chonglibloodsport
@chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
- Comment on Any Roguelike/Roguelite suggestions? 1 week ago:
You owe it to yourself to try some traditional Roguelikes:
- Caves of Qud (Just released 1.0 a month ago. Amazing game. Unique science fiction world full of weird and wonderful characters, complex tinkering crafting system, crazy mutants and really cool cybernetics. Huge amounts of lore and a rich detailed world. I can’t stop playing it!)
- Shattered Pixel Dungeon (Really awesome game with a friendly developer who posts on Lemmy. Extremely well balanced classes: 5 main classes with a 6th in development. Cool character customization and equipment upgrade system. Super deep alchemy system. Probably the best mobile roguelike but amazing on PC too, with a great UI for every platform)
- NetHack (old school, developed since 1987 and still active, very tough game, might not want to try this one first. Incredibly rewarding once you learn it! Absolutely crazy amount of interactions between items, characters, and features in the dungeon. Takes its “verb-based action system” much farther than any other game, including text adventure games)
- Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup (very complex but not as brutal and spoilery as NetHack. Extreme replay value due to the huge number of species, backgrounds, skills, and gods)
- Tales of Maj’Eyal (not as many races as DCSS but still a huge variety of character builds. Great music as well)
- Comment on Vibes based cooking 1 week ago:
Oh I don’t disagree with you. I’ve looked for decent non-IPA microbrews and have been puzzled at the lack of selection!
- Comment on Vibes based cooking 1 week ago:
One of the weirdest takes I’ve ever seen. Bravo and well done for somehow working politics into this!
- Comment on "Family Size" has no meaning anymore 1 week ago:
1200 calories / 4 people is 300 calories. 300 calories times 3 meals per day is only 900 calories. According to the American Heart Association, that’s the recommended calorie intake for a 1 year old.
So unless your “family of 4” consists of 4 babies and no older children or adults, this is not a family size meal.
- Comment on Are there any games like Starfield? 1 week ago:
Wow you aren’t kidding! I was expecting some 3D modern graphics thing but it’s literally a new Escape Velocity game without the EV name!
- Comment on Vibes based cooking 1 week ago:
A lot of IPAs are gross. Some are quite good. Bitterness is the most maligned of all tastes. Tons and tons of bitter things that people love and every one of them is a love/hate acquired taste thing.
Grapefruit, bitter melon, bitter black coffee, any sort of bitter beer (IPAs aren’t the only one), heck even burnt sugar!
- Comment on Mildly McInfuriating 2 weeks ago:
A lot I think. McDonald’s doesn’t just build restaurants anywhere. They conduct rigorous market analyses to determine where they want to buy real estate. They don’t buy unless they expect a place to be growing.
They have the benefit of all the data from their restaurants. They can compare that with publicly available data from local city councils. This is one of the reasons big companies seem to be immortal. They just have so much data, experience, and understanding of exactly how the business works at a local level.
Of course what they can’t anticipate (and few can) are global economic slowdowns and other major trends or even sudden events.
- Comment on Mildly McInfuriating 2 weeks ago:
Say you want to open your own McDonald’s branch. You pass their financial vetting, get on their waiting list, go through McDonald’s boot camp, then McDonald’s corporate builds a new McDonald’s restaurant on land they own (or acquires land before doing so), then they lease the land to you, sell you all the equipment for the kitchen, the furniture for the dining area, and all the food and other supplies you need.
The prices are set according to their rules, the food is provided to you by them, the recipes are all very simple (you learn them at boot camp), all you do is hire and train the staff and operate the restaurant. You pay McDonald’s for everything, your profits are entirely based on sales, they own the land your restaurant sits on. If you decide you want out they’ll find someone else to take over.
Just as residential real estate has skyrocketed in price, so has commercial real estate (even more so). If you decide you’re out and McDonald’s corporate decides that location is no longer profitable then they sell the property with a large return on their investment.
- Comment on Mildly McInfuriating 2 weeks ago:
But here’s the really annoying thing about McDonald’s: they don’t care if their sales trend towards zero. McDonald’s makes all their money on the real estate values of their restaurants, not on food sales.
- Comment on What's the deal with male loneliness? 2 weeks ago:
Our western culture of individualism is older than capitalism. Much older. It stems from our agricultural and pastoral modes of production. Grains like wheat as well as livestock like sheep, goats, and cattle are highly amenable to work by an individual farmer or shepherd or rancher. Wheat is sown in ploughed fields that have been worked by oxen or horses.
Compare with a different grain like rice which must be transplanted into flooded fields by large groups of people or crops like potatoes or yams which must be planted and dug up individually by mass labour.
The structure of individualism or collectivism is in the roots of our cultures going back thousands of years. So rather than capitalism giving rise to individualism I think the opposite is the case.
- Comment on Women Directed Just 16% of 2024's Top 250 Grossing Movies 2 weeks ago:
The medical profession used to be totally male-dominated. That didn’t stop women from becoming doctors in droves despite all the discrimination and outright bullying they faced. Now women dominate many of the medical specialities.
I think this is different. I think becoming a film director is simply not a viable career path for 99% of all people who attempt it, regardless of gender. This is very much distinct from both acting and music as careers (there are countless moderately successful small-time actors and musicians but almost no small-time film directors).
- Comment on Anon trying understanding women 2 weeks ago:
There’s definitely plenty of that sort of behaviour going on. But there’s also plenty of people who are just lonely and prone to misinterpreting signals in a biased way. It’s possible to have compassion for lonely people without excusing bad behaviour.
- Comment on Anon trying understanding women 2 weeks ago:
We’re the most intelligent species on the planet and we have the most complicated mating rituals that are constantly evolving through time and across cultures. It’s very frustrating but it is what it is!
- Comment on Copyright Doesn’t Provide A ‘Living’ For A Successful Author 3 weeks ago:
It says she earned $3400/year since she began writing the book (2012) and that her book is in the top 20% of book sales. Yes, it’s an unsustainable amount of money to support yourself on, clearly. You could earn more money stocking shelves at the grocery store.
But here’s the thing: she wrote one book in a decade!
Nora Roberts, at the peak of her career, was writing one book a month (now she’s only writing one book every three months in her 70s)! And the great thing about writing is that it builds momentum: the more you write, the better you get at writing, the faster you can write a book, the more you build a name for yourself, the more sales each of your books get.
There’s no problem here. Anyone who wants to can publish a book! You don’t have to go through a big publisher and collect a tiny royalty. You don’t have to take an advance. Just self-publish and keep all the profits yourself!
- Comment on Copyright Doesn’t Provide A ‘Living’ For A Successful Author 3 weeks ago:
I read the link. It doesn’t say what you think it’s saying. The perception you’re getting is that there are millions of authors out there, that they’re all writing full time, and that 80% of them are earning less than Monica Byrne.
There are simply huge numbers of books that essentially don’t sell at all. I’m talking about technical manuals, academic books in niche topics of research, and even textbooks for courses that only a handful of people take. We don’t need a system to support these authors because they’re not trying to support themselves by writing books. Rather, the books they write are basically a side effect of their day job.
- Comment on Copyright Doesn’t Provide A ‘Living’ For A Successful Author 3 weeks ago:
If nobody is buying their books then how important are they?
The structure is a mathematical one. More rain falls in large puddles than into small ones (and the rain makes large puddles larger). More asteroids fall into large craters than small ones (and the large craters grow larger).
- Comment on Copyright Doesn’t Provide A ‘Living’ For A Successful Author 3 weeks ago:
Book sales, like almost everything else based on popularity, follow a power law distribution. This means that having a book in the top 20% of all books by earnings is not that great considering that the bottom 80% of books earn basically nothing.
- Comment on Copyright Doesn’t Provide A ‘Living’ For A Successful Author 3 weeks ago:
It took her 12 years to write a book! That’s not a successful author, that’s a hobbyist.
Look at an actual successful author like Nora Roberts. Since the start of 2012 she’s published 57 books!
And before you say “there’s no way those 57 books are as good as the one book which took 12 years to write” let’s look at reviews on Goodreads:
The Actual Star by Monica Byrne (2704 ratings for a 3.88 average rating).
Private Scandals (2012) by Nora Roberts (10151 ratings for a 4.01 average rating).
And that’s just one random book I picked by her. Many of them are way more popular than that (hundreds of thousands of ratings on Goodreads).
The point is: if you want to make money as an author (of books, video games, YouTube videos) you can’t ignore your own productivity. Taking 12 years to write a 624 page book is extremely unproductive! That’s 4383 days (including leap years) to write 624 pages for an average of 1 page per week. A part time newspaper columnist writes several times that output and probably spends no more than an hour or two working on it.
- Comment on Fear of job loss hits its highest point in years—but workers won’t accept less than $81,000 3 weeks ago:
You still need to be enterprising and have business skills. Some of the tradespeople I know are just struggling to get by because they don’t know how to manage their money.
Heck, I’ve heard that a shockingly high percentage of professional athletes end up broke within a few years of retiring from sports. We’re talking about people who make millions a year ending up with no money and even declaring bankruptcy!
- Comment on Amazon: The same 31 products you don't want, again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again 3 weeks ago:
Amazon: the world’s largest enshittification platform!
- Comment on Suit Accuses Georgetown, Penn and M.I.T. of Admissions Based on Wealth | The schools were accused of giving special treatment to wealthy students who might not otherwise have been admitted. 4 weeks ago:
Here’s the dirty secret of the Ivy League (and similar top tier schools): the education doesn’t matter. The whole advantage of going to these schools is networking. Who do you network with? Rich kids whose parents own big companies! That’s how you get a high paying job after busting your butt to get into an Ivy League school!
If somehow we force these schools only admit the top students and not the underachieving legacies (rich kids) then that whole networking advantage disappears.
- Comment on oh man 5 weeks ago:
We disagree on what these words mean. There’s no further progress to be had here while that impasse remains.
- Comment on I washed my black underwear and now one of my black socks looks brownish on one side. How do I return the sock to its original black? 5 weeks ago:
Some kinds of black dyes are actually just really dark brown. When they start to fade they turn lighter which reveals the brown colour. There’s no way a poop stain transferred to your sock in the laundry. The enzymes in laundry detergent break that stuff down and keep it suspended in the water.
- Comment on oh man 5 weeks ago:
I didn’t say they were irrelevant, I said they’re tools of survival. They’re obviously useful. People without any emotions at all just sit there with what looks like a catatonic state.
But being a slave to your emotions is nothing to aspire to. Far better to pick the emotional states you want to have. For me it’s enjoying deep focus on a task, having a lively conversation, sharing a great meal, laughing at a great joke, or cheering on a great play in sports.
Being a slave to your emotions is like being a ship tossed about on stormy seas. Emotional regulation is a skill that must be learned like any other. We’re supposed to teach it to young children, though increasingly I find myself meeting adults who don’t even have the basics down. People screaming at each other like angry birds!
The tougher one of course is learning how to overcome depression. That may need different strategies for different people. Mindfulness works for me but maybe not for everyone.
- Comment on how badly could a pelican fuck me up in a fight? 5 weeks ago:
Just be glad your brother isn’t a pigeon or other similar sized bird. A pelican can and will swallow smaller birds whole!
- Comment on oh man 5 weeks ago:
Survival. The emotions are ultimately just crude tools the brain and body have for promoting the survival of the person.
Their crudeness is probably best illustrated with phobias.
- Comment on Why don’t more people start profit-sharing companies or co-ops? 5 weeks ago:
Even something very simple like a coffee shop is difficult to run as a co-op.
Yes, if you have a few friends who are all passionate about coffee it’s possible for you all to get loans / mortgages to pool together enough money to buy/lease a small commercial property and open a coffee shop together. The only really significant pieces of equipment are the espresso machine and coffee grinder, both of which can be bought used for a few thousand dollars.
But here comes the issue: suppose it’s you and 4 friends who started the coffee co-op with $200k each (total $1 million) to buy the real estate and all of the furniture and machinery. Now the 5 of you work in the coffee shop and it starts growing more successful so that you need to hire more baristas (or pastry chefs or sandwich artists) to work there. How many baristas can you find who can afford to put up $200k to buy into a share of the co-op?
Or even more fundamentally: what if 2 out of the starting 5 decide that working in a coffee shop is too exhausting and they don’t want to do it anymore so they quit? Now the other 3 need to put together a total of $400k to buy them out? Or do you have a clause in the contract which says they forfeit their investment if they quit? Now I dunno about you, but as much as I love using my espresso machine I would never want to enter a contract like that! I’d much rather keep my $200k in the bank and work as a regular employee barista knowing I could quit any time I want.
- Comment on Why don’t more people start profit-sharing companies or co-ops? 5 weeks ago:
They don’t have access to capital (means of production). Consider the following scenario:
All of the employees at a car manufacturing plant are sick of being paid a fraction of the total sale price of the cars they make. They decide, in solidarity, to quit en masse and start a worker co-op car plant instead so that they can all enjoy sharing 100% of the profits themselves.
So they quit. Now what? Well, knowledge isn’t an issue because they already knew how to operate all the machines in a car plant. The problem is that they don’t have the money (or the land) to build a new car plant. We’re talking billions of dollars and a huge piece of land which ideally should be located on a railroad line so that parts (which are very large and heavy) can be delivered affordably by rail.
So where are they gonna get the money? Not from private investors, of course, since that nixes the worker only profit sharing arrangement. Not from banks either because these workers, while highly knowledgeable and motivated, don’t have any collateral to put up for the bank loans. The banks do not want to be in the position of repossessing a bunch of specialized manufacturing equipment and trying to resell it at a loss.
The common response to this is: the government. But think about that. Do you want your government giving billions of dollars to a few hundred people so they can start a car plant and then keep all the profits?
- Comment on Charities of Employees from "non-profit" I was going to donate too 1 month ago:
You earn less than 20k? Save your money, volunteer your time! Much more productive and rewarding!
- Comment on TURKEY POWER 1 month ago:
Time zones probably help with that!