Other people have more detailed and factual answers, but a good heuristic is “there must be outgroups for the law to bind but not protect, and in groups for the law to protect but not bind”. That’s what they want. They want to do what they want while women and queers and non-whites are subjugated. They want to say something inappropriate and touch their women coworkers without consent, and know if she raises her voice she’ll be fired.

They are scum.

Maybe? Conservatives are mostly about feelings. The “fuck your feelings” thing was a confession and projection, as most conservative accusations are.

I feel like they’d make more money if they targeted lower end machines. My friend has a potato laptop and would enjoy borderlands, so they’re out of luck. They’re not going to spend any money on a new gaming toy because it’s not that big a hobby for them. I imagine there are many such people.

I liked that one but weirdly there’s no NG+ and the DLC kind of sucked. I finished it with a friend and we were like, “that’s it?”. It’s not very long, and it ends shortly after your end of skill tree powers become available.

I don’t consider single player changes cheating. For something to be cheating, you need to break the rules agreed to by the players. If you’re the only player, you presumably can’t break the agreement you make with yourself.

Hypothesis: people who cheat in video games are scum bags in other aspects of life. I wonder if anyone’s done a study on that. I feel like the kind of person who has to cheat in video games is a broken sad sack.

Stuff I use the phone for in rough order of importance:

• maps and GPS
• messaging (signal)
• emulators and other quality games (none of that candy crush slop)
• ebook reading
• Wikipedia / quick research
• Lemmy

I could drop lemmy from mobile because it’s just a time waster and news source.

Wikipedia is important because too often people are interminably arguing something that can be settled with a 30 second search. Like, you don’t need to spend 5 minutes arguing about the population of NJ just look it up.

Games are nice. I don’t want to go back to carrying around a second device for games like it’s 2001. I could bring a steam deck everywhere but that doesn’t fit in my pocket.

I don’t have any notifications turned on except like direct messages, so I don’t find it much of a distraction.

I forgot they were even making this game. BL3 was kind of bad, the pre sequel was painful. The tiny Tina one was okay but weirdly had no ng+ and shitty dlc. Meh.

Thanks for the reasonable response.

In essence I’m contesting that strict language standards are necessary to be understood. I mean, of course some standards are still required, just not strict enough to be all uptight about it when people start to bend them.

We agree on this, I think. I’m mostly a linguistic descriptivist - that is, language is what people speak more than what’s written in a rulebook somewhere. I’m not a linguist but I have an undergraduate degree that required some courses on English language.

It can be annoying when there’s a word for something (eg: enshittification, gaslighting, woke) and people then over extend it to mean “things i don’t like”. There’s not much to stop that, other than as an individual trying to be more precise in language. I think it’s not good for one’s brain to only have a few catch-all words for stuff.

I think “slop” specifically is a very old word (1400ce, if etymology online is to be trusted). But like if there was a word for “low quality LLM content” (let’s say… slopplement), applying that to any low quality writing would kind of suck. it would almost certainly happen, though, because all of us humans are kind of lazy.

Anyway. We mostly agree. I would just recommend being mindful of one’s word choices, because a narrow vocabulary can be a drag on thinking and communication.

You say it’s foolish to enforce strict language standards, but the most important thing about language is that it is understood. You buried that point in the middle of your second paragraph.

Did you read 1984? It has a major thread though it about how collapsing language reduces the ability of people to think. One of the first and most prominent examples in the book is replacing the many words for “good” and “bad” (eg: great, amazing, excellent, terrible, atrocious, etc) with simply “good” and “ungood”. Similarly, the dispossed has some writing in it about how language shapes thought. For example, the prevalence or absence of possessive forms (eg: my house vs the house I stay in)

The reason I used “good” and “ungood” is because those are the preeminent examples in 1984. They’re not a judgement of your post.

I’m not sure why you’re dismissive of “high school reading lists”, but you are coming off as someone who might actually be a high schooler. Your last emoji didn’t render, so maybe that would’ve changed the meaning.

Switched to PopOS on my desktop and Mint on the ancient laptop my gf had laying around. No real complaints. Games run fine. Browser runs fine. I had some trouble getting mint installed on the old laptop, but the internet had a solution.

I think the install process is kind of daunting for many users, but once it’s going I think the average user won’t have any problems. Windows, by contrast, is kind of aggressive with its “GOING TO UPDATE NOW” and “don’t you want to use one drive???”

So long as you’re understood, it’s fine.

Burying the lede here.

But also like language shapes the way we think. If you just let all your words boil down into “good” and “ungood”, you’re reducing your tools for thinking. 1984 and The Dispossessed are great books, by the way.

This small community way of thinking you’re describing is kind of a bad system. It doesn’t scale well and is extremely vulnerable to injustice. It shouldn’t be held up as a gold standard or even an acceptable way to think. I thought most people accepted the law should apply equally to all, but that “small town” mode is going to produce “sure Jimmy stole the car and crashed into the deli, but he’s a good boy. Give him probation. But that [slur] parking in the fire lane? Throw the book at them!”

Workers should unite and tell management to get fucked.

Capriciously applied rules is a terrible system. We hold up ideals like “rule of law” and “democracy” but as soon as capital is involved it’s right back to “I am the law” and tyranny.

You’re probably more correct than not. I’d be curious to see like those people’s budgets. How many are carrying credit card debt or neglecting other parts of their life to spend on digital gambling?

Oh that’s a neat library. Type annotations in python are really nice, and you don’t have to add tooling like when you switch from JS to TS.

This is like a fractal of stupid. Any portion of it is just as stupid as any other portion. I suspect it’s a joke.

There was an interesting video I saw online that was saying the final boss’s theme is interesting because it’s a piano piece for two players. The boss’s theme in it is very static, and the other, presumably yours, is more dynamic. Fits with the hollowing static world

That looks like one of the windows default background images. Is that the joke?