Spending a bit more time thinking about it, my main issues are with the UI. I am finding it a bit difficult to plan and re-spec my party because there are so many influential components in different places. Character base stats, weapon stats/levels/effects, picto stats and effects, skill trees, and ability points for 3+ characters is a lot of info to try and juggle in my head at once since the game only lets me view segments of that info at once. It is a bummer because the gameplay makes me want to experiment builds and party combinations but I feel like I need an external app/spreadsheet to make sure my builds make sense before committing to respeccing.
I've been playing a shitload of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (which I'll shorthand to CO:E33). I'm honestly floored by how much I am in love with the game. I have only ever enjoyed one turn-based game before and that was Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for the GBA. I didn't really like the Pokemon games, I didn't enjoy the other FF games I tried, I couldn't get into Persona 3 when my friend suggested it. But I have been really enjoying CO:E33's combat. The addition of sweet spots, free aim, dodging, and parrying really goes a long way in making the combat more engaging and interesting to me. And each of the party members have pretty different and unique "gimmicks" (in a good way) that make each character feel different to play in your party. I have been having a lot of fun theory crafting and building different party combinations around skill interactions and game mechanics in a way I usually find tedious. The music is incredible; easily the best game soundtrack I have listened to since Outer Wilds. The art direction and execution are top-tier. I love weird and somehow beautiful eldritch horror style of the game. Overall I think that's really what I keep coming back to with every aspect of the game, it is just oozing with passion and focus towards being exactly the game the studio wanted to create. If I tried to explain all the reasons I love this game, I would be here all day. The best summary I can give is that today is my birthday, and the way I have chosen to spend it is by introducing some of my closest friends to this game. I'll try to quickly bullet-point some major points before I go to try and convince you it's worth it.
Why would I celebrate a malignant tumor of a company gaining more control over local transportation and replacing unionized labor that offers health insurance with non-unionized, underpaid gig economy workers that get few-to-no benefits or protections?
I have had some really strange interactions with people over this. In either 2018 or 2019, a friend of a friend from college reached out to me because he heard I had moved to the same city as him. He was in finance, and was trying to move into FinTech. He would constantly try and recruit me to come work for his team, saying my starting pay would be $300,000-400,000/yr, and all it would take would be working 70-80hrs/wk in a pressure-cooker of stress and anxiety because no one had any semblance of job security. Low performers were cut immediately and aggressively. I was already making pretty decent money (slightly below average for where I lived), but I loved the company, loved my coworkers, and had great work-life balance. Dude could not understand why I kept turning him down. In the end he gave up and I later found out he was trying to recruit me because he knew he was going to be on the chopping block soon and was desperate to hire anyone to either dig him out of the hole he made, or to blame to save his own ass.
<this comment is mostly meant for humor despite being accurate to my experiences interacting with Amazon employees, predominantly engineers and sales reps>
Pro tip for getting in with the strong majority of managers I ever worked with at Amazon: they love to drink.
I've found there are two very easy ways to start a relationship with Amazon employees: alcohol and cocaine. Obviously not everyone and not everywhere, but I have never seen people so shamelessly doing cocaine in the bathroom at a company-hosted event. They would go W I L D.
Two random quotes I have sitting next to each other in a note with no other context and they were added months apart.
"In eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow. Nothing can become, nothing changes. And so death created time to grow the things it would kill. "
"It is a product of its time in a way that makes it unique and notable among the products of our time. A representative artifact of a lost moment and an artistic aesthetic that will never feel contemporary again."
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying nazism or other similar ideologies should be tolerated
people in general should be tolerated in good faith, and where they can’t exist in a community advocating violence even in a joking way isn’t helpful.
Please explain this to me, because as far as I can tell, they're contradictory
Edit to add a second question: Do you think non-violent Nazis or non-violent fascists exist?
Probably because anyone who is queer or is passingly aware of Republican policy in the US knows that this is going to be used to oppress queer people.
yeah I think a lot of people (myself included) will often conflate “Fuck PHP, it’s a shit language” with “Fuck PHP, I hate using it”. I am forever on the “fuck PHP” train because of my experiences working with it in college and for a few years at my current job; I just find it extremely frustrating to work with every time I am asked to. But that doesn’t mean it’s inherently a bad language or that people should feel bad for liking/using it. So usually I just keep my thoughts on it to myself unless directly asked.
I was reading "On Lisp" by Paul Graham (free download of the book can be found here) and something he said made me think of your comment. Sorry for the wall of text but I wanted to include as much context for the quote as possible. The quote starts at the bottom of page vi of the preface and runs onto most of page vii. Emphasis is mine:
Understandably, introductory Lisp books do not emphasize the differences between Lisp and other languages. They have to get their message across to students who have, for the most part, been schooled to think of programs in Pascal terms. It would only confuse matters to explain that, while defun looks like a
procedure definition, it is actually a program-writing program that generates code which builds a functional object and indexes it under the symbol given as the first argument.
One of the purposes of this book is to explain what makes Lisp different from other languages. When I began, I knew that, all other things being equal, I would much rather write programs in Lisp than in C or Pascal or Fortran. I knew also that this was not merely a question of taste. But I realized that if I was actually going to claim that Lisp was in some ways a better language, I had better be prepared to explain why.
When someone asked Louis Armstrong what jazz was, he replied “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.” But he did answer the question in a way: he showed people what jazz was. That’s one way to explain the power of Lisp—to demonstrate techniques that would be difficult or impossible in other languages. Most books on programming—even books on Lisp programming—deal with the kinds of programs you could write in any language. On Lisp deals mostly with the kinds of programs you could only write in Lisp. Extensibility, bottom-up programming, interactive development, source code transformation, embedded languages—this is where Lisp shows to advantage.
In principle, of course, any Turing-equivalent programming language can do the same things as any other. But that kind of power is not what programming languages are about. In principle, anything you can do with a programming language you can do with a Turing machine; in practice, programming a Turing machine is not worth the trouble.
So when I say that this book is about how to do things that are impossible in other languages, I don’t mean “impossible” in the mathematical sense, but in the sense that matters for programming languages. That is, if you had to write some of the programs in this book in C, you might as well do it by writing a Lisp compiler in C first. Embedding Prolog in C, for example—can you imagine the amount of work that would take? Chapter 24 shows how to do it in 180 lines of Lisp.
I hoped to do more than simply demonstrate the power of Lisp, though. I also wanted to explain why Lisp is different. This turns out to be a subtle question—too subtle to be answered with phrases like “symbolic computation.” What I have learned so far, I have tried to explain as clearly as I can.
I actually did watch a chunk of 2022 worlds! 2011-2020 I was watching every NA game, about 50% of EU, vods for a handful of other regions (CN, SK, BR, SA, OCE (never forget ;_;)), PLT/GLTS, and playoffs for every region. These days, I do still try to tune in for worlds. Some years it has only been finals, some years it has been all of main-stage. Just don't have the time or passion for it the way I use to.
I think the most amazing part of all of this is how unphased and unsurprised I am reading that headline. I haven’t followed LoL closely for a couple years now, but I was a die-hard fan from 2011-2021ish. Off the headline alone I was like “oh neat. I bet Faker pulled some absolutely inhuman shit to pull them to another worlds title”. Faker is just so absurdly good that I can believe any team that has him on it has the ability to win worlds
I agree that I think a lot of it comes down to personal preference. What works for you might not work for me, and vice versa.
To give the reverse perspective: I would do anything for my company to force people to come into the office 1-2 days a week. This isn't flawless, but I tried to track how much work I would get accomplished in equivalent meeting types between video calls and in-person white boarding over the course of a few months. In a single day of 4hrs solo-work and 4hrs meetings, my team can get done the same amount of work that it takes us an entire week to get done when everyone is remote.
I think that is a massive flaw in how we teach STEM at undergraduate levels and does a massive disservice to students.
I just finished watching the first 5 minutes of the Bill Burr video. I was unimpressed. IMO, the use of f*g wasn't necessary for the joke and really didn't add or do anything for the joke. I have heard slurs used in jokes that I have found extremely funny, this was not one of them. You didn't miss much by not watching.
Not every paper is trying to take an authoritative stance, especially from within the humanities
This is the big sticking point in my experience. Idk why but STEM folk almost seem allergic to the idea that there can be multiple equally-valid way to analyze something, or that there is value in analyzing problems from different baseline assumptions inherent to the act of doing the analysis itself and not just what the conclusion is.
I don't disagree with you that a lot of STEM kids wouldn't take the courses seriously. I double majored in math and cs at a liberal arts school; I saw and heard how my peers talked about the required non-STEM courses. However, I also took a Native American Religion and Culture class freshman year to satisfy some of my graduation requirements and decided to minor in Religious Studies. I had 0 interest in religious studies prior to walking into that class. The requirement to take that course drastically changed my life. If I am purely trying to appeal to STEM kids and focusing on the things they value: the skills I learned from my humanities classes have helped me stand out in job interviews, I am better at communicating my ideas and explaining things, especially to non-technical people like managers which has let me advance in my career at a faster rate than the other people I know in similar fields. Personally, I think it is worth it to make them required. A bunch of people wont learn anything, but plenty of people will and that is enough for me. Especially given the current consequences of the bulk of the tech field having a lack of understanding and/or respect for the humanities.
I feel like I have tried and given a fair chance to Cowboy Bebop and Steins;Gate dubs. Which is sad because I would love to add Cowboy Bebop to the list of shows I can passively enjoy having on in the background while I am knitting or something.
Baccano is a weird case. I think it is the dub that I feel is the best-done. Unfortunately(?), I first watched the Baccano sub in my formative years and it immediately became and has remained one of my favorite pieces of media ever. I've watched it countless times and shown it to everyone I know. It's just a very special piece of media for me and so hearing the dubbed voice I can't stop thinking "that's not what that character's voice sounds like". No offense to the voice actors of the dub; the parts I saw were good! I'm just too married to the version of the show I watched when I was younger.
Never heard of stand alone complex, but I am adding it to my list to try!
Are you watching subbed or dubbed? I keep searching for dubs I enjoy and I just cannot do it, but I am always willing to try again if someone says the dub is spectacular