BillyClark

@BillyClark@piefed.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I tried proton-ge, using proton plus, and I got no flashing screen, even when playing a 1v1 competitive match. Hopefully, it will still work when I play with my friend later.

  Thanks for the tip. I think it probably worked.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Smell the Roses⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Rose’s are red,
  Violet’s are blue,
  Ethel’s are green.

  A poem about old lades’ panties.

  (Shamelessly stolen from an episode of 8 out of 10 Cats does Countdown, but I couldn’t find the link. And their version was far more British. I think they said something like “pensioners’ knickers”.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks I’ll give it a shot. Especially because I don’t want this technical problem to ruin this long tradition.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I always switch back and forth between hotfix and experimental to see if one works better. So basically, I use those two.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  For me, when I load the game, sometimes at the title screen, but more frequently only when I start a competitive game, the entire screen starts flashing black and then back to the game maybe once or twice a second. It often settles down after a minute and stops flashing, but sometimes it starts flashing again or it won’t stop for the entire game. And then, sometimes, the entire screen turns black and stays black and I have to restart the game to get the graphics to return.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been playing Rocket League for years, just because it’s a good way to hang out with a friend who likes it.

  For probably the past year, I’ve been playing it in Linux. But recently, suspiciously at about the same time that they added the anti-cheat software, Rocket League has become barely playable in Linux, at least for me.

  I don’t really see the need for either anti-cheat or an engine update. I only anticipate that it will make it run even worse in Linux.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there an "Avoid Amazon" community for people who want to support smaller online retailers?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Amazon will drop customers who return too many items. They have to protect themselves from ongoing fraud just like every retailer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is chess the most frustrating game to lose in?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Whether the game is chess or League or whatever, your tilting comes from yourself, not from the game.

  You probably know some people who play those same games and don’t tilt, even when they get a really bad break. Use those people as role models and get control of yourself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An 82-year-old YouTuber grandma was raided by police and SWATs during her live stream last night where she plays Minecraft to raise money for her grandsons cancer. Authorities brought 20 police cars⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s not surveillance. That’s basic service, allowing the recipient of a call to know who is actually calling them. The same thing would also stop a lot of scammers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An 82-year-old YouTuber grandma was raided by police and SWATs during her live stream last night where she plays Minecraft to raise money for her grandsons cancer. Authorities brought 20 police cars⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There are a lot of things that can be pointed at as to why this happens so much in the US. But I think most people forget that this is a problem that can literally be fixed using laws and technology.

  Swatting can only happen because the US telecom system is so full of holes and because the US legal system isn’t doing its job.

  The primary thing you have to do is fix it so that the emergency operators can know where a call actually originated. And all we need to do to make that happen is to change the law so that telecom companies are held criminally and civilly liable when a person uses their infrastructure to fake where an emergency call is coming from.

  Calls that come from foreign sources or from internet sources would harbor great suspicion. Imagine that the operator gets a big flashing notice that the call is suspicious right from the start.

  I’m not saying that police and gun nuts and police gun nuts and incompetent police and nazi assholes don’t have a lot of culpability, or that we shouldn’t have severe penalties for people who do the swatting but the core fault lies in our elected representatives being too corrupt to hold telecom companies to account.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An 82-year-old YouTuber grandma was raided by police and SWATs during her live stream last night where she plays Minecraft to raise money for her grandsons cancer. Authorities brought 20 police cars⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  All cops are idiots.

  “ACAI”???

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I type an apostrophe and use print screen on a European Spanish keyboard?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Either you’re making some sort of joke that escapes me or you completely misunderstood my comment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I type an apostrophe and use print screen on a European Spanish keyboard?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re a distinct character.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thor⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This implies that Thor’s normal name should be something like MjolThor.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Japanese authorities just dropped a Minecraft map based on actual submarine topographic data, and it lets you explore the seabed from Tokyo Bay to the Mariana Trench⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Lately, when I read the news, I occasionally get this urge to go build a house at the bottom of the Mariana Trench and just live there. Now I have a straightforward way to scout out a good location.

  I’d say I should go to any old pole of inaccessibility, but I have this sneaking suspicion that whenever I showed up at Point Nemo, for example, I’d find a crowd of people there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We're not going to make it⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If it’s “natural” grass, as in, the grass is native to that area, and it doesn’t have to be watered or manicured, then it won’t have zero benefits. But I imagine you’re talking about lawn grass, which despite being alive isn’t particularly natural.

  I don’t know about artificial turf, but I imagine it’s not great for surface water. Does the water get soaked into the ground properly, or does it generate runoff?

  Soak into the ground means surface water is slowed down. It means surface water can make it down to the water table.

  Not soak into the ground means quick moving runoff that can strip nearby land.

  With house foundations and roads, and even lawns, and so on, we keep reducing the area where water can properly soak into soil. Our soils suffer. Our water tables suffer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Haxxed⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I remember once while debating religion, Sam Harris making a point about how, when sharing certain beliefs, people pay an immediate price when they talk about them. The one in particular is that Elvis is still alive.

  He wasn’t specifically talking about conspiracy theories, but it made me think about them, nonetheless. If I did my math right, were Elvis still alive, he’d be 91 years old today. So, it’s far, far more likely that Elvis is alive than it is that the Earth is flat.

  Flat earthers do pay that sort of price, but I don’t think we ridicule them enough, compared to how much more ridiculous their views are than the people who think Elvis is still alive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it weird that I cringe whenever someone calls my name and I avoid using peoples names when talking to them?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I suspect that blindness changes the rules and expectations by quite a lot, so most of my advice would fly out of the window.

  However, I do personally have a problem with remembering names, and so I have one bit of advice that I think is relevant.

  there’s no polite way for me to say “hi, who are you again?”

  My advice is that, if you think you have, say, a 60% chance of getting their name right, just say that name. If you get their name wrong, they’ll probably correct you, but if you’re anything like me, when you think it’s 60%, the odds are actually much higher.

  That is actually what I do, personally, as a person who is bad with names. I realized that I used to mentally punish myself when I messed up a person’s name, but conversely, when somebody else messed up my name, I didn’t care and immediately forgave them. Basically, I was holding myself to an insane standard that I didn’t hold anybody else to.

  So, instead, if I think I more likely than not know the name, then I say it. I’ve only had one person get upset with me in all the time I’ve been doing this. It’s a person who I used to run into fairly frequently, like once every couple of months, but I seemed to have a mental block on his name specifically, and I simply couldn’t remember it no matter what I did.

  My only other advice is to be careful about letting people know you can identify them by odor. It depends on the odor and the person, but some people could probably be offended by that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it weird that I cringe whenever someone calls my name and I avoid using peoples names when talking to them?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  For most people, their own name is one of their favorite sounds in the world. If my friends didn’t call me by my name, I wouldn’t think we were as close of friends.

  If you know somebody’s name, it’s really good and normal to greet them using their name. Even if you only say their name during the greeting, it will improve relationships and moods with just that. It’s so important that I would even recommend that you “fake it ‘till you make it” in this case. Even if it feels awkward, start greeting people in person by saying something like, “Hi Steve,” or whatever similar greeting feels comfortable to you.

  You can use people’s names more that that, but it’s a skill how to use names without being too weird. So if you’re not used to it, start with greetings.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scumbag Brain⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are ways to mitigate these things.

  If there are things that you want to remember, you can use strategies to help you remember. For rote memorization, there are all sorts of mnemonics. You can find ones that work for you. There are techniques to help you remember names, for example.

  And my favorite method to remember something that needs to be done is to assume you’ll forget it and do something that makes it much harder to forget. The example everybody knows is the bookmark. Most people won’t remember the page number they were reading, so they put a bookmark in, and don’t even try to remember. You can do similar things, like if you don’t want to forget something for work the next day, you can put it inside your work shoe.

  Forgetting something that you want to forget is probably the harder thing. But I think mindfulness meditation helps. A lot of times, the thing that you want to forget is something that you’re intentionally thinking about, despite what you say you want to do. Mindfulness meditation can help you just let go of those thoughts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Any Card⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The magician vs. the pickpocketer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anyone feeling like doesn't belong anywhere?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I can’t say anything about the general culture of Spain or the Netherlands, but I am an American who lived in Japan for a while and I have had similar thoughts.

  My advice is to stop worrying about integrating like this. I’m not saying to stop integrating more. You’re a human so that is almost inevitable. It is the worrying that is the problem, not the integrating.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨dont do it⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know how legit this is, but I heard that datacenters also where people store their catalytic converters when they change to electric vehicles.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Best Friend 🫂⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, it sounds like dogs are man’s best friend, and horses are that other one who thinks they’re good friends with man, but it turns out that man was just using horses like a tool and telling horses that a friend would carry all of man’s stuff and would fight for man, and man is always sending horses out to buy stuff without ever paying horses back. Man is actually a bullying horses!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Think Bold⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh they’re not my children. The neighbors keep dropping them off. They said somebody has to look after them while everybody else is out fighting wolves. Fortunately, when the parents came to pick up their children, nobody asked about those three, so I guess it all worked out in the end.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Think Bold⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Recently, I seem to have a problem that there are too many wolves around. I’ve lost three children this month alone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨North America contains some of the longest continuous decididous forest records on the planet.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This is so outrageous that I find it hard to believe. The cost of the entire US Forest Service must be minuscule, especially if you compare it to cost of waging unnecessary, illegal, and unethical wars all over the planet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Playbird⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There was an anime this year that had a mermaid character who refused to eat fish because she is half fish.

  And all of the other characters just acted like that made total sense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Playbird⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  A lot of owls will prey on other birds.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Struggle⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It wouldn’t be surprising if a person who was drinking too little water was also getting too little sleep and too little exercise, so they could have multiple sources for the same symptoms.