cecilkorik
@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca
- Comment on I balance my checkbook every day. I manage my bank acount . Why does the goverment have so much problems with this? I get large payouts and such but it always seem they are in the neg?? 2 days ago:
You’re trying to use logic to understand it but you also have to understand that the only actual logic about is the logic we’ve intentionally applied to it, by choice. Money only has the meaning we give it.
It makes more sense when you realize it’s all fiction. It’s just a game we play our whole lives because so many of us are very competitive and the ones who aren’t still have to compete against the ones who are, and at the highest levels of national policy they’re not even playing the same game anyway. They’re using it to metagame against other countries.
- Comment on Relooted - Game made by South Africans has been bombarded by right-wingers 1 week ago:
Free speech issues are not relevant because it’s a private company. Free speech is about limiting the government’s ability to control speech, companies are always free to do so for their own reasons on their own platforms. While that can be problematic when you don’t know whether the government is leaning on the companies behind the scenes, what the first amendment is really written to prevent is the overt fascist gestapo tactics the Trump administration is now using to bully their critics.
It is important to understand the constitution and why it was written, so people can act accordingly. It’s especially important when the government is not acting accordingly.
- Comment on Relooted - Game made by South Africans has been bombarded by right-wingers 1 week ago:
I am not a fan of platformers and puzzles, in general, and am not too interested in this concept specifically. But I may end up buying it out of spite for hateful people. I also suggest taking a peek at their previous game Semblance which, although also a platformer, looks genuinely sort of novel to me (granted, as I said, I am not a fan of platformers in general so maybe it is in fact not unique at all). Feel free to take my thoughts with a large grain of salt, this is not really my area of expertise.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
True, that’s what I was trying to imply when I said it’s necessary to progress. I suppose someone could maybe devise a mod to provide evidence to the contrary, but I’m pretty sure the starter deck pool simply wouldn’t have enough scaling to survive at higher ascension levels.
That said, I would absolutely love some kind of mechanic that allows you to control the contents of the overall pool to some limited degree as well. (Too much freedom would essentially trivialize the game and I’m not sure if there’s any mechanic that would provide effective counterplay to a literally stacked deck)
- Comment on 1 week ago:
Absolutely. The reason for this is that as you get to understand the mechanics more you’ll naturally start adopting higher risk play which provides access to higher potential rewards, and that is in some ways necessary to progress, and also really incredibly satisfying when it pays off. But the risks will bite you more often, which then feels like you’re just “being worse at the game”. The progression and scaling mechanics of games like these basically force you to adopt riskier strategies to overcome the challenges that higher levels of play bring.
The really experienced high level players do a very delicate balancing act of min/maxing to do get the absolute most they can out of the minimum level of risk they need to realistically have a sensible chance of success. Finding that sweet spot in the ocean of randomness is the real skill, and people will all have their own different sweet spot of risk vs reward, but in almost all cases there will always be a significant risk of losing because that’s just how the game is balanced especially for higher level play. Luck and trying to make perfect decisions with imperfect information are always a factor.
- Comment on what advice can you give me to try and mend a broken friendship so we don't interrupt each other or yell at each other while trying to solve our issues? 2 weeks ago:
Analyzing your own feelings through the lens of stoicism may help. I’m not saying you have to live by the philosophy but it may help you decide which of your feelings actually make any logical sense, and that may help inform whether it’s worth destroying a friendship over them.
- Comment on Why do people call it “woke”? 2 weeks ago:
No that’s quite accurate, they are against antifa. For example, Fox News hates antifa. They regularly call them a terrorist organization, use them as a pejorative or a bogeyman to dismiss protests or opinions. One could reasonably conclude they are very anti-antifa, making them anti-anti-fascist. This is indeed a double negative, which can be confusing and even misleading. If you seek to clarify the situation by removing the “anti-anti-” double negative, what does that make them?
… that’s correct, “fascist”.
Does that clarify things at all? Yes, I think it does. Interesting.
- Comment on What is the origin of the whole "X destroys and humilates Y" genre of debate videos? 2 weeks ago:
…using this one simple trick!
- Comment on How does the Chinese government even work 2 weeks ago:
At the end of the day all governments are desperately afraid of making people angry (at them), from the healthiest democracy to the most totalitarian dictatorship, because the people are always the overwhelming majority, creating all the goods and services, creating the surplus that the rich and powerful exploit and enjoy, and therefore ultimately holding all the real power no matter how much legal, policing and enforcement structure is built around them. Some governments are just extremely creative at making people forget that or preventing them from learning it in the first place, while finding ways to manage their expectations to either convince them to be happy enough, or to make sure they’re always going to be angry at somebody else (or each other), or some combination of the two. They usually turn to the latter when they fail at the former. When they fail at both, it tends to become a revolution.
- Comment on Why is insulting people for their state (Florida) ok, but not gender or race? 3 weeks ago:
I regret attempting to answer your question in good faith. I should’ve known you’d be an asshole about it. All your other comments on this thread are asshole replies too. Fuck off, loser.
- Comment on Why is insulting people for their state (Florida) ok, but not gender or race? 3 weeks ago:
This is an overgeneralization. It is not always okay to insult someone for their state. In fact, I would argue that it is only rarely “ok” and that requires certain rather specific conditions to be the case.
People often do it without it being fully okay, because not everybody agrees exactly what these conditions are, and that creates an unwinnable situation where you’re guaranteed to offend somebody, and some people decide that is acceptable. Is this is a “majority rules” situation where if the majority are not offended it is okay? Not really, but many people (perhaps even the majority) treat it that way.
I would offer to describe some examples of the sort of conditions that apply, but doing so is fraught and dangerous, not just because nobody agrees universally, but also because anything I could possibly say about someone’s state, someone else will invariably chime in and try to apply the same logic to gender or race. They will use it as an excuse to justify racism and sexism as if they are simply being reasonable. It is a trap and I will not fall into it.
Instead I will offer you some questions that you can use for yourself to decide what conditions you might think should apply. And then you can feel free to apply them or not. I’m not your dad. None of these are absolute anyway, they are always on a sliding scale, there are always situational elements and not every situation is going to be the same.
- Does a person choose to live in a state? Were they born there, and did they have a choice about that? If they do live there, would they choose something different given the opportunity? Is it plausible that they might get such an opportunity eventually?
- Does a person sometimes insult their own state? Is it okay when they do it? Is it a joke when they do or are they serious? Familiarity breeds contempt, but sometimes we just need to vent about our own situation, and that doesn’t mean it’s automatically okay for others to do the same or double-down, or sometimes you are welcome to play along. How do you know the difference?
- Could the target of the insults be interpreted to be directed at the state’s government, law enforcement, education or other specific state-level systems rather than an individual or the state’s population as a whole? These sort of things probably qualify more as free speech rather than hate speech.
- Comment on If you argue for a cause like affordable housing for everyone, is it necessarily hypocritical if you also own investment properties? 4 weeks ago:
It’s not hypocritical if you are providing affordable housing for someone.
Despite the kneejerk hate towards landlords lately, which is largely justified due to the extreme levels of rent-seeking behavior evident in today’s completely unaffordable rental market, affordable rental housing is actually a legitimate market and there needs to be availability to meet that demand. Renting on its own is not a crime. Some people even prefer it. It can provide significantly more flexibility and less responsibility, stress and hassle, at a lower monthly cost than home ownership IF (and ONLY IF) you have a good landlord, either because they choose to be or because the laws require them to be, which is not so much the case with most of the laws.
So for me those are the dividing lines. If you are not:
- A slumlord providing “affordable” rental housing by leaving your tenants in unsafe, unsanitary, and unmaintained properties.
- Demanding luxury-priced rents for an extremely modest property with no features that can be considered a luxury and no intention of maintaining anything to luxurious standards.
Then maybe it’s not hypocritical. And I don’t mean just taking the highest price you can find on rentfaster and posting your property for that price because “that’s what the market price is” I mean actually thinking about whether that price you’re asking is actually affordable for real human beings living in your area.
Basically, if you treat your tenants like actual human beings with the understanding they may be struggling to get by, trying to raise a family, working as much as they can even when work is not reliable, and dealing with all life throws at them, and you don’t treat these things as immediately evictable offenses like a battleaxe over their head just waiting to drop, then yes, you absolutely can argue for a cause like affordable housing for everyone – because you are helping provide it.
If, after contributing to legitimate maintenance expenses and reserves, you are making a tiny profit, barely breaking even or even losing money renting, good. If you are treating it as a cash cow that funds your entire life, fuck you.
- Comment on Google will not be forced to sell Chrome, despite its near-monopoly, as its dominance is not 'sufficiently attributable to its illegal conduct' 4 weeks ago:
Well you see after being the shot the man decided to stop breathing, therefore his death is not sufficiently attributable to your single bullet.
- Comment on Rogue.site is a new worker-owned, reader-funded gaming site 4 weeks ago:
Yahtzee and his coworkers and team recently escaped from The Escapist (pun intended) to form a new independent group called Second Wind, too. I’m enjoying the direction that gaming media is going. Corporate media can mercilessly suck all value out of the industry until it withers and dies, and the names and legacies of these places will die with it, but they can’t destroy the talent if the community are still behind them.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
Getting old sucks, it’s only preferable because the alternative sucks worse.
- Comment on Centipede Simulator Steam Page is now live 5 weeks ago:
Thanks I hate it.
- Comment on Four wheels good, two wheels bad: why are there no exciting cycling games? 5 weeks ago:
- Comment on Why don't they have simpler names for brain disorders, where perhaps even the person suffering the disorder might be able to remember the term themself? 5 weeks ago:
Nothing wrong with asking the question and I’m sorry if my response sounded dismissive or hostile, I actually think you asked a great question and your heart is definitely in the right place. I think we should do a lot more discussion and education around brain diseases and brain aging, if we spent as much time trying to understand how natural intelligence works as we do how artificial intelligence works these days, maybe we’d have a lot less chaos in the world.
- Comment on Why don't they have simpler names for brain disorders, where perhaps even the person suffering the disorder might be able to remember the term themself? 5 weeks ago:
Is “senile” not simple enough for you? The problem is, it’s maligned because its too loosely applied and becomes used as an insult. So it’s really a no-win scenario. Make it too simple and it becomes clinically useless and people will throw it around like an insult, make it too complex and it becomes only useful in clinical settings and average people can’t remember it. Is there a middle ground? I’m not sure. Alzheimer’s and dementia/demented are kind of in the middle, but they both get used inappropriately and are clinically useless, so they end up being a worst of both worlds.
- Comment on Did Ukraine provoke Russia by building a dam? 1 month ago:
He is misinformed or deliberately revising history to fit his narrative. Ukraine’s damming of the canal was done after the annexing of Crimea, and in direct response to it. The other relevant dam, the Kakhovka Dam was built by the Soviets in the 1950s. It was destroyed (after a few failed attempts) by Russian demolition charges, though they continue to deny it.
There were arguments from Ukraine about the continued Russian occupation of their Sevastopol naval base in Crimea, which Ukraine wanted to end. That was the real provocation that Russia could not tolerate, but that is not so sympathetic of a story as saying the “Ukrainians cut off the water to the poor independence-minded Crimeans” /s
Of course, if someone is going to wholesale believe one side or the other I doubt there is any way of convincing them otherwise, but the facts simply do not fit the Russian narrative. If, indeed Ukraine “damming the canal” was such a great provocation that they had to start a war over it, why then did Russia subsequently destroy Kakhovka dam during said war which dried up the canal anyway? Of course they claim they did not, because it is a war crime, but it’s pretty absurd to pretend that Ukraine had the means to do it given the dam and surrounding area was very thoroughly under Russian control at all times.
- Comment on At Gamescom, it felt like the industry now has a plan: make games quicker | Opinion 1 month ago:
*me looking at most of the graphical-atrocity indie games I play non-stop still being in “Early Access” after 10+ years* Yes, games taking too long to make definitely is the problem. Work faster, not smarter. Sounds like a winning strategy AAA-studios, good luck!
- Comment on Why are drivers for food delivery apps so often listed wrong? 1 month ago:
That’s fucking amazingly hilarious(ly bad) but mostly just hilarious. The systemic enshittification of the entire concept of service jobs is basically complete at this point. As an anonymous, replaceable delivery drone nobody cares about your name not even the company employing you just, like, leave it empty it’ll use the default name or some shit and get to work, deliveries are waiting.
- Comment on How does one join a terror group? Like example ISIS , do people go to a secret website sign up and get provided flags, bomb parts, or whatever? Or is it just a person saying what they did was for ISIS 1 month ago:
Your imagination is oversimplifying the process. It’s not “this morning I decided to be a terrorist so I signed up for jihad on their website and later that evening I was planting IEDs on tanks”. It’s a gradual process of recruitment and radicalization, testing and evaluation over months or years, with many intermediate steps and countless small tests of loyalty along the way as you work your way into the organizations and then up within them. Trust is not given it is earned. Your first “job” will probably be from someone who acts like they’re just being social and having conversations with you as a friend, and they’ll likely to encourage you to do something like parroting their propaganda on other places on social media, and as you do they’ll judge how well you follow instructions and how resourceful you are and might start giving you hints of other things you can do and see if you take the bait and judge how you react to those suggestions.
- Comment on Where has the tax money "saved" in uk austerity gone? 1 month ago:
During the 2008 crisis, QE made the debt a problem for some people.
I read this as “Queen Elizabeth made the debt a problem for some people” and was struggling to figure out what she had done or said in 2008 that influenced this, before I eventually realized you meant “Quantitative easing”
- Comment on Is it everywhere? 1 month ago:
This is like a running joke they do. They reuse the sounds on purpose. The Wilhelm Scream is everywhere when you know how to listen for it.
- Comment on Lemmy.World blocks VPN? 1 month ago:
Because you have to choose who to trust. You can’t “trust no one”. You’re currently trusting your VPN provider. Are you willing to trust lemmy.world? No? Fine, then don’t. Set up your own instance, or use another one you are willing to trust, or find one that allows your VPN that you trust. No one promises these would be easy decisions but you’re going to have to make these choices. A web without any trust is a useless cesspool. Believe me, it’s been tried.
- Comment on Why is the spellchecker in Firefox so abysmal? 1 month ago:
Such as?
- Comment on Steam Survey for July 2025 shows Linux approaching 3% 1 month ago:
Is “Stop Killing Games” also dramatic? Maybe we need to be dramatic to accomplish actual change. Thanks for the backhanded compliment though, I guess.
- Comment on Steam Survey for July 2025 shows Linux approaching 3% 1 month ago:
The only way to do that is to use Linux anyway, ditch Windows, and give them the middle finger until they make their game available. No amount of asking politely or screaming obnoxiously will make them care if people just continue using Windows because they feel like they “have to” play this game and keep paying them money, because all they care about is money. Only when they can clearly see their position is losing them money (3% is probably not clear enough for many of them but time will tell) are they going to change their behavior. There’s nothing else that motivates them more than seeing money slipping through their fingers.
Depending on white knights like Valve and CDPR to ride to our rescue is good but they can’t do this on their own either, and in fact they’ve already done very close to as much as they reasonably can. They need our help, we consumers are the ones who are statistically not doing our part. We need to recognize that we have the bulk of the agency here and we need to start to use it.
We have to choose what matters more to us, the future of playing video games on our own terms or letting the developer dictate how much we need to spend and what rights we need to give up to able to play a popular video game right now. We’re not talking about something we need to live. This is a choice we can make. Will enough people choose the future instead of immediate gratification? I don’t know, available evidence doesn’t paint a particularly reassuring picture, but I never am willing to give up on hope.
- Comment on Whatever happened to the blockchain/smart contract 'revolution' we were told about? 2 months ago:
Vaporware turns out to be vapor. Shocking.