I totally agree. And it blows my mind that games think it's OK to just hand out grind missions.
That's bullshit. It's so fucking lazy and disrespectful to the players.
Stick some barter tradeposts in the game, and price the items in them in terms of grind. 100 bandit bandanas to avenge my father, and I'll give you his old rifle. Medicine man has ED medicine I need. Get me some of that, and I'll give you this pistol. Medicine man needs 25 sequoia seeds to make the ED medicine, along with a live snake. To get sequoia seeds, you'll need to shoot something at the flowers. An easy way to get bandit bandanas is to release live snakes into their camp, so they all run out.
You can build somewhat disguised grind structures into games, and let people opt-into a grind as they want/need to. There's this mentality in sooo many games that you need to have an NPC say, "now go get me 100 bandit bandanas to fulfill this quest", and when you do that you get 100 xp. Um, why not skip the middleman and just give them 1 xp for every bandana? Oh, because they might not do that. Then what? They'll be too low level for the next scene that is not optional and is required to progress in the game.
It comes down to making sure that players don't fail, or find the game too challenging. In my example above, you actually have to think a little to piece the quest and the grind requirements together. And if you don't want the guns, skip it. Maybe down the line that means you can't beat a boss. If that's the case, you'll need to go back for supplies, and hit the grind. But it's not required to do it then, or possibly at all.
I desperately miss games like this. There are a few that come out every year, but they're swamped by the rest of games which railroad and hand-hold, while telling lazy stories with stupid, mandatory grind quests.
The one thing that distinguishes games from other forms of media -- interactivity -- appears to become less and less important.
I would agree with that wholeheartedly. As the publishers started to get a hard-on for ham-fisted scripted games, I really started to rage about that shit. The first "fuck it, I'm out" I remember really, really clearly was the first Assassin's Creed. I was supposed to kill a dude. Managed to spend a large amount of time once I found him to stealthily infiltrate the building he was in, navigate above him, and line up my kill-shot. I dropped down and....CUTSCENE! I walk in through the front door, witty banter ensues, and then all the guards come to have a giant fight with me.
It's not just the interactivity, it's ripping control of the game out of the hands of the player to force it to go the way the publisher has laid their animated movie out. And the way they laid it out is a linear, inflexible, predictable path, with a couple of sharp bends right where you'd expect to find them. Maybe if we're lucky there's a fork in there somewhere, but more than likely no matter which one you pick you end up back on the same path.
Thinking back to games of yesteryear, a lot of them let you play the damn game, successfully or not. I definitely remember breaking games by dicking around in them. Killing a critical NPC. Making quest-givers mad at me so I couldn't progress. Unintentionally ruining things I needed later. Today, very few publishers are willing to allow stuff like that to happen, because inevitably some entitled twat will go and post a shitty review because the game allowed them to fail.
Lately, I've been playing text based RPGs, because those are all human-driven, and don't have significant issues with a storyline being imposed on the player. I've been a Duke in a doomed kingdom, and a minor criminal in a modern-times crime game. Those are/were tons of fun, and not having a story imposed on me was very liberating.
I also dabble in Dwarf Fortress every now and then. I really need to be in the mood to battle that dumpster fire, however. My current save is a fortress where I have an abundance of dead dwarves, and nobody will engrave memorial slabs or make coffins because they're being haunted, so more ghosts are showing up because the dead are lying around everywhere because nobody is making memorial slabs or coffins. I'm trying to drag the corpses way off to a corpse stockpile on the edge of the map, but nobody seems interested in doing that either, because they're all traumatized due to seeing dead bodies and ghosts.
Maybe I'm just getting old and bitter.
Maybe. Personally, I find battling something like a vicious ghost cycle a hell of a lot more interesting than fetchem quests and heinous railroading to force a game story to unfold in a single, uncompromising way.
I don't see how you extrapolate that from your link. He's proving that you can move large stones very small distances on very flat, hard surfaces. Nothing more. If they had built a 150 mile long flat road and paved it we'd probably have found at least a little bit of it. FFS we've found hundreds of henges, some even made of wood, but zero paved roads from that time period.
You're arguing something that doesn't have any evidence to back it up, and has some huge logical problems. (Hills and swamps, for starters.) It's more likely that they loaded the stones on ships and shipped them most of the way there. That, at least, would explain the lack of 150 miles of paved road.
I looked but I don't see the video where he did that with a couple dozen stones over 150 miles through forests and swamps and over hills and streams. Could you point us to that video?
Now, on the other hand, if a cop stops you in the street and starts asking you questions and your first reaction is to get uber-defensive and maybe even confrontational, then I'm sorry to say but in my eyes, you're the problem.
And in my eyes, if you don't do this, you're the problem.
Normalizing a police state is not what we should be doing. I am not ok with "papers please". A police state never ends well for its citizens. Given that here in the US police shoot non-armed individuals all the time, yeah, I'm fucking going to be on the defensive if some try to stop me. There's a non-zero chance that they will kill me. In fact, it's about as likely that they will kill me as an actual criminal would.
1. I am from a visible ethnic minority that is responsible for some not-insignificant portion of crime 2. My minority group also generally falls into the lower income bracket 3. It is statistically more probable that a member from my ethnic group will commit a violent crime compared to Caucasian or other groups
And the answer to none of those problems is police action. Those are 100% social issues, and need to be addressed with social change. Cops stopping you and potentially killing you does not solve those issues.
4. If I'm stopped and even searched by someone who is polite and has the welfare of MY community at heart, I welcome it
In what fantasy world do cops have the wellfare of your community at heart? Stop and frisk is the opposite of that. It's a tool of authoritarian repression and discrimination. It does nothing to solve the root issues of the problem, and everything to propagate them. You are far less likely to be carrying drugs than a white person, but you are far more likely to get stopped, searched, possibly killed, and sent to jail if you're not. Killing and jailing the men of minority populations does not make crime better or reduce poverty within those populations. It does exactly the opposite.
The way Netflix works is that you have to buy multiple seats, so ofcourse when you legally buy them, and then actually use them.. That shouldn't count as piracy, but now apparently does..
And it doesn't factor in all those people who bought the extra seats and then didn't use them either. Pure profit for Netflix! If you're going to count "piracy" losses, you need to count the "bought but didn't use" gains against that, since the two are very much related.
If there was only one login available at one time, you wouldn't have much "piracy", but you wouldn't have all that bought-but-didn't-use revenue either.
A lot of people view a silent business as a dead business. Sure, once you get a critical mass of couples and groups chatting it sounds lively, but the first few through the door wonder what's wrong with the place. One guy drinking at the bar in dead silence does not make a place seem friendly and inviting.
And a lot of people want to talk in a public place without it seeming like everyone else in there is listening to them. If there's some background noise, psychologically you'll think that you can't be heard by people further away and will be more willing to talk freely.
It doesn't have to be loud, and it doesn't have to be memorable, but most places need more than dead silence to convince the first handful of people to come in and breathe some life to the place.
This question has been asked a lot, and it's been answered a lot. Google is up there ^. Go find out how many mosquito species are out there, and then find out how many bite humans.
I think you underestimate how much mid-level busywork can get automated in most businesses. In my own organization, I can think of a good half-dozen people who are going to be missing half their workload once their managers decide to get on the automation train.
One person spends a good day a week doing data entry into one system of data we already have in another system. Then they spend another half day dealing with the data entry errors causing problems down the line. Even if we just get them access to the one system and a script to change the data format and upload it into the other system, we're chopping a day and a half of work down to about 15 minutes of work. (Ideally we'd just link the systems, but that's a bit bigger project.)
There are piles of things like this in every organization.
It's quite possible that there are a few visionary people now in management positions who know full-well the rot and waste of time within the organization, and who are going to try to slim it down. Depending on how thoughtful they are, this could be a massive cost savings with minimal impact to the day-to-day operations.
On top of that they don't even all use the same light colors on emergency vehicles. I grew up in the NE US where there are a lot of small states, and it was always a game when driving through several in a day to figure out what was coming up behind you. Police? Fire? Ambulance? Flashing Green and White? WTF is that?
Our state troopers have a reputation for being able to talk someone into a set of handcuffs.
That should be how all cops work, and I'm blown away why we don't demand that of them.
And it doesn't require fear of getting shot for that to be the cop culture. England has a real tradition of friendly bobbies being able to talk people into coming down to the station to discuss what they did wrong. Instead of fear of getting shot, their motivation stems from the fact that they are very likely to live in the communities they serve, and spend a lot of time on foot talking to people in those communities. They're known as individuals, not as a faceless paramilitary force. It's face-to-face policing, rather than the US tradition where cops spend all their time driving around in their car, and only get out to harass people.
Indeed. I fully support great pay, benefits, and training for cops. But I also expect that they will use proportional force. I don't expect their guns to come out until one is being pointed at them. But no, instead a guy running away is threatening to them, and they can shoot him in the back without consequence half the time. That is such utter bullshit that I've lost all respect for cops.
Yep. I'm always blown away by people who lie awake in bed messing around on their phone until they pass out way too late, only to wake up and lie there messing around on their phone until they're late getting up too. (See the twitter in chief for a great example.)
If your phone and social media is the first and last thing you see every day while in bed, yeah, you personally have a god damn problem.
And if adults have this issue, their kids likely have no chance. If you can't put your phone down for any length of time, there's no way you'll be able to get your kids to. You're teaching them that the imaginary online world is far more important than the real world around them.
And almost everyone who codes stumbles across some old code and asks, "Who the hell wrote it like this?" And then realizes it was them a long time ago, and that there was probably a reason for it but they have no idea what it was.
Best place I ever worked knew that, and worked to quantify it. That helps a lot when you're trying to figure out whether or not to refactor. In a couple cases, it became apparent that a partial refactor was going to accomplish something like 90% of a full one, with 10% of the effort.
Quantifying your pain-points with even back-of-the-envelope calculations can really help you make good decisions about how to move forward.
Midwest, 12 year old suburban house. All they installed was giant over-the-range microwave with a recirculating fan in it. Just spits the grease fumes back out over your head.
It's surprisingly common in places built in the 90s and early 2000s. I don't understand it either.
Whether it's government silencing people or an army of twittering dorks...
Well, you're dead wrong there. Freedom of speech has always been about the government not being able to silence you. It's never been about mobs or companies being able to silence you. Or your mom.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech...
That's what we're talking about here. When people talk about freedom of speech, that's the context.
I went from 4 to 7 two years ago, and I've been really, really happy with the S7. At this point I'm considering jumping to the S9 in 6 months or so, once the price drops. I'm not considering jumping to the 10. Too expensive, and it doesn't offer enough over the 9 to make the price worthwhile.
1) Freedom of speech has only ever been about government squashing of it. Corporations are not included in this conversation. 2) What company in their right mind is going to allow people to use their name and platform to publish and distribute lies that get people killed? That specifically get children killed? That's a recipe for a lawsuit.
About the only way a company could get away with allowing dangerous speech like this is if they can get classified as common carrier, but then you have to not be censoring anything. Every social media site censors at least something, so common carrier isn't an option. The only other options then are to censor harder to try to avoid getting sued, or just accept that you're getting sued and build up a war-chest to deal with it.
The other ways to accomplish work/home life balance is to allow working from home where feasible, with no limits at all. If someone wants to work from home for two weeks straight and they are still accomplishing the tasks they have been assigned, or the tasks they have assigned themselves, then surely this is a positive?
I struggle working from home for more than a day, two at the most. Why? Because I run out of shit to do.
I'm ridiculously more productive working from home. Comfortable, it's quiet or has good background music going, food, drinks, and bathrooms aren't a long walk away, and nobody can interrupt me until I'm ready to be interrupted. I would definitely be more productive with 3 days at work and 1 day at home vs 5 at work. I'm not sure about 4 days at work vs 5 days. It's so unproductive there that I'm not sure I could really get that much more done.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, grind can be fine if it's sort of optional...
I totally agree. And it blows my mind that games think it's OK to just hand out grind missions.
That's bullshit. It's so fucking lazy and disrespectful to the players.
Stick some barter tradeposts in the game, and price the items in them in terms of grind. 100 bandit bandanas to avenge my father, and I'll give you his old rifle. Medicine man has ED medicine I need. Get me some of that, and I'll give you this pistol. Medicine man needs 25 sequoia seeds to make the ED medicine, along with a live snake. To get sequoia seeds, you'll need to shoot something at the flowers. An easy way to get bandit bandanas is to release live snakes into their camp, so they all run out.
You can build somewhat disguised grind structures into games, and let people opt-into a grind as they want/need to. There's this mentality in sooo many games that you need to have an NPC say, "now go get me 100 bandit bandanas to fulfill this quest", and when you do that you get 100 xp. Um, why not skip the middleman and just give them 1 xp for every bandana? Oh, because they might not do that. Then what? They'll be too low level for the next scene that is not optional and is required to progress in the game.
It comes down to making sure that players don't fail, or find the game too challenging. In my example above, you actually have to think a little to piece the quest and the grind requirements together. And if you don't want the guns, skip it. Maybe down the line that means you can't beat a boss. If that's the case, you'll need to go back for supplies, and hit the grind. But it's not required to do it then, or possibly at all.
I desperately miss games like this. There are a few that come out every year, but they're swamped by the rest of games which railroad and hand-hold, while telling lazy stories with stupid, mandatory grind quests.
The one thing that distinguishes games from other forms of media -- interactivity -- appears to become less and less important.
I would agree with that wholeheartedly. As the publishers started to get a hard-on for ham-fisted scripted games, I really started to rage about that shit. The first "fuck it, I'm out" I remember really, really clearly was the first Assassin's Creed. I was supposed to kill a dude. Managed to spend a large amount of time once I found him to stealthily infiltrate the building he was in, navigate above him, and line up my kill-shot. I dropped down and....CUTSCENE! I walk in through the front door, witty banter ensues, and then all the guards come to have a giant fight with me.
It's not just the interactivity, it's ripping control of the game out of the hands of the player to force it to go the way the publisher has laid their animated movie out. And the way they laid it out is a linear, inflexible, predictable path, with a couple of sharp bends right where you'd expect to find them. Maybe if we're lucky there's a fork in there somewhere, but more than likely no matter which one you pick you end up back on the same path.
Thinking back to games of yesteryear, a lot of them let you play the damn game, successfully or not. I definitely remember breaking games by dicking around in them. Killing a critical NPC. Making quest-givers mad at me so I couldn't progress. Unintentionally ruining things I needed later. Today, very few publishers are willing to allow stuff like that to happen, because inevitably some entitled twat will go and post a shitty review because the game allowed them to fail.
Lately, I've been playing text based RPGs, because those are all human-driven, and don't have significant issues with a storyline being imposed on the player. I've been a Duke in a doomed kingdom, and a minor criminal in a modern-times crime game. Those are/were tons of fun, and not having a story imposed on me was very liberating.
I also dabble in Dwarf Fortress every now and then. I really need to be in the mood to battle that dumpster fire, however. My current save is a fortress where I have an abundance of dead dwarves, and nobody will engrave memorial slabs or make coffins because they're being haunted, so more ghosts are showing up because the dead are lying around everywhere because nobody is making memorial slabs or coffins. I'm trying to drag the corpses way off to a corpse stockpile on the edge of the map, but nobody seems interested in doing that either, because they're all traumatized due to seeing dead bodies and ghosts.
Maybe I'm just getting old and bitter.
Maybe. Personally, I find battling something like a vicious ghost cycle a hell of a lot more interesting than fetchem quests and heinous railroading to force a game story to unfold in a single, uncompromising way.
He's proving that it's possible.
I don't see how you extrapolate that from your link. He's proving that you can move large stones very small distances on very flat, hard surfaces. Nothing more. If they had built a 150 mile long flat road and paved it we'd probably have found at least a little bit of it. FFS we've found hundreds of henges, some even made of wood, but zero paved roads from that time period.
You're arguing something that doesn't have any evidence to back it up, and has some huge logical problems. (Hills and swamps, for starters.) It's more likely that they loaded the stones on ships and shipped them most of the way there. That, at least, would explain the lack of 150 miles of paved road.
Achievements or punishments?
I looked but I don't see the video where he did that with a couple dozen stones over 150 miles through forests and swamps and over hills and streams. Could you point us to that video?
Remind me again where in LOTR a wizard moved large stones?
Now, on the other hand, if a cop stops you in the street and starts asking you questions and your first reaction is to get uber-defensive and maybe even confrontational, then I'm sorry to say but in my eyes, you're the problem.
And in my eyes, if you don't do this, you're the problem.
Normalizing a police state is not what we should be doing. I am not ok with "papers please". A police state never ends well for its citizens. Given that here in the US police shoot non-armed individuals all the time, yeah, I'm fucking going to be on the defensive if some try to stop me. There's a non-zero chance that they will kill me. In fact, it's about as likely that they will kill me as an actual criminal would.
1. I am from a visible ethnic minority that is responsible for some not-insignificant portion of crime
2. My minority group also generally falls into the lower income bracket
3. It is statistically more probable that a member from my ethnic group will commit a violent crime compared to Caucasian or other groups
And the answer to none of those problems is police action. Those are 100% social issues, and need to be addressed with social change. Cops stopping you and potentially killing you does not solve those issues.
4. If I'm stopped and even searched by someone who is polite and has the welfare of MY community at heart, I welcome it
In what fantasy world do cops have the wellfare of your community at heart? Stop and frisk is the opposite of that. It's a tool of authoritarian repression and discrimination. It does nothing to solve the root issues of the problem, and everything to propagate them. You are far less likely to be carrying drugs than a white person, but you are far more likely to get stopped, searched, possibly killed, and sent to jail if you're not. Killing and jailing the men of minority populations does not make crime better or reduce poverty within those populations. It does exactly the opposite.
The way Netflix works is that you have to buy multiple seats, so ofcourse when you legally buy them, and then actually use them.. That shouldn't count as piracy, but now apparently does..
And it doesn't factor in all those people who bought the extra seats and then didn't use them either. Pure profit for Netflix! If you're going to count "piracy" losses, you need to count the "bought but didn't use" gains against that, since the two are very much related.
If there was only one login available at one time, you wouldn't have much "piracy", but you wouldn't have all that bought-but-didn't-use revenue either.
A lot of people view a silent business as a dead business. Sure, once you get a critical mass of couples and groups chatting it sounds lively, but the first few through the door wonder what's wrong with the place. One guy drinking at the bar in dead silence does not make a place seem friendly and inviting.
And a lot of people want to talk in a public place without it seeming like everyone else in there is listening to them. If there's some background noise, psychologically you'll think that you can't be heard by people further away and will be more willing to talk freely.
It doesn't have to be loud, and it doesn't have to be memorable, but most places need more than dead silence to convince the first handful of people to come in and breathe some life to the place.
This question has been asked a lot, and it's been answered a lot. Google is up there ^. Go find out how many mosquito species are out there, and then find out how many bite humans.
I think you underestimate how much mid-level busywork can get automated in most businesses. In my own organization, I can think of a good half-dozen people who are going to be missing half their workload once their managers decide to get on the automation train.
One person spends a good day a week doing data entry into one system of data we already have in another system. Then they spend another half day dealing with the data entry errors causing problems down the line. Even if we just get them access to the one system and a script to change the data format and upload it into the other system, we're chopping a day and a half of work down to about 15 minutes of work. (Ideally we'd just link the systems, but that's a bit bigger project.)
There are piles of things like this in every organization.
It's quite possible that there are a few visionary people now in management positions who know full-well the rot and waste of time within the organization, and who are going to try to slim it down. Depending on how thoughtful they are, this could be a massive cost savings with minimal impact to the day-to-day operations.
On top of that they don't even all use the same light colors on emergency vehicles. I grew up in the NE US where there are a lot of small states, and it was always a game when driving through several in a day to figure out what was coming up behind you. Police? Fire? Ambulance? Flashing Green and White? WTF is that?
Our state troopers have a reputation for being able to talk someone into a set of handcuffs.
That should be how all cops work, and I'm blown away why we don't demand that of them.
And it doesn't require fear of getting shot for that to be the cop culture. England has a real tradition of friendly bobbies being able to talk people into coming down to the station to discuss what they did wrong. Instead of fear of getting shot, their motivation stems from the fact that they are very likely to live in the communities they serve, and spend a lot of time on foot talking to people in those communities. They're known as individuals, not as a faceless paramilitary force. It's face-to-face policing, rather than the US tradition where cops spend all their time driving around in their car, and only get out to harass people.
Indeed. I fully support great pay, benefits, and training for cops. But I also expect that they will use proportional force. I don't expect their guns to come out until one is being pointed at them. But no, instead a guy running away is threatening to them, and they can shoot him in the back without consequence half the time. That is such utter bullshit that I've lost all respect for cops.
Yep. I'm always blown away by people who lie awake in bed messing around on their phone until they pass out way too late, only to wake up and lie there messing around on their phone until they're late getting up too. (See the twitter in chief for a great example.)
If your phone and social media is the first and last thing you see every day while in bed, yeah, you personally have a god damn problem.
And if adults have this issue, their kids likely have no chance. If you can't put your phone down for any length of time, there's no way you'll be able to get your kids to. You're teaching them that the imaginary online world is far more important than the real world around them.
And almost everyone who codes stumbles across some old code and asks, "Who the hell wrote it like this?" And then realizes it was them a long time ago, and that there was probably a reason for it but they have no idea what it was.
Technical debt is a thing...
Best place I ever worked knew that, and worked to quantify it. That helps a lot when you're trying to figure out whether or not to refactor. In a couple cases, it became apparent that a partial refactor was going to accomplish something like 90% of a full one, with 10% of the effort.
Quantifying your pain-points with even back-of-the-envelope calculations can really help you make good decisions about how to move forward.
Midwest, 12 year old suburban house. All they installed was giant over-the-range microwave with a recirculating fan in it. Just spits the grease fumes back out over your head.
It's surprisingly common in places built in the 90s and early 2000s. I don't understand it either.
As a follow-up question, is it illegal to stand in the road not dressed like a cop and wave self-driving cars into hilarious situations?
And it's quickly becoming unuseful given our current ability to treat the disease.
Whether it's government silencing people or an army of twittering dorks...
Well, you're dead wrong there. Freedom of speech has always been about the government not being able to silence you. It's never been about mobs or companies being able to silence you. Or your mom.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech...
That's what we're talking about here. When people talk about freedom of speech, that's the context.
I went from 4 to 7 two years ago, and I've been really, really happy with the S7. At this point I'm considering jumping to the S9 in 6 months or so, once the price drops. I'm not considering jumping to the 10. Too expensive, and it doesn't offer enough over the 9 to make the price worthwhile.
1) Freedom of speech has only ever been about government squashing of it. Corporations are not included in this conversation.
2) What company in their right mind is going to allow people to use their name and platform to publish and distribute lies that get people killed? That specifically get children killed? That's a recipe for a lawsuit.
About the only way a company could get away with allowing dangerous speech like this is if they can get classified as common carrier, but then you have to not be censoring anything. Every social media site censors at least something, so common carrier isn't an option. The only other options then are to censor harder to try to avoid getting sued, or just accept that you're getting sued and build up a war-chest to deal with it.
But none of them are Old Yeller.
The other ways to accomplish work/home life balance is to allow working from home where feasible, with no limits at all.
If someone wants to work from home for two weeks straight and they are still accomplishing the tasks they have been assigned, or the tasks they have assigned themselves, then surely this is a positive?
I struggle working from home for more than a day, two at the most. Why? Because I run out of shit to do.
I'm ridiculously more productive working from home. Comfortable, it's quiet or has good background music going, food, drinks, and bathrooms aren't a long walk away, and nobody can interrupt me until I'm ready to be interrupted. I would definitely be more productive with 3 days at work and 1 day at home vs 5 at work. I'm not sure about 4 days at work vs 5 days. It's so unproductive there that I'm not sure I could really get that much more done.