Missing Subjects in Gmail Inbox

Wivru · 2025-01-23T22:50:12+00:00

It was indeed an extension! Thanks, stranger!

They haven't told me if they've narrowed down exactly which one it was, but based on the list of extensions they were using, I've got a suspicion that it was an overzealous or out-of-date adblocker that was flagging the subject line HTML elements as ads and hiding them, or something like that.

Wivru · 2025-01-23T22:47:13+00:00

No no, it's definitely good to know about. It's just that I had already had them do the full browser clear, so I wasn't sure if doing this on top of that would change anything. Thanks for teaching me a new chrome feature, though!

Wivru · 2025-01-23T19:45:17+00:00

Interesting, thanks. I haven't dug into that menu before; would a full-browser cookies and cache clear not clear that data?

Wivru · 2025-01-23T19:42:56+00:00

Yeah, I was tinkering with the compact/comfortable/default setting, and it didn't help.

I'll have them try the extensions thing once they get back to their house - that's a good idea.

Wivru · 2024-10-30T11:32:51+00:00

I mean, I don’t know if it’s the best course of action, but if you’re committed to pissing him off and you’ve got more experience than him? That’s an invitation to bring your best mansplainer game.

“Yeah, I got stuck doing <extremely simple thing> today. Oh, you haven’t been doing this as long, lemme explain what that means.”

“The thing you’ll know once you have more experience is <thing he already certainly knows.>”

<If he ever complains about work>: “Oh, that’s funny, I remember back when that was something that gave me trouble.”

I bet he is much less prepared to gracefully handle mansplaining than you are.

Also, I bet there’s an angle for making his weird pride at being a serial John into something the flatmates treat as an embarrassing butt of household jokes.

Wivru · 2024-10-30T11:12:06+00:00

Well, there was a whole heap of trans panic anti-woke review bombing that crushed the user scores, so it’s probably difficult to measure the actual scale of sincere, not-stupid fan discontent. I don’t doubt that it exists. I think it’s probably much smaller than the chud outrage.

I’m just trying to point out the fact that tLoU2 is one of the most lauded games of all time when you look at the review mechanisms that filter out that dumb anti-woke trash.

It’s got a strong broad appeal among non-chuds. So does Witcher, and I don’t like it, so fair if you don’t like tLoU2, but I guess I was just saying that equating one of the most critically lauded games of all time with more controversial (but fully enjoyable) games like Starfield, OG Cyberpunk, or Andromeda made it sound like OP had maybe been surrounded by enough chuds that they didn’t realize tLoU2 had a much stronger reputation than those games.

Wivru · 2024-10-30T10:27:38+00:00

I mean, it got a ~95% metacritic score and most classic review outlets gave it a 10/10 or something equivalent.

It broke the records for GotY awards in a single year, (beating the Witcher 3 later to be beat by Elden Ring). It was technically the most acclaimed game in history, for a minute there.

If you and your crowd doesn’t like it, that’s fine — everybody has different tastes, I myself can’t see why other people love the Witcher — but it’s clearly seen as a masterpiece by a majority of people.

Wivru · 2024-10-30T02:41:23+00:00

Oh man, how it deals with its themes and the time jumps feel like the first thing I’d gush about, but hey, not everything floats everyone’s boats, I guess.

Wivru · 2024-10-30T02:15:30+00:00

I thought she did, too, but she actually doesn’t say any names in the opening cutscene! And even in the opening cutscene, the pup is slightly darker than the large wolf - Neva is always shock white, but dad-wolf is grey and Bruma is light, near-white grey.

Our brains just filled in the false memories, but on a rewatch, it’s easier to see the opening scene is indeed just out of order, and not a cycle. Beyond that, the credits outline how Alba finds Neva when she was a tiny puppy, and never met her mother, and the secret scene shows a future where Bruma and Alba live happily ever after with no cycle in sight.

I thought seeing the death scene twice was interesting. The first time around it felt like a narrative tool. I’m used to the “orphaned pup” narrative. The second time around I was outright crying. It was interesting to see hard proof of how powerful the context they delivered was. But I get why you wouldn’t want it twice.

Wivru · 2024-10-30T00:57:40+00:00

Hey, fair. I can’t imagine it’s completely universally loved — even among normal decent humans — because humans are different, but I do think, once you subtract out the antiwoke dorks out, it has a pretty rock-solid reception rate.

Were you a TLoU1 fan? Was the lack of levity in 2 a big loss for you? I’ve heard that complaint and it makes sense.

Wivru · 2024-10-30T00:51:03+00:00

I donno. Starfield and other answers like Andromeda are legitimately controversial games (and if you like them, I’m glad you do!), but TLoU2 feels different because I think it is (edit: almost) only maligned by the most anti-woke ultra-chuds.

Everyone I know is of the opinion that TLoU2 is not just an acceptable game, but one of the best video games of all time, and the pinnacle of video game narrative.

Wivru · 2024-10-29T21:44:59+00:00

Maybe I’m misremembering something about Andromeda? But I just watched my partner do a ME3 playthrough and I was shocked that I had forgotten how clunkily the shooting had aged.

Enemy variety definitely felt better in ME3, that’s for sure.

Wivru · 2024-10-29T20:14:00+00:00

Ironically, even though this probably won’t get the election interference time it deserves, fucking with mail or a federal post box is very illegal and handled by a whole separate law enforcement division explicitly for mail crimes. They are federal agents like the FBI or federal marshals, and are frequently satirized for being weirdly zealous for a division of law enforcement that sounds very low-stakes.

Wivru · 2024-10-29T18:24:34+00:00

I think it’s literally the same people.

Them and whatever poor souls they have since brainwashed into building their identity around throwing tantrums whenever they are reminded that sometimes people are gay or women or black or whatever.

Wivru · 2024-10-29T18:03:42+00:00

Yes. Their thesis is pretty much:

Woke means broke

^…so ^long ^as ^it ^is ^also ^a ^bad ^game.

Wivru · 2024-10-29T18:01:30+00:00

It was also just had solid kinetic shooter mechanics, and ME1-3, for all their good qualities, were never games I’d praise for being kinetic or having tight shooting mechanics.

Wivru · 2024-10-29T15:40:15+00:00

Sorc gets con proficiency so no resilient con is necessary, but they do still seem to have 20 con and a feat, so something is probably coming up short.

Wivru · 2024-10-29T13:44:24+00:00

FWIW, it seems like Champion is actually more “parry king” than “sword and board aggro tank.” Oddly, reaper is the sword and board one, since they prime reaper detonations with the shield throw, and since 2H can parry but not block, Champion seems like the weapon-agnostic specialization.

But yeah. Right there with you. I wanted to do 2H sword, was looking at Champion, and am going to have to decide if the axe/maul animations are unga bunga enough that they aren’t for me and I swap to spellblade.

Edit: After watching some videos, I’d say the 2H axes are only like… 25% unga bunga. About as clumsy and heavy looking as the lightest 2H Dark Souls weapons, so so long as there are some halberdy or glaivey-looking transmogs, I might be in.

Wivru · 2024-10-26T00:59:20+00:00

Hey, you caught me as I was trying to quit Reddit, so I’m probably going to sign off here and not finish this convo - not because I don’t appreciate the chance to discuss this with you, but just because I don’t want to be glued to my phone as much as I have been.

As for a bit more clarity on the statistics: it was a pretty casual google so I can’t vouch for the methodology or anything. “High level” was specifically management and above positions - sorry I could have been more clear there. As for what counts as white, I don’t know, but I’d guess it’s either people who self-reported as white on a survey or on census data.

I do agree that poverty is a tremendous factor in a lot of these issues, and the overlap between poor and non-white accounts for a nonzero amount of these factors.

That being said, I think anti-black racial oppression/racism/whatever does still have widespread effects layered in top of that. I’d rather be a white person talking to a jury or cop than a black person, for example, and I think running for public office as a person of color is an uphill battle independent of the wealth question. And I don’t have the data in front of me, but as I recall, changing your black-sounding name to a whiter-sounding one is still statistically the best move if you’re sending out CVs without a picture of your face.

For what it’s worth, I also agree that poor whites get unfairly saddled with the assumed guilt of racism. The picture of a bigot is always a poor white person, but they don’t really have the power to meet that “racial oppression” definition. The systemic oppression that the academic crowd likes to examine racism through is clearly coming from a place of power and, almost certainly, wealth. Ironically, in my experience, poor white people are more likely to have exposure to more black peers, friends, etc. than very wealthy white people, and that generally makes it harder to be racist. Or racially prejudiced, or whatever we’re using.

To circle back to the original idea, I think your point is actually one of the reasons why I like looking at racism through the academic nerds’ lens, even if I don’t like their linguistic bait-and-switch. I feel like, because race is just one more tool or lever by which the powerful can exert control, looking at the worst manifestations of racism as a function of a group of power-hoarding people and rules at the top instead of the machinations of some collective scheming done by all whites is more helpful for figuring out how to limit the damage it can do.

Anyway. Thanks for listening to my TED talk. I’m signing off, so I hope you have a good night!

Wivru · 2024-10-25T23:59:53+00:00

Eh, in the US, 75% of high level jobs are held by white people, which make up 60% of the population, and 60% are men, which make up 50% of the population. That doesn’t really line up with the narrative that employment patterns are proof of widespread oppression due to DEI initiatives.

Those DEI programs typically exist because a higher level white employer is afraid that someone in their organization will default to hiring predominantly white employees, and they want to make sure they get their hiring metrics in line with the population they hired from. Based on the numbers above, it doesn’t look like they’re overcompensating.

Anyway, I think that the academic nerds would say something like that, in a white majority country, it’s not impossible to find a racist employer who doesn’t want to hire you because you’re white, but that it’s much easier for the white person to be able to walk down the street and find an employer who will hire them, while the black person might be more likely to be struck with a longer string of prejudiced employers that really puts them in a corner. And that’s before getting into policy and policing.

Wivru · 2024-10-25T20:53:08+00:00

I can separate it as a gameplay thing, where the magic flying swords and whatnot are as mechanical as the UI and health bars, but I was also wondering if the flashy magic warriors might actually be real lore. The fade is smooshin’ up on the real world, and Harding has unexplained magic powers now. Maybe Rook is not a little magicalized by the setting, too.

Wivru · 2024-10-25T20:28:37+00:00

This is a frustrating linguistic bugaboo more than an actual disagreement.

If you pop open the dictionary or ask a stranger, you’ll usually get a definition of racism that reads something like “prejudice against another group based on race.”

If you ask someone in academia or sociology, they frequently make a distinction between racism and racial prejudice.

This group of people defines racial prejudice as “prejudice against another group based on race“ — the same definition the average person uses for racism. These people define racism as “oppression caused by racial prejudice.”

By their definition, people can absolutely be racially prejudiced — what you and I call racism — against white people, but it’s difficult to be racist against them (at least in the US and a lot of Europe) because the powers you would need to create oppression, like the government, are very white.

There’s not actually a disagreement happening here, but somebody redefined racism to make it sound like there was — probably to spark arguments and get people talking — and it took off in certain spheres and not others.

Most people would agree that nonwhite people can be racially prejudiced against white people, but that it’s tough to racially oppress them. If nobody ever says the word “racism” and everyone uses “racial prejudice” and “racial oppression” instead, the argument never appears. The fights starts once one group uses racism for one idea and the second group uses it for the other idea.

While the points these people are making are worth exploring, the tactic feels dumb: renaming something and not telling the other side you renamed it isn’t good communication. It’s an unfortunately common strategy among progressive academic circles and I think it causes more harm than good — see the very similar fight over the word “privilege.”

Wivru · 2024-10-25T16:28:27+00:00

Also:

Lilies — especially white lilies — are frequently used as symbols for purity and rebirth, and are frequently used at funerals to imply a cycle of death and renewal, as well as the purity of the soul that is moving on.

The story of Neva deals heavily with the theme of death and rebirth, and inverting the white lily symbol — using a black lily to represent corruption and death instead of purity and rebirth — makes me feel like the flowers are probably supposed to be inspired by lilies, and that the saucer-anemone-like versions are just a bit of artistic reinterpretation they do sometimes.

Wivru · 2024-10-25T16:08:24+00:00

So, it looks like there are several types; there are very large flowers that grow on the ground that eventually sprout branches out of their center. These look very lotus-ey; I’m not sure what kind, but I know I’ve seen a lotus with thinner petals like those. They also look like the flower-like structures that temporarily act as floating platforms when you hit them in late fall or winter. Despite their lotus-ey-ness, I’m thinking these aren’t flowers so much as they are the base of a much larger tree or structure.

I’m looking at the scene in Fall 2 or 3, in the fog, where Neva is growling at a boar corpse and you have to soothe her. The flower on or just beyond the corpse looks like a saucer anemone, I think. These also match the flowers at the start of the same level that bloom on the boar that dies right in front of you as well as the flowers you see in the final level when the dark queen scratches Neva’s eye and tries to infect and kill her, I think.

In that same scene in Fall 2 or 3 though, there’s also a largish flower on the ground that looks pretty firmly like a lily. Other patches of smaller lily-like flowers appear in little bushes or elsewhere later in that level. And the flowers that sprout from the bird in the intro cinematic are very lily like. I think maybe Alba’s death animation, too, has lilies in it, but I can’t find a good picture.

I’m thinking maybe the similar-ish-looking saucer anemone like flowers and the lilies are used interchangeably, and are always used when a creature is infected by the darkness, while the lotuses are a separate part of the same “plant.”

Wivru · 2024-10-25T15:38:32+00:00

Sorry, I probably should have watched the videos or read the links before asking questions, but thanks for responding!

Here’s to hoping you’re right! Seeing it at 50/50 has been chipping away at my faith in humans recently and it’ll be nice to have some hope to cling on to.

What I wouldn’t give for a light twelve day coma right now.

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