Kichae
@Kichae@kbin.social
Astronomer & video game data scientist with repressed anger
- Comment on An admin deleted all my uploads and I have no clue why 1 year ago:
if abusive admins on a power trip will just arbitralily wipe my stuff “accidentially” whenever they feel like.
You've jumped to a lot of conclusions here.
You're using a website that's operated by volunteers, that's seen a ton of abuse from spammers and bots, that's run on software that's pre-version-1 and that lacks advanced mod tools, and that likely has an admin team that's using some hacked together third party scripts or tools to try and identify bad actors. It's not only possible, but entirely reasonable, that one of those tools may have falsely identified you as a spam account, and someone either just ran a script that banned a bunch of people, or got into a flow state and just hit the wrong button out of habit.
Pointing fingers and accusing others of bad behaviour out of pure speculation while you're both stomping your feet and having a fit because you feel hurt while simultaneously telling others that the lens they're using is "pure speculation" is... Not productive, to put it mildly.
- Comment on SAG-AFTRA Pushes For Another Video Game Strike 1 year ago:
So ultimately, it's about the union, and the celebrities are a key way the union leverages its members to get game studios to sign union contracts.
If studios want the big celebrity actor to say 5 or 6 lines in its game, then they need to sign with SAG-AFTRA, and that means accepting some rather strict restrictions on hiring on-union VAs for the other rolls.
- Comment on All your favorite Cyberpunk 2077 mods are disabled in Phantom Liberty, CDPR says 1 year ago:
Especially when they can just type in a provocative prompt and get 500 words of generic rage bait in a second.
- Comment on Does it matter if I skip sponsored ad segments in YouTube videos? 1 year ago:
They're referring to "Let me stop talking about the topic of this video to tell you about Shadow Shark, thr VPN Game" type sponsorships. Is YouTube planning on disabling the scrub bar now or what?
- Comment on UAW strike Day 4: GM threatens to send 2,000 workers home, Ford cuts 600 jobs 1 year ago:
Imagine you’re Biden and you hear about this railroad strike. Your advisors are telling you if the strike goes through how many rail passengers are stranded in the middle of nowhere, how much food is just going to go to waste and not make it to various towns, which factories manufacturing hospital equipment will be without material and unable to continue production.
Strikes are supposed to be inconvenient. A strike that is not inconvenient garners workers no leverage. Interfering with a strike because it is inconvenient is union busting.
On top of a gigantic economic impact there could be deaths associated with the strike.
There are deaths associated with a lot of things that the administration is not acting on. Why was this one special?
Imagine you’re that guy and have to make the call to say nope, I don’t care, the strike continues.
Imagine you're that guy, and your call isn't to tell the rail companies to negotiate in good faith and get the strike dealt with.
He sided with the companies, not the workers. He did so publicly, and with the weight of the state.
There's no nuance here. He interfered with workers rifhtgs to strike and to negotiate, favouring business over workers.
- Comment on Wreck the economy because it only works for the billionaire class. 1 year ago:
It's not sealioning when you say something incomprehensible and someone else asks you WTF you tried to say
- Comment on YouTube suspends monetisation of Russell Brand's channel 1 year ago:
without any convictions or similar
Even with a conviction, seems to me like it's a question of hosting him or not. Demonitising him is Google trying to have their cake and eat it, too.
- Comment on Unity Apologizes For Runtime Fee Policy, Promises To Alter Plan This Week 1 year ago:
That's just the system. This is what happens when people confuse commerce with capitalism: They think that capitalism is being rewarded for doing commerce better. Instead, capitalism is about leveraging ownership of property and underpaying workers in order to get money for free.
And the thing about money is that it's really just a proxy for power. When you only have enough of it to eek out a comfortable life (or less), you don't really notice, because all of your power goes in to achieving or maintaining that acceptably good life (or hanging on for dear life trying to survive), but once your needs are comfortably and handidly met, money is entirely about being able to make other people do whatever you want. And the more money you have, the more things you can get them to do, or the more of them that you can get to do what you want.
And if you've managed to be one of the lucky ones who just get free money for owning shit, then you have the power at your fingertips to try to grow your power over others exponentially, while still doing no honest work in your days. And if you're a shitty person who gets off on all of this, that's exactly what you'll do.
The wealthy are insufferably greedy leeching assholes because one does not become wealthy without being greedy, leeching off of others, and being an insufferable asshole.
- Comment on Creators of Slay the Spire will migrate their next game to a new engine if Unity doesn't completely revert their changes 1 year ago:
Unity: Successfully implemented a product strategy that floods the market with game developers that know how to use its product.
You, an insufferable prick: "Why would they use a product they could find ready-trained developers for when they could use a niche product no one has any skills in??!?"
- Comment on Star Trek Day 2023 Special 1 year ago:
Jerry O’Connell looks like he desperately wants to be anywhere else
He's worried that people will discover his secret identity, and distracted by trying to find his way home to his native universe.
- Comment on Shrinkflation is out of control 1 year ago:
Yeah. One of my favourite restaurants closed a couple months ago because they just couldn't justify charging more for food, but their suppliers sure could.
- Comment on LTT: What do we do now? 1 year ago:
And employers are never abusive.
- Comment on Why You Should Not Kill House Centipedes 1 year ago:
It was fall, 2002. It was the start of my 2nd year of university, and I had just moved into a basement apartment with my new roommates, who I'd known from residence the previous year. It was only my 2nd year living away from home, and I hadn't adjusted to the new region of the country in any way. I was 2000 km from home. My roommates all grew up within a few hundred km of school.
So, when I looked up one afternoon and saw... THAT clinging to the hallway ceiling, I didn't know what to make of it. We have centipedes back home, but they're small, narrow, and live under rocks. Nothing about them suggested that what I was looking at then was related to them (other than that they both had way, way too many legs). So, I was... concerned, but mostly that I'd meet these alien things from this sometimes alien feeling place regularly.
I grabbed some tupperware so that I could capture it and ask my roommates about it, because surely they'd know what it was. But when I brought the plastic container up to meet the ceiling, the thing made off down the hallway like it was trying to win the 100 metre dash. After several attempts at trying to encapsulate the thing, I accidentally squished it between the edge of the container and the ceiling. This was, at least, enough to actually get it out of the house.
On my way to the back door, I passed one of my roommate's rooms, and poked my head in to acquire about the still squirming hellspawn hanging out of the plastic tub, expecting to discover the name of this fell beast, but all he did was back away in disgust, declaring much more loudly than I think he intended that he didn't know.
So, lacking a proper name, we just called them "evil bugs". Thankfully, we only found a few more of them over the next few years.
I don't miss Ontario.
- Comment on The Elite's War on Remote Work Has Nothing to Do with Productivity 1 year ago:
Most of them are not. The reality is, workers in the US are more or less equally split between big businesses and small-to-medium businesses, and outside of the States it skews much more toward small-to-medium. These are companies that often have less than amicable relationships with their landlords, because landlords have this nasty tendency of acting like landlords.
On top of that, much commercial real estate is owned by REITs, which are managed from the biggest cities, and aren't really entires small and medium businesses get to have real relationships with, any more than an apartment renter gets to have a relationship with their residential REIT.
They're not buddies. They don't even have a direct line of contact.
- Comment on The Elite's War on Remote Work Has Nothing to Do with Productivity 1 year ago:
From what I've seen, every push to have everyone return to the office has either been that they just want control over employees or they want butts in seats because the seats aren't free.
Yes, exactly.
Everyone keeps pointing to the real estate issue, but the simple fact of the matter is that most office-based employers don't own any commercial real estate. It's a great theory as to why the media has been promoting back-to-office stories, but it doesn't explain why employers are actually doing it.
Raw, unmitigated distrust of and disrespect for employees, though...
- Comment on Bill Maher Bashes ‘Barbie’ as a “Preachy, Man-Hating Zombie Lie” 1 year ago:
Feminism left men behind
I'm sorry, but WTF? I don't know how you look at feminism with any kind of understanding and walk away with that impression.
The fact that, as men, we've collectively ignored feminism's every attempt to help us, while whining that women are helping themselves and each other, doesn't mean that feminism has left us behind. It means we've refused help and to help ourselves.
- Comment on Bayonetta director Hideki Kamiya thinks Japanese devs should be proud of 'JRPG' 1 year ago:
Those are action RPGs.
- Comment on Capitalism indoctrination in progress. 1 year ago:
Indeed.
It's telling that "basic dignity" or "managers who aren't dicks" didn't make the list.
- Comment on We’re now finding out the damaging results of the mandated return to the office–and it’s worse than we thought 1 year ago:
Preaching to the choir. I left my last job because they mandated return to office so that I could work remotely with teams in Montreal and Paris.
The only difference between doing that in my home office and doing it from their office was they could watch over my shoulder from there.
It's not about managing remote teams. It's about controlling workers, and those are very different things. These people are worried that you might be getting your laundry done between work tasks, or that you're actually working 5 jobs, or other ridiculous bullshit, not about whether you're achieving your assigned tasks.
Remote work is cheaper, more efficient, and leads to happier workers, and they'd rather wreck the first two to ensure the don't have the third.
- Comment on We’re now finding out the damaging results of the mandated return to the office–and it’s worse than we thought 1 year ago:
I'm sure that's part of it, but most office-based companies do not own commercial real-estate. They're renters of it. Having workers return to the office does nothing for the value of their property.
While it does give management a sense that they're paying rent on those long-term commercial leases for a reason, it's pretty clear that the real value for them is in being able to directly see employees when they're not in-camera. Managers and ownership have demonstrated that they do not trust their employees, and pulling them back into the office is much more about feeling like they can control their lessers than it is about anything else.
- Comment on I think minors need a union, may help with the safety issues at the work place 1 year ago:
I can’t fathom why a civilized country
Making some bold assumptions there, I think.
- Comment on Switch 2 would arrive in the second half of 2024 and development kits are already out 1 year ago:
The Switch has a screen? I've never really noticed mine.
- Comment on "We Didn't Know It Was The End": Jonathan Frakes On Directing Star Trek Discovery Series Finale 1 year ago:
Burnham is raised by Vulcans which is used when it suits the plot (then she’s extremely analytical and objective) but then suddenly turns into an emotional mess when they want to portray drama. That just feels … off
No, that part feels very, very on to me. Burnham was a human girl who was witness to family being brutally slaughtered (as far as she knew/could tell) who was then placed in the care of a Vulcan man who liked living as a sociology experiment. This is a person who is traumatized from a relatively young age, and who has no idea how to cope with her feelings. She's never received therapy, only more psychological abuse.
The issue I ended up having with the show is that the show itself never addresses this. It's actually pretty clearly the setup for the entire series, but no one ever acknowledges that Michael needs help, no one ever tries to get her any, and, in the end, she never gets the help she needs. They took what could and should have been a character arc about healing from abuse and just turned it into "SMG's pretty good at crying".
- Comment on Elon Musk wanting to remove dim theme from twitter 1 year ago:
He just needs to chew on bigger, thicker wires. The kinds with beefier plugs on the end of them.
- Comment on Strange New Worlds 2x08 was one of the best Star Trek episodes ever 1 year ago:
I feel it hid to much information just to be able to give a twist in the end
I don't think it was much of a twist. Between the doctor's actions in The Broken Circle (using the protocol 12 combat enhancer to fight his way through a ship of Klingons with Nurse Chapel, as recapped at the start of the show), the Special Ops Andorian trying to recruit him to the mission (and the doctor declaring that his days of doing such things were behind him), the re-introduction of the P12 green vial, and the repeated aggressive physical contact between M'Benga and Dah'Ruk, it was pretty well spelled out for us before the end of the episode.
- Comment on Why SAG-AFTRA’s Streaming Revenue Sharing Proposal for Casts Was Flatly Rejected by AMPTP 1 year ago:
Yeah. "We spent some money on something we assessed and determined to be a sure thing" is what they call risk. Meanwhile, opportunity costs for actors are never considered a valid concern. The risk of taking a bad gig over one that turns into a long term job exists for every everyone in the industry, and they're not insured against lost income from taking the wrong job.
Meanwhile, studios never fail to consider the opportunity costs in finding projects. Are you profitable, but the studio thinks something else would be more profitable? Well, better hope there's a project that's actively losing money that they can cancel, or else you'll be on the chopping block.
- Comment on ‘Futurama’ Review: New Episodes on Hulu Are Fun Fan Service, but Not Much More (And That’s OK) 1 year ago:
My guess is either they don't have the funding to spit out a full 24 minutes anymore, and they never figured out how to write for shorter, or the lack of commercial breaks aren't forcing them to hit certain milestones in the episode. But I really don't know.
- Comment on ‘Futurama’ Review: New Episodes on Hulu Are Fun Fan Service, but Not Much More (And That’s OK) 1 year ago:
The self-referential aspect of the episode was a bit much, but I was actually buoyed by the episode on the whole. The content was kind of meh, but the tone was right. The Comedy Central episodes always seemed to suffer from tonal issues.
Now, the pacing felt a bit weird in this one, but I feel like a lot of TV is weirdly and poorly paced now.
- Comment on Samuel L. Jackson Claims Strange Film Editing May Have Cost Him Academy Award Consideration 1 year ago:
But he’s also operating at some of the highest levels of privilege, wealth, fame, and adoration. And that’s not enough for him…?
He's talking about the Academy Awards. You know, little gold statues for being famous enough at playing make believe to be noticed, and and good enough at it to be considered as one of the best of the well known.
If there's anything the rich, privileged actors can publicly whinge about, it's probably this.
- Comment on Lucasfilm Sued in Trademark Dispute Over Backpack in ‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ 1 year ago:
Oh, it sounds like that's not the issue. It's that they're using clips from the movie featuring the backpack in anoyher backpack company's commercials.
This isn't "you used our product without permission", but "you're using our product to directly market a competing product".