I hate it when people ask me to disarm the nuclear warhead.

In the second subversion, it’s still a chocolate factory but Charlie is allergic to chocolate

Okay, totally off topic…what is it with this annoying trend of censoring a company/name with an asterisk when it’s a subject of ire? It just bugs me - and not in a way that focuses my anger to Microsoft.

What makes me angry here is, I am 90% sure the browsers could code against this.

If the user clicks a control on a webpage one time, the stack can declare “One user click! You have earned yourself One (1) navigation.” Then, the click activates some JavaScript that moves you to a new webpage. That new webpage has an auto-loader redirect that instead runs a 300ms timeout, and then takes you to some other page. The browser, meanwhile, has seen this, and establishes “We are still only operating off of that One (1) click. So, instead of adding a new page to the user history, we’ll replace that first navigation.”

I have yet to hear a satisfactory reason as to why that’s not possible.

Ask yourself directly, as a matter of reflex; “What is it I hope to get out of my phone?” when you reflexively take it out.

Also, commonly ask yourself “What would I like to do today?” Whether that’s something enjoyable for yourself, or an important task. It’s difficult to realize that while many tasks take some planning and commitment, there’s plenty of time in the day to get them done if you can work past the stress of starting.

Theoretically, everyone’s supposed to have right to self-representation. If some enterprising individual helps them to forego their need for a lawyer, and gives lengthy instructions on all the right forms, even if only 40% of the participants do it correctly, it could be a big hassle for them.

Of course, the other issue is that it would be a big hassle for the courts.

I’ve actually wanted to write a story like this;

Have an ultra-brutal “antihero” character like Punisher, who does extremely violent shit to many “only slightly evil” parties. Each time, as part of their calling card, they leave behind a message to the effect of “We do not have a fair court system, and so I am creating one.” Biggest victims include judges, but not many lawyers - and they aim for an end result where large organizations don’t try to lobby their way out of problems, but instead argue them on true merits in court.

I have gradually wondered if the issue has not been in our obsession with plastic specifically, but our need for sanitation of every object. “We need a material that will preserve its shape in transit and operation; but we then want it to gently break down into nature when we’re done with it.” No matter what materials of what strength we invent, that’s always going to be an oxymoron. There’s a reason people criticize biodegradable materials as often falling apart.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure medicine has made tremendous advances through the preservation of sealed instruments and drugs, especially for those with sensitive immune systems. But the 3000% thorough sanitization we keep of every single object we interact with has had a very gradual impact on our planet. I kind of want to envision just how fatal of a health risk it would carry if so much of our food wasn’t triple-secure-wrapped, and whether that’s comparable to the current impact of widespread plastic.

I’m saddened that Reuse has fallen by the wayside. I brought some cleaned liquor bottles back to my store for deposit, and the clerk admitted to me they’ll just end up in the recycling chain - it’s too much effort to locate transport/handling for the bottles.

Theoretically, there should be a lot of inward transit for cities and civic centers with not much going out. There’s a very efficient mental image of dropping off 80 bottles, and picking up 80 empty bottles to bring back, but it would just take more logistics than people care for to do it that way.

I’m going to guess quite a people here work on businesses where “sometimes breaks, but fixed in less than an hour” isn’t good enough for reliability.

Marine biologists cringing at the forced joke when the ocean has actual Pistol Shrimp that work very much like you’d expect.

Incoming flood of posts about Assassin’s Creed, Redfall, Gollum, and Skull and Bones. Remember what you said - if you don’t like the game, stay silent!

It’s usually not a matter of just waiting - it’s a matter of memorizing. I get the impression if the AI bosses could manually set different delays on their swings after winding up each time, they would literally be impossible.

Boiling down the descriptor to one word - “hard” - really doesn’t serve the discussion well.

Someday, I want to make “The hardest game ever made”, just to show raw inability to win is not fun on its own.

Yeah, you’ve heard the excuses. Just scared to respond to them, I suppose. The answer should be obvious: We don’t want a dictatorship.

Why does history not bear this out? Because Obama had a brief slim majority?

Even having a 60% democratic majority doesn’t do what you think it does. The Democratic Party, thankfully, is not a hive mind. It’s normal for 15% of them to vote differently on a subject based on differing opinions. But Republicans will denounce a bill as illegal, immoral, and then still vote it in to tow the party line.

Hot take: 90% of their promises fallen short are because of Republican representatives stonewalling them to make them look incompetent (because their voters don’t follow logic). Vote the Republicans out, and they can get free reign to make real progress.

Amnesia did this really well imo. The first half of Rebirth has no direct threats, but many many things that make you feel uneasy. You won’t know offhand when you’re finally in a “lethal” situation, and it hides its failure states a bit so that you’re never sure if you could have avoided an encounter.

The end result is something very close to the one-chance experience of being a character in a horror movie, complete with unrealistic escapes.

Even if I don’t want to end violence in fiction (it’s a very effective theme of conflict) I do think there’s too much out there that normalizes the extremism of it, and especially the fetishization of death.

In the one hand, you have fiction where large groups congregate around arenas where prisoners fight to the death, and applaud the bloody carnage. I firmly believe there’s not nearly so many of this kind of spectator as fiction implies.

On the other, there’s fiction where, even amidst a chaotic and violent conflict, the heroes labor to save even singular lives of people lost or separated from the destruction - retaining focus on the preservation of life as the goal, and violence as the unfortunate but necessary method to achieve that.

We’ve also seen this in Marvel vs DC Movie universes - where DC has reveled in mass death and destruction, while Marvel, even if their large-scale spectacle makes it seem unrealistic, emphasizes the narrative point of characters going well out of their way to keep people safe; 90% of Cap’s signature Avengers “Why should I listen to you” plan being around how to keep the aliens away from innocent people.

I’m glad Game of Thrones has had a bit of this analysis too. There’s some very well-planned and tragic deaths in there, but also plenty that just bought into the theme of “anyone can die” without building any useful or engaging narrative theme.

To make the point in an unnamed game: This game showed one interesting person as the main character. After one chapter, it killed them off in a surprise twist. This was well-written and unexpected…but then I realized on my next play I just wasn’t interested in continuing - not out of sadness, but boredom. What they’d gained in shock value, they’d destroyed in stakes.

Alright, my overly-optimistic personality made me feel this was a joke against over-beauracratic bug tracking at software companies. Like, Modules 1-20 are all broken by a Schnoffer update. Okay; get an engineer to start fixing away? No, we need to carefully list each and every Module that’s broken, verify it’s broken, and give each bug a number so we can individually verify it fixed before fixing the next one.

Granted, there’s often good reasons for it that aren’t made clear, but it’s still annoying.