It’s ironic that you mentioned game credits as an example… The video game industry (particularly in Japan) actually has a pretty sordid history with credits. Many Japanese game companies in the 80’s outright refused to credit the makers, fearing that their workers would be poached. There’s a very strong “you should be completely loyal to your company” culture in Japan, and companies didn’t want to give their employees any kinds of wiggle room to consider jumping ship.

There was also a negative stigma associated with working in video games; it wasn’t a “good” job at the time, and the general consensus was that video games were just for nerdy kids. So there was some shame associated with being in the video game industry. As a result, many of the makers used pseudonyms when they were credited.

But going into the 90’s and 00’s, that stigma began to evaporate as video games became more widely accepted, and began to hit the global markets. However, game makers then had an uphill battle to actually get the game companies to properly credit them. The practice of not crediting (or using pseudonyms) had become normalized, so game companies initially resisted proper credits.

Yeah, I can guarantee that at least one bug gets planted in a wall, floor, or ceiling somewhere important. Hell, with Trump acting like a Russian agent, that may actually have been coordinated right from the start.

It also means they could expect to need it after the renovations are complete. Could be part of why things seem so rushed.

For some slightly more in-depth context: Emiru is a popular streamer on Twitch. She has a personal bodyguard who normally accompanies her to events like TwitchCon. Twitch banned her security guard this time, because of a prior incident where he grabbed a dude and detained him until police arrived. Twitch said they would provide their own security team to protect her instead.

During the event, a creep strolled up on stage (walking directly past multiple levels of Twitch’s security) and forcibly kissed her. The creep was interviewed by security (who discovered he had a knife) and then allowed to leave instead of being arrested. Several of the security guards were even overheard by other streamers backstage, laughing about it. In response, Twitch banned the creep for 30 days. Notably, Twitch has a long and sordid history of blatant misogyny, so this is just another notch in their belt. The image is from Emiru’s response video, right after she found out how he got away with only a temporary ban.

The NFT doesn’t hold the rights to the image. That’s one of the biggest parts of NFTs. Transferring the NFT doesn’t transfer the image rights, because the NFT doesn’t inherently hold any image rights. The NFT is simply a string of characters that say you own the specific image. But it doesn’t confer any actual rights, aside from being able to say that you own it.

I could mint an NFT for the US constitution. That doesn’t mean I can sue others for reprinting it. Because owning that NFT doesn’t mean I own the copyright for the constitution. I also couldn’t stop someone (like congress) from changing the constitution later. Because again, I don’t actually own the rights to the constitution. All I own is an NFT, which says I own the constitution.

NFT theft would require stealing that token. But again, stealing the token wouldn’t steal the rights to the constitution, because the token didn’t actually confer any ownership rights to the constitution.

This is unironically the type of preaching that megachurch pastors use to incentivize people to donate. It’s called prosperity gospel. Basically, it’s the belief that God rewards his most devout followers with material wealth. So if you’re not rich, it’s because you’re not a good enough follower and need to keep donating. It’s what pastors like Joel Osteen and Kenneth Copeland use, to get their followers to buy them new private jets.

Also, tithe is supposed to be a percentage of your income, not a flat amount. Most Christians will say 10% of your annual income goes to the church as tithe. Asking for a flat amount unfairly burdens the poorer parishioners, in the same way that flat rate taxes unfairly burden the poor.

Yeah, Adam Savage was saying that as a highly skilled person. I’ve worked with personality hires. I’ve worked with military-grade weaponized autism. I prefer the autism, because at least I don’t need to babysit them and double-check all of their work.

With the autists, at least you can reliably know “if I give them {A}, I’ll get {B} in return. Not {B-1}, not {B+1}. Always {B}.” I don’t mind teaching. It’s inevitable in any job. But working with personality hires always ends up being an exercise in patience, because there’s only so many times I can show someone how to do something. I work in an industry with extremely strict deadlines where your work is presented to hundreds or thousands of people at a time. So if a personality hire needs to be re-trained on things because they can’t grasp something, (or just keeps doing things wrong because they don’t want to ask for help), then it puts an extra burden on the rest of us to keep meeting those deadlines.

Honestly I don’t know why anyone would consider it hard: you just stop eating animal products.

Maybe you have a different definition of vegan. Most say “vegan” means no animal products at all. It requires a ton of research to avoid constant minefields, because animal products can be in everything. Dyes, scents, preservatives, flavors, polishes, powders, etc… Even fresh fruit can be non-vegan, because sellers will polish their fruit with beeswax or shellac to make it more shiny, and give it a better shelf life.

That’s largely because one half of the elected officials are dedicated to defunding and deconstructing government organizations, so they can then point at those same organizations and go “look, the government doesn’t work! We should stop funding it!” The government is actually great at organizing a lot of things. But they’re all so engrained in society that you don’t even think about them as being organized by the government. Systems that just work, reliably, all the time.

The government’s job is stability and reliability, not being as efficient as possible. Where a corporation may only have one person doing a job, the government will have four or five. Those people aren’t bloat; They’re on the payroll because the government is expected to keep functioning during emergencies. People would lose their minds if the streets department (responsible for clearing downed trees out of public roads) shut down after a bad storm rolled through, just because a few government employees had a tree branch fall on their house. What if firefighters stopped working because a local wildfire burnt a few firefighters’ houses? What if the city water department shut down because three or four city employees’ water supply was affected? What if the health department shut down during a pandemic?

The people who work in government also live in the same areas they serve. Which means that they are affected by the same emergencies. The government needs enough redundancy to be able to continue functioning, even after those employees are affected by the same emergencies as the general public. If some emergency affects 75% of the public in a given area, then 75% of the local government employees are likely going to be affected. So if the government doesn’t have enough redundancy to be able to redistribute the work, people will see their government shutting down in the wake of the emergency. And to make matters even worse, during (and in the wake of) those emergencies, people look to the government for help. Which means that’s the most critical time for the government to continue functioning.

I say all of this because the same is true for the infrastructure that runs critical government systems. The government expands and implements things slowly by design, because everything critical has to go through multiple levels of design approval, and have multiple redundancies built in. If the government has updated a critical system, I can guarantee that new system has been in the works for the past two years at least. That process is designed to ensure everything works as intended. I wouldn’t want my city traffic lights managed by a private company, because they’d try to cut costs and avoid building in redundant systems.

Exactly. The only people it would affect are the ones who want to be able to steamroll over the casual or PvE players. And those players are a fucking blight, even among other PvP players.

Yup, it’s amazing how quickly PvP sucks the fun out of a game. People immediately turn into sweaty tryhards and min-maxers when PvP is required.

Or just different loot. Destiny actually had a fairly decent approach to this. Some gear was PvE only from enemy drops, and other gear could only be found in the PvP shop (which required grinding currency in PvP to purchase). There was some gear that was categorically better for builds, but the devs tried to keep the exclusive stuff fairly balanced. So like the PvP stuff wouldn’t try to make you outright overpowered in PvE, for example. It meant you could take the same gear across the two different modes, without being able to simply get OP by focusing on one mode entirely.

The devs struggled with balancing the gear between the two modes, (looking at you, Gjallarhorn), but the idea wasn’t awful.

Yup.

“Oh hey, we have a partial outage right now due to AWS. Most of the site still works, but users can’t log in, because that is handled on AWS… ^{Which means users can’t access the “most of the site” that still works…} But at least we can say we weren’t completely down during the outage.”

My worst back injury was from picking up a loaf of bread after a long day of very heavy work. I had been slinging 300 pound pieces of gear all day long. Lots of heavy lifting, bending, pushing, pulling, etc… I handled all of it just fine. Got in the car, baby-wiped my face and arms to clean up a little bit, and headed to the grocery store on my way home.

20 minutes later, I was at the store. I just needed two things: Milk and bread. I headed to the back to grab the milk, then went past the bread aisle on the way to the registers. I stooped down to grab the bread, and felt a little twinge in my lower back. I barely even thought about it. Then the closer I got to the registers, the worse it got. By the time I was to the registers, I was hobbling around like an old man who needed a walker. Hell, I felt like I needed a walker; I was cursing myself for not grabbing a shopping cart, because I had nothing to hold onto.

That was on a Friday at like midnight. I suffered through two days of agony until my doctor opened on Monday. Doc was just like “oh yeah, that just happens sometimes.” Doc, can we make it fucking not happen? He said it was probably because I worked hard and then cooled down.

Apparently it’s an extremely common phenomenon, where industrial athletes will get injured after work. Because they’ll be good about staying safe during work… Then they get injured by something stupid and small after cooling down. Because when you’re warmed up and being mindful about how you lift, your risk of injury is low. But then you head home, cool down during the commute, and some muscle or tendon decides “nah, I’m done stretching for the day. Time to rip instead.”

Over a decade later, and I still occasionally have issues with that spot on my back.

Yeah, when I moved out of my parents’ place, my second roommate was a displaced Palestinian. His family had owned an olive farm for six generations. He had to flee when Israel cut down all of their olive trees, and gave his family’s land to some random Jewish dude. He got out, but was separated from his family and had no idea if any of them had survived.

That was in 2013, and he said he always felt crazy talking about it, because there was nothing about it in the news.

Yeah, catbox is notoriously spotty. It’s outright blocked in many areas, and I have to VPN to a different location to even access it. And even after that, getting a full video to load is an exercise in patience. After trying four different VPN servers I finally got it to connect… And then it would only load the first 15-20 seconds. Not sure why it’s so popular here.

Because impeachment is only the first step of the process, and removing him from office would require a 2/3 majority after he’s impeached. Currently, his supporters hold a majority in every branch of the government, which is how they’ve been able to pass so much heinous shit in such a short period. So there’s no chance of that 2/3 vote happening under the current congress.

The grinder thing is because Keurig K-Cups came out, and the entire industry shifted towards selling those instead.