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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: November 13th, 2023

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  • 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.








  • 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.


  • 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.



  • My favorite was the hostess who didn’t want to clean the bathroom so she would just fill the soap and and paper products and fill a spray bottle with Lysol that she would spray around to give the smell of a clean bathroom.

    This is exactly the kind of BS I’m talking about. I once knew some pool lifeguards that had to rotate through bathroom cleaning duty. I overheard that their MO was to just get everything wet with a hose, splash pinesol on the floor, and call it a day.