celluloid_dream
No bio...
User ID: 758
celluloid_dream
21hr ago
braindead / slacker jobs tend to exist wherever there are stupid rules. They are largely unique to the specific stupid rules, but for example:
- a company needs to send confidential files to other companies. There are rules about who is allowed to touch the files. The company employs a small team of professional uploaders/downloaders who literally click upload and download on some professional file transfer software, then watch the progress bar, then unpack the files and email someone to tell them it's done.
- property owner is renting out some property for temporary use. In addition to security, they also hire a representative to be physically present on the property to be the first point of contact for questions or concerns. Job consists of sitting on the property, and maybe once a day answering some questions, or escalating if required. I don't entirely know why these jobs exist, but it's probably because they are making so much money on the rental, it's worth it to them, or possibly some insurance reason.
- government agency is allotted a yearly budget. If they do not spend this entire budget, it shrinks, and is hard to get back. They hire staff and contractors to fill the budget, even though there's very little actual work to be done, and indeed very little work is allowed to be done. Days mostly consist of going for coffee, applying to get something purchased, and perhaps working on small projects that don't need approval from anyone.
celluloid_dream
3d ago
I was amused to discover a few weeks ago someone had stolen my old Riot account that I hadn't touched in well over a decade.
They didn't compromise the password or email. They apparently just asked for the account and got it. I only found out because they tried to change the email - did successfully change the email in fact - and password. You would assume at this point, the account was gone. Not so. I just asked for it back, and got it. Their automated support was like "yeah, sure whatever, sounds right. here ya go". Then I changed the password and email, and now it's mine again.
What is even going on? How does the internet work any more?
celluloid_dream
6d ago
"Help me cultivate the virtue of curiosity"
-- but, to your points:
- A custom app isn't going to brick your phone. They're sandboxed, and at worst, they'll run inefficiently and have to be killed.
- do you not read books? If you do read books, do you immediately comprehend everything about them? If so, I take it back.
- Are you not interested to know how things work? How products are made, and what goes into them? Maybe you already know everything. In that case, ignore the suggestion.
- If you want to know where that cool photo was taken, because maybe you want to go there someday? Maybe you're stalking someone. idk. Maybe you're bored and it's entertaining.
- the tpot character creator was supposed to be illustrative of how it can take pop cultural knowledge and work with it.
- what game? idk? What games are you playing? "Men are born for games. Nothing else". Maybe you're pretty sure a thing can be optimized but don't know how to math it out.
- You can get youtube transcripts by expanding the description, scrolling down to the "show transcript" button, then copy/pasting from the text window that pops up. There are probably also browser extensions that will do it, or you could ask an LLM to make one for you.
celluloid_dream
6d ago
"Here is everything I've ever written down, public and private. Tell me what patterns exist that I might have overlooked"
"I always wanted an app that would do X. Please build one and install it on my phone."
"I'm reading this book (pdf attached). Do a deep analysis of chapters 1-3, as if for a book club, and let's discuss"
"(attached photo of a product's ingredients) explain what all these ingredients do individually, and how they come together to form a complete product"
"Geoguessr this photo and explain your answer"
"create a custom tpot (twitter) character creator, complete with all the obscure classifications, kiki/bouba, apollo/dionysus, theatre kid/band kid, Kegan stages, the works"
"calculate the optimal talent build for this game given these specifics about its combat system. explain and show your work"
"help me unpack why I irrationally hate this popular thing"
"give me the tl;dr of this 2 hour youtube transcript so I can decide if it's worth my time"
"educate me on the background context I need to understand this current world event"
celluloid_dream
6d ago
It's a slow accumulation of shit.
- search engines failing to find exact quotes that I know for a fact exist online, and I'm just being lazy using a search engine to navigate to them. The text is still there, but the search engine is either hiding it, or not indexing it.
- I get blocked searching in incognito windows (which I do by habit for tracking/profile reasons). Search engine says no. Do a captcha - the really annoying kind of captcha, like "click on 8 grainy pictures of buses". No thank you. If your browser isn't full of tracking cookies, it assumes you're a bot now.
- minor annoyance: when opening a new tab in a private session and browsing to Google manually, it has a focus-stealing popup that means you can't just start typing. You have to click it off first.
- a page of AI answers first - admittedly, this has gotten a lot better. It used to be comically bad, but I'd say it's now pretty good, so long as the thing you searched is mainstream enough.
- but if I wanted a nice AI answer, I'd go to perplexity, except perplexity hits me with a login wall half the time now. No thank you.
- been trying alternatives to get around the captcha problem, but they invariably suck. Google is still the best, even in its degraded state. Of the others I've tried, Bing is probably second best. Then Brave. Main problem I see with Bing/Brave is lack of contextual precision, and lack of updated/current results.
- oh, and then there's the censorship. There is no substitute for yandex when you're searching for something the googs doesn't want you to see, like sports streams or TV or whatever.
celluloid_dream
10d ago
Bored of most games at the moment.
Have an itch to return to modding Starfield, but it'd be casting pearls before swine. The game itself is wide open for adding depth, systems, gameplay, meaning, purpose, lore.
But, if downloads and hype are anything to go by, the player base does not want meaning, or purpose, or lore. They want their character to be hotter. They want the companions to be hotter. They want their hot companion to have blonde hair and not black. They want to be able to fuck all of the hot companions at once.
Oh, and they want guns. Not cool sci-fi lasers and particle beams appropriate for the setting. They want their AR-15 lovingly ported in so they can sling lead around like the game's not set 300 years in the future.
celluloid_dream
16d ago
I think they are correct to do so? I tend to trust Reddit commentary, flawed as it is, to give human-ish opinions on things. Maybe not as the only source, it certainly should be one.
I think it's more that not much has been written about cymbals. I notice this in domains where there's a lot of tacit knowledge because the domain is physical and separated from screens. (e.g. climbing, outdoors stuff). Coding and writing document themselves by their nature, and also the keyboard is right there to jot down notes. Almost no one is taking notes at that level while they play music.
Side note: in your OP, the phrase "X with the serial numbers filed off" stood out as a red flag Claude-ism (along with the subsequent cadence) and caused me to frantically re-read the whole thing to see if I'd just been LLM-ed.
celluloid_dream
17d ago
prole-tier fragrance review: Old Spice Wolfthorn deodorant smells like orange candy, and I love it
celluloid_dream
17d ago
On lifted pickup trucks - not sure how lifted you mean, but around here lots of the access roads get washed out and you need something with good clearance and breakover angles to get through.
celluloid_dream
17d ago
on going out for coffee generally - coffee varies between roasters and shops. I enjoy the variety, and DIY can be some effort (e.g. timing cold brew so it's not under or over-extracted). Cafe drinks don't cost that much more than doing it at home, and it forces me to go outside and go for a 5-10m walk, when I might otherwise spend the entire day indoors.
on Starbucks specifically - known quantity, not terrible coffee. Their staff around here get paid decent wages and all speak English as a first language. (unlike Tim Hortons, our budget chain, where 95%+ of their staff are temporary foreign workers on slave wages). I don't go to Starbucks often, but definitely pick up the free birthday drink, and occasionally use it for reliable app pickup because it has locations everywhere.
celluloid_dream
30d ago
Coming into it with barely any knowledge of the setting, dogmatic seemed lawful-stupid, or even pointlessly cruel. Look, I can get behind "for the Greater Good", or even "My Country Right or Wrong", but the choices were like:
- [dogmatic] execute this poor commoner for having a reasonable complaint
- [heretic] execute this poor commoner for the lulz, cackling maniacally
- [iconoclast] don't execute the poor commoner
and like, it didn't do a great job of selling the appeal. I was interested in heretic initially because the evil artifact that will obviously obviously corrupt you seemed like a solid roleplay arc, but then the early heretic choices were chaotic-evil right off the bat. I was hoping they'd start off being written as neutral-evil power seeking and then by late game, you'd have frog boiled yourself into a servant of chaos.
Then, iconoclast was completely normal western liberal morality, and the game doesn't punish you for picking those options, so why not pick them?
Exception:
celluloid_dream
1mo ago
I loved the Owlcat Pathfinders and Rogue Trader, but with RT, it felt like I could see the rails on the universe much more clearly than with the others. It felt smaller. Not sure if it actually is, but it feels that way. Maybe it's that a lot of the tedious mechanics (e.g. wealth, inventory) are handwaved because you're a Rogue Trader who doesn't need to deal with such trivial inconveniences, and those are actually load-bearing on the immersion. Maybe it's the reduced narrative complexity and choice branches. I don't think I could bring myself to start another RT playthrough today, whereas there are still things I'd like to try in WotR or KM.
celluloid_dream
1mo ago
Horizon's Gate, which is something like Final Fantasy Tactics stapled to a nautical exploration and trading game.
Haven't touched it yet though - still researching classes / builds / team comp
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
ha. yes, I genuinely regret not buying a lifetime supply of some items before they discontinued them. Would have felt extremely autistic to do at the time, but I miss them and nothing has replaced them.
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
- bad guess about how the item will fit after washing or wear. This is especially a problem with shoes. Some people seem comfortable with a full +1 size of slack, but I want mine to be snug within 1/4 size of perfect, which usually entails buying them just slightly too small so that they are the right size after a few weeks of use, but it doesn't always work.
- insufficient courage / better judgement - I thought I was that person. I'm not that person, so the item goes unworn.
- some unforseen issue that I couldn't have reasonably predicted when trying the thing on. (unfixably scratchy tag, weird stitching that turns out to be a problem in everyday use, etc.)
- and similar
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
some combination. basically: will I ever wear this thing, or will I hate it for one reason or other (fit, looks, quality) and decide buying it was a mistake?
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
What's your hit rate when shopping for clothing (casual wear)?
Trying to figure out if I'm uniquely bad at this, or if it's normal and I just need to be buying more stuff to increase successes, or instead skill-up and reduce the failure rate. I think once I've walked out of a store with clothing, there's maybe a 50% chance per item that it actually works out for me.
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
trend in modern gaming to do a 3rd-person PoV with the camera offset to one side so the player has the center of the screen open in an attempt to be a hybrid of 3rd person (advantage for melee action, jumping, and narcissistic obsession with seeing what your character looks like during every second of gameplay) and 1st person (advantage for precision shooting, crafting placement, seeing stuff that is not your character).
It achieves this by sacrificing symmetry in a way that my OCD can't handle. It feels so wrong to be moving something on the left or right third of the screen. What if something comes at you from the left? You're missing that part of your peripheral vision! You're left-sided. Everything is off balance. It's not right, I say! Worst offender and probable source of the trend: Fortnite
If a game wants to have both, that's fine, but it should do it by allowing swapping between centered 3rd person and centered 1st person POV camera like the old Jedi Knight games did.
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
ugh. I want to check it out, but it looks like it suffers from terminal camera-off-to-the-leftism
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
I went for slaves over robots because they can do farming/industry/mining. The bots are useful for specific, narrow tasks. It's worth having some salvage bots to scrap derelicts and do simple logistics. The combat bots are hilariously overpowered killing machines, and I think optimal combat strategy might be to have a full ship of them, just point the army at what you want to die, and don't even send any crew.
Truthfully, I found slaves to probably not be worth it when factoring in the food and energy costs (demands ongoing resource intake), and I should have put a bullet in most of my captives and cut losses, but at that point, running a successful slave operation was kind of its own goal, and after sacrificing everything to get those slaves in the first place, it felt right.
for sure, the combat is a bit shallow at the moment, and I'm very interested to see where modding takes it.
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
Video game thread.
Got sucked into a week-long Space Haven rabbit hole - a spaceship survival / colony sim game that had been in early access forever and is now out. I'm sure there are dozens like it. You start with 3-4 crew, build a ship, try not to die .. profit? Comes with a moderate depth of systems + some "The Sims" elements, like the crew forming friendships/relationships, and having personality traits. e.g. one of mine has "antisocial", which gives a passive -5 mood condition "did something I dislike" every time another crew member tries to socialize with her, which is often on a tiny cramped ship, especially when another has the "comedian" background and "charming" trait.
Anyway, turns out surviving in space is really hard: too much work to be done, not enough hands to do it. My tiny crew of 3 was living hand to mouth with almost no time to do anything beyond basic needs. After a month of this, the shiny "enslavement facility" upgrade in the tech tree was looking real tempting. Fine. I guess we're slavers now.
Using the element of surprise, we picked a neutral faction, the galactic military, bribed them with the last of our money and nearly the last of our fuel until they were friendly enough to let us board their prison ship. The initial plan was to steal some prisoners, but it turns out you can use drugs on allied NPCs without turning them hostile. Probably an oversight. We come back with a load of sedatives, drug all the guards, pick them up one by one, and shuttle them back to our ship, locking each in a separate room to be dealt with later so that we can deal with each 3v1 when they wake up.
Once we've abducted as many as we can fit, we spool up the hyperdrives and jump systems. The game informs me this is "kidnapping" and will turn the military hostile. No problem. Expected. I locked them all in separate rooms for that reason. Unexpected: for some reason jumping systems resets everything, meaning the guards all wake up and, crucially, the doors on the ship all unlock, letting them group up. What follows is a chaotic and destructive ~30v3 fighting retreat which leaves our injured crew locked (manually) on the bridge, and 23 surviving angry guards on the other side of the door. To solve this problem, we open the airlock vents, causing a massive amount of damage to the interior of the ship, but dropping O2 low enough that the guards pass out. We quickly close the airlocks, don spacesuits, take the guards prisoner and put the slave collars on.
That's the start of our problems. We now have 23 nearly-dead slaves, no money, little fuel, on a ship with most of its critical systems broken. We need to, in rough order of priority: repair/build more oxygen generators to support that many people, find a source of energy cells (each slave collar runs on a specific type of battery that needs to be crafted with electronics + power), heal the slaves and make sure they rest enough so that they don't die, expand the ship and get a farming operation running so that we don't run out of food given the expanded headcount, and source raw materials to support all that - this, in an already very resource-starved survival game, and having just made enemies of a major well-armed faction.
The adventures that follow are pure emergent gameplay, riding the tiger of our slave enterprise, evading the space cops, and trying to turn enough of a profit to keep it all together. Would recommend if you have time to burn and like this sort of thing.
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
In your post, and in some replies here, you're constantly sliding between different implied definitions of good/bad opinion. I think it'd help if you were more explicit.
"Person has factually incorrect beliefs about the world" is different from "person's claim about morality is unpersuasive to me" is different from "person articulated this thought poorly" is different from "person says things I find aesthetically distasteful" is different from "person's post got ratioed on twitter".
If you mean all of them, what do they have to do with each other? If you mean specific ones, which and why?
celluloid_dream
3mo ago
It should converge to blue, because people have loved ones, and the recursive "what do I think they think I think they'll press" combined with enough shared cultural sentiment of "I wouldn't want to live in a world without my loved ones" = Blue wins
but personally, like @sun_the_second , if I'm being brutally honest with myself, I value my own survival above others'. I'm a rationalist, not a romantic. I'd pick Red. Extrapolated out, maybe Red wins
(no, I don't have kids)
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/numb-at-burning-man
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/in-my-zombie-era
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