AngryDeuce

Definitely. Like I think a lot of people forget that the older generation of games, like the 8bit era especially, were arcade ports that were designed to eat quarters and not really modified much when moved to console. That was the main reason it was like, “here’s your three lives to get through the next 15 levels and when you’re out go fuck yourself start over loool”.

I was an 80s kid and have tons of nostalgia for the time and the games even but to put it simply, there were not many games back then that you were getting more than a couple hours out of unless you were getting your shit pushed in constantly due to the artificial difficulty designed to suck up those quarters at the arcade. Even games like the original Legend of Zelda, if you know what to do ahead of time youre only talking a few hours of actual content. For platformers it was far less…Ninja Gaiden, a brutally difficult game…turn on invincibility and you can speed run that shit in like what, 20 minutes?

And not to toot my own horn but there would be games I paid $50 for that Id have done in an afternoon and then what? Nothing, play again I guess. Which sometimes was worthwhile, other times not so much.

Even later the ethos was still there, just instead of the quarter stealing mechanic, it was the “dont let them finish it in a rental period” mechanic…they wanted people to buy, not rent.

But, I do definitely miss the simplicity. No fuckin achievement chasing bullshit, no fucking unlocks, no dlc…they couldnt as easily release 40% of a game and lock the remaining 60% behind season passes and shit.

And of course having the whole game be dependent on multi-player and an active community for it to worth a shit beyond the first 60 daya. How many full price AAA games out there that lasted a few mere months befoee the server was a ghost town and nothing to do in the single player game.

Cest la vie lol

God on the PC end of things youd get like a literal book with some games. Keyboard overlays for controls, posters, all sorts of fun shit.

Well I want Microsoft to take a big step back and fuck their own face

That’s for after youre onboarded, so they know what names to drop when theyre sending you scam texts and emails.

So whatever you do, make sure first thing you do when you get a new job is drop as much PII in there about your current employer so your IT department doesnt get too lax with thinking people are finally figuring out that the CEO that you’ve never even met in person would totally send you a text asking you to buy 1000 bucks worth of iTunes giftcards on your second day of employment.

As a former kleptomaniac, I cant wait to see all the self driving trucks getting helplessly forced to the side of the road and ripped off while the people monitoring the cameras in India or Thailand frantically try to get the US police force to give half a shit about their fucking self driving truck getting stole from.

People about to make bank if they ever try to pull that shit, and it aint gonna be the people owning those trucks lol

Really. And even better, now they can granularize Windows even further. Windows 11 Home or Pro? Naw fam, that’s not enough. You’ll have the baseline Windows 12 sub for $10 per month…seems reasonable, right? Except that’s the baseline. That’s the version that can only make use of, at maximum, 4 CPU cores. Want to use all the cores in your bomb ass new processor? You need to bump up to the $20 per month subscription which includes the CPU-MAX add on. Not a fan of the basic Windows wallpaper? Well, fret not! You just need to download the Personalization add-on for an additional $5 per month and now you can change your wallpaper. Hey, is that a new GPU you got there? Yeah, you’re going to need to spring for the Gamer bundle…$20 a month for that, on top of the base sub. Oh and don’t forget about your local storage…they can subscription lock that, too. “You don’t even need local storage anyway! Just use OneDrive!!! It’s only a few bucks extra per month!!”…deliberately priced far less than the local storage subscription so that they can scrape all your shit for marketable data which you’ll see in the fine print of the ToS they’re allowed to do with abandon.

Go to turn on HDR…“sorry, you need the graphics booster add on”. Try to output 5.1 audio? “Sorry, no can do, you get 2.0 only, peasant, you didn’t sign up for the media add-on.” Want to throw another stick of memory in your rig to extend it’s life? “Sorry, base Windows can only use 16GBs…you need the performance package to address anything more.”

And you know what the best part is? This shit would all likely be legal. Know how I know? Because Windows enterprise server and software licensing is already like this, and has been for years.

Shit is so fucked man…

More “Microsoft doing their part to get people used to the idea of having to login with an internet connection so that they can make Windows 12 subscription based.”

Thats what this bullshit is. Training the user base for OSaaS.

And they will have enterprise by the balls because they control like 90% of the enterprise market. The consumers, they could give a fuck if they take it or leave it. Windows licensing is such an teeny tiny part of the equation that screaming at them is going to get as much traction as screaming at Nvidia for the fact that a midrange GPU is 1000 bucks now. Nvidia doesnt care if their consumer gpu market disappears tomorrow, they’ve got the AI fucks locked in.

That’s the part of all this that truly blows my mind…nobody wants this shit. You dont even need to be a technophobic boomer to fucking hate dealing with AI when youre trying to get an answer to a question that isnt something you can find on wikipedia, like for example, “How much will this particular software license cost me if Im installing it on two host VMs serving approximately 200-250 concurrent users?” The AI isnt gonna answer that right…I know it wont, because Ive spent at least 2-3 full fucking 10 hour days in aggregate playing this stupid fucking game as phone lines are getting closed left and right and I always end up running in circles until it will even permit me to get an actual human fucking being involved, if that is even a possibility, which 70% of the time, it just dumps you to an email and a wait for a response email that also didnt answer the fucking question.

And the thing is…its getting harder and harder to opt out. I cant even vote with my wallet because its either deal with the AI trash, or deal with some fly by night company that no one has ever heard of and goes radio silent for weeks when they cant fix a problem in 3 minutes.

This is gonna make me sound old but I saw this coming 25 years ago with self checkouts. Look at what a piece of shit the average self checkout is. Just last weekend the lines at my local grocery store were out the fuckin door because all the self checkouts somehow decided the cart itself was an item in a cart that wasnt scanned and thought everyone was stealing. Rather than get humans on the checklanes and shutting the self checkouts off, the store just had an extra person at the self checkout to enter their code after literally every single transaction to bypass it. Im talking rows of 20 self checkouts that had two people that had to code through every single transaction. Human cashiers wouldnt have had that problem, but human cashiers cost money, so better your service as a customer suck fat ass then bring in a couple teenagers extra to cover some weekend shifts on a register.

I see this at the doctor now with their self checkin machines that take fifteen minutes to get through what you could do with the person in three. I see this when trying to ship a fucking package and the machine runs out of labels and theres no human being for miles around to put more in so you can get on with your life.

This shit fucking sucks, and they no longer have any incentive to improve, because theyre all doing it, so everybody sucks, and we just get to deal with it.

Remember this when you see the lack of savings being passed on in lieu of all the payroll theyre saving. Every minute you fight with AI to answer a simple fucking question, some oligarch is screaming CHACHING!!!

Grids were more efficient for pedestrians and unmotorized transport, but the caveat is that motorized transport, especially on large grids, will often be driving faster than is desired among the pedestrian traffic.

Which is why the ethos has changed off of grids to the windy, curvy roads that naturally encourage slower speeds…no straightaways to really build up speeds like you can with a grid.

Most town centers, which have likely existed before the car did in large numbers, are still laid out in a grid…but youll notice as you get farther out, when the neighborhoods started getting built in the post wwii era and the rise of the burbs, are not generally grids.

This is an easier way to eyeball how old a particular neighborhood is…with some caveats and exceptions of course.

A grid is still most efficient, but were trading efficiency for safety which is reasonable…weren’t too many idiots doing 60mph on 35mph city streets like we have today.

Yeah here in WI too. Like on 55mph state highways in the literal middle of nowhere, as in the intersection is corn fields on every quadrant.

Its weird, but of course I stop. Im only ever stopping for the corn, but I aint trying to have some cop come flying out of the corn and tear my ass up either lol

I knew that the people running the show were scumbags, but i guess I never knew they were MAGA scumbags.

I should have made the switch after their API horseshit, but I guess a lesson learned late is better than not learning the lesson at all.

I got permanently banned for insinuating Donald Trump was a pedophile. I appealed and they blew me off, no response. Tried to sign up for another account and got immediately IP banned for ban evasion.

Id been on the platform for 14 years and had over 1M comment karma. Somehow the last 14 years of my contributions to the site never caused anything, not even so much as a subreddit ban, but pointing out that Donald Trump is a sexual predator was a bridge too far for them.

I find it curious that Reddit Admins are trying to limit discussion of the factual statement that our current president is a documented child rapist. Guess the investors theyre courting are probably in the files, or at the very least, dont see nothin wrong with a little pedorasty.

Just because people don’t have the energy for your bullshit doesn’t mean they are neurodivergent.

Uh, actually, it kinda does mean that, because the vast majority of people aren’t so exhausted by responding to “Hey, hows it going?” with a normal, human response that they not only completely opt out of doing it but then go on the internet and complain about how unfair it is that they’re expected to behave in line with what is defined as ‘the norm’.

Here’s the questions you need to ask yourself: Why do I feel like being asked to engage with a person that is asking a normal question is equivalent to being forced to engage with someone that is treating me poorly? Why am I seemingly unable to separate the two, and conflate participating in social niceties with being abused? Why is the social equivalent of a papercut and a shotgun blast to the face the same in my eyes, and why do both generate a similar response?

But whatever you do, if you can’t handle being expected to respond to “hey hows it going?” with some variation of “not bad, you?”, for the love of Christ, please don’t willingly seek out employment where a key facet of the job is doing just that, or at the very least if you do, save the blinking and acting like Im inconveniencing you for asking a normal-ass question like “Is this the line to pay?” If you can’t even handle that, that is not at all the fault of the person on the other side of the dialog.

Oh, believe me, I know that’s not just a GenZ thing. I’ve worked with people that were in their 60s that would pull the same sort of shit. I think it’s human nature to react negatively to being asked to perform an annoying task, and there are many shades of gray in whether the task itself is justifiable or not. Where I differ though is that in my own experience, so long as a request was reasonable, even if the request itself sucked, I didn’t refuse to do the thing, or at least, knew that if I refused to do the thing that it might have negative consequences on my continued employment.

I’m not a slave driver…believe me, I am very selective with delegating and like I said, I have literally never once in my life, not ever, asked someone to do something that I haven’t done myself and know intimately what it entails. I’ll delegate the task and even help them along by giving them guidance on the most efficient way to complete it…way more than I ever got, that’s for damn sure; where Im at now had a real sink or swim mentality before I came along and was able to shape things more constructively when it came to developing our new hires and that’s reflected in the changes in our turnover over those years.

But anyway, getting back to the point, it’s not just a GenZ thing, but it is something I’ve noticed at a much higher percentage in our younger interns and entry level employees then the years pre-Covid. Everyone is different, but that weird sense that they can have their cake and eat it, too…they can just opt out of doing what’s expected of them and still somehow expect to not have any consequences for doing that…that’s the thing that I see more and more as time goes on among the fresh hires where Im at. The surprisedpikachu when they’re getting talked to about the fact that they’ve rolled in a minimum of 20 minutes late every day this week with no explanation and that’s not okay. Being accused of being unreasonable for talking to them about it in the first place, like I’m out of line with the expectation. That’s the attitude that bothers me, and it’s more common then I’ve ever seen it before.

Never said that. I worked retail for twenty years, dude. I went back to college in my mid 30s.

I know what the job is. I know what the expectations are. You need to examine why you consider both “Hey, can you help me find something?” and “You’re worthless to me and I don’t care about you” as equivalent in your mind, because that is the shit people are complaining about.

Nobody is telling retail employees they need to take abuse. What we’re telling retail employees is, being asked to assist a customer in itself does not constitute abuse, so please, hold the ire when I come to the customer service desk, the place that exists for that explicit purpose, and ask a simple question. That is literally what you are being paid to do.

Dude, seriously. Work phone/personal phone. The two never touch in any way, not even for so much as alternate contact method. I don’t want my bank calling my work phone. I don’t want my clients calling my personal. When Im not working the work phone gets set down next to the bed and doesn’t get picked up again until the next time Im getting up and ready for work.

I truly do not understand how people can even tolerate having both of these parts of their lives on the same device. Is the hardship of two phones really that insurmountable for people when the benefits are so readily apparent?

I trust them to not be as bad as the MAGA types. That’s why it’s the lesser of two evils. I know that they’re evil fucks in their own way, believe me.

I want a third choice, I truly do. I’ve long gotten behind third party candidates, and pulled their lever at the voting booth. I voted for Nader in 2000. I participate in the primaries. But at the end of the day, if my candidate of choice doesn’t get nominated, I’m not going to abstain in the general if the choice is between the soulless vampire democrat and the Christofascist MAGAt that is running on a platform of making homosexuality punishable by death. I doubt there is even a majority of people voting for that democrat thinking they’re the next FDR, they just know that by not pulling that handle, they’re possibly going to give the Christofascist the win. We’re choosing the devil we can live with versus the devil we can’t.

Unfortunately, until we somehow get legal mechanisms in place that codify the basic human rights of the people the MAGAts are targeting in these fucking purges (that’s basically what they are), and solidify the ability of the government to make it literally impossible for this kind of shit to happen going forward, this is what it boils down to. I want election reform, I want ranked choice voting, I want the level of representation to be adjusted so that the number of reps in congress isn’t hard locked so that we can have more abilities for niche candidates to achieve the office and break the hold these two parties have, I want publicly funded elections, I want strict rules regarding the media as concerns elections. I have a feeling you and I both have a very similar set of values and ideas as to what constitutes a functional democracy.

All Im trying to say is, don’t take people voting for democrats as endorsement of their bullshit. It’s not that, believe me, it is not that. It’s just the only other realistic alternative, the MAGAt, is so, so much worse, that we have no choice but to hold our nose and do whatever we need to do to prevent that asshole from getting into office…even if that is voting for the lesser of two evils.

That’s what blows my mind with that specific argument…that people hesitate before just talking because it’s considerate. I appreciate it when Im in the middle of composing an email and the person standing at the door to my office gives me a second to finish the sentence Im writing. Im sure the people that are standing behind the counter have similarly been doing something that requires concentration and appreciated that someone gave them a minute to get to a stopping point before taking their attention away from it.

How the blue fuck that could ever be interpreted as “stupid” or “annoying” is completely beyond my understanding. Or how we’re just waiting for someone to say “Oh hi” or “Ill be right with you” or “Can I help you with something?” before interrupting their work is somehow, in itself, worthy of being treated the same as if you just came in dropping F bombs screaming at them.

So I guess that’s the disconnect for me…how they literally cannot see the difference between a bog-standard customer service type of interaction and someone legitimately being an asshole to them. To them, they are both equivalent. Anything that involves them interacting with someone they don’t feel like interacting with is some sort of slight or imposition. It’s totally fine to be that way in your personal life, but not when you’re standing at the fucking information kiosk at the hospital, being paid to work at the information kiosk at the hospital, where your job is…wait for it…providing information to people that come to you at the fucking hospital.

To a degree, I do agree with you. However, if you are of the legal age where you are even allowed to hold a job, period, you shouldn’t have to be trained on how to interact with human beings. That training should have happened long before you came to us looking for a job. If they’re even hired in the first place, they must have demonstrated that they are capable of having a conversation or else they wouldn’t have been brought on.

I mean really that’s the whole reason we do the interview…we don’t give a shit about their technical skills really, because that’s all stuff they will be trained on. What we give a shit about is that they’re capable of interacting with other people in a professional manner. If someone is sitting for an interview and just blinks at us whenever we ask them a question about their application, they’re not going to be offered a job. So its pretty clear that for the interview, at least, they demonstrated that they have that base skill or else I wouldn’t be training them in the first place.

So then why the fuck is it that all those skills they demonstrated they have during the interview evaporate the minute they’re on the payroll? Like do I really have to train someone that if the phone rings at their desk, they need to answer it? That if they receive a direct email from someone, they need to respond to it? That if someone asks them a question, they need to answer, and not just stare at them?

I can teach people the technical shit all day long, and literally do it all day long. But I should not have to teach them that a ringing telephone needs to be answered, especially if the job they were hired to do was, in part, answering the fucking phone. And there are people out there that still think that I should have to do that, or worse, that Im the jerk for expecting it in the first place. Just such a fuckin clown show all around.

FWIW, I agree with you. But to be clear, I didn’t list that choice because I felt it was obvious. They absolutely can walk out and not ever come back, they have that autonomy of course.

Where I make the distinction is where the line is drawn as concerns continuing your employment. If you will not perform the tasks expected of you, you will no longer be paid, your badge will no longer open the front doors, and you will not be working here. If that’s the decision you need to make for yourself, I fully support and there are no hard feelings on my side of the desk. I can and have had those sorts of frank discussions before, and it comes with my role in the company as it stands today. Don’t want to work a job with a set schedule? No problemo man, I get it, but that’s not how it is here, so best of luck to you in the future!

But as long as the wage is being drawn, and I’m asking for things that are part of the job expectations that are listed on the documentation they signed when they started working for us, that is beyond the point of negotiation. I’m not an asshole, and I have never in my life assigned a task that I have not personally done myself when I was in their shoes. The tools and technological gains have made their role easier by orders of magnitude then where it even was when I was the intern all those years ago. But when my mentor was assigning my tasks, never in a million years would I have thought that I had the right to dictate to my boss whether or not I would do that task if I wanted to continue being an employee of the firm. I felt it was pretty obvious and clear to anyone that has worked in their lives that it do be that way…I dont get to tell my boss what Im doing if I want my boss to continue employing me.

That is the disconnect Im referring to…the fact that people are taking jobs thinking that they get to dictate what the job entails, even after being told what the job entails, even after signing documentation saying they agree to what the job entails. Where does that come from? And why are people so surprised that refusing to do what a job entails means that you no longer can reasonably expect to continue that job?