Lurker > ParanoidObsessive

rexcrk posted...

Whats it like to be able to afford to take that time off work and also afford to go on trips .___.

It's great. But like with most things in life, it's an ironic paradox.

When you have the money to go you won't have the time, and when you have the time you won't have the money. And when you finally get to the point where you have both time and money, you won't have the energy or the motivation.

And then you die.

Rectum? Damn near killed 'em!

You're kind of lucky people like you, otherwise this topic could be modded into the ground for disruptive.

wwinterj25 posted...

WWE is having a Pay Per View event over here in Britain for the first time in 30 years at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff.

Garlands_Soul posted...

I'm going to NYC to see Soft Cell

Hah, I was aware of both of these events before this topic!

Not going anywhere soon myself, though. I am now old and am just patiently waiting at home for death to come.

Yes, they're almost 40% of the total human population between the two of them alone.

It's one of those things that can change your perspective of the world and global politics when you think about it.

Nah, he's a comedian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Brooks

Because they only exist as a pun based on the British and Germans in WWI.

lihlih posted...

At least yours isn't as bad as mine:

39 - ??? - Reachable in 3916 days

4127 days for me.

Not that I foresee that ever happening. The site will be long dead and gone by then. Or if not, it'll be a sad sick withered thing with like 12 users left all of whom just spitefully hate each other, and Allen still managing to find ways to trick someone into paying him - and I'll have noped the fuck out (or died) before then.

wwinterj25 posted...

This. I can't believe anyone wouldn't follow the site rules. I've never had a moderation in my life.

Even that isn't a foolproof defense. I've absolutely been modded for things that aren't against the ToS before. I've been straight-up put into purgatory for things that aren't against the ToS.

If you say something that's ambiguous enough to be interpreted multiple ways, and you make enough enemies of people who are willing to come after you, and it gets forwarded to a moderator who doesn't really care or isn't really paying attention, you can totally get modded for stuff that's nowhere near ToS-violating.

If you've managed to fly completely under the radar for years, it's because no one on the site cares enough about you to even bother coming after you.

Count_Drachma posted...

Yeah, that's Gamefaqs for you. Meanwhile there are a massive number of posts they don't even touch, whether it's somebody advocating for the overthrow of the US government the SAME WEEK as the Jan 6 riot or advocating violence towards other posters. (Or suggesting it's okay to hurt pets.)

Start marking posts. Make sock-puppet accounts and mark them with those as well. Convince other people to mark them with you.

Zang only gets hit as hard as he does because he's abrasive and he's pissed people off, so they go out of their way to aggressively mark anything even remotely borderline he posts. That plus the spotty moderation history means he's going to keep getting hit hard every time.

The mods don't really choose what to mod, they just pull posts out of the queue that users have marked (and the more people mark a post, the faster it moves to the top of the pile). When really offensive or vile stuff stays up, it's because no one marked it. When totally innocuous posts get shot down, it's almost always because someone with an agenda has weaponized it.

I'd easily argue that a majority of the "unfair" moderations on this site (and I mean legitimately unfair, not just the ones where idiots absolutely break the ToS and then whine about being persecuted) mostly stem from people vindictively using the moderation system as a weapon to fuck with people they don't like. Piss someone off enough, and they'll happily start sifting through every topic on the board in an attempt to find every post you've made and start marking every one that can be misconstrued, misinterpreted, or misunderstood. It's why a lot of times you see a cascade of moderations one after the other.

And then of course, once your moderation history starts looking like swiss cheese from all the hits, future attacks just get though even easier and do more damage, because the mods just assume you're a troublemaker and rubber-stamp your moderation.

For all that people here complain about the mods, the real problem most of the time is the shit users.

DrPrimemaster posted...

And I feel like even with the sophistry that only works if no trade was done. But a trade was done.

Yeah, but the harm in question wouldn't be "physically or health-wise", which is the only assurance the initial post offers.

Financial or material harm isn't actually covered under the existing offer. So trade or no, they'd still be telling the truth while still fucking you over.

And that's before we get into things like changing terms and conditions that alter the agreement at a later time. You know, the sort of thing tech companies do literally all the time.

None. The closest I get is dude.

ArvTheGreat posted...

They didnt ask to be born it was the parents choice so all bad behavior should be the responsibility of the parents run someone over oh well parents should go to jail for it you didnt ask to live this life

But by that logic, the parents didn't ask to be born either, so everything they do is the fault of their parents. So they can't be held accountable for anything either.

I wouldn't know. I have a habit of blocking Mead the moment I know they've made a new account, and even if I don't they wind up blocking me eventually anyway.

So I have no idea if they've actually settled down and become a productive member of society again or if they're still a batshit crazy tantrum throwing child in desperate need of help who should really cut themselves off from this site and social media in general for their own mental health.

Could go either way, really.

Sufferedphoneix posted...

For interacting with other people or accessing certain information sure. Being able to do basic functions like pay bills or buy stuff no.

It's not even as if that's a necessity - I still pay all my bills physically and do all my banking in person.

Arguably about the only thing I do digitally at all that has a financial element is when I order stuff from Amazon. But even that is 100% luxuries, nothing that I absolutely require to live or survive.

Society as a whole is certainly moving more towards a digital-only future in many facets of life, but we're not really there yet at all. Denying someone total access to the Internet right now would certainly be an inconvenience to them, but the average person could live just fine never going online again.

DrPrimemaster posted...

Wouldnt that be harm done to you?

You're assuming they're telling you the truth. When's the last time a corporation did that?



And that's without getting into sophistry like how taking away money you've only just acquired really isn't harming you because you're just losing something you barely had anyway.

11110111011 posted...

Muscles posted...

but man, Sanderson really likes to shove his magic systems down our throats.

This pretty much sums my take on Sanderson.

Same. It's one of the main reasons I steer clear of his books like the plague.

(The semi-related other major reason being that he trips my usual Pronoun Test for fantasy/sci-fi hard. If you're reading the back-cover blurb of a book and you've seen at least a dozen different made-up proper nouns, you're generally looking at a bad writer who has mistaken LOREBUILDING for "actual storytelling".)

It's kind of telling that the best writing he's ever done (IMO) is when he was finishing someone else's series and couldn't indulge in all of his own bad habits.

I used to, until they basically did away with all the stores I actually shopped in.

faramir77 posted...

$3000 per year tax on that is insanely high. My house was well over twice that price and my annual taxes are close to $3000.

Again, Connecticut.

Connecticut really isn't a state you choose to live in if you're poor.

Nichtcrawler-X posted...

You have to remember, in this use of the analogy, I am below the sword and you/US posters are effectively holding on to its string.

Unless you spend at least a few hours of your day every day worrying about this, it's not really a Sword of Damocles.

And if you DO spend at least a few hours of your day every day worrying about this, then you probably need to get some hobbies.

A Sword of Damocles is more like what we had in the Cuban Missile Crisis (or just the Cold War in general), where there was always a looming threat that something could go wrong and things would spiral out of control into a catastrophic clusterfuck. Where everyone was on edge, brinksmanship would impede any effort to mediate or de-escalate, and where the consequences of things going wrong were utterly dire.

This is more like a landmine in the middle of nowhere with a 90% chance of the fuse being a dud. Sure, it could blow up, but most likely it's never going to. Regardless of what agreements exist, the likelihood of any scenario that would escalate to a meaningful point is almost zero. This isn't something you should worry about at all, and it's something very few Americans even remotely give a shit about.

It's not a Sword of Damocles dangling overhead, it's a Sword of Derpules propped up against the wall in the corner of a room no one ever really goes into.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

https://imgur.com/a/GQYwRjL

No, this is awful.

I'd happily take her off your hands if you don't want her.

Dikitain posted...

I have heard the phase before, but outside of the edgiest of edge-lords, no one is using it in common speech.

I feel you either have a phenomenally incorrect understanding of what "Sword of Damocles" actually means, or a phenomenally incorrect understanding of what "edge-lord" actually means.



CaptBuzzKiII posted...

Because we are both nerds on a video game message board and not an accurate representation of the population as a whole.

Considering he was only talking to nerds on a video game message board and not the entire population as a whole, your entire argument is kind of invalid.

Though to be fair he also kind of misused it in the first place anyway. Because the thing he's worried about isn't as much of a looming threat as he thinks it is.

Revelation34 posted...

Isn't that the main reason those game exist?

No, any more than every movie with nudity is automatically porn.

There are plenty of adult games trying to tell a meaningful story where sex is just part of the experience rather than the entire purpose of the experience.

It's just harder to find them in a sea of garbage. But that's true of Steam in general.

Judgmenl posted...

Why would you ever play a console version of the best single player adventure game of the 2010s?

I feel like literally every single word in this post is somehow wrong.

If it's well-maintained, it should probably cost waaay more in that particular market. Connecticut is expensive as fuck, and 5 bedrooms is kind of ridiculous.

I'm in NJ, and you couldn't even buy my property for $145k, let alone the house sitting on it. And CT in general tends to be higher than my area is.

Zareth posted...

They sell too many different types of food, none of them are probably that great

Most good pizza places effectively double as Italian restaurants, so they'll have a ton of stuff like sandwiches and pasta and the like.

But this is an ad for pizza in the UK, so I can only assume it's probably terrible.

Snorlax. He'd immediately fall asleep and then I could actually get to eat something myself.

The rest would all just dive in and pig out and either there wouldn't be any food left over, or they'd get their own hair or slime or whatever in it and it would all be too gross to eat.

Since they're not telling you what the chip does, they give you the money, but then 20 minutes later the chip triggers and you suddenly feel compelled to return all the money.

Straughan posted...

This smoked salmon is literally heaven.
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/3/8/AAfGAbAADm5K.jpg

https://youtu.be/ZA_Tl1kvlQU?t=36

hypnox posted...

So I will go ahead and put you down for three all you can eat shrimp meals at Red Lobster.

No, because I loathe seafood.

DirtBasedSoap posted...

i wanna play halo again

Why? They haven't made a worthwhile game since 4.

Maybe since Reach.

The joke's on them - eventually you'll both be dead and back on equal footing again.

Unless it fixes my poor eyesight, fixes my joint pain, normalizes my sleep pattern, adjusts my metabolism to lose weight to the perfect healthy level, and has absolutely no external access that can be hacked or abused by outside sources (including the people who made it), there's no chance in hell I'm putting any tech in my brain.

I barely trust the people who make tech I use now. I sure as fuck wouldn't trust someone to have direct access to my brain.

Metalsonic66 posted...

Looks like an interesting movie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Girls







...but if all it takes to get you interested in somewhat obscure movies from the 80s is to post music videos from their soundtracks, I now feel obligated to post this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNQUhqFZ3h8

Metalsonic66 posted...

https://youtu.be/iC8X34iMKfg

I cry every time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWJem7RuBpc

Zareth posted...

I wouldn't say that makes you a good person, it makes you not a bad person. A decent person.

https://youtu.be/B0B_ekSrsEk?t=20

Nichtcrawler-X posted...

I am allowed to point out a problem (where I see one) without being immediately required to offer a solution for said problem.

Yes, but when you are pointing out a problem and implying what the actual root of the problem is (which is 100% what you're doing), it helps to actually have some idea of what you're actually talking about.



adjl posted...

As much as this is an easy excuse to fall back on, many of the European cities with functional transit and active transport infrastructure have very comparable population densities to many North American cities.

Which is sort of the point. The solutions might work in cities, but there's a hell of a lot of the US that isn't city. Certainly more so than is the case in Europe. So unless you intend to force everyone into the US into metropolitan areas at gunpoint, those sorts of solutions will always be less effective here than elsewhere.

Part of the problem is that US infrastructure (and multiple facets of our society and culture) grew up at the same time cars did, so cars are so integrated into our infrastructure at a deep level that you'd basically have to social engineer and deconstruct dozens of different and seemingly unrelated aspects of our lifestyle to undo it. Not just streets or transport or delivery, but things like the literal concept of dating and our shopping preferences.

Ever-increasing adoption of cell phones is actually paving the way towards chipping away at 100 years of automotive symbiosis, but it's a process that's going to take decades, if it ever really goes full term.

There's a really good book that addresses a lot of this, and points out just how strongly cars have influenced most of the 20th and early 21st century (especially in the US):

https://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Motion-Wheel-Comes/dp/1635573610

hypnox posted...

Are any of those adult steam games even good?

Depends on what you're looking for.

If you're interested in games that have deeper stories and which are more like interactive fiction that also happen to have nudity and sex in them, there's a few games here and there that can actually be interesting, complex, fun, or even heartwarming. It's mostly just a case of knowing what to look for and doing your homework in advance.

If all you're really looking for is games to jerk off to, then that's an entirely different issue.

Nichtcrawler-X posted...

Anyone looking in from the outside, can see the gun culture is a large part of your problems.

Realistically speaking, based on every time I've seen a European online talking about "what America is like", there's a pretty strong likelihood that most people looking in from the outside have no fucking idea what our gun culture actually is.

Or any of our socioeconomic culture in general.

Or any grasp of actual realistic solutions to most of our problems.

It's basically the flip-side of Americans who couldn't find Africa on a map but still feel fully capable of voicing their opinions on global geopolitics.

BUMPED2002 posted...

It's the one thing that keeps America from becoming a total totalitarian state because most of the citizenry is armed to the teeth.

This is incredibly untrue, considering the trend for decades now has been fewer and fewer gun owners, but gun owners themselves owning more and more guns.

So the number of guns in the country isn't actually proportional to the number of people who actually have guns. Most of its citizenry isn't armed at all.

And most people are dumb and don't understand how statistics work.



ReturnOfFa posted...

The existence of other countries is the counter-argument to this.

To be fair, the existence of other countries isn't necessarily a counter-argument to anything, because millions of different variables exist across a wide span of categories, so direct comparison between nations can be incredibly misleading.

For instance, gun control works better in the UK because the borders of an island (or more accurately, a handful of islands) are easier to patrol and control than the massive borders of a continent-spanning nation. Social net policies and massive income taxes work better in a homogeneous nation like Sweden than they potentially would in one of the most heterogeneous nations on Earth. It's easier to push mass transit solutions over individual car ownership in smaller European nations than it is in a nation with massive sprawling landscapes and spread out populations. And so on.

There are always "The US should do X because Nation Y does it and it works", but most of those arguments are simplistic as fuck and fatally flawed to anyone who is actually paying attention.

adjl posted...

Fortunately, Amazon's plan to ship people things it predicted they would want before they ordered them got enough backlash that they seem to have stepped back from the idea for now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_normality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door-in-the-face_technique

Mensis posted...

Libraries are the only places I see functioning drinking fountains anymore. In many ways libraries are the last bastion of a bygone era.

I see more free water fountains around these days than I did 40 years ago.

The only place I used to see them back then was school and recreational areas like the beach, but most of the ones outside of school never worked.

adjl posted...

They've done that for a while. Even if you don't have an account, pretty much any site with a link to Facebook will send your site usage stats to Facebook for them to compile and use in case you ever do create an account, as well as selling that data to other corporations as they can.

They've done that almost since the very beginning. It's one of the things people complained about when Facebook first started getting popular, and why more savvy people started trying to find ways to block Facebook's access on other websites.

Not like it even matters at this point though, considering there are dozens (going on hundreds) of different services out there that constantly accumulate and sell every facet of your life on a regular basis, and who do not give a shit about your privacy or consent in any way. Not to mention people willingly carry around phones that all contain GPS data and post tons of details about their personal life on social media all the time. There are no more secrets.

This is the future we've created for ourselves - one in which your entire existence is documented in a digital folder that anyone with enough money can read. We've even passed the point where "going off the grid" is even a viable alternative, because everyone leaves at least some trace now (unless you're planning to fake your own death and live on land you don't own in some third world nation where you grow all your own food and purify your own water without using money or interacting with anyone else in any way). Big Brother is essentially here, and we welcomed him in because he had amusing cat pictures.

Next step is when services use all that data to manipulate the fuck out of you. We're already well on our way via targeted advertising and media recommendations, but the end-goal is one where AIs can predict your behavior and preferences better than you can and then will narrow-cast ads directly to you in ways you don't even realize you're being advertised to.

Zareth posted...

This is false, men can be witches and women can be warlocks, and they aren't the same thing.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/warlock#Noun
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/witch#Etymology_1

Lokarin posted...

why is that name familiar for someone I'm sure I never heard of?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z-aezZWwTg

Mr_Nobody posted...

The bodycam footage shows the guy holding a regular garden hose. So that's not much of a concern.

Those damn bodycams!!

Yeah, but you still have to worry about deliberate overwatering. Plant murder is less traceable that way!

Also, there's always the "grab a hose and pretend to water flowers as an alibi when you get caught trying to break into someone's house" scam. That old classic!

Oh, excardon me. Would'ja help an old denominator like me gather his spectacles?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfbPFopMV0c

Mr_Nobody posted...

Criminals go out and water strangers' flowers in broad daylight to get their jollies?

I mean, there are people in this world who will feed your pets poisoned food in the hopes of killing them because they hate you, it's not out of the question that someone might try to poison your flowers by watering them with weed killer.

Though yeah, the rest of the story makes them look pretty bad in general.

11110111011 posted...

I've never cared this much. I use them all interchangeably with the exception that a Warlock specifically means male and Witch means female.

https://youtu.be/tx2UlW_T8Zk?t=190