celluloid_dream
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User ID: 758
celluloid_dream
8d ago
The point, for a lot of players, is to be the best.
They are obsessed with it, often to their detriment.
If there's an boss to kill, they're tracking their DPS and posting the logs to compare against the rest of the world. They sharpen their characters into the finest instruments of damage, or healing, or mitigation, trading off literally everything else that isn't perfectly optimal for their role. They will never be satisfied until they get the #1 "parse". If this results in the raid having 40 characters without a single extra point of health buffer, so be it. If this means any mistake would kill them, or wipe the raid, they would take that trade in a heartbeat. They're always chasing that perfect parse.
If there's a dungeon, they're mentally tracking how long it takes and trying to do it faster. If they can shave 30 seconds by doing a mechanically difficult jump to skip some enemies en route, they will try it every time. If there's an 80% chance a teammate gets the timing wrong, and they all die, and it ends up costing them 5 or even 10 minutes, they will still try it every time. The "best" way to do that dungeon is to skip the trash packs, so they will try and skip.
If they need to farm, they will always go to the "best" farm. That is, the one that theoretically pays the most per hour. If this area is heavily contested, and everyone else is farming it too, they will not adjust their strategy, because farming a less contested zone would not be "the best". If the area is better farmed by one class that is not the one they are playing, they will level an entirely new character of that class from scratch just to farm (taking weeks of effort).
If there is gear that is "BiS" - Best in Slot - they will spend every waking minute trying to get it, until they do, and it's an act of mercy by Blizzard that the raids can only be attempted once per week. In vanilla classic, there was a dagger that dropped from the end boss of a dungeon at a 0.2% rate (not a typo. zero point 2 percent, and later 2% after the devs changed it). Players would solo this dungeon boss 5 times an hour (the limit) nonstop until they got it.
But "best" only has value in a social game. If everyone leaves, they're just playing solitaire on Blizz's servers. They naturally move to the new thing and try to become the best there.
Physical logistics used to be a bigger part of the day to day. My dad took pride in knowing all the alley/residential shortcuts to avoid traffic on his way home when the bridges were stuck. People took pride in maintaining a house and car. A person's car was an extension of their competence, a reflection of their personality, etc. Handling all the small bullshit in the world was life.
Downstream of this:
- It works as a proxy for really asking how things are going without prying, as @birb_cromble notes. In a guess culture, you can't just be like, "HELLO FELLOW AUTIST. ARE YOU DEPRESSED?", but you can triangulate it by asking about their life and reading between the lines. They haven't done anything with friends in two months. They aren't cooking, aren't eating anything interesting. They haven't fixed those problems with their car in half a year. Etc.
- It's signaling, because conversation is not about exchanging information. When ye olde person says "Oh sure. Just head down Lakeview, take a left at the legion and you're there", it's kind of giving directions, but it's also boasting that they are a competent person who has experience navigating the area and plenty of knowledge to share.
- It leads to deeper conversation. "How's your car runnin?", "Not bad but I picked up a flat when I was coming down the old forest road on Mount Pointytops." "oh whatcha doin up Pointytops way?", "me n' Sophie went camping. You know Sophie from dance class", "just the two of you?". or whatever.
and like, a lot of that is still relevant. I think there's just a lot more to life that people who frequent this forum care about and we (projecting) maybe wish people wanted to talk about. Like, I would love to get into conversations (and sometimes I do try) about people's online lives, their philosophical musings, etc, but most people just aren't that thoughtful or online. e.g. Most people's thoughts on AI are like "boo datacenters", "hate AI slop", and aren't keeping up with it. Most people aren't in niche internet subcultures. Most people haven't read Heidegger.
celluloid_dream
1mo ago
Seveneves also had stand-ins for Hilary Clinton (probably the most entertaining of them), Cory Doctorow, and Malala Yousafzai. Doob-NdGT was one of the more obvious ones, for sure. Probst was half Musk, but with elements of other CEOs.
celluloid_dream
1mo ago
I was under the impression that among ASOIAF snobs, AFFC is considered the better book, but is liked less because it follows PoV characters most of the fandom doesn't care about. Meanwhile ASOS is considered a bit sloppy by George's standards because he wrote the whole thing relatively quickly and was just throwing stuff out there. Less attention to detail.
Not an intro, but I really like Alex Yard's Sonic 3 Music Theory series on YouTube.
It does a lot of going over why things sound the way they do. Also plays the track with alternate choices and you can hear how it sounds different. It assumes some music theory knowledge, but I only have a little formal education, and I still find them enjoyable.
celluloid_dream
1mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo ago
prole-tier fragrance review: Old Spice Wolfthorn deodorant smells like orange candy, and I love it
celluloid_dream
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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.
Never played retail, so I'm not 100% certain, but as I understand it, the reward structure has been gradually made less rivalrous there. This is "good", in that no one gets screwed out of their vertical progression by luck or politics, but it undermines the thing they were chasing all along. They want to be the best, and if the best isn't rare or difficult, it doesn't mean anything.
In vanilla/classic, only one person gets the legendary sword Thunderfury (maybe 2 or 3 if the guild gets very lucky). That represents potentially months and months of effort by 40 people, and it can only go to one recipient (typically the main tank and guild leader first, then a second tank, then maybe the top performing dps). It's not guaranteed either. Some guilds can run the raid for a year and never get it.
As for the Anniversary/TBC realms, it was generally understood from the start that those were "Classic plus waiting rooms" and that the population was always planning to drop them as soon as the new Classic came out. Maybe in a nod to the sheer number of classic releases, they called Classic Plus "Forever" and are planning horizontal progression. We'll see how that goes when it meets the population of minmaxers always itching for a little more vertical.
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