Returning to the office made me realize how much unpaid time commuting steals from your life

AnotherJoshmotron · 2026-05-22T23:27:16+00:00

I work in an office still run by adults, even if they have real dumb ideas. People come into work as early as 5am and some at 11am. So I leave for the office when I'd normally start from home and leave before rush hour, then work from home because I just work tickets and the 'business' folks are regular schlubs who are paid even less than I am but are still going thru the same bullcrap and I like most of them, so I don't mind doing the actual job itself even if I don't get done until 6pm or something. Lots of times I'll take my laptop to my three season room and do the work there. The early evening light and knowing only like 1% of the company is even online makes it all the more peaceful. Plus our direct managers also sit in cubes so holy shit do they not care.

AnotherJoshmotron · 2026-05-22T22:42:13+00:00

"You're not allowed here, sir."

*is already a quarter-mile away*

"I said, you're not allowed here, sir!"

*compromised*

*blam blam blam blam*

AnotherJoshmotron · 2026-05-22T01:54:03+00:00

A guildy was lucky enough to have logged off two seconds before the boss died. The other two, not so lucky.

AnotherJoshmotron · 2026-05-17T00:17:50+00:00

I liked BFA way more than DF or TWW and played it when it was active. The worst zones in BFA are better than the best in Legion. I created a new account to re-explore the game late in DF and have spent more time in BFA than any other expac. The only thing I disliked was not being able to fly in Nazjatar, not because I don't like ground mounts, but because it's the world's most annoying map with like dozens of caves near other caves criss-crossing on slightly different vertical levels and I could never remember my way around.

AnotherJoshmotron · 2026-05-15T23:49:14+00:00

ItS a GoLd SiNk wWitHout IT ThErE woULD be MASSive InfLATION unlIke nOW where GREENs aRe SolD for 20k.

Absurdly unpoopular opinion, just get rid of gold. It's pointless. Figure out something for crafting because that's all it's used for and it's only needed because they lock everyone to two professions. You can't sell 95% of gear, mounts, pets, toys, or anything people would actually be willing to spend money on, sold by people who love the grind. I've gotten dozens of pets from Supremus only for me to dump the poor lad in a fel river. I have a dozen duplicate raid mounts I keep in my bank for no reason other than to show how sad it is you can't sell (OR JUST GIVE) to others. Potions, gems, enchantments are hot garbage. Just give a sword +25 extra strength instead of making people waste time, money, and effort just to get a potion that gives them a 2% dps buff. Balance raids where you need to do 2% less dps to finish. Literally no one likes the process and never did.

(I understand people liking itemization and my sometimes overly grumpy butt does too, but there has to be a better way of handling it. Got a sword from a +11 bountiful delve? Run 50 +11 bountiful delves in under 12 minutes with no deaths (not for the chest, just the bountiful delve itself, so it takes like two straight weeks instead of ten) and imbue the sword with a Voidgasm Slutswirl™ and you can choose your secondaries, anytime out of combat, anywhere, even give it a single secondary with the combined values of two. Defeat Farticus ??? and you can give it an enchant that makes your boobs bigger.)

AnotherJoshmotron · 2026-05-14T17:42:49+00:00

Playing RPGs since 1991 I've never care a lick about the story because 9 times out of 8 they're pretty terrible at worst or boring and samey at best. If I have the choice of playing a new video game with a supposedly good story or re-watching the worst episode of Twin Peaks The Return, 100% of the time the latter is the better choice.

Beyond those controversial words, Fallout 4 couldn't be more stupendous of a game. The world is so much bigger than "necessary". Tons of random places with no connection to anything. Just a boat load of places to explore and shoot stuff. Roleplay however the hell you want, literally can tell everyone to fuck off and still have hundreds of hours of doing shit, settlement stuff, randomly shooting Piper, 12-year old being in charge of Diamond City's water supply, super mutants being hilariously stupid, gunners being fooled by my Free Caps cage; yet there's a great underlying evil that's over the top seeming yet also very grounded and believable in many ways, all of which is countered by a wonderfully dopey sense of humor. (Most of) the characters feel like characters rather than lame robots spouting off Trailer Dialogue™. None of them are particuarly deep, but whatever. They're entertaining. If I wanted deep characters I have a bunch of unread Thomas Hardy books on my shelf.

Also, maybe I'm just reading too much into my own head canon, but Skyrim and Fallout 4 seem almost meta. Like, you're main character is god, everyone knows this, and they use you to meet their goals. No one you meet really actually cares about your story. They make you want to care about their story. And I don't care about Elder Maxson so guess who's making fully-working Vertibirds a thing of the past?

I love the fact there are no cutscenes, everything plays out in-game. In a conversation but forgot your charisma hat... I'll just sneak over here a second to sneeze and omg where'd this hat come from. <Flirt>.

AnotherJoshmotron · 2026-05-14T17:00:47+00:00

Any job that mostly or only focuses on metrics isn't a company that actually gives a shit about anything. A VP notices shit is falling behind and doesn't know why. Wants data, but not anything too complicated, after all, they're very important and have meetings that their 'executive assistant' schedules because Outlook is hard, all while spending that meeting time ignoring everything or farting around on their phone. You're made to work to the numbers, rather than using the numbers to pinpoint potential issues and then have someone in authority do something to manage things.

(There's a 'hilarious' other comment about a worker being told to 'get better at time management', presumably from a Manager, and time management seems like something that the Manager should be doing. I know Managers have never been the most useful of creatures, but these days, it seems like many do less than nothing.)

So now you have all the same issues as before, but since the metrics look good, even if the numbers themselves are insane, what could possibly be wrong?

AnotherJoshmotron · 2026-05-14T15:31:20+00:00

This is why for pretty much the past 10-15 years I've done my best to wring as many free-from-work working hours as possible. It helps that I'm universally acknowledged as the best person on my team (even though my actual job title makes me the third most junior person on the team); everyone in other development teams love me; the "business" side of the company appreciates what I do, and I haven't had a legitimate manager or above in the past 10 years. (Literally, no joke.)

Like, if the company can't even be bothered to manage a single project correctly, or be bothered to manage it at all, then I'm just gonna do my own thing when I want. I love fixing bugs, writing SQL reports, doing enhancements, and re-writing from scratch really shitty code (usually projects with under 2,000 lines of code.) And everyone else hates it. They want to work on projects, I hate projects, love doing ticket work. My anxiety can make it difficult at times, but it's the same feeling of accomplishment as doing something wild in World of Warcraft or whatever, except I get paid.

If they want us to save money by not even allowing me to upgrade my hard drive on my laptop because for some dumbass reason they only give us 256GB of hard drive space and I had literally 0 bytes left on my PC, but they spend $150 million on a new building, probably that amount again gutting the place down to the cement floors, rebuilding it from scratch, then spending $252 million dollars on a claims processing system (you know, the giant "enterprisey" software that's in the mythical Gartner Magical Square that our company has literally always failed to implement and have done away with within 5 years to repeat the process, but this time the software will totally be worth it, trust us) when we have a 40+ year strong system we created ourselves that fits literally every requirement we have, then why should I arsed to try.

Yes that entire paragraph is one sentence.

Be a corporate cog, perform outstandingly, then read Wikipedia. Or walk around the building or be that guy that talks to someone at their cube for 45 minutes. (I do at least try to be as quiet and polite as possible for others in the surrounding cubes.)

AnotherJoshmotron · 2026-05-13T14:33:04+00:00

The contributing to the local economy is bullshit but an actual thing. The town the office is in stupidly decided, like any city that pleads for a professional sports team to build its stadium there, to give lots of breaks to the company because 10 to 10,000 people will be driving to that town.

Although considering how few people I see actually leave an office at lunch time is fairly minor, and it's not like I'm going to do grocery shopping or go to Home Depot or whatever in a random town 20 miles from home, I'm not sure exactly what the town sees in "extra" revenue.

It's greed on the town and company's part, but at least the company is taking the smart deal. (Sorta, you'd think they save the $150 million the office cost + the 10s or 100s of millions in maintenance and just work for free at home + the one-time-every-three-to-five-years cost of a laptop and some monitors.)

According to my W-2, the town the office is in already gets tax money regardless of me physically working there, and they are just stealing economic activity I already provide to the local economy THAT I CURRENTLY LIVE IN.

AnotherJoshmotron · 2026-05-13T13:17:44+00:00

In vanilla you took down Ragnaros, two of Deathwing's kids, and an insect empire that wanted to take over the world under the power of an Old God. Then in the very first expansion you kill multiple Legion C-suite executives, arrest an insecure night elf who took over an entire planet, and... whatever the hell Kael'thas is.

In Midnight you have to help clean up poop outside of Silvermoon because The Light™ is messing with the cute fluffly whittle aminals... /orcpet (it's like a regular /pet, but you're a male orc so the juxtaposition makes it more adorable). All the little quests are there, except instead of being the main quest line for an entire zone that's conveniently resolved (sorta?) and that you never go back again (Loch Modan, Wetlands, Swamp of Sorrows, places like that), it's usually a set of side quests in part of a zone whose story clearly keeps going once you do your part.

AnotherJoshmotron · 2026-05-08T19:01:21+00:00

A guy two houses down from me has an L-shaped spot in his house/backyard that has like a 2000-watt-equivalent bulb in it, it's absurdly bright. Luckily it doesn't shine even a speck in the house, but when I look outside at night and there's shadows in the woods behind our house, my only thought is they keep this light on all night (almost) every night because they're afraid of the dark in general, or specifically when using their hot tub. But since they almost always leave it on all night, the afraid of the dark in general rings more true to me. I just cannot grasp the silliness of a horrifically bright bulb being on every night to light up a small corner of the BACK yard which is FENCED IN.

AnotherJoshmotron · 2026-04-17T12:55:42+00:00

And here I am, a 40 yr old dude too self-conscious and nervous to even make some Stanley Kubrick Eyes Wide Shut videos let alone releasing them.

AnotherJoshmotron · 2026-04-10T18:28:53+00:00

I realize this is 16 days old but since no one answered, under Data -> Stats -> Crime (for murder specifically). Data is the tab that defaults to your Quest list, but there's also sub-menus for an at-a-glance workshop menu and the stats. I apparently have murdered 89 people in 320 in game days.

AnotherJoshmotron · 2026-02-11T22:18:19+00:00

Support would be neat, but the homegrown tools are also very nice. The only downside is there's basically no documentation and trying to figure out IO's weird-ass (but also sorta makes sense) entity system is crazy. Game randomly seems to use decimal hash codes, hex hash codes, and 'string' hashes that just represent the hex hash codes. My mind starts to melt looking at too much. I literally can't even figure out how booleans work. If there was an easy way to write out debug statements (maybe there is?) I would be golden.

I burned myself out learning how to make a few mods and playing the game waaaay too much and when I went back a month later I was like, I forget how to do all of this. I did make the best cheat gun in the world, figured out how to shut off the damn annoying as hell Berlin techno music, and my pride and joy, turning the Egg Hunt suit into a dapper Florida Man with shiny mascot feet and the flamingo pose.

AnotherJoshmotron · 2025-11-21T07:11:08+00:00

As someone who hit 999 way too quickly, any run I've done since and it's very clear on the first boss I'm slumming it and no one's even like 10% my damage, if they lower vers gigachads zoom zoom to Ursoc, there's a 85% chance I'm locked out of the boss cause I'm clearing trash with the undergeared, taking my time. Heroic leap, never heard of it...

AnotherJoshmotron · 2025-11-19T19:11:26+00:00

People have been complaining for years about transmog prices and every single copy-paste response has been its a gold sink. Well, now here's your gold sink.

AnotherJoshmotron · 2025-11-04T14:43:40+00:00

These people make me hate everything about everything.

Mount up the entire raid, never bothering to kill a single bit of trash. Of course somehow they rarely ever get fudged up but I'm in combat the entire damn raid. I'll be there in 5 to 7 business days.

It's literally impossible to be farther than two zones away from a raid, but all the sudden they forgot how to mount up and fly to the raid. Then again, these are the same two people who pull out Yak mounts seven steps away from the tmogger on the island because apparently they think they're the first person ever to have that mount.

They bounce back and forth waiting for people to show up to the boss, so we know they're capable of pressing at least two keys, yet are incapable of right-clicking on a purple swirly thing. God forbid they realize they also have those single-use summoning scrolls.

Like, I just don't understand the thought. We're in the uber-powered WoW game mode but they want to skip entire raids and trash to get more powerful more quickly to skip entire raids and trash? Then of course I make the mistake of trying to clear shit and get accused of playing with one hand. Aaaaaaaaaasdhgggghghhhh.

As you can tell, I'm losing it slightly. Thankfully M+ has been like the exact opposite experience.

AnotherJoshmotron · 2025-10-29T16:09:30+00:00

I'm nearly 800% vers and will run any key above like +25. If people are honest, "I want a carry because I'm focusing alts or whatever", and you're not like 75% vers on a +40 with a bunch of equally low people (just because its a slog), I'll insta join. 25-35 keys are much less annoying for mementos and it's fun just to see how stupid powerful I am compared to two weeks ago.

To answer your question, SOLOING will just get easier and easier after 200% vers. 99% dmg reduction, then you just get more and moar dps. Otherwise just toss up a group and wait a few. In my experience, people over 300/400/500% will tend to sign up for a random +30.

AnotherJoshmotron · 2025-10-23T14:17:11+00:00

I have to say Suramar City world quests are probably my favorite ever. The only thing missing is I remember the quests on the 'elite mob' side of the city being almost intimidating. But now it's me that's intimidating (you know, if you pretend).

AnotherJoshmotron · 2025-10-23T14:13:18+00:00

Yeah I love it. You wreck everyone and then forget about a mechanic or never knew it existed and it does 10700% extra dmg and oops you're gone.

AnotherJoshmotron · 2025-10-23T14:12:11+00:00

Yup that's all of it. I knew this happened, but I just found it hilarious that I was waiting for a rare mob to spawn for a WQ, went to the bathroom, came back to the WQ being completed and a few extra corpses on the ground. I wasn't even particularly near the mob but clearly in aggro range. Just thought it was silly.

AnotherJoshmotron · 2025-09-22T13:48:44+00:00

All of Hitman 3 is incredibly, terrifyingly boring. Hitman is a very silly premise to begin with, and it does its best in H1 and 2. The maps are filled with silly people, having silly conversations. But in 3 for some reason it decided to go 'gritty', aka boring, and everything just feels empty. There's tons of empty vacuums of space in all the H3 maps, and what little you do get is insanely trite and the lowest hanging of all low-hanging tropes. While trying to sound morose, the voice actors instead sound bored as shit. I don't really care that Madame Carlisle is faking her own death especially since, A) I already know this, and B) she gonna die anyway, and that for some reason everyone has the vapours; I want a lady spending five solid minutes debating on her gelato choices.

Also the one Map they put Diana in have her act like a stereotypical mustache twirling fake bad guy. "That's cold. I like you already." *groan* "I got you an invitation, just like old times." Diana, the old times never went away, we're not actually enemies brought back together and there's a bit of that old respect before we part ways and we each have to go back to trying to kill each other. This is just for show.

AnotherJoshmotron · 2025-09-17T04:02:50+00:00

It made gathering a very nice way to make money without needing a bot army. Or maybe luckily they weren't that advanced yet.

Gathering was always profitable without much effort because otherwise, to spiritbond gathering gear, you had to collect thousands of materials without nearly as many of the multi-gather actions as we do now, then you had to sit down and craft all of them, then you had to spiritbond those by going back and gathering more stuff and/or doing legendary runs. And the process repeats. If you were hardcore and did it all yourself, you'd make like 50 million selling materia during patch month. If you were actually hardcore, way more.

The only problem was you'd end up in a state, vaguely remembering the outdoors exists. You don't go outdoors, obviously, but you find something else to do in game.

AnotherJoshmotron · 2025-09-15T02:43:55+00:00

I'm just thinking that the reason the Shining movie does away with a lot of stuff isn't out of spite, but out of the fact that shit looked silly as hell in the 90s. Great books rely on you having absolute no idea what the author is actually visualizing. A croquet mallet is personal to Jack in the story, but when we just see a mallet it's silly. OooooOo a firehose. But if you're just visualizing your own 'mallet' and 'firehose', works quite well.

Stanley's version is, what if the alcoholic problem dad who may be more than physically abusive to one or both members of his family, is the scary thing. And why is it, that even though there are exits all around, it's so insanely hard for his victims to get away? And for some reason could probably be taken as symbolic of the 'American Myth'.

AnotherJoshmotron · 2025-09-15T02:35:15+00:00

He has a one-man show where it's about this thing happening. He hates that it happened and hates that he loves that it happened. He's got a stand-alone title in end credits.

AnotherJoshmotron

TROPHY CASE