Initiateofthevoid
@Initiateofthevoid@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on A shapeshifter standing in front of a mirror for hours making subtle adjustments to their disguises like a gamer in the character creator. 18 hours ago:
God I would genuinely kill you be able to do this.
I know it’s a typo, but it brings a level of personal aggression to the phrase that completely changes the meaning and I love it.
It’s not just that “I would kill (somebody) for that”, it’s “I would kill you for that”
- Comment on Can you read and understand this passage? 3 days ago:
Hah dang you should have told me to read the rest of the sample before I read the study! Now I’ll never know how far I’d get before I stopped imagining some nobleman drinking at a pub for no reason. I’m certain I would have figured it out eventually… but 35 English students never figuring that out? Almost half?
Given a dictionary and the words solicitor, injunction, affidavit, talk of tripping each other up with arguments and a literal reference to a “pile of money”?! They couldn’t make the leap to “court of law”? Couldn’t functionally use the dictionary as a tool for comprehending a sentence?
…That’s really scary, huh…
- Comment on Can you read and understand this passage? 3 days ago:
Thanks! Oof, I don’t know a particular favorite book, but favorite author is the late great Sir Terry Pratchett.
- Comment on Can you read and understand this passage? 3 days ago:
Oddly enough I overthought the first sentence, and imagined the Lord Chancellor was some type of local decorative feature like the Duke of Wellington. Then I realized it’s probably just a guy with a fancy title sitting at a table in a pub?
The rest is mostly straightforward to me. The text feels the way it literally reads - a bit muddy?
The streets are so full of fresh mud that they may as well be prehistoric mud flats after a Great Flood. I imagine it’s quite a large street leading up a big hill if he could imagine a giant dinosaur making the walk. So I picture basically a solid river of mud rising up in the distance.
If there are normally cobblestones or whatever, they’ve disappeared beneath the muck. I don’t know exactly what a chimney-pot is, but black smoke is pouring from the chimney somethings and mixing with the falling drizzle into dirty soot water. The rain is so blackened - and the weather so dreary - that the city itself could be in mourning.
It’s so muddy that the dogs are just dirty shapes in the muck, the horses have mud all the way up to their blinkers… which I read as blinders first, so I imagined it up to their heads and necks, like only the top 10% of the horse is actually visible and most of that is the headgear, and the rest of the horse is mud. I don’t know if that’s what a horse blinker is though.
The foot traffic feels cramped and irritable in the muck, people holding umbrellas against the dirty rain. It also sounds like a lot - tens of thousands of people walking the same paths. The edge of the sidewalk or whatever at the street corner is probably invisible under the mud, and because of that people keep slipping in the same spots. This pushes the mud more and more in the same directions, forming gross layered piles of muck in specific places against the sidewalk or something.
The day is so dark and dreary that it may as well be night. Overall, it’s muddy, raining, sooty, and depressing. There’s a big, wide, muddy street up a hill, filled with a constant flow of unhappy people.
I don’t know if I would actually read this for leisure, but I like it. I think I’m on the same page for most of it? But I still have no idea what’s up with Lord Chancellor. Is he a person staring out a window at the scene in the street? Does his title imply nobility and fancy clothing? What does the inside of the Lincoln’s Inn Hall look like?
- Comment on Nextcloud cries foul over Google Play Store app rejection 4 days ago:
I see it all the time whenever someone’s consumerism is threatened.
Lol how, exactly? Do you think I am the tech illiterate end user we are talking about?
Or maybe I am someone who constantly has to deal with end-users, and I’m forced to acknowledge that educating them is like trying to hold back the tide?
Systemic problems require systematic solutions. Anything less is just shouting into the wind.
- Comment on Nextcloud cries foul over Google Play Store app rejection 4 days ago:
That’s not a solution, that’s a vague idea.
How do you hold people accountable? How do you encourage them?
- Comment on Nextcloud cries foul over Google Play Store app rejection 4 days ago:
What cultural solutions do you suggest?
- Comment on Nextcloud cries foul over Google Play Store app rejection 4 days ago:
Nah, I just think that we spend too much time blaming people instead of systems. You can’t change people. You can change systems which will then change people.
- Comment on The emotional support dunkies 4 days ago:
This might be one of the few good things about widespread AI adoption -the value of real-life images and videos must be depreciating when anyone can just generate whatever images they want and most of the audience won’t know or care for the difference.
Or worse (for the paparazzi) - audiences will assume or become convinced that the real photos are AI generated anyway.
With GenAI maybe we can stop taking so many meaningless pictures and videos of people just living their goddamn lives, or people doing dangerous or stupid shit for clout…
Right? Maybe? … I hope?
- Comment on The emotional support dunkies 4 days ago:
It really has to do a number on the brain to be so justifiably paranoid at all times.
That pic of Jonah Hill comes to mind, where he’s just absolutely not having it when he thinks someone is running up and recording him, and then relaxes when he realizes it’s Dicaprio.
And then you realize that the moment was captured on camera, so he actually was being surveilled at that exact moment.
A lot of celebrities are just terrible humans, but surely at least part of that is from the influence of being surrounded and surveilled by equally terrible people at all times. Not an excuse, just a sad observation.
- Comment on Nextcloud cries foul over Google Play Store app rejection 5 days ago:
To blame someone is to consider them responsible.
Do you consider the average user responsible? Is it productive to try to hold them responsible for any of this?
The end-user has always been the bane of all tech development. It doesn’t change the fact that the increasing tech illiteracy of end-users in the modern day is by design.
Nobody can fix the user, but we can fix the companies that build containerized little retail environments that encourage mindless engagement and discourage curiousity and experimentation.
- Comment on GOP sneaks decade-long AI regulation ban into spending bill - Ars Technica 5 days ago:
It’s funny but sad. Vague, selectively-enforcable laws are the point.
We can’t just call something AI to prevent regulation.
They can, though. With “laws” like this, the government can freely pick and choose who is punished and who is protected.
- Comment on Kids nowadays don't have many (if any) videogame heroes... 1 week ago:
This looks awesome!
It checks a lot of boxes for me:
- Indie
- local co-op
- playable demo
- Brian David Gilbert?!
I’ve never heard about this before, so I’m glad you shared. It looks like it’d be great to play with my nephew. Hope you can make the sequels!
For the rest of you’s: www.inkinsidegame.com
- Comment on Even Starfield's community patch modders are growing 'disenchanted' with the sci-fi RPG, as volunteers depart in droves: 'If nobody comes forward, we may have to retire the project' 1 week ago:
But I could get over a lot if it didn’t feel like I was playing a menu instead of flying a spaceship at every change of scenery.
I stopped playing mid-loading screen. My awareness just snapped into place, and I realized that the last 30 minutes of “gameplay” was effectively:
- bland fetch quest dialogue
- walk through corridor
- loading screen
- space (menu)
- loading screen
- Space over different planet (menu)
- loading screen
- landing pad - walk through corridor
- bland fetch quest dialogue
- GoTo step 2
- Comment on Kids are short-circuiting their school-issued Chromebooks for TikTok clout 1 week ago:
Anyone else remember kids watching videos of other kids nearly choking to death on cinnamon, and thinking “hey this looks like fun”? Or the “chug a gallon of milk” thing. Those “trends” were just weirdly masochistic and sadistic. It wasn’t even misinformation or anything. Kids watched other kids suffer, and then chose to suffer too.
I can imagine that TikTok has been for Internet trends, to what slot machines did for gambling.
It’s closer to what mobile apps did for gambling. Crazy how quickly that was normalized in the US, and it’s tragic how easily people can just delete thousands of dollars from their bank account on a whim from the comfort of their couch.
I guess what I’m saying is, maybe sometimes children and adults really do need some protection from their stupid impulses.
- Comment on Is it weird to juggle in the park? 1 week ago:
I’ve seen bagpipers doing their thing in random parks. Alone, with a bagpipe, standing in a field, practicing. Bagpipers who needed the practice, btw.
I thought it was cool. Nobody seemed to mind.
You do you!
- Comment on When did I get so old 1 week ago:
I feel that the memery at TenForward have a lot of potential to add here. I don’t know enough about their inspiration material to understand why, but from what I can tell they’ve certainly got a lot of beans. More beans than these young’uns could ever hold in their tiny little kling-ons.
Janeway would lair them up dozens, maybe even hundreds of times, and they wouldn’t even know they were dangling the whole time.
For all I know these are fighting words to them. If so, I will try to die with my honor.
- Comment on When did I get so old 1 week ago:
I’m cool with it for streams, but it got really confusing because I’ve also heard slightly older young’uns refer to ChatGPT as “Chat”
So, like, “Idk I heard it from Chat” can either be a horrifying revelation that they listen to and trust random twitch users, or a horrifying revelation that they listen to and trust inchoate AI tech.
- Comment on Seriously Jesus, who was doing that for that to be added 😭 2 weeks ago:
I… uh… what? This still isn’t how words work.
I repeat:
what exactly are they coping with?
Who is coping here? With what? It’s… an athiest coping with a lack of faith? A jewish person coping with flaws in their religious law?
There is no one on the face of the earth that can reconcile passages from religious texts such as these.
Uh… way to just miss the point of the entire religion.
All of Judaism - down to their goddamn rite of manhood - is built upon literacy. Reading and interpreting the will of God. Scholarly analysis of their own texts - reconciling the word with the world - is literally the foundation of their entire religion.
- Comment on Seriously Jesus, who was doing that for that to be added 😭 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think this word means what you think it means… what is “copium” about discussing possible origins of dogma?
OP is literally saying “this widespread institutionally-reinforced religious practice/dietary restriction could all be due to a mistranslation”, what exactly are they coping with?
- Comment on Could wastewater plant simply heat up water past 500C to decompose all chemicals and output clean water? 2 weeks ago:
Dishwashing is a significant underestimate here, and don’t forget hand-washing (before/after bathroom, food, cleaning…).
Plus you missed outdoor and gardening, which would help explain why the Land of the
FreeLawns uses more than anybody else. - Comment on Me when I zoom past traffic on my e-scooter 2 weeks ago:
What about adding a lane?
We’ve already added a lane.
Yes, but what about a second lane?
I don’t think he’s ever tried adding a second lane, Pippin.
- Comment on If you're a broke vampire, just say that 2 weeks ago:
Fantastic! Who knows, maybe the guy Ea-Nasir pissed off was a vampire.
- Comment on Apex Legends writer gets laid off 24 hours after the character she wrote is revealed, because that's what the games industry in 2025 looks like 2 weeks ago:
Now can be both the second-best-time to plant a tree and the first-best-time to grab a bucket of water!
Remember everyone, the forest is on fire and there’s not many places to run. The fires of climate change affects the entire world, and this administration and the wealthy that back them will gleefully pour fuel on the flames and let your house burn.
You can stand around begging for rain, asking why the landlord didn’t fix the sprinklers or why he never checked the fire extinguishers or why he’s hiding under his desk clutching the cash register for dear life…
Or you can grab a bucket.
- Comment on If you're a broke vampire, just say that 2 weeks ago:
You know, a lot of people say that about me, but if anything I have very thin skin. Other vampires say that I have thick skin because I can go out in daylight and so it’s okay for them to joke about me because my skin is so thick, but my skin isn’t thick at all. You can’t just put a vampire in a thick suit of skin and the sun won’t burn him, that’s not how skin works I don’t think. I think light goes through skin, that’s why we can still see some light when we close our eyes. Have you ever done that? Have you ever closed your eyes, but you could still kind of see light through your eye lids? I like to do it sometimes. I close my eyes and pretend the lightbulb in my room is the sun shining on all of us. Me and all of my vampire friends. So warm. Do you want to try that? Do you want to close your eyes with me? I can see the light right through my eyelids, so that must mean that the skin on my eyelids is actually pretty thin, right? Can you see how thin my eyelids are?
- Comment on If you're a broke vampire, just say that 2 weeks ago:
To be fair, the number of times entire villages, towns, cities, and even kingdoms were completely wiped off the map… I could see a vampire being forced to start over. A lot.
They can expect vampire hunters in their castle, but nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
- Comment on Apex Legends writer gets laid off 24 hours after the character she wrote is revealed, because that's what the games industry in 2025 looks like 2 weeks ago:
Recent and huge progress on that front. It’s an industry wide union, and apparently even recently laid-off workers can join.
- Comment on What do office workers actually do? 3 weeks ago:
Thanks! Try not to let it get you down. It’s less a Lovecraftian horror and more like a giant Rube Goldberg-Plinko machine that got way out of hand.
- Comment on What do office workers actually do? 3 weeks ago:
You are seen! There are thousands of “you’s” out there building permanently-temporary fixes out of digital duct tape. Users think it’s black magic, IT thinks it’s a security risk, management thinks it replaces IT, and you know it just keeps things moving while everyone else talks about the big software overhaul that’s way overdue but always 6-36 months down the road.
- Comment on What do office workers actually do? 3 weeks ago:
Most office workers move things from point A to B in the physical, digital, or financial world. Electricity, toys, real estate, insurance contracts, missiles, you name it. The office worker is a link in a chain of information that stretches from the beginning of causality to the final effects of human existence.
There’s a mine, somewhere in the world. In that mine is metal. A factory owner wants that metal. Office workers for that factory call or email the office for that mine, and asks for that metal. The two offices negotiate a deal.
This usually involves calls or emails to management, accounting, sales, legal - all different office workers doing different things - that ultimately boil down to:
- a price per unit of metal +/- applicable taxes that can benefit both parties, and
- logistics of when and how to deliver or pickup that metal, and how much those logistics cost.
From there, it’s pretty much the same deal. The factory isn’t making enough money. They want to sell a better product. Office workers negotiate a deal with other office workers at an engineering firm. Both parties make calls, send emails, design proof-of-concepts, and they negotiate a deal. Sometimes they logon to an hour-tracking software, so an office worker can bill the factory per hour a different office worker spent working for that factory.
A major importer wants the product that the factory made with that engineer’s designs and that mine’s metal. Office workers make calls, send emails, check tariff and tax regulations, contact representatives at the port or border, schedule times and dates, and negotiate a deal.
A major retailer wants the product that the importer purchased from the…
A consumer buys a product and dies. Their family hires a lawyer. That lawyer has his office workers make calls, send emails, logon to government websites, and schedule hearings and submit documents to prove that the product killed the consumer.
An insurance agency investigates the plaintiff that is suing the retailer. They google the person that died. They contact office workers that know about how people die or know about how products can kill, and they check the insurance company’s database for how often people die to that product, and they calculate the odds that the product will kill a person, and then insurance office workers renegotiate a contract with the retailer office workers for higher premiums.
An office worker in the government works for the court. They make and cancel appointments, make phone calls and send emails to other office workers, employees, lawyers, or plaintiffs, they send data from one lawyer to another, etc.
The whole system builds and builds until you have office workers talking to office workers talking to office workers about the movement of imaginary assets that never actually move, or the buying and selling of personal data for targetting ads that everyone hates, or software engineers building cryptocurrencies designed to fail or call centers that exist only to convince you to pay them money, or tax filing software companies that only exist because they pay the government to make tax filing hard…
And there you have the modern day office worker.
TL;DR: Reading emails. Sending emails. Checking data. Making phone calls. Signing contracts. Approving decisions. Buying, selling, loaning, stealing, hiring, firing, murdering, perjuring, harassing, gassing, lying, crying, building, destroying - all pixels on a screen and voices on a phone, text in an email and words in a voicemail, all the world’s wealth and all the world’s future moving piece by little intricate piece from one human to the next in an impossibly vast network of causality that nobody really understand or controls but nonetheless keeps rolling forward one dollar at a time.