Targeted ads should be illegal.

Contextual ads are a compromise I would accept. That is, you can buy ads based on the page content, but not the viewer details. So if I’m looking at a website about bikes, you can have bike ads on there. You don’t need to know I’m a xx year old living in zip code 10001. That’s how ads worked for like decades (centuries?). It’s fine.

Then I say we enforce the social contract of “don’t be a fucking asshole”, with force if needed.

Climate change deniers should have to stay. Everyone else should probably get assistance moving somewhere else.

Guild wars 2 is a very good game, but very different than guild wars 1.

They both avoid the endless gear and level grind, but gw2 is generally easier and less tactical. You can solo most of it. Builds are a little more limited, but it’s also harder to make a useless character.

They addressed the most common problems with early mmos: other players are never a bad thing. there’s no kill stealing. If you’re doing some event to fight off demons that have invaded the town, and other people show up, the game silently scales up a to accommodate more players, and everyone gets credit. it’s great.

I really like it. I don’t play it every day, but I go back to it all the time.

My parents and grandparents would get weirdly but wholesomely excited whenever they saw the animation on the cards (like the sun on the beach smiling). They all played a lot of solitaire.

My cat would always try to drink out of people cups, so I conceded. There are tea cups on the ground in the hallway for him.

Government is inefficient if you elect people who believe it is and set out to prove it.

People who say “run things like a business” don’t know shit. Every job I’ve worked at has had tremendous waste, but no one was looking closely because it’s private.

Like, right wing nut jobs would lose their shit if they learned a government office was buying fresh fruits for workers but most of it was going bad and being thrown out. But that happened every day for a while.

There’s also been a lot of “why is this machine still running? How much are we paying AWS for this??”

There’s also been a lot of "we don’t need to do accessibility on our website because most of our customers don’t care, and no one’s making us ".

I have very fond memories of a pandemic DND game where the players were making their way through a large puzzle sort of encounter. The confusion, the despair, the panic - so good. And the rising mood when they started to figure it out! And the triumph when they escaped! It was fantastic. One of the players said afterwards “I’ve never been so stressed before” and I was like “that is the greatest compliment you could give me”

I miss that group. Alas, when the pandemic wound down they all returned to real life interests. We’ll never know what the gnome depot was up to in their corporate office, now.

Have you played Nioh2? It has diablo-like items, but actual combat. It’s very good.

What if leveling up didn’t make number get big, but instead gave you more options in a fight?

Horizontal progression is pretty cool .

Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t want that. They want to feel cool and competent without actually doing anything. That’s not to say like you need to “earn” your fun or whatever. But that the progress quest number go up don’t think too hard is immensely popular with a lot of people. They don’t want to be challenged.

And that’s fine. It’s a game. It’s just not a game I want to play all the time.

I still remember the thrill when I was a teenager when I clicked a random corpse in Diablo 1’s hell and the unique staff Mindcry popped out.

Belief is largely social. This is true for all of us, to some extent. It doesn’t matter much when the social belief is “our baseball team is the best”. Unfortunately, the republican worldview is afactual and hateful. That’s really the bulk of it, I think. People identify with republicans, or with their neighbors that are republicans, and that’s the most important thing. More important than facts or truth.

Also there’s a lot of authoritarians. They want a strong in-group and an out-group to hurt.

So when someone says like “So-and-so Republican is a rapist, felon, and liar” that smashes right into the “my in-group is important, and if i reject my in-group I will die alone” part of the brain. So the facts bounce off and they write you off as an asshole.

Fixing that seems difficult. Appealing to a shared group identity can work (eg: we’re all americans here and we want to make the best of our great country, together). You see this sometimes where someone hates some out-group, and then actually meets a member and spends time with them. Now that person might be part of the in-group, and things have to shift around.

The other thing that changes minds is trauma. Horrible trauma. If your house gets blown apart by a hurricane, that might be enough for you to reevaluate your world view.

Anyway, the oatmeal did a comic about belief: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe Here’s a free book about authoritarians: https://theauthoritarians.org/

Been happy buying music from Bandcamp and not having a subscription. Didn’t even make it onto the chart :(

if slate is to be trusted, it’s not trivial: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/biden-cannot-fire-usps-louis-dejoy.html

The republican party is a pervasive blight on our government.

A response (or status!) on slack that’s like “I’m at the grocery, back in 20” is fine with me. It’s more annoying when someone wanders away with no status and is unresponsive for hours.

Some people are bad at working remote, and want to drag the rest of us down with them, too.

Yes, it’s a slightly different skill set to work remote. You have to be better at the written word. You can’t just roll up to someone’s desk and be like “have a minute?” (which is fucking awful anyway). You also need to be responsive and set your status appropriately. A lot of coworkers just wander off and leave their slack status as active. To my mind if you’re running an errand longer than taking a dump, you should update your status.

Sex work should be legal, regulated, unionized.

This is true. The same problem applies to transportation, health care, food security, etc. Poverty is terrible. Unfortunately, the right wing also seems to hate any effective programs to deal with it. No school lunches, no basic income, no nationalized insurance, etc etc.

The left continues to treat them with kid gloves,

This has generally been bothering me. You’ll have someone on the far right say like “We should kill the jews”, and I say “We should stop that guy. Like, I’m okay with someone doing violence to that nazi” and people are like “whoa whoa whoa we can’t have VIOLENCE.” So basically the right wing can do and say whatever, but everyone else has to hold themselves to pristine standards and just take it.

“Cops brutalize family and shoot their dog”. “Maybe we should fight back.” “Whoa whoa whoa violent speech is unacceptable bro.” Like, ok, I guess I’ll just get shot quietly.

https://archive.is/ktNni