Okay, so this video, plus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdZkXWo_ydU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0itEOM8oxkE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFbPzUvWxrg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Elkt_pfTOgs&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnqE3pM22pI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1v-HM7Q9PE
... what are you trying to tell me, exactly, YouTube?
I just mean... really, now?
(I have never had an alien abduction, and was only vaguely aware of the invade area 51 memes as "a thing happening.")
((Also got a bunch of things on the President, so, go figure on that.))
EDIT: and now I'm naked for some reason. Ah, it's a dragon. *gets dressed, shakes fist at dragon* Fact^ is truly stranger than fiction!
^
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We're under flood warnings.
We're fine, on a hill six blocks from the lake with no basement.
But the rest of the isthmus is going to get f*$#ed up.
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Happy belated birthday John.
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Happy birthday, John!
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Happy Birthday, John!
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Happy birthday John!
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It's a coup! A coup, I say!!
No, but seriously.
I don’t know what the names of the songs are, but opening four (“Put your hands up”), ending 3 (“Jump, jump”), and ending 4 (“Endless song” - the actual title of that one) are just so daggum great.
No, but seriously.
I don’t know what the names of the songs are, but opening four (“Put your hands up”), ending 3 (“Jump, jump”), and ending 4 (“Endless song” - the actual title of that one) are just so daggum great.
(Though I must admit that perhaps Endless Song requires context or translation.)
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*sigh*
Humans.
Typical.
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*sigh*
Humans.
Coming over here, with their limited lifespans and their extra feats at 1st level. Bloody round-ears!
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Coming over here, with their limited lifespans and their extra feats at 1st level. Bloody round-ears!*sigh*
Humans.
And let's not forget: their proclivities to mate with literally everything!
And they're so dangerous! Terrifying, I say! Horrible!
And leaving their weird mutant hybrid spawn of various denominations and sorts!
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There's nothing like slowly going through everything you own and throwing it all out to learn just how insidious our culture of gift-giving truly is: I am at the point of going through a game cabinet, finding game after game after game still in its shrink wrap, and putting each one out front for other people to deal with.
On the bright side, people take them.
On the down side, why do I have so much stuff!?!??!?!?!
It's because in a family of 4 in the U.S., every occasion (Christmas, birthdays, Easter, other variegated holidays) is considered a "gift giving" occasion, and it's "rude" to fail to give a physical gift or *gasp* a gift card, so you get stuff, much of which you'll never use. Multiple times a year. Every. Single. Year.
I blame marketers.
EDIT: And the one that really gets to me is gift cards. Even thought it's illegal for gift cards to expire in California, national chains make them expire anyway, and you need to jump through a bunch of hoops to force them to pay you. I've found over $300 in gift cards the kids never used. Just money down the toilet that is the altar of worship known as consumerism.
But now I'm getting political...
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Coming over here, with their limited lifespans and their extra feats at 1st level. Bloody round-ears!*sigh*
Humans.
In the Freehold! campaign setting, "candle" is one of the slang terms for humans in elven, particularly among "common" elves, who usually use this term to refer to humans they are in a (usually short term) relationship with, but also random people they encounter on their travels. While this term is somewhat joking(although it can become mean and even cruel quite quickly, as is their way), the slang for half elves, "drop/droplet", as in a drop of wax from a burning candle, is more directly insulting, although it can have endearing implications, depending on how/when the term is used.
Among the Shuu, slang is never used.
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On a lighter note, this month's utility bill still shows us generating a vast surplus of electricity. As the days grow shorter and all 3 other family members start using portable electric heaters to heat their rooms, I suspect that trend will change.
But the idea that we may be able to heat the house this winter for nearly-free definitely appeals to me. We'll see how the new insulation holds up in the winter.
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Yep. I'm old.
I have no idea who Night Monkey nor Unnamed Goose are.
But I did just send off physical letters to my congresspeople! That makes me cool, right?
Hello, I'm Troy McClure! You might remember me from such educational films as "Catsup, Our Tastiest Vegetable!" and "How To Invest the Shemp Howard Way."
Today's double-feature is "Night Monkey: Lethal Menace or Deadly Threat?" and "Untitled Goose, America's Second Favorite A$$hole!"
{flips off classroom lights, takes a long swig from whisky flask}
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Yep. I'm old.
I have no idea who Night Monkey nor Unnamed Goose are.
But I did just send off physical letters to my congresspeople! That makes me cool, right?
Hello, I'm Troy McClure! You might remember me from such educational films as "Catsup, Our Tastiest Vegetable!" and "How To Invest the Shemp Howard Way."
Today's double-feature is "Night Monkey: Lethal Menace or Deadly Threat?" and "Untitled Goose, America's Second Favorite A$$hole!"
{flips off classroom lights, takes a long swig from whisky flask}
It really *IS* Impus Major's description: "It's the new internet meme game where you just go around as a goose being a **** to people."
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Gods. Emergency call this morning. Another team getting shut down and outsourced to India as a "cost-cutting measure". *SIGH*. More good people gone.
As I think I've also mentioned, the best engineers I've ever encountered are the ones who were trained in India ("This is the standard method for solving this problem. Use it. Always."), then immigrated to the U.S. ("You are allowed to try to make things better, even if it's not in the specifications!")
But as it is, I lost some good co-workers, and I'm not hopeful about working with a team whose approach will likely be, "You did not put the file names in the proper format. Please fix this problem and re-submit," causing a 24-hour delay (because of the time shift) for a 2-minute problem...
EDIT: It's very much like a famous U.S. Football player once said (I want to credit John Madden, but it may or may not have been him): "If referees enforced every rule in the rulebook as-written on every play, there wouldn't be a game."
Similarly, our last experience with an Indian production team was along the lines of:
- Day 1: "You entered incorrect file names. I cannot proceed. Please fix."
- Day 2: "You have corrected the file names, but the page number in Lesson 8, slide 12 is incorrect. Please fix."
- Days 3-5: Additional one-line fixes reported at a rate of one per day. I have no idea what these people did with the rest of their days, because with us they were literally like a poor debugger: "Go to the next issue. Full stop. Wait for resolution."
Then, after a week of back-and-forth where they refused to proceed at all as soon as they found something wrong, they blamed us for the project being a week late, and we responded that if they'd just reported all the issues at once it would have taken under a day.
Neither side went away happy.
EDIT: Added edit inside spoiler.
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Night Monkey is pretty great (and a reference to the Spiderman: Far from Home film, which is great).
Untitled Goose on the other hand... well, stealing people's stuff and making life unpleasant isn't... isn't great. I do hope people have fun with it, though! Much better in games than real-life!
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Gods. Emergency call this morning. Another team getting shut down and outsourced to India as a "cost-cutting measure". *SIGH*. More good people gone.
** spoiler omitted **
This... this explains so very much about my interaction with various companies. Hm.
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Gods. Emergency call this morning. Another team getting shut down and outsourced to India as a "cost-cutting measure". *SIGH*. More good people gone.
** spoiler omitted **
My experience with Indian outsourcing isn't any different from my experience with Americans: Finding people that can follow directions in the first place is the hard part. Finding someone that can transcend the directions as needed is an amazing bonus.
I'm also not disagreeing with you. There is a major cultural difference in the work environment and expectations.
Also labor laws. We had to give someone working through a 3rd party contractor in New Dehli 60 days' notice before we could officially terminate employment. 60 days. In Illinois they could just show up at my desk and escort me out on the spot.
Gods. Emergency call this morning. Another team getting shut down and outsourced to India as a "cost-cutting measure". *SIGH*. More good people gone.
** spoiler omitted **
My experience with Indian outsourcing isn't any different from my experience with Americans: Finding people that can follow directions in the first place is the hard part. Finding someone that can transcend the directions as needed is an amazing bonus.
I'm also not disagreeing with you. There is a major cultural difference in the work environment and expectations.
Also labor laws. We had to give someone working through a 3rd party contractor in New Dehli 60 days' notice before we could officially terminate employment. 60 days. In Illinois they could just show up at my desk and escort me out on the spot.
I was once called and informed that I didn't need to show up for work today. After I'd been there for several hours and had sensitive financial documents!
... so, yeah, I finished delivering everything and then eventually left before lunch. I'unno. Companies be weird.
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This... this explains so very much about my interaction with various companies. Hm.Gods. Emergency call this morning. Another team getting shut down and outsourced to India as a "cost-cutting measure". *SIGH*. More good people gone.
** spoiler omitted **
Well, Vanykrye is partially right -- there are likely extremely good Indian outsourcing teams out there. The problem is, they're not the cheapest.
Microsoft is the most infamous that I know of for the sheer a**hattery of, "Here is my issue and here are the support articles I have tried."
"Very good, sir. Now, try this support article that you just mentioned."
And with Microsoft support, it goes on and on, exactly on script, until after 15-20 minutes of sheer frustration you realize that they will tell you absolutely nothing that a Google search would have given you in 60 seconds...
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This... this explains so very much about my interaction with various companies. Hm.Gods. Emergency call this morning. Another team getting shut down and outsourced to India as a "cost-cutting measure". *SIGH*. More good people gone.
** spoiler omitted **
Well, Vanykrye is partially right -- there are likely extremely good Indian outsourcing teams out there. The problem is, they're not the cheapest.
Microsoft is the most infamous that I know of for the sheer a**hattery of, "Here is my issue and here are the support articles I have tried."
"Very good, sir. Now, try this support article that you just mentioned."And with Microsoft support, it goes on and on, exactly on script, until after 15-20 minutes of sheer frustration you realize that they will tell you absolutely nothing that a Google search would have given you in 60 seconds...
Hee-heheh. Yeah.
Yeah.
... yeah.
:I
*long, cold, hard stare into the distance*
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This... this explains so very much about my interaction with various companies. Hm.Gods. Emergency call this morning. Another team getting shut down and outsourced to India as a "cost-cutting measure". *SIGH*. More good people gone.
** spoiler omitted **
Well, Vanykrye is partially right -- there are likely extremely good Indian outsourcing teams out there. The problem is, they're not the cheapest.
Microsoft is the most infamous that I know of for the sheer a**hattery of, "Here is my issue and here are the support articles I have tried."
"Very good, sir. Now, try this support article that you just mentioned."And with Microsoft support, it goes on and on, exactly on script, until after 15-20 minutes of sheer frustration you realize that they will tell you absolutely nothing that a Google search would have given you in 60 seconds...
Yes. I've ran into that a lot. They're going for bottom dollar in a lot of these cases.
My company has offshored some of our IT work, but they aren't meant to be the traditional phone-rep-help-desk kind of guys. And we still have issues trying to get them to follow the directions we give them in the first place.
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Yep. I'm old.
I have no idea who Night Monkey nor Unnamed Goose are.
But I did just send off physical letters to my congresspeople! That makes me cool, right?
Hello, I'm Troy McClure! You might remember me from such educational films as "Catsup, Our Tastiest Vegetable!" and "How To Invest the Shemp Howard Way."
Today's double-feature is "Night Monkey: Lethal Menace or Deadly Threat?" and "Untitled Goose, America's Second Favorite A$$hole!"
{flips off classroom lights, takes a long swig from whisky flask}
I love you and this post.
Also: what the heck is going on with that guy.
Seems like he miiiiiiiiiight be totally horrible in every way.
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NobodysHome Muses on Game Design Decisions:
So, all of us are playing AFK Arena, a fun little army-building mobile game (or whatever the formal term is), and it has the idea that you can "hire mercenaries" from your friends, which really just means adding one of their heroes to your lineup for one victory. (You can lose all you want, but once you win with the mercenary you're done with them for the week.)
I hired one of GothBard's heroes as a mercenary, and then GothBard significantly leveled her up. And... she didn't change on my side... I still had the lower-level one as a merc.
Most people would think, "Oh, that's to prevent cheating!"
But what kind of cheating is there in this situation? Mercs cost nothing at all, you're free to hire them the next week, etc.
Then I thought of it from a developer point of view: "If we link directly to the other person's hero, we've created an unnecessary security risk by linking two accounts. Better not do that. Just grab a copy and be done."
In short, I think it wasn't a design decision, but a security decision.
I'd love to know one way or the other, but I doubt I'll ever meet someone on that dev team.
EDIT: Shiro says it's more likely that they didn't want the hired merc suddenly disappearing (you feed heroes to other heroes to upgrade them) or losing all their gear. Unfortunately, his explanation is more likely.
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Hm. Cost of living correlates directly with quality of life. Who knew?
Everyone.
Everyone knew.
Can you see forever?I... I'm thinking of downloading it, guys.
Of putting it in my library and... and... and playing it.
With a bucket of KFC.
Because.
I mean, come on, guys.
Buwahahahahahah! Guys! Guys!
I’ve cracked the code~!!
I’m eating a box of Chick fil A while playing it instead!!!
NYAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!
No. I can’t even see, like, ten minutes, which is what I was expecting to play at most. My Desktop can’t connect to the internet still, so Steam is all, “Yeah, nah, I’m out, dawg.” So less fracking the code, and more cracking my face by smacking it.
Well played, game. Well. Played.
I was forced to restart the game, ‘cause my own fault, so I played it through as I could, actually taking it “legitimately” (well, as much as possible - there is literally no taking this legitimately), aaaaaand... ran out of time and was forced to stop. Mostly because it just froze (I was having unrelated technical issues that I think contributed; I don’t think it was the game itself). So, yeah, somehow I’ve played it three times, total, and have never seen the ending. I mean, just, what. This seems so improbable, and yet I’m loving living it. (Sorry, McDonalds commercial typo’d itself into my KFC commercial review there.)
EDIT: typos in my typo-correction. Tropical, reel-y.
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LOLOL. You KNOW it's a slow week when your manager pings you to ask you whether you need anything from her because she has some free time right at the same time you were about to ping her to let her know YOU had free time.
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Vocab Drama
"By-product. Example. Sausage, since you probably killed the pig for the other cuts, is a by-product of pork."
"Sausage is still good."
"...yes. By-product doesn't necessarily-"
"It's made of guts and skin."
"No, it's not."
"Yes, it is!"
"It's not skin!"
"Ms. Scint, is there skin in sausages?"
"...I have never in my life wanted to know how they made sausage, so I can't tell you."
"See? Skin."
"That's not what she-"
"I'M GOOGLING IT."
"I'm going vegetarian now, and it's all your fault, [classmate]!"
"No one cares!"
Vocab Drama
"By-product. Example. Sausage, since you probably killed the pig for the other cuts, is a by-product of pork."
"Sausage is still good."
"...yes. By-product doesn't necessarily-"
"It's made of guts and skin."
"No, it's not."
"Yes, it is!"
"It's not skin!"
"Ms. Scint, is there skin in sausages?"
"...I have never in my life wanted to know how they made sausage, so I can't tell you."
"See? Skin."
"That's not what she-"
"I'M GOOGLING IT."
"I'm going vegetarian now, and it's all your fault, [classmate]!"
"No one cares!"
That checks out.
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Vocab Drama
"By-product. Example. Sausage, since you probably killed the pig for the other cuts, is a by-product of pork."
"Sausage is still good."
"...yes. By-product doesn't necessarily-"
"It's made of guts and skin."
"No, it's not."
"Yes, it is!"
"It's not skin!"
"Ms. Scint, is there skin in sausages?"
"...I have never in my life wanted to know how they made sausage, so I can't tell you."
"See? Skin."
"That's not what she-"
"I'M GOOGLING IT."
"I'm going vegetarian now, and it's all your fault, [classmate]!"
"No one cares!"
Just as an aside mention that you know someone who likes haggis and have them Google that.
I await the hilarity.
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Hm. Cost of living correlates directly with quality of life. Who knew?
Everyone.
Everyone knew.
Except people who try to live in Manhattan.
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Vocab, Act II
"Bureaucrat. The bureaucrat at the DMV processed my license."
"At the what?"
"DMV."
"What's that?"
"Department of Motor Vehicles. Everyone's favorite-"
"OH MY GOD THAT PLACE."
"I went there and waited THREE HOURS"
"I got there at 6:30 and had to be there till 1!"
"What were you doing there that long?!"
"They said to get there really early to retake my test!"
"Right, so just write down-"
"The DMV is literally the worst!"
"I hate the DMV!"
I have got to get better at picking my example sentences.
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Except people who try to live in Manhattan.Hm. Cost of living correlates directly with quality of life. Who knew?
Everyone.
Everyone knew.
there are a lot of interesting areas in Manhattan where that wasnt necessarily the case, but the world has changed now. Drastically.
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there are a lot of interesting areas in Manhattan where that wasnt necessarily the case, but the world has changed now. Drastically.
Oh, tell me about it.
When I was growing up in the 70s, Albany was where families who couldn't afford to live in Berkeley went. We were a bunch of UC Berkeley brats -- grad students, lecturers, maintenance staff, etc. All of us lived in Albany because Berkeley was too expensive.
And we laughed at all the "rich towns" like Piedmont, Palo Alto, Moraga, or Los Altos.
Heck, John Fogerty went to El Cerrito High School just a few blocks out of Albany.
And looking at that list, VE has the right of it: 6 of top 11 cities are cities that we historically thought of as, "Rich people" cities.
And now Albany's among them. And considering the assessor just tried to bill me as if my 900-square-foot house is worth $1.8 million, I have to agree. We have changed.
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Vocab, Act II
"Bureaucrat. The bureaucrat at the DMV processed my license."
"At the what?"
"DMV."
"What's that?"
"Department of Motor Vehicles. Everyone's favorite-"
"OH MY GOD THAT PLACE."
"I went there and waited THREE HOURS"
"I got there at 6:30 and had to be there till 1!"
"What were you doing there that long?!"
"They said to get there really early to retake my test!"
"Right, so just write down-"
"The DMV is literally the worst!"
"I hate the DMV!"
I have got to get better at picking my example sentences.
No-no! Change nothing! This is pure gold!
(Also, guarantee it is unlikely to help. High school.)
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This... this explains so very much about my interaction with various companies. Hm.Gods. Emergency call this morning. Another team getting shut down and outsourced to India as a "cost-cutting measure". *SIGH*. More good people gone.
** spoiler omitted **
Well, Vanykrye is partially right -- there are likely extremely good Indian outsourcing teams out there. The problem is, they're not the cheapest.
Microsoft is the most infamous that I know of for the sheer a**hattery of, "Here is my issue and here are the support articles I have tried."
"Very good, sir. Now, try this support article that you just mentioned."And with Microsoft support, it goes on and on, exactly on script, until after 15-20 minutes of sheer frustration you realize that they will tell you absolutely nothing that a Google search would have given you in 60 seconds...
Wait... People are actually using M$ support?! (besides reading their articles, that is?)
O.O
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Vocab Drama
"By-product. Example. Sausage, since you probably killed the pig for the other cuts, is a by-product of pork."
"Sausage is still good."
"...yes. By-product doesn't necessarily-"
"It's made of guts and skin."
"No, it's not."
"Yes, it is!"
"It's not skin!"
"Ms. Scint, is there skin in sausages?"
"...I have never in my life wanted to know how they made sausage, so I can't tell you."
"See? Skin."
"That's not what she-"
"I'M GOOGLING IT."
"I'm going vegetarian now, and it's all your fault, [classmate]!"
"No one cares!"
Skin? No, traditional sausage is made out of intestines.
Also, it is somehow debatable about sausages being byproducts. There is a lot of high quality sausages that might be actually primary co-objectives of pig slaughter.
EDIT: Skin, or at least some of its layers might be grounded and added to other worse cuts of meat to make some kinds of (probably) poor quality sausages, though.