I remember my child mind being blown when some clothing store my mom took me to had two giant mirrors facing each other. I guess it was so you could see how you looked with their outfits, but I was amazed by the infinite hall of me.

True. Having some reasonable photos and sending a good first message helps with that. Ask your friends of your desired gender to look at your profile. (If you have no such friends, maybe work on that, too.)

Some people just write “hey” and that’s a really poor strategy. Write something that plays off their profile.

Also don’t spend too long chatting on the app. Initial exchange, like 1-3 more volleys, clear any deal breakers, ask them out. You want to get in person so all the normal human things like body language work for you, and the siren song of new matches is somewhat muted.

I guess I’m an elder millennial now. Got the greying hair and all.

I had pretty good success on the dating apps without paying. Location is a big factor. But also, as the saying goes, “the bar for men is in hell”. I think just having a reasonable conversation and caring about her put me a tier above the average.

Of course, the apps are profit seeking machines that don’t especially want you to be happy. They can work, but they’re not trying to.

I’m pretty sure the apps algorithm didn’t think I’d click with my partner. It feels very much “pretty close”, like they wanted me to have a few dates and move on. But to everyone’s surprise we really got on, despite things that superficially looked incompatible.

They should have had cross play with windows from the start. Fuck Microsoft.

I leave my PR in draft until the checks pass. I don’t want anyone reviewing it when it’s broken.

The other day I saw some dude throw his cigarette on the ground before getting on line in front me to get carded to enter a bar. For a long moment I considered picking it up and going “hey, you dropped this” and handing it back to him.

But I didn’t, because there’s no way that ends happily.

But man, fuck people who litter.

I have a recurring fantasy of a honey pot for this sort of thing. You advertise like an exclusive doodad that no reasonable person would buy. Maybe extra-large cars. Maybe horse armor. Could be anything. Everyone who goes to buy one goes straight to therapy, and they don’t leave until they’re no longer a fucking moron. Kind of like The Good Place.

I think it was Diablo 3 (not a game I recommend) that had like “5% more damage” and “5% more fire damage” as buffs, but due to esoteric maths, the latter was significantly more impactful on the damage equation. Not a fan of that kind of secret maths in games.

I sometimes think about how things are so bad in part because there are so many people making unnecessary bad decisions. Like, just don’t buy the horse armor. Do something else.

But there are so many idiots that bad things remain profitable

I don’t think the graphics are a big part of the problem. It’s more the math.

Pillars of Eternity, for example, has it so every point of Might above 10 is 3% more damage. This is a little hard to reason about - my sword says it does 17-24 damage. So if I have 15 might, that’s 15% more damage , so the sword is now… 19-27? I had to use a calculator because I’m kind of bad at math. If I take one more point of might, my max damage becomes…28? Does it round?

This is not very quick and easy.

Now imagine instead of every point of might was just +2 damage. Or +5 damage. Much easier to reason about. If you want might to matter more for some weapons, slap a double might bonus on them. You might (pun intended) just need to scale the rest of the system around this new range of values.

I accidentally swerved a little from “impactful stats only” to “easily understood stats”, but they’re kind of related.

It’s the usual “there must be in groups for the law to protect but not bind, and out groups for the law to bind but not protect” thing as always.

They wanted small government when it suited their desires. Their desires, as conservatives, are usually bad. Pollution, exploration, segregation, etc.

“request desktop site” usually gets rid of the app nag.

I never post there anymore but there’s a lot of useful stuff from the old days.

I think if I was making a game I would really strive to make it so every upgrade is meaningful and easily noticed.

I liked pillars of eternity, but I didn’t like trying to think about if 3% more damage was even going to survive rounding.

Imagine a context where the reader is looking at the news for the first time that day. They think they missed news in the morning, perhaps the US starting aggressions, and now China has dropped another bomb.

I’m sure you can imagine such a scenario

Because I thought China had literally bombed the US for a very tense moment before I finished reading the headline. Especially because of how the words wrapped. I didn’t need that stress.

Can we please not write headlines like that when we’re on the verge of ww3 and literal bombs might be dropped on the US in the coming months?

I will continue not giving Microsoft money. Fuck them.

There’s a few strands of toxic monogamy that are pretty common. Really jealous, controlling, and with poor emotional regulation.

I’m lucky my current partner is very chill about these things. I’m still good friends with two previous partners and it’s never been an issue. We’ve all hung out together.

I was looking at the costs of raising a child the other day and I don’t know how anyone does it. My job pays garbage with trash health insurance.

I’m just so mad at the management class with their high pay and not doing any actual work. My boss seems fine - I think he knows this is bullshit and goes a little out of his way to make it easier for me. But everyone above him? If I saw them drowning I’d have to think a long time before throwing a life vest.

How about labor getting their fair share of loss if business they work in fails. No? Why not?

If the business fails, the workers lose their income and their shares are just as worthless as anyone else. The workers should have shares. (Or some other mechanism so there’s not a handful of fat cats living a life of luxury due to the labor of many others)

The person who started the business can always go work somewhere else. It’s not like he’s put to death. And if the concern is that “someone who loses their money might suffer and die” then we should fix that problem more generally, because there are many other ways to end up there.

And you haven’t proposed any better system. It’s always the same when I ask that question.

That wasn’t the question or the point. A fairer system off the top of my head is profit sharing with a union. But that wasn’t the point.

If someone says “X is bad for A, B, C” saying that Z isn’t better is not a rebuttal. We haven’t gotten that far. We’re trying to reach agreement that X is bad. Then we can talk about replacing or fixing it. Maybe Z does suck.

It’s a common mistake. Someone will be like “windows sucks” and someone will be like “well apple is expensive”, just blazing by on that express train of thought. Take the local train.

But I’m still in favor of capitalism. Because my parents and grandparents lived in socialism and told me how their life looked like.

So you have generational trauma skewing your views.

Long story short: It was an inescapable poverty and no free speech.

Free speech has absolutely nothing to do with this economic system. And let me remind you of all the people fired because their employer didn’t like what they said, where they risk falling into poverty and worse.

The way capitalism manifests in the US is a set of tiny tyrannies. Your boss tells you when you can piss, what you can wear, what you can say in public. Maybe you don’t care because you are the boss. You give your people time off?

I am a capitalist. I run super small business. If you think it’s sunshine and rainbow, you’re sorely mistaken. It’s more work, there’s no pay guarantee, competition is ALWAYS ahead of you, in capital, scale and know-how, you’re sweating shitless on any change in costs, because raising prices always comes at the risk of losing customers, meanwhile you’re required to do shit ton of government mandated paperwork.

And the dream is for you to make it so big that you don’t have to work anymore. Your business expands. You buy out or out compete everyone else. You sit back and let other people work. Then you raise prices, lower wages, and buy a private jet.

The end state of capitalism is a rich asshole who doesn’t work, and a shitty world for everyone else. Maybe it takes years. But enshittification is pretty widely understood.

Maybe a worker owned collective would enshittify, too. But as a small consolation, you’d at least have thousands of rich people instead of a billionaire.

Now, I wrote this on the toilet so it’s not the most coherent or polished. I appreciate you taking the time to go back and forth even though we disagree.