermediary stage where patterns are being matched to a picture. Less "what are traits I associate with an apple" and more "how does it feel when I recognize an apple?"