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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • When you aren’t choosing based on merit but on frivolous selfish whims, it’s hard to all agree on the same person.

    They are probably just fishing for our public opinion to see which ones feels more like they are “owning” us to us.

    If it wasn’t the literal scariest thing to happen in the real world in decades, Trumps presidency would feel spot on as a cartoonish caricature of an evil movie villain somehow tricking their way into presidency. Like if it was in a movie, you’d think “this isn’t very believable, they could have at least put in some effort to make it convincing that this could actually happen instead of this cartoony slapstick bullshit in what was otherwise a serious movie”…

    Every step of the way just seems like he is doing his best to get out of having to follow through with all the stuff he said by doing stuff so dumb that his followers will finally be disillusioned, but it keeps backfiring and making them like him even more. And it just keeps escalating…

    But I know in reality he actually wants it, and is just pushing as quickly as he feels he can to pivot his audience towards his goals without losing them.







  • And to play two copies of the same game at the same time, any 2 members of the family could own it. So my brother and I can each buy a game, and then my mom and sister could play it while we are at work. My sister can’t work, so she has a lot of time to fill but can’t afford to buy games. We do have 5 copies of Stardew Valley, though, as that is a game for the whole family.

    There was already a bunch of games my brother and I both owned before steam family was an option. But now games I’m only tangentially interested in after he played them or vice versa are much more of an option to quickly play through to see if I like it too. Before, it just wouldn’t have been worth buying it to find out. And it’s a bonus for the devs too if I do end up liking it, because then I am more likely to buy their next game so I can play it at the same time as my brother.

    Gaming is inherently social. Even when we play single-player games, I’m sure most of us have a friend or sibling we talk to about them as we play.



  • That paper specifically concludes that despite all that, there is no reason to even look into whether fluoridation in drinking water might be a problem because there has clearly been no corollary deleterious effect. So, knowing what it would look like if it was a problem, was enough to know that it isn’t even close enough to warrant checking how close it is. The highest reported extremes of exposure already didn’t cause issue, so there is certainly no cause for concern at normal levels.

    Basically, normal levels are so far below potential risky levels, that they aren’t even concerned of accidental overexposure due to mistakes or accidents. They concluded they had literally zero concern…

    So linking that paper isn’t really supporting your opinion.



  • Yeah, I know at least 4 of my ancestors should have been diagnosed as Autistic but never got tested. And 2 more were for sure undiagnosed ADHD. They all just ended up being stunted unhappy people instead that had a couple happy moments with their other stunted unhappy friends whenever they would hang out and play trains or music or whatever other “weirdly” deep hobby their sposes had to eventually pull them away from to go back to “normal” life.


  • Kids with diagnosed or undiagnosed Autism didn’t used to stay in the same class as “non-disruptive” students, oftentimes not even in the same school. But it’s so much better understood now that there is a much stronger effort to keep the classes as integrated as possible and just figure things out as they present. But the problem is that it’s being compounded by spending cuts that have led to integrating even more than what currently makes sense because they can’t afford enough teachers to split classes more. Instead, they hire cheaper teachers assistants and try to handle 30+ kids in the same room. A teacher and 2 TAs for 30 kids is a much worse situation than 2 teachers with 15 kids each.

    When I was in school, even my, at the time called Asperger’s syndrome, was enough to have me pulled out into a side class with a specialised teacher. That side room was 10 kids and had 2 TA’s as well. They managed to keep that room so well organised that I was able to pull ahead a grade in that environment. Partially just due to not having to wait for all the other kids in the bigger class to learn stuff before I could move on. Each kid in the 10 kid side-class was on individual learning. So I could breeze through all the stuff I found easy to have more time to work on the stuff that was unduly challenging for me.

    On the neurodivergent version of the IQ test they had me do back then, my section scores varied from as low as 74 in a section to 152 in my highest, averaged out to 121 overall. So there was more that I was good at than bad, but 74 is pretty low, so I had to spend a lot of time on that stuff. And it’s tough, the brain hates doing stuff that is relatively challenging. But they worked out a sort of interval training reward system that worked for me. I guarantee I am a much more useful person to society now than I would have been without the funding schools used to have. I shored up my weaknesses while still building my strengths.

    After a year in the side course, I was able to rejoin the main class, but a grade higher than the class I used to be with before. The school got me a personal education assistant to keep me on task through challenging stuff or boring stuff. Anything that would otherwise cause my mind to wander or seek out other activities. Eventually, with practice, I was able to keep myself in check with the same tactics.


  • They are a very handy shoe when it comes time to clean them. Especially nice for jobs where that is every day, or multiple times a day. And honestly, despite being so cheap, they don’t lead to foot problems anywhere near as much as other shoes, even at twice the price.

    They may not have much respect, but they are a useful shoe.




  • Dude, don’t worry about it, like I said, save your money. If it’s not important to you, it’s better to keep it that way.

    It is important to me, I’m gonna keep doing it.

    As we get higher and higher frame rate, there are certainly more and more people that won’t care.

    But you can’t say it doesn’t make a difference, in blind testing(name of the testing style, obviously) people who freshly walked into a room with a game running and were asked if it was 60 fps or 120 fps guessed right 100% of the time, literally no errors made, they were not gamers. But they did have one training attempt each of walking in on each setting knowing which one it was that time.

    So literally everyone -can- see the difference, but not everyone cares.

    It is a real thing anyway, unlike cable quality for digital audio.


  • I very much know how other people feel about it, we can be different and both our opinions can still be valid. I don’t think at any point in there I said that everyone is wearing their headset 16 hours a day.

    But the matter remains that one headset has sold 4x as much as the steamdeck, and the second most sold is 2-3x as much as the steam deck… so why is the steam deck considered a good seller and VR is considered dying?

    I was just making a pre-emptive counterpoint to the arguments people usually make against VR. That the headsets “aren’t comfortable”, which has been less and less true for the out of the box experience over time, and has never been true for people that are willing to tailor the experience to their individual headshape and preferences. I have always worn my headsets for 8+ hours even right from the dk2 days, first step: battery bank on the back, to get the weight counter balanced and for older headsets a different choice of facial interface was often a good idea. Eventually, once I tried a few options, I determined my personal best comfort came from “halo” style headstraps. So I have since just been buying BoBoVR’s kit for each headset I buy that is an all-in-one cenversion kit to take headsets from 2 hours of play time to infinity with no other adjustment needed.

    I think honestly most people have only tried VR once or twice, and don’t even know what state it is in now. The Quest 3 crossed a threshold, now that you can use it as a 4k 120hz screen, it’s the first headset I would say is clear enough that normal people would find it worth using. I do still think the tech barrier is a bit too high. I’m very aware that if I didn’t show her how, my Mom would have had trouble figuring out on her own how to do virtual calls with my sister in New Zealand. But she very much appreciates being able to sit in the same room as her and have face to face conversations now. And even though desktop streaming is something built right into the headset, the default option isn’t the one that would sell people on it, Virtual Desktop is so much better. If in the future that becomes the default, and the desktop streaming client half of it is just baked into the headset software. Or if the default solution just learns from Virtual Desktop and at least looks as good as it even without all the extra bells and whistles… either one would be a huge help. The built-in desktop streamer just hasn’t been revisited since the screens are clear enough to actually see 4k, so it’s still unoptimised and kind of muddy looking.

    But, my Mom did figure out on her own how to launch and play Tetris Effect, she loves it. Also Puzzling Places and Cubism. My mom is a bit of a gamer though. She doesn’t like anything with killing, but she has made some exceptions like for Stardew Valley. My Dad on the other hand still needs me to launch games for him from the phone app, hehe. He just “doesn’t want to break it”, to be fair he prefers the Quest pro, which is still a pretty expensive headset. So I can understand his hesitation, he’s used to windows 95… where you very much could break it by clicking the wrong thing. But he loves city building games, and there are a few good ones to choose from in VR. Cities:Skylines VR for “professional” city building ported to VR, and Little Cities for “fun” city building made for VR first are his favourites so far.

    My brother only really got into it when I gave their family my old Quest 2, he still just plays the default “normal people” games like beatsaber and other exercise stuff. But he doesn’t have his VR legs yet, he does want to play adventure/rpg games with me, but they tend not to have comfort settings, as they would be kinda ruined with teleporting and stuff. I explained to him how to go about training for not needing the safety features any more, but he keeps taking it too far any time he tries, he likes the games so much that he doesn’t want to stop playing so soon when he first starts feeling the symptoms. But that is the most important part, otherwise you are working to make your VR sickness worse instead…

    So yeah, there are definitely hurdles still. Maybe there should be supervised programs for getting your VR legs. You very much need to stop as soon as you notice the very first symptom for you, usually face flush, but can be different per person. The earlier you stop, the more you convince your brain it doesn’t need to “save you from the poison berries”. The bodies reaction to a vestibular mismatch is to assume you must have eaten poison, and it should save you by throwing up. But you can train it to leave you alone. Done well, you can gain as much as 5 more minutes of playtime each attempt. Doesn’t take long until you don’t even have to think about it any more.




  • I don’t know… would E.coli cause someone to miss alot of interviews and events due to “exhaustion” and potentially choose to sit on an absorbant mat when sitting on a clean white couch?

    Maybe it did affect his.

    Looked it up, e.coli symptoms tend to start 4 days after infection, in healthy people, as little as one day after for people with weaker immune systems. Symptoms involve diarrhea, stomach cramps and can include fever.

    If he got it the first day those burgers were tainted, and most people took another 3 to 4 days after they had their burgers to start showing symptoms. It’s entirely possible that by the time enough people had it that it was definitively traced back to mcdonalds and then we finally heard about it, that could easily be what has been up with Trump lately.

    Edit, actually just thought to look up the timeline of both as they should both be known. Mcdonalds said they determined the tainted burgers/onions seem to have been available from september 27th to october 11th. The day trump cut his rally short to stand on stage and listen to music for 40 minutes was october 14th. Could sort of be related, but I think the e.coli outbreak is just a bit too early to explain his recent behavior, as much as diarrhea and stomach cramps would sort of explain some of it. He could just be shitting his pants normally instead of brought on by anything specific. And he could just be normal exhausted instead of e.coli exhausted. And he kind just always looks like he has stomach cramps…