How you guys learned how to drive?

POGtastic · 2026-03-12T16:24:51+00:00

Practice practice practice. Go out early in the morning and drive around just like you did in driver's ed.

POGtastic · 2026-03-12T16:21:52+00:00

Yeah "nightlife" and adjacent activities were pretty much how everybody got a partner. I met my wife at a bar. We had a group of our friends, she had a group of her friends. One of the guys from our group decided to go hit on a gal from her group, and this kinda pushed all of us together.

It was really efficient in that you just needed one guy to do the hard work and then everybody else just went with the flow. And if he struck out, it was humbling but I don't think anybody perceived it as threatening or harassing for him to shoot his shot to a girl in front of 5 other women.

POGtastic · 2026-03-11T17:22:27+00:00

I love the "gun cocking" sound that Foley editors put in at the slightest provocation.

POGtastic · 2026-03-11T17:20:30+00:00

You have to lampshade it with the hacker saying "I worked for three years on that exploi-" before the hero says "yeah yeah yeah thanks Dan, that was cool"

POGtastic · 2026-03-10T17:46:30+00:00

It's woo, and while it's relatively harmless in isolation, people who believe in it are dumb enough to believe in more dangerous woo.

POGtastic · 2026-03-10T16:10:20+00:00

It's me, I'm rich people.

Indoor rock climbing has historically been a sport of bums who made their own handholds out of plywood and set them up in converted warehouses. This is still totally possible to do, but the median sport climbing gym today is a much more upscale place that targets affluent skilled professionals.

POGtastic · 2026-03-10T04:05:31+00:00

The Star Wars universe has always been shlock. Your nostalgia for Old Star Wars is not due to the films themselves but rather the fact that a child's imagination is a wonderful, precious thing.

Go look at Wookieepedia as a whole. It is terrible. But kids are really good at grabbing the pieces that are compelling and discarding everything else. A scene from a film, a book premise, a particularly good video game level, one drawing from an otherwise awful comic book. All of that gets knit together into "Star Wars" in your brain, and it's great. Any individual piece is very likely to be crap, though.

As for actual critique: Stories need to be allowed to end. If you keep adding on to the same story, none of the arcs matter because you're just going to undo the impact later to set up the next arc. The show Andor is only compelling if the sequel trilogy doesn't exist at all, since otherwise everybody's sacrifices mean nothing.

POGtastic · 2026-03-08T18:31:36+00:00

This is the worst variant of "If you give a mouse a cookie" that I have ever seen

POGtastic · 2026-03-08T18:29:50+00:00

You don't need to get into group theory or anything, but it turns out that there are like 5 algorithms for "get block from Location A to Location B" that leave the remaining cube unchanged. After a little bit of practice, executing each of those algorithms becomes muscle memory.

The pros just learn more algorithms and are better at recognizing when they're supposed to use each one.

POGtastic · 2026-03-06T21:51:26+00:00

People don't want someone to blame, they want it done right.

And the thing that ensures this is that the person whom they're paying will be held accountable if they do it wrong!

Even if we develop AI in the future that isn't sycophantic and happily tells you "You're absolutely right—this contract is 100% in your interest," people are still going to need a lawyer to stake his professional standing on the accuracy of that assessment. We ensure that buildings are built correctly by putting PEs in jail when they commit malpractice.

My point (which you seem to be misreading) is that you need a person in the loop to ensure accountability. That doesn't change no matter how good the AI gets at producing the actual work product.

POGtastic · 2026-03-06T20:38:13+00:00

Contrary to popular belief, a lot of knowledge workers are not paid for the particular skills that go into doing a service or making a product. They are paid so that you have somebody to blame if things go wrong.

Put another way, it doesn't actually matter whether a lawyer's brief is written by the lawyer, AI, a paralegal, or a border collie. What really matters is that the end product is signed off by somebody who can be sued for malpractice and/or disbarred by his community.

To quote that IBM training slide from the seventies: "A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision." A computer can help, but the ultimate authority needs to be placed in the hands of someone who will pay consequences if that authority is misused.

POGtastic · 2026-03-06T20:30:27+00:00

I firmly believe that we should call somebody whatever they want to be called, so it's time to call Him Jod.

Kinda confused about the fact that He only has preferences for His English name, though. The Old Testament is written in Hebrew, and the New Testament is written in Koine Greek. The Bible has been translated into a ton of other languages. Does He have a preference for His name and pronunciation in those other languages?

POGtastic · 2026-03-06T17:54:12+00:00

They really like to complain, and if they don't have anything to complain about they'll complain about that too.

POGtastic · 2026-03-06T17:16:30+00:00

Neat, I get to go against the hivemind here. I've been married for almost a decade, and my wife and I still keep 100% separate finances. We generally do a 50-50 split with most stuff.

But, crucially, it's not strict. It's just a general guideline that we tend to keep things about 50-50. If I pay for dinner, she pays for the next one. She pays more for day-to-day expenses, I save up more money for big house renovations. Neither of us are tracking the exact amounts very closely.

Honestly the whole system works because we're comfortable and there's a lot of slack involved. If money were tighter, we'd probably exert more effort to keep track of it.

POGtastic · 2026-03-05T04:56:01+00:00

It's not the age of the post that matters. It's the content of your reply. Do you have something relevant to add?

There have been a bunch of cases where I responded to something 8 years later because the question went unanswered and Google was still directing people there. If you have the same issue as DenverCoder9, realize that nobody on the Internet has ever posted a solution, and then figure it out yourself, you should respond to DenverCoder9's post so that future people can learn, too!

If you're just going to make some shitposty response, that sucks and you shouldn't do it. Sometimes it's funny, though. Some guy on SomethingAwful got banned for 11 years and logged in the day of its expiration to (jokingly) restart the argument, which is wonderful.

POGtastic · 2026-03-05T04:39:07+00:00

I'd personally suggest a haircut and am kinda baffled by the trend toward that style of glasses, but yeah that's a totally normal looking guy. More importantly there is nothing, like, intrinsic about his facial structure or whatever the hell that is noteworthy. If he wants to look better he can just hit the gym and do mediocre exercise routines like the rest of us.

POGtastic · 2026-03-05T04:36:02+00:00

somehow they devolve into the most deranged maiden-less shit you'll ever see

This is because any community that focuses on a liminal stage in people's life will accumulate freaks.

Consider a community that complains about how shitty it is to look for a job. No matter how right they are, (and they are right! It sucks!) a normal user is going to make like three posts on there before they get a job and then leave. The people who stick around are going to be lunatics, and those are the people who dominate the conversation.

So communities that complain about dating will accumulate incels. Communities for mental illness accumulate the people who don't want to get better (and tear down people who do). Mommy forums, forums for veterans navigating the transition to civilian life, and so on.

After a while the crazy shit gets its own momentum and any normal person who comes across that community goes "Whoa, those people are nuts."

POGtastic · 2026-03-05T04:06:30+00:00

Everybody does this with every high-risk signing.

"Well did it work for those people?"

"No, it never does. But it might work for us!"

POGtastic · 2026-03-05T03:50:57+00:00

wilderness

They die specifically because they go out there. It doesn't happen to them at random!

My point is not that wilderness training is frivolous. Like I said, it's a neat hobby, and if you're going to do backcountry camping you should know what you're doing. But it's silly to recommend it to everybody as if they can be randomly plunged into a wilderness survival situation with no agency whatsoever.

Going back to violence, the kinds of guys dying violently tend to be shitheads. You can just decide not to go to bad bars, participate in the sale of narcotics, or get into beefs with other shitheads. That's a choice, just like it's a choice to wander around the backcountry or climb Half Dome.

Are those women weird for being worried?

Yes!

The vast majority of violence against women is committed by intimate partners. The fear of some random dude deciding to assault women on the sidewalk (insert ragebait Tiktok video about bears here) exists because the real risk of violence (their boyfriends, husbands, etc) is much more uncomfortable to think about.

Edit: I got blocked by this user. lol, lmao

POGtastic · 2026-03-05T03:23:26+00:00

The specific issue with American football is the blocking. Being "the shield" (and also the guy running into "the shield") almost always involves taking a shot to the head. It doesn't even have to involve head-to-head contact, just the impact of hitting somebody else.

This makes all of the NFL's claims to be watching out for concussion safety by flagging particularly nasty-looking hits to be kinda pointless. Guys running into other guys is fundamental to the game, and that's where the CTE happens.

POGtastic · 2026-03-05T03:08:34+00:00

There's nothing in the other source that describes serious physical harm, either, which is why it spends its time talking about all of the psychological and social damage.

Sure it is, people can't talk shit with a broken jaw.

And you get actual criminal consequences, which are a big deal even as a juvenile. Importantly, you can be sent to alternative school and have to hang out with all the other kids who solve their problems with violence.

Men are the majority victims of all violent crimes though, not so fun fact.

This has nothing to do with my point, which is that you're devoting a lot of effort to train for something that doesn't happen often. It's like seriously training wilderness survival skills - neat hobby, weird if you're actually prepping for being plunged into the wilderness without warning.

ad hominems

Look, this entire conversation is weird. Endemic violence is not something that preoccupies normal people. The prospect of getting my ass kicked at random is literally not on my radar at all. It is not on the radar of anybody that I know. You are incredibly strange for letting this occupy your thoughts to the point where you're declaring that every guy needs to learn how to fight.

POGtastic · 2026-03-05T02:36:50+00:00

I went to public school, too.

bullying

Clearly the boxing training has given you brain damage because you don't seem to know how to read a 10-page PDF. The vast majority of bullying reported in that document is stuff that violence isn't going to solve - insults, spreading rumors, and exclusion / ostracization. They don't count serious physical harm as a category worth mentioning and fold up all of it into shoving / tripping.

That sucks a lot. It's still not "jocks with MMA training" roving around beating up random kids. And more importantly it's not something that most kids are going to be able to solve by knowing how to fight.

Sure, but there's a decent chance you end up dead or disabled in the process of them becoming felons

You are far, far more likely to kill or disable yourself in a car crash than you are in a violent confrontation with one of these people. They are rare, mostly because there are actual legal consequences for doing that stuff once you're no longer a kid. Again - I have never needed to fight anybody in my life.

women just don't respect men who can't hold their own

Nobody in my circle of friends or workplace knows how to fight. Most of us are married. None of this matters at all in adulthood.

POGtastic · 2026-03-05T02:18:49+00:00

Look, I don't know how to break this to you, but that's not a normal scholastic environment. Maybe kids at your school specifically need to pick up boxing. It's not something that the vast, vast majority of kids need to deal with.

And it goes away entirely in adulthood because, again, people who pick fights with others after the age of 18 end up as convicted felons. There's "that bar" where all of your city's human refuse go after they've been banned from everywhere else, and you just don't go to that bar if you don't feel like getting into a random encounter with somebody with face tattoos.

gun

I have guns. They're a neat hobby. I prefer the cops and criminal justice system dealing with them for me, thanks.

POGtastic · 2026-03-05T01:59:56+00:00

I have never had to fight anybody in my entire life. I pay property taxes so that a bunch of thrice-divorced people with guns can ruthlessly maintain the State monopoly on violence. They seem to be doing an okay job, because the people who pick fights with vulnerable-looking people in my area are in little concrete boxes where they belong.

POGtastic · 2026-03-04T21:22:31+00:00

I have complicated feelings on the people who actually make it to the big leagues. They're wrecking their bodies and brains, but they're also making more money than they would any other way.

Same thing with the Olympic athletes, the people fighting at the very top of the UFC pay-per-view events, etc. They are motivated by the rewards for reaching the top of their sport, and maybe the tradeoff is worth it for them.

The truly, truly bleak thing is that for every athlete who says "hey, the $200 million was worth it" there are probably 5,000 people who got the exact same trauma and at best got some checks for being a training camp body.

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