tburkhol
@tburkhol@lemmy.world
- Comment on Why not serve fried chicken on Juneteenth? How is it different from serving corned beef on St. Patrick’s day? 1 week ago:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coon_Chicken_Inn Black people and chicken was like leprechauns and breakfast cereal for a while.
- Comment on How many people actually want fully on-site IT jobs? 1 week ago:
My brain definitely focuses better with environmental cues. I mean, I can work just about anywhere, but if I’m not in the mood, then having the environmental cues displaces alternatives. Subjectively, I feel more productive at work. Never had a really bad commute, so I was never motivated to try to set up a ‘work-only’ space at home, but I’d only do a 70 mile one-way drive for very special occasions.
- Comment on If I put a gallon of 10% cider vinegar in a shallow pan and let 1/2 gallon evaporate, will that make it double its strength? 4 months ago:
acetic acid is almost as volatile as water, and the atmosphere contains a lot less of it. If you evaporate vinegar, you’re likely to lose about as much - maybe more - of the acid than the water. So, evaporation is probably not a good way to concentrate vinegar.
- Comment on 'We have no rights.' Frustrated with California wage laws, Moonstone Bistro in Redding cuts lunch service 5 months ago:
If he’s not getting paid enough working for himself, he should go work for someone else and get all those breaks and overtime.
- Comment on Why do we have an internal monologue? 5 months ago:
I do wonder if not having to ‘hear’ words changes the rhythm of reading.
Hadn’t thought of this…what’s your take on poetry, especially meter-forward? Like, Robert W Service or Robert Frost, I feel would be less interesting if they didn’t have their beat.
I don’t do voices or accents when I read. Everything is in the same ‘voice,’ which isn’t quite the same as my spoken voice. My internal voice enunciates much better and slightly lower pitch. It’s more like the voice I wish I had than the voice I do have. :)
- Comment on If your instance is defederated from another instance, would it be sockpuppeting to create another account to view posts from that instance? 6 months ago:
No, that’s the way the fediverse is supposed to work. It would be sockpuppeting for both of your accounts, say A@A.social and B@b.social, to have a conversation with each other on a third instance, say !politics@c.social, with which both a & b are federated.
- Comment on Light No Fire Announcement Trailer 6 months ago:
Valheim, but I can ride a dragon? Keeping my fingers crossed.
- Comment on US Question. Will the people that have to wait until 70 to get Social Security ever get what they paid in to it back out before they die since men's life expectancy is only 77 now? 7 months ago:
If you make it to 62, your life expectancy is 21 more years. that mean 21*0.7 = 14.7 years worth of social security payments. Full benefit at age 67 gets you 16 years worth of payments. If they’d raise full retirement age to 70, you’d only collect 13 years of payments.
- Comment on US Question. Will the people that have to wait until 70 to get Social Security ever get what they paid in to it back out before they die since men's life expectancy is only 77 now? 7 months ago:
In the US, social security is a tax on poor people earning less than~$160k. That’s the bottom 90% of earners.
The top 10% of earners collect about half of the country’s personal income. Each of them does have to pay SS tax on the first $160k of earned income, but clearly there’s a huge pool of income that doesn’t pay into social security.
- Comment on The death of ownership: Companies are taking away your ability to actually own the stuff you buy 7 months ago:
Back in the day, you weren’t allowed to plug a private phone into AT&T’s network. You had to rent phones from Ma Bell, for something like $10/month, back when $10 would fill a gas tank.
Between that and Columbia Music Club, so when Netflix was still sending DVDs in the mail, I decided I’d rather buy one movie a month than rent 4. Ripping them wasn’t so easy in those days, but there was already library organizers. Now, it’s like 20 years later and I’ve got something like 250 movies I can watch any time. Mostly good ones, now spread over four different streamers, if they’re even out there. Plenty to keep me entertained.
It’s a corollary of Pratchett/Vimes “boots theory.” More expensive to buy stuff, and the first few years you go without a lot, but in the long run, you get enough for less.
- Comment on I'm not asking to be rich. 7 months ago:
Excess money may not buy happiness, but lack of money causes a lot of unhappiness.
The study you’re referring to was basically that. There has been some follow-up, including www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2016976118 that suggests any plateau, if one exists, is more like $400-500k. The latter study used continuous sampling via go.trackyourhappiness.org, where the former did retrospective, daily, binary sampling, so they’re not exactly comparable. i.e.: if you ask someone 6 times a day to rate their happiness 1-10 right then, you’re going to get different results than if you ask them whether yesterday was a good day.
There’s a whole weird thing people do where they can be quite satisfied with their life at any particular moment, but dissatisfied when asked about their life overall. I suspect that the $75k plateau is more of the latter, where the lack of plateau is more of the former.
- Comment on [deleted] 7 months ago:
Opinion arguments, like “gaming feels like a chore” require different support from fact arguments like, “the world is flat.” You absolutely can not prove the world is flat, gravity works, or birds are real with an opinion poll, but a poll will support whether newer games are less fun or Coke is better than Pepsi.
IMO, the best argument against the video is that he’s focused on old games that he still plays - he’s comparing the best of old games with whatever has just come out. I’d argue that there’s something special and unique about a game you can still play a decade later - it’s not the story, which is definitely going to get tiring after 10-20 playthroughs; it’s not the quests for the same reason. Game mechanics, decent pacing for that one-more-turn feel, and maybe just aesthetic appeal. Where would he put games like Minecraft or Valheim, both of which rely heavily on resource farming and repetitive building?
I think that many of the new, big titles have tried to capture all possible niches - part FPS, part RPG, part basebuilder - and it’s hard to make all of those seem important to the game without forcing FPS players to do basebuilding and basebuilders to do RPG. That takes away from each person’s enjoyment of their preferred mechanic and imposes tedium.
- Comment on Why the original, 1999 version of EverQuest is still one of the best MMOs to play today 7 months ago:
I have a nostalgic affection for making my own maps. I remember discovering hidden rooms based on unfilled squares of graph paper, and mapping mazes of twisty corridors, both all alike and all different. I think that translating the digital representation to physical added vividness to the imaginary worlds when they were presented as simple wireframes, 8-bit graphics, or even just text.
Today, I don’t have time for it. I would almost certainly end up visiting the same - I’m guessing - half dozen places I could keep in a mental map, decide the game is boring, and play something else. Lazy. Jaded. Spoiled. Whatever - that phase of my development from reading static books, to reading interactive text, simple avatars, now near-photorealistic animations…the phase where I enjoyed the physical crutch for imagination is just gone.
- Comment on The reason CEOs want workers to Return To Office is because they want you to quit 8 months ago:
Yeah, but you’re thinking about when the company picks people to fire. Forcing people back to the office decreases worker satisfaction across the board, and workers will respond individually. I’d argue that those highest paid will be most willing to suffer the inconvenience of commuting, regardless of their talent, so the “make working here annoying” plan will tend to retain higher paid employees while losing lower paid people through attrition. Likewise, workers are more likely to tolerate the annoyances if they don’t have any other options. Good people can more easily job-hop, so this strategy is also likely to retain the lower-performing employees while the top performers go elsewhere, not considering pay rate. Total labor costs will decline, because there’s fewer people working, but it’s not an efficient selection process.
Long story short: pissing on your employees results in a smaller, lower quality workforce.
- Comment on How is woke a religion? 9 months ago:
And does it apply only to verbal, podium speech, or also to written books and speech by people in [drag] costume.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 ended up making me regret playing. 9 months ago:
Gotta admit, I only went looking for the dragon because everyone in game said it’d be super helpful, and there’s a quest called “Gather your allies.” My talker had like 20 charisma and expertise in all the charisma skills…I resolved a lot of conflicts without violence. Disappointed to be forced into combat with the dragon by our guardian angel.
Kind of disappointed with all the interactions with our ‘guardian angel’ once their true nature was revealed. Maybe I made wrong choices, but their guidance just seemed…off. Not wrong. Not evil. Just somehow not quite right. Maybe somehow inconsistent with their revealed nature, and pushing towards ex machina, like a number of things I don’t see how I’d have discovered if they hadn’t outright told me. The dragon interaction is part of that not-quite-rightness.
I definitely found the ending to be the least satisfying part of the game. I went straight from the dragon to the final battle, and I think that sequence intensified the less-than-satisfying feeling.
- Comment on GOG Autumn Sale 9 months ago:
Own 8/10 - assuming you count Phantom Liberty different from CP; finished 7/10 (likewise PL), mostly before this decade. Some of them before 2010. I wonder if I can still find my Baldur’s Gate CDs…
I’m old.
- Comment on Why do so many Lemmy instances use weird TLDs? 9 months ago:
I hate that my brain played little riffs of both of those songs for me just by seeing their titles.
- Comment on I am LOVING Baldurs Gate 3 10 months ago:
I feel like there’s two parts. On the one hand, Larian’s engine is fantastic and allows really creative and diverse approaches to their puzzles. There’s a number of fights that feel more like puzzles than fights, because they’re nearly impossible if you just go in spells blazing, but not nearly as threatening with a little preparation. They’ve honed that engine through DOS & DOS2, so it’s much more mature than you’d get if this were a pure derivative of BG1/2. The first time I lit Shadowheart up with Spirit Guardians and dashed her around a battlefield reaping the canon fodder…I actually giggled with glee.
Then there’s the storytelling. My journal is filling up with quests & side quests, but I don’t think any of them have been the “Kill 5 orcs,” “gather 10 blood moss,” or “deliver this McGuffin” variety. The NPCs you meet tend to reappear later and react differently depending on how their previous quest ended. I suppose, technically, that’s similar to going back to the same quest-giver, rising in their ‘ranks’ toward some prize, but it doesn’t feel the same. The NPCs, even the side-quest NPCs, feel like they’re woven into the overall narrative and it makes for a much more immersive experience.
I can’t imagine how much writing, animation, and voice acting had to be done to accommodate all the choices I won’t make. Even just the times some NPC voices my gender.
- Comment on Fallout 4 has been released on GOG 10 months ago:
For $10? Hell yeah.
- Comment on Noooooo you can't make a microtransactions free game and finished too 😭😭😭 10 months ago:
The most favorable reading I can give to the “don’t expect this to be the new standard” lines is that BG3 Is special. It is an exceptional piece of art within the genre, and it will be difficult or impossible for other studios to replicate its appeal. Like, you can say that readers really enjoy The Hobbit, or The Expanse, or A Visit from the Goon Squad, but you shouldn’t expect them to be the new standard. Few fantasy books since 1937 have been as good as The Hobbit, although a lot of them have imitated its characteristics.
Viewed that way, they’re absolutely right. We’re going to continue to get a bunch of buggy, derivative crap, and we’ll keep paying for it because…what else are you going to do? Play Skyrim for the 47th time? 23rd run through Elden Ring?
- Comment on [deleted] 10 months ago:
Not in their primaries.
With so many states ridiculously gerrymandered, Republican candidates - in non-state-wide races - really only need to beat other republicans. If the Evangelical/anti-abortion block can reliably deliver around 1/3 of voters, they will reliably swing a primary. That keeps the party captured by their radicals, and keeps the country stuck with the ideology of a minority of the minority.
- Comment on When Baldur's Gate 3 came out, Steam's overall bandwidth consumption went from around 18 Tbps to 146 Tbps 10 months ago:
piqued implies a mild interest worthy of further investigation.
peaked implies interest can’t possibly get any higher, as though they were already super interested, but the ability to pan the camera eclipses all other interesting features.