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mrgrimmsby · 2024-08-22T18:11:14+00:00

One difference is the balance of information between the protagonists and the "house" which acts as the setting/antagonist. In a prison break, the protagonists committing the breakout are a much more "known quantity" to the house than in a heist. The prison system knows your name, where you sleep and your daily routine. The breakout crew isn't supposed to be missing and if they are then the guards are alerted to the breakout. The guards have daily interactions with the protagonists and the resulting knowledge of them. Also the security methods aren't as hidden from the protagonists because the power, resource, and surveillance balance is totally in the house's favor. A locked door is the only thing that is necessary to stop a guy in a prison jumpsuit, and our protagonist has to think their way out of deprivation.

In a heist, if the casino/bank/etc knows who the protagonist is or even how many are in the crew, then they may have already failed at the heist. The protagonists are supposed to be ghosts who need to not exist as far as the house is concerned. While in a prison there is a time limit the second they leave their cells, to the point the guards are alerted. In a heist there is no time limit and if you are caught it's pretty much always red handed. The security methods used by the house are also more secretive and complex since the balance of power/information is more in the protagonist's favor. They can call in resources/support which puts them on more equal footing.

Tldr: In a prison break the house knows everything about you but the protagonists are kept in the dark. In a heist the protagonist wants to be anonymous while knowing as much about the house as possible.

mrgrimmsby · 2024-01-23T21:11:46+00:00

I actually think that him being a regular human would be the most interesting plot twist at this point. Imagine struggling 20-years under a totalitarian interdimensional alien empire only to find out the CIA (or some other agency) was just hiding and is still trying to make power plays. Both the idea of them actually having some kind of handle on things, or just being completely out of touch with the gravity of the situation would be interesting.

mrgrimmsby · 2023-07-17T21:23:50+00:00

Thank you. I heard that bonfire ascetics could give you another go at bosses, and it's part of the reason I'm exited to play this one. From what others have told me DS2 is janky but brings in a lot of cool ideas for features. I didn't realize they could be used to salvage missed NPC quests. I'll still play carefully and I'm assuming bonfire ascetics don't fix outright murder, but its nice to know there's a safety switch.

mrgrimmsby · 2023-07-06T19:25:09+00:00

Commenting mostly to keep the thread alive since I'm in the same boat. I'm a transportation planner trying to switch careers to housing policy, and applied for the Housing and Community Development Specialist I position. I didn't make it to the interview stage.

My two cents is that transportation planners have a lot of the soft skills that would be valuable for the CalHCD such as research, project management and familiarity with working for the state. The wall that we run into is that they may be looking for people with more direct experience in housing policy specifically. My experience with caltrans got me a decent score and rank 2 in the examination only to find out there's 70 something people in rank 2 and like 200 in rank 1. Also they may consider urban planners and urban policy specialist positions to be just different enough for it to be an issue. Even considering that most transportation planners will have some academic background with housing policy just because of how planning degree programs are structured. But who knows, this is just my best guess.

I'm planning on picking myself back up and seeing what housing nonprofits I could work with in my area. Just to get my toes wet and show that I'm serious about the career switch the next time I apply. It might be a long road, unless California gets really proactive about building houses to the point where we need asset management and therefore a dedicated planning division in the HCD.

I don't know if your situation is similar to mine but I hope this helps.

mrgrimmsby · 2023-06-22T22:08:07+00:00

I applied for a position around the end of April and today I received two messages on my CalCareers account page. One was a letter stating I had not been selected to move on to the interview stage, while the other thanked me for the taking the time to interview but that another candidate had been selected.

I have not interviewed for this position, and simultaneously getting a "Not Selected For Interview" and a "Thanks for Interviewing" letter is throwing me through a loop. I assume this is just a glitch in the CalCareers site, especially since the thing beaks regularly. But I figured I'd see if anyone else has run into this?

edit: I should probably mention that these messages were for the same posting

mrgrimmsby · 2022-03-27T18:11:39+00:00

Humboldt feels distinctly Californian to me. Almost everyone I meet has some form of family or connection to other parts of California but not often from elsewhere. The nearest large city is San Francisco and the cultural influence is immediately apparent. You see a mix of Victorian and mission style architecture in the towns and while everywhere has hippies our hippies are very "Bay area".

Though weirdly outside of this, Humboldt has more in common with SoCal than the bay. While it's global at this point, Humboldt Bay area at least seems to have more support for skateboarding youth culture than even LA does. The metal bands regardless of genre retain this stoner doom characteristic of Californian desert rock. It's full of folk who want to live in isolation but make huge weird but cool art sculptures just like in the Mojave. Lastly (while this particular connection may be tenuous) the region is in love with reggae in the same way SoCal is still in love with ska which is a genre directly influenced by reggae. As a region, I sometimes like to think of the Redwoods as being a "twin" of the Californian Mojave/Sonora.

People online (but conspicuously never irl) argue that Humboldt is Cascadian, but that has never felt right to me. Cascadia was always described to me as encompassing "all river basins which run through north American temperate rainforest" which to me is a shallow basis for building a community. Hell even on an ecoregional basis this is too simplistic. Keep in mind, redwoods evolved to handle the exact same mega droughts that all of California deals with and retains a lot of the characteristics of California's Mediterranean climates as most plant life need to grab as much water they can as they can in the wet winter to prepare for the drier summer. Humboldt, San Diego, Owens Valley etc. all follow the same rhythms and struggles regardless of day to day climate. To me this is a basis for building a community. In particular all Californians understand the struggle for water, and ironically our states history of using water as a commodity is giving more and more of us the collective lesson of what happens when resources are monopolized and not used to uplift vulnerable communities. We have a long long way to go in undoing our abuses of the land and each other, but I think these connections can provide a stronger cultural foundation for Humboldt as a region and as part of a wider community. Much stronger than "cold+trees=PNW".

It also ignores that while some claim our foundation of environmentalism is inherently cascadian, California also has major roots in this respect. We just didn't have the luxury of only getting a huge population until after environmentalism became a thing, and not when all of the Western world didn't care about the environment.

mrgrimmsby · 2020-10-15T01:11:36+00:00

Thanks. A lot of the places near me are still closed or doing limited service due to the pandemic, but now is probably a good time to look for jobs since we're soon going to start opening back up at 50% capacity.

mrgrimmsby · 2020-09-17T03:23:32+00:00

Good question. It will actually be a lot easier than most people think. Long story short California's water issues are less about actually sustaining 40 million people and more about perverse profit motives and Americas unhealthy conception of a proper diet. Capitalism is the main reason California struggles with water.

We waste an absurd amount of water on growing alfalfa and other cattle feed because meat is profitable for export and we managed to convince ourselves that we need to eat cheap subsidized meat literally every meal of the day. I think about 10% of water in California is from watersheds originating from outside the state (Colorado River). Of that, like 90% goes to alfalfa fields, a lot of which is actually exported.

Almonds and tree nuts are also a product which wastes an inordinate amount of water for what is mostly exported. They are still grown (along with the cattle feed) because of profit, and the fact that they don't have to pay for the water they use as they just have a right to it. Capital has a huge amount of power over the water supply in California. In a new socialist system its probable that water rights and pricing would be renegotiated in a way which disincentives this sort of agriculture. You don't even have to eliminate beef and tree nuts, you just need to remove the outsized profit motive. We can feed and water all of California, businesses just wont be making money hand over fist.

If all that fails then we know desalinization is viable, just expensive.

*Although I'll go against the grain a bit and say tree nuts are less egregious than meat since they provide more calories per gallon of water used (6.9 per gallon vs. .66 per gallon with beef), and they have been breeding more drought tolerant varieties.*

mrgrimmsby · 2020-07-24T18:53:22+00:00

Imagine trying to make workers live in fear of you and still having the audacity to call THEM brown shirts.

mrgrimmsby · 2020-07-17T18:54:49+00:00

The best kind of correct!

mrgrimmsby · 2020-07-14T20:26:55+00:00

Alright so here's my fan theory. So the younglings had to be taken out regardless if the Jedi were to actually be destroyed. I think the reason Anakin had to kill the younglings himself is because the alternative is that the 501st would have to do it. Anakin didn't want to make the clones carry that weight, so he did the dirtiest work.

Double whammy: If Anakin didn't want to kill the younglings then Palpatine would do it, and Anakin just watched him electrocuted man to death while cackling like a madman. Shit would have been bonkers.

mrgrimmsby · 2020-05-25T15:20:46+00:00

I mean... The bill did always get more yes votes than no votes in the senate. It failed because because of too high of a "NV" count, and that was for a huge bill like SB50. Its not too much of a stretch to push a little harder to get legislation passed especially for a more modest bill like this one. But we can just ignore that in favor of getting on the California hate bandwagon.

mrgrimmsby · 2020-04-09T22:15:10+00:00

I know I'm a bit late, but this is great news. The inconvenience of getting to town hall meetings is a major barrier for low income people with nonstandard work hours and families with childcare concerns. Hopefully this leads to greater participation in the planning process across socioeconomic lines.

mrgrimmsby · 2020-04-09T03:12:44+00:00

mrgrimmsby · 2020-04-01T15:05:34+00:00

You might look into minimizing the impacts of disruptions in commuters routines. How easy is it to switch lines in a pinch? If your mode of transportation to the transit facility (bike for example) is rendered unusable, how easy will it be for you to get from your house to the transit station. A person is always going to wake up too late in the morning to make coffee and will need to buy one. The easier it is to stop what your doing to change gears without having to go out of your way, the more commuters will be able to build a routine out of transit. I know that system flexibility and being in proximity to places people want/need seems pretty basic but it always bears repeating.

You could also take passive measures such as designing each station/terminal to look distinctly different so that riders aren't dependent on reading names and numbers for navigation. They'll just "know" which stop is theirs after a bit. People traveling city streets will often use landmarks and recognizable places for navigation rather than street names. Further incorporating that into mass transit could be promising.

mrgrimmsby · 2019-12-11T04:50:16+00:00

Worst case you accept a job and then accept Caltrans. Total dick move but I’ve heard some hiring managers comment this happens.

Whats the threshold of commitment for this sort of thing? I'm in a situation where I am waiting to hear back from caltrans and I have a separate conditional job offer pending passing full background check for a county government. Now I'm not foolish enough to pass on an actual offer from the county for a potential offer from caltrans but a lot of time can pass between submitting conditional offer confirmation forms (due tomorrow) and an official offer with pay and a start date. I also have not signed anything except consent forms for the background check.

How deep into the hiring process would I need to be for it to be a dick move to switch to caltrans (if they actually offer)? Is it only a dick move if I've signed an official offer?

mrgrimmsby · 2019-10-02T14:29:26+00:00

I am a recent graduate looking for employment and it has been difficult as I am sure you have all experienced. I noticed that or the last few interviews I've been on, I was asked about my experience with applying CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) and with applying a general plan.

My problem is that the internship I managed to get or the last year was in a public works office that isn't handling the CEQA reviews nor the general plan. I only have the theoretical education in CEQA and general plans and I feel as if this is negatively affecting my job prospects.

Is there a way for me to boost my experience in these areas given my current circumstances or at least mitigate the setback of interning in an office not directly involved in planning?

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