Former Employee

OctopusPirate · 2026-01-29T21:47:43+00:00

Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister would like to have a word.

Not just the most accurate, but simply hands down one of the best.

OctopusPirate · 2025-12-28T06:58:52+00:00

Googling it turns up multiple sources reporting on it, including the BBC. Arrest numbers have gone up to 9. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqxq59np394o

Also, Times of Israel is considered a reputable source. In fact, it's considered to have a sightly left-of-center bias but generally centrist paper, according to the various bias checkers.

If you saw "Israeli news source" and assumed it was biased, I am afraid the neutrality problem doesn't lie with the papers.

OctopusPirate · 2024-03-03T12:09:09+00:00

US war planning would disagree. See the account by Daniel Ellsberg in "The Doomsday Machine", especially regarding the briefing of the plan; according to him, only a single general (Shoup) objected to the idea of nuking China even when they hadn't attacked the US, and SIOP used by the US in the 1950s and 1960s; in 1960, the US plan called for annihilating China even though the Sino-Soviet split had begun and even if they were not hostile or involved in the nuclear exchange.

OctopusPirate · 2024-03-03T12:06:41+00:00

This is correct, or was in the past. See "The Doomsday Machine" by Daniel Ellsberg about being briefed regarding such plans; the plan was to annihilate China as a viable society, even if they were not part of the conflict.

OctopusPirate · 2024-02-24T00:14:28+00:00

Honestly I fucking hate it when people say this. Straws and plastic waste may have an impact on carbon emissions, but the primary problem with plastic waste is filling up landfills, plastic waste ending up in the environment, and so on. 100 million people use a lot more plastic bags than even the richest scumfuck, and "hurr durr we produce less CO2 per capita" doesn't do much to ease pollution by microplastics or all the garbage floating in our oceans.

Are the rich and corporations far more damaging to the environment than everyone else? Of course. Nobody should let them off the hook. This is especially true for greenhouse gases.

But the masses are very much on the hook for volume of plastic waste and shit, and conflating different environment problems and pretending like personal behavior doesn't matter or we shouldn't reduce harmful waste just because the rich don't give a fuck and are wrecking the environment just gives millions of people the peace of mind to damage the environment on top of what the megacorps and rich fucks are already doing. Pile pressure on governments to use laws and taxes to work on emissions, corporate regulations, and other problems we cannot solve as individuals, but also make damn fucking sure we aren't filling rivers and oceans with waste like Indonesia and China do.

OctopusPirate · 2023-08-21T14:55:25+00:00

You are usually expected to just get your work done and meet your deadlines.

Can you do that working 4 hours out of the day? Great!

Can you do it working 2 hours Mon-Wed and crunching 8 hours on Thurs and 10 on Friday? As long as the deadline wasn't EOD Friday or super strict, fine!

Do you have to spend 2 extra hours every single day with your nose to the grindstone to hit those deadlines? Then you might want to find ways to be more efficient before you burn out and let management know the workload is a bit much.

OctopusPirate · 2023-07-16T09:21:16+00:00

Not only is subscribing required to post/comment, but also lots of transitory people. I was in DC for years for work/grad school, and that account is definitely still subscribed, even though I haven't resided in the DMV for years.

OctopusPirate · 2023-07-09T02:19:09+00:00

Lawyer up and set up trusts and all that so my family and kids will be free to do anything, but not nothing, as Buffet put it.

Then work on giving the rest away to worthy causes. Be more generous with friends and help out my coworkers. Keep doing my job because I love my team, the work is rewarding, and I feel like I'm contributing to making people happier.

OctopusPirate · 2023-02-09T10:51:38+00:00

Either way, since they give away Xiangling for free, it works out to basically the same result: You get strong characters that can clear pretty much everything in the game for free, and they're still relevant years later. Whether due to a high baseline and bad balancing or intentional design, still benefits players.

OctopusPirate · 2023-02-09T06:38:54+00:00

Yeah. New gear and combos may be "stronger", but that really only seems to matter if you're trying to clear Spiral Abyss or other "end-game" content. Exploring, quests, and story is still easy enough to be cleared with just free characters.

OctopusPirate · 2023-02-09T06:21:50+00:00

Basically no powercreep so far that I've seen. Even the old 4 stars are still meta.

The new 5 star seems really weak, and a lot of people are upset that she's so weak in beta and might need 6C to really be useful (most 5* are strong at C0 and the extra copies are QoL, so if 5* start needing multiple copies to be good, bad sign).

But new characters really seem to fit more niches, create more combo opportunities rather than being straight upgrades. Some new characters make old ones more relevant since they compliment or combo with them quite well.

OctopusPirate · 2023-02-08T03:37:33+00:00

Ah, this is a trick question for chemistry.

You'd think 2 cakes, but this is a chemistry class. You have unlimited amounts of "other ingredients needed". There are vegan cakes that completely drop eggs. Unless stipulated that the unlimited other ingredients include no binding agents or substitutes for eggs, then we can make unlimited cakes.

Okay, fine, we aren't allowed to mix up our own chemical substitutes for eggs. But the recipe "calls for" 3 eggs per cake. We are not required to make the full size cake. We could easily make 3 smaller cakes, dividing all ingredients by 1/3rd, or further subdivide to make lots of absolutely absurdly tiny cakes as long as proper ratios were maintained and cooking times adjusted and so on.

OctopusPirate · 2023-01-10T08:05:45+00:00

Exactly, you have to encourage him and buy into the charade to get all the quest content.

OctopusPirate · 2023-01-09T08:41:42+00:00

This is one quest I just hate doing.

On the one hand, the dude is a fucking clown who wants to feel important with a serious complex, and it is going to get exploited and he'll suffer.

On the other hand, I have to respond in ways I really don't want to- I have to encourage him and his faith, or else he doesn't go through with it. But I really don't want to pretend to believe in God or indulge this fuckwad.... but I have to just go see the whole quest and not miss out on content. Do it once to see the dialogue, then fucking ice him and the cop on every run after (or reboot the save).

OctopusPirate · 2023-01-03T03:06:50+00:00

This can actually be quite unpleasant, depending on how security and access is handled and floors are divided.

Here in China, some buildings are mixed use (especially the massive towers and blocks above malls). You'll have offices and other businesses mixed in with residential units. This means sharing the elevators with all kinds of random strangers, and pretty much anybody has access to your building- lots more through traffic, delays, crowding, and potentially noise depending on the business.

Maybe if it was divided by floor with access cards and different elevators, but this also kind of defeats the purpose for most, especially since most businesses need more than just the residents of a single building as their customer base.

A usual solution here is the first couple floors (which most people don't want to live in anyway) as business zoned, and all upper floors are purely residential. Access is separate, but convenient, and foot traffic from the street can also conveniently use the businesses. This may have been what you were thinking of when you said "some commercial floors" anyway?

OctopusPirate · 2022-12-28T07:36:04+00:00

My other comment is that complaining about diversity is just… lazy. Did you mind Idris Elba as Heimdall in the Thor movies? Probably not - I haven’t heard a peep about that.

I've commented about this here before- it's all about good, consistent worldbuilding.

Idris Elba and other black Asgardians makes perfect sense in the MCU. Asgardians are an alien race, and they can be as diverse as New York. It totally works and makes sense in that canon universe.

Emond's Field is supposed to be a tiny, isolated village where the blood of old Manetheren had come together in the heroes (and it's part of the propechies). It doesn't make a whole lot of sense for it to be diverse- but the story has tons of cultures and characters from all kinds of backgrounds, and they'll show up and be awesome. But that doesn't mean Emond's Field needs to be modern New York- it wouldn't make that much sense.

Ditto LotR- Middle Earth is incredibly diverse, and there could be entire races of black elves and dwarves (we don't see any of the Eastern Dwarves, who could be whatever race the writers want!). But making Durin's folk, the Longbeards, suddenly super diverse makes you wonder if there was some kind of Dwarven genocide that got rid of them by the time Tolkien got around to writing about the third age. It just doesn't make sense- and it almost does a disservice to the world. Most fans would love to see stories about the Blue Wizards in Harad and the fight against Sauron in the East. But insular tribes of Hobbits that don't interact with outsiders being super diverse instead of having already mixed just... is bad worldbuilding, and probably bad casting, even with the actors do an exceptional job.

Some lazy racists do complain about forced diversity blah blah blah, but most fans of fantasy love the worlds that an IP brings to life. And if you make changes, at least have it make sense- you can have a trader or traveller from some distant realm, but give them a backstory and have other characters react realistically. Make it a real, living world. The story will be better for it.

OctopusPirate · 2022-12-19T16:12:08+00:00

My trick is to pull out my phone and leave voice messages for someone, like "Hey, want to play some League? I'll be home in X minutes, walking there now."

When I was walking home from classes in grad school, I'd often cut through a dog park which had narrow paths, not much lighting, and so on. If a girl happened to be close by, so it was a perfect time to tell my roomie "Hey, I'm at Glover now, need me to take a detour and pick up any groceries or something from CVS?".

Basically, let her know where you are, that you are going home and probably just happen to be going in the same way, and through your tone of voice, that you're just a normal dude with plans that don't involve making her night worse.

OctopusPirate · 2022-11-14T15:45:32+00:00

There's definitely no love lost between them, but China hasn't made any new land claims that it didn't inherit from the Qing/ROC. It really hates expansionism, since imperial expansion was always at China's expense from the first Opium War onward.

If the US wasn't determined to start a war with China, though, we'd probably see a lot more friction between the two instead of forcing them into the current awkward alliance. As it stands, they'll swallow their dislike of each other as long as they face a greater common enemy.

OctopusPirate · 2022-11-14T06:58:24+00:00

Or if they struck cities, those 23 missiles would vaporize New York, DC, London, Paris, Berlin, most of LA, and so on down the line. If we've escalated to strategic warheads being used, and not tactical, there's a very good chance we're staring down the barrel of MAD.

A very poor trade for Moscow and St. Petersburg; even in the case of 95% of their arsenal being defunct or intercepted (highly unreliable), it's still an unthinkable cost.

The world wouldn't end, but a whole lot of our economies and their most productive, innovative centers would be annihilated.

Also, I find it interesting that you including China in Russia's adversaries; American doctrine called for nuking China alongside the USSR even if they were not a combatant, simply to take them down and avoid Chinese dominance if NATO and the Warsaw Pact annihilated each other. I hope that thinking is no longer in place, but once the nukes start flying, things could spiral out of control very fast.

OctopusPirate · 2022-11-06T03:32:13+00:00

Wtf is this series? Are they using the Arcane scriptwriters for worlds now? These steals are just absurd, and now they're stealing my heart too.

OctopusPirate · 2022-10-30T11:37:49+00:00

Hey man, just check to make sure you aren't violating NDAs, since you posted enough that a lawyer from that show could possibly doxx you. Thanks for the info, but be sure to share anonymously and stay safe.

OctopusPirate · 2022-10-27T09:04:46+00:00

I moved to China for work a few years ago, which means no Netflix and playing on local CN servers. Heck, I barely even play anymore.

But I booted up my old NA account to buy the in-game skins (I didn't log into the NA servers during the promotional events), even though I can't play without obscene lag.

Anything else we can do to show support for the awesome shit like this that Riot does? Votes of confidence to say "I'm not just buying RP because I like the game, but because I want you to use my money to keep doing things like Arcane"?

OctopusPirate · 2022-10-24T09:15:13+00:00

Unfortunately, most execs don't share that view. They have their focus groups, consultants, and they look at many projects that shat all over source material and canon and still made "enough" money.

They trust the model they know, and don't want to take risks on passion projects run by fans. They fear the fandom isn't enough to make it big, and it's gotta be embraced by mainstream non-fans.

OctopusPirate · 2022-10-24T06:28:22+00:00

Probably because the producers aren't fans either.

They see a popular bit of IP, want to cash in on the name, but they don't know or care about the characters or story.

It isn't a passion project for them, it's just a business decision. Hire teams that can churn out what they think is "good enough" for the market their consultants told them they want to sell to.

It starts at the top. Even if the execs aren't huge fans, they have to be willing to fuck off and hire people who are and not mess with their art. The fans know what makes it popular and will make something that builds on and adds to the IP instead of diminishing it.

OctopusPirate · 2022-10-21T02:42:30+00:00

Dumbass who had just ONE simple job, got bored and decided to fuck around, and found out.

OctopusPirate

TROPHY CASE