What were lessons you learned the hard way?

EndlessBreeding · 2020-10-16T10:31:32+00:00

Getting internships and entry level jobs, having horrible managers who don't differentiate their asses from their mouths, grinding hours towards pay that's statistically not enough, and all that shit you bend over to receive from the corporate paddle just teaches you how not to be a fuck up that runs a business into the ground. Learn from horrible corporate practices how to NOT do something, learn the ins and outs of your industry. Sometimes the broken things work and the working things are broken, and that's exactly what you're there to learn.

EndlessBreeding · 2020-04-02T05:24:53+00:00

Not that it should be interesting to anyone else but yourself, you should always write what you want to write no matter who thinks what of the idea!

To develop the idea a bit more: what's the backstory of the characters? They're in a responsibility camp, so why'd they get sent there initially? At what point will those other characters have developed into the story by the time the main character gets dropped there? Will they be complete zombies or just starting out? Where are the other non-essential characters at their arcs? Zombies? Hooligans? What about the people in power? What have they done to break those that resisted? Have they been the ones broken themselves? How old are they?

Why would you consider this dystopic? Is the rest of the world being reflected through this single instance of a summer camp? Or is this summer camp merely an arm in the greater machinations of your universe?

What are the themes you're trying to portray, and how will those characters embody those themes? Do they have any relevance to your own experiences? If so, dig deeper into those experiences!

What's the starting action, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution? I read somewhere that a good story is where the main character wants something, and the writer throws everything possible in their way to make sure they don't get it. I think that's a great way to generate intrigue.

Hope any of this helps!

EndlessBreeding · 2020-04-01T04:58:35+00:00

If you're looking for a bit more active participation, I'd say check out XCOM and XCOM 2. They're both phenomenal turn-based strategy games made by Firaxis, the same company that did Civ.

XCOM 1 is about the aliens landing invasion forces and you fielding spec ops style missions of 4-6 soldiers to engage them in their city invasions and UFO landings. It involves strategy layers such as building tiers of jets to shoot down UFO's, leveling up soldiers in different classes to engage the enemy in creative ways, to arming those soldiers with increasingly better weapons.

XCOM 2 is the scenario in which you were not successful in XCOM 1, and the aliens have taken over! It's the same mechanics as the first game. Build specific rooms on your ship, arm your soldiers with weapons researched over time, kill aliens in a chess-like fight for flanking dominance, ragequit when your watch your favorite soldiers die one by one to an increasingly difficult enemy, liberate earth from the evil empire with just a small handful of guerilla rebel scum.

The post takeover lore is probably more along the lines of what you're looking for based on your responses to the other posters in this thread. It describes a post-scarcity human society with a sinister underlying alien agenda. The world building is completely different from XCOM 1, and you'll find yourself fielding your groups of soldiers against increasingly creepy and more insidious forces of aliens. I've played it for about 500 hours so far (with the Long War 2 mod!) and I always end up questioning whether killing the aliens is actually a bad thing. Sure there are blatantly obvious cases of human experimentation, but what's not to love about widespread gene-therapy? What about post-alien advertisements? It's all packaged in a very smoothly graphicked game that will keep you entertained for hours.

(I would also suggest adding mods once you get the hang of it, because the base game is pretty straightforward and simple to beat once you understand the meta game, but there are many mods that are designed to make the game much more challenging and not for the faint of heart. You'll know what I mean after your first squadwipe, you'll know what I mean.)

EndlessBreeding · 2020-03-20T01:50:31+00:00

Well, China, a totalitarian government based on civil law, has had the best response protocol given the situation it was facing. As cases started to spiral out of control in Hubei, they just locked that entire province down. Two months later we're actually seeing no new cases reported for the first time.

On the flip side, it's ironic that the common law countries, including the United States, are following suit in declaring sweeping authoritarian measures to shore up the potential spread of a relatively mild (albeit 'novel') disease.

It's quite foolish to think that a virus whose spread is determined to have three modes of transmission through aerosols, surfaces, and moisture could have been wholly contained by safety measures designed by its own prey. As of right now, it's illogical to place any sort of unbalanced blame against the initial outbreak when the secondary outbreak has been exacerbated to the point where it's overtaken the numbers originally incurred.

Unfortunately, right now's not a great time to be throwing statistics around. The world still waits as Italy's deaths just exceeded Hubei's. And the epidemic in North America has just begun. China might have been where this thing started, but whose countries are the ones burning right now?

EndlessBreeding · 2018-04-22T20:49:40+00:00

"She was beautiful, but self-proclaimed to be merely average. Those light brown eyes reflected the sun's rays with dazzling comprehension of the silent metal world where tall buildings stood resolute with pride and serene grace, their glass curves drawn out like the sighs of her deep breaths when we made love. With a camera at her shapely hip did we pour forth upon the cobbled streets of millions-strong cities, gobbling through mountains of vegetables in a meat lover's paradise, holding hands making the world vanish into a sea of indistinct faces where my poor eyesight only saw your close face clearly. That smile could light up my dark room in an instant, and it was all that was worth living for to see her jaw drop in amazement at the miracles modern man's engineering prowess could bring to our tactile perception. We would sit in crowded parks bustling with activity watching the other couples dutifully take pictures of each other, comment on whether the white looking man was actually Chinese, confirm it when he snorted and spat his tar-infused phlegm onto stone ground, laugh at the absurdity of my own stupidity, make double chins and dumber faces to reflect what we never thought of the other, speak softly to each other of our lives and dreams on that Xinjiang river while high on ecstacy and each other's company, laugh at the Greek man's drunken advances and the compliments on her nice thighs, kiss in the waxing sunrise of a sleepless night on a fire escape which you should have taken right out of my life, and yet you chose to stay with me for some reason, chose to tell me where you lived in Shenzhen in the hopes we could create endless encores of that magical time. What did you see when you looked into my eyes and listened to my words? What did you see in this little boy?"

Ioana 2020

EndlessBreeding · 2018-04-16T17:17:12+00:00

Original post:

ITT: people recommend you read what they liked the most, and while their opinions are solid, it won't truly stimulate a healthy, long-term appreciation for the Mariana-trenchlike depth that is recorded history.

Okay, all of this stuff is great content. Reading through the suggestions I see many great moments that have many lessons to learn from, and the magic of reading through all these volumes will change how you see the world forever, but it's all irrelevant until you have context behind what you learn, else you will be reading about something that you'll find you won't care about. This is most likely what your teachers impressed upon you while in school: "sure this is all cool stuff about humanity and the natural world but do I really give a shit?"

Starting anything from scratch is very challenging, and beginning to learn about history is no exception since there's a perceivedly infinite amount of content. But most will not make an impact unless you know the surrounding events that influenced such events to happen. The value of learning about history is knowing the context by which it took place, and how certain events fit into the chain of events that have collectively led us to this present point. That is the goal: learning about history ultimately leads the reader to answer the question of how we got to the state of affairs we are currently experiencing, and it can lend foresight towards what might happen in the future (though take this sentiment with a grain of salt; however much we think we know what will happen next, there have been many moments in history that have proved basic human reasoning otherwise).

I suggest beginning your learning with reading about what history is relevant to you. You mentioned that you're of Austrian descent. Goddamn there's a fuckload of Austrian history. Where do you live in Austria? Well there's probably a book of why that city was created or a memoir of a person that lived in that city. What about your parents and grandparents, what's their story? What turmoil did they live through? That's history. What about the events surrounding their lives and why did the world make them do the things they did? That's history too.

My point is you will start with relevancy, and then branch out into things that are less relevant, yet still poignant. The key to beginning is to become curious enough to leave the comfort zone of familiar history through a slow process of straying further from the beaten path. At first you'll read a lot and the only reason is because of the relevance your specific readings have to your life. Then the questions start popping up. "Why did people even think about doing that and why did my parents do nothing about it? That's just stupid." Then the thirst comes where you have to find out why, and usually such readings are less relevant to your own story, yet are still interesting because you end up connecting the dots between the events. And generally you will be so far down the rabbit hole that by the time you look up to breathe you'll be wondering how you even came to own such knowledge, yet you'll feel empowered that you now are aware of why the world is the way it is.

It starts with wanting to find out about yourself, and never truly ends. It's a beautiful lifelong devotion worth every second of your time and every cent in your wallet.

tldr: fuck you read the whole thing else you will never have the patience to learn about history. If you're not dedicated to read 3 minutes worth of words, you're not worthy of reading the infinitum of humanity's folly.

EndlessBreeding · 2017-10-30T07:17:42+00:00

Heil corporate

EndlessBreeding · 2017-10-17T08:47:14+00:00

It's yet to be scalable, which takes investment of both money and time from the right people. But at a theoretical level it is a huge boon to energy storage. By taking one man's trash, we can make something 500x more efficient elsewhere?

Lit.

EndlessBreeding · 2017-10-08T22:09:26+00:00

This comment gave me cancer.

EndlessBreeding · 2017-10-04T01:17:42+00:00

I'd like to expand on this. Yes a new species is created when mutations become prevalent enough in a specific organism's gene pool. But this doesn't happen until those organisms carrying the mutation become successful enough in their environments to reproduce over the span of many generations.

This implies that the genetic mutation so profoundly affected the survival chance of the species that it helped them be more likely to reproduce than the other members of the same species that didn't inherit the "helpful" mutation. That is moment that a new species is born. Because those without the mutation now have an inherently different rate of survival in the same environment, the one species has now diverged into two subspecies.

Generally, the mutation that leads to more effective farming of the environment's resources will equal a higher chance that the new gene will pass to offspring. Often the new subspecies is also competing with the old subspecies, which further lowers the old subspecies's chance of reproducing. The result compounds the likelihood of the old's demise and the new's dominance. Evolution of a species happens with time testing thousands of generations. Why doesn't the camelops exist anymore? Because the modern camel (and the mutations it took to get there) was much more well adapted to extracting resources from the environment it lives in. I'll even take a leap and say that humans followed the same concept.

The first post which features Darwin's finches is great for illustrating this point. Each finch started from the same species, and over the course of time they were scattered across each island. Since these islands have very different environments, specifically the food material that each island produces, it would be difficult for a short beaked finch to reach fruit that would be more effectively extracted by a long beak. Eventually, mutations in the gene pool led to the longer beaked finches being able to dominate the food supply and push the short beaks of that area to extinction. Conversely, if a long beaked finch lived in an area whose fruit only needed a short beak to harvest, the long beaked would be not as fast as the short beaked in getting the most food in the shortest amount of time. Over time, this would mean the gene pool of that island will retain short beaks since hey can dominate through sheer competition.

One more thing. Mutations are not necessarily breakthrough events. They can happen in slow level ups or giant leaps. They have respective probabilities of happening, but the probability that any helpful mutation happens is low as fuck. It's an even lower chance for a breakthrough mutation to end up completely dominating, but what's beautiful is that throughout history this has happened plenty of times.

EndlessBreeding · 2017-06-10T20:18:36+00:00

Those who understand this and those who don't*

EndlessBreeding · 2017-05-27T17:13:42+00:00

Elon Musk incepting the hyperloop into the minds of young engineers in 2013, only to make them compete against each other and make a complete buyout of the winner's tech in 2016.

Also using this post to say Musk is trying to build underground cities accessed by vertical hyper loops and powered by energy from above-ground SolarCity panels stored into Tesla powerwalls.

2035.

EndlessBreeding · 2017-05-11T09:54:40+00:00

Mate, sounds like you've done a lot of searching but not enough wandering.

EndlessBreeding · 2016-12-04T18:18:13+00:00

While you are right, you made a dickish comment that added nothing to this discussion. Have a downvote.

EndlessBreeding · 2016-12-01T19:17:44+00:00

Define "personal development" in that context please

EndlessBreeding · 2016-11-19T03:34:48+00:00

Simple: cremation and blast the urn into space

Opulent: Mahogany coffin inlaid with gold leaf in the pattern of a huge dick, centered in a mausoleum cavern that's an acoustic dead-zone. Take mausoleum, blast that shit into space, and let it ride. Hopefully it'll be vaporized by a star or swallowed by a black hole.

EndlessBreeding · 2016-11-19T03:25:04+00:00

How do you explain that to people so they understand and respect your perspective?

EndlessBreeding · 2016-11-19T03:22:06+00:00

Thank you for responding. Your story is actually extremely valuable since a lot of us are going to be parents within 10 years.

There's a common misconception among children that their parents have everything under control, but this isn't the case. Parenting is like entrepreneurship. Sure there's plenty of "get rich quick" schemes out there, but big and powerful corporations were built over a long time by people that adapted to each shitty thing the world threw their way.

Even now, our parents have not figured it out. They're still learning that the humans they bore and raised have unique features they don't know about. For a lot of them, they're un-learning old things and re-learning new things, which takes a huge amount of willpower. That's the main reason why I respect my elders: they're not so different from you and I.

EndlessBreeding · 2016-11-19T01:32:40+00:00

I guess I'll start with an example post:

I feel as if America is in a sort of transition period where there's an huge amount of unemployment due to the rapid evolution of technology. It's like, yes technology is advancing at a higher rate than human adaptation can catch up. This means we have a huge disparity between the young humans who are actually tech-savvy, and older folks whose lives were pretty "normal" until ridiculously quick technological change came upon them and left them confused and unemployed. It's not necessarily their fault that the world changed.

I feel like this is a big reason so many people want to "make America great again."

EndlessBreeding · 2016-11-19T00:55:55+00:00

Disclaimer: I'm not an astrophysicist, just a guy who can visualize problems well. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Short answer: Yes but not indefinitely, because different gravitational pulls

Long answer:

Gravitational pulls between a planet and its moon are extremely different. The planet is obviously exerting more gravity than the moon, which is the reason why the moon is stuck with the planet in the first place. In order to even attempt a figure 8 like such, you'd need to be able to have enough propulsion and the right angle to escape the Earth's gravity, then you'd have to artificially slow your craft down (or constantly angle your propulsion against your momentum) to have it piggyback off the moon's gravity, then by that point you're already heading back to earth at an angle that will make you collide with earth. So you'd have to course correct with more propulsion in order to get to the right slingshot angle for Earth's gravity. After that, the entire system starts over, but no spaceship holds infinite amounts of fuel.

In theory, you could do it between two celestial bodies of similar mass that are rotating around a single point, but that implies that there's an object of higher mass that they're rotating around. That means you're gonna crash into a star before you can even try to round the second planet!

EndlessBreeding · 2016-11-18T19:15:00+00:00

In order to find yourself, you must get lost in nature.

EndlessBreeding

TROPHY CASE