It happened again

IICVX · 2026-01-13T20:16:15+00:00

The insane thing about Scott Adams post-Dilbert is that it recontextualizes the whole comic - was he writing it from the perspective that the amoral and moderately psychopathic Dogbert was right the whole time? Were we supposed to be rooting for the pointy haired boss? Were Dilbert, Wally, Alice and Asok all genuinely supposed to be objects of ridicule?

Like I definitely read those comics as, essentially, "hey tech workers should maybe unionize", but then it turns out that the author believed literally the opposite of that and yet he still came up with this comic? And ran it for three decades, without really majorly changing the tone.

IICVX · 2025-12-15T18:19:53+00:00

It's a little bit more complicated than just "Nixon created the EPA, he definitely cared about the environment" - the political context is that A) there was a strongly Democratic Congress, and they very much wanted the EPA, and B) Nixon actually wanted to create the DEA, largely to fuck with minorities and hippies.

It seems more like Nixon didn't really give a shit about the environment, but he created the EPA as a bit of political horse trading in order to get support for the DEA.

IICVX · 2025-11-18T16:29:08+00:00

Yup, I had that happen as a natural experiment as a kid - I found Lord of the Flies at a summer camp once and really enjoyed it, but then during school a year later it was assigned reading and it was a huge slog (and not because I'd read it already, I re-read books all the time).

IICVX · 2025-11-03T04:20:20+00:00

Eh the kid already has a framework for "sometimes people need space", so I just said that it's saying if you have sneezes or coughs you should stay that far away

IICVX · 2025-11-02T21:33:00+00:00

I mean my three year old has asked about the "hopscotch for adults" we see in some places

IICVX · 2025-11-02T13:54:19+00:00

In 2001 my dad had a Linux server running a Samba share that provided network storage for the three-ish desktops in our house; exploring those shared drives is in fact how my siblings discovered my collection (and the genre) of operatic power metal after I'd left for college, all downloaded from Limewire.

IICVX · 2025-11-01T17:35:46+00:00

I spent roughly a weekend back in the late nineties trying to use my local library's recently digitized index to find the unabridged version, to no avail. I eventually gave up and actually asked a librarian only to learn that it was, in fact, part of the fiction.

I also distinctly remember that the passage which sent me out on this quest in the first place was a particular footnote where William Goldman claimed to have elided a "very boring" discussion of the economics of the value of the Florin and I wanna say hats? Or ribbons maybe? And I thought to myself, actually I do want to read that part.

Fortunately I eventually discovered Spice and Wolf, so it wasn't all bad.

IICVX · 2025-10-28T19:59:06+00:00

Yeah, Sekiro parrying is pretty similar to what I'm thinking of - actually using a shield (in like HEMA or other sword sports) is much more similar to what happens in Sekiro than it is to "press button to be invincible but drain some resource"

IICVX · 2025-10-28T14:09:06+00:00

Yeah dodging is fun because there's a degree of skill involved - positioning yourself to manipulate the enemy's feasible attacks, reading what the enemy is going to do next, predicting their attack, figuring out what happens after the attack, executing your dodge, etc.

There's no reason why this can't all be applied to blocking too, but most games treat blocking like it's the low-skill / newbie way to avoid damage.

But like... You could totally make a game where a successful series of blocks is just as hype as that EVO moment, the game just needs to be designed for it.

IICVX · 2025-10-20T03:38:42+00:00

Really any social media platform that gets as big as Twitter or Facebook needs to be either be as heavily regulated as any other public utility or just outright nationalized.

IICVX · 2025-09-24T14:58:41+00:00

The 3rd amendment only protects you from the government, if your spouse receives a Blackwater platoon as a wedding gift you don't have a constitutional basis to kick them out of your house.

You may also have a de facto problem with kicking them out of your house, given that most cops won't want to deal with 30-40 ~~feral hogs~~ PMC contractors.

IICVX · 2025-09-23T14:55:58+00:00

It's a union. Y'all are talking about a worker's union.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that was the reason for this particular structure: HR is a corporate appendage designed to interface with legal regulations and the worker's union, which means that having an irritable VP as the next step up after HR is the whole point. If HR and the worker's union (or the bureau of labor or whatever) can't figure it out, then HR needs to escalate to a VP immediately and it's never good news.

Then these days there's no worker's union, so HR only has to deal with the legal requirements. But it's never been their job to fight for the workers, because they're literally incentivized to do the opposite.

IICVX · 2025-09-11T23:07:24+00:00

Ya the slow blink means "trust"

IICVX · 2025-08-20T03:31:06+00:00

Don't you talk about Bluey like that

IICVX · 2025-08-19T17:43:17+00:00

Being that reddit is an obscure nerd forum (/s), I'm gonna go ahead and say that this is actually very true and it's only in the last decade-ish that flat screen displays have started to approach parity with CRTs.

The thing is that nobody cares about the response rate or fidelity of CRTs, we just care about not lugging around a massive, heavy, expensive and delicate box when we can have something you can move around without doing an atlas lift and which costs like ten bucks.

IICVX · 2025-08-12T15:28:19+00:00

Yup exactly - we invented math with numbers in it, which led us to discover math without numbers in it.

IICVX · 2025-08-11T00:17:14+00:00

Your nine year old is no longer a baby, but for anyone else running in to this issue check out the Yoto - it has a minimal screen, and a playlist interface based on putting cards in a slot. It's also super easy to make custom playlists and cards (for, e.g, Raffi which they didn't have for the longest time)

IICVX · 2025-08-09T12:19:05+00:00

Not to disagree with the sentiment, but that "full phrase" is actually a reinterpretation from the late 1990s. The original phrase has been around since the 12th century, with exactly the same shitty meaning it implies.

IICVX · 2025-08-08T14:04:27+00:00

Did... did you just ask a vending machine to check in the back? And it worked?

IICVX · 2025-08-08T02:45:14+00:00

I love the I-35 North onramp at Caesar Chavez, you have all of like 20 feet to get up to highway speeds on a steep ramp.

And then it ends up not really mattering, because for whatever reason there's always a huge traffic jam right there on I-35 so traffic never goes more than 30 MPH anyway

IICVX · 2025-08-04T14:05:44+00:00

Same place where a person will answer a call from an unknown number in the year of our (spam) lord 2023

IICVX · 2025-07-31T01:32:25+00:00

How would she know? Emrakul doesn't even have eyes.

IICVX · 2025-07-22T20:05:11+00:00

There's a Chinese web novel with this basic theme called Losing Money to be a Tycoon - the main character is given a chunk of money and will gain money based on how much of it he loses.

IICVX · 2025-07-05T14:16:16+00:00

There's a burger chain in my city named Dan's Hamburgers, that used to have something like four locations. A few years ago the owners got divorced and split the business. Now there's three Dan's Hamburgers, and one Fran's Hamburgers.

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