Two things started the slow 10ish year journey to atheism for me. I can’t remember which happened first.

Some Mormon lads doing their mandatory missionary work knocked on our door when I was home alone. I decided, screw it, kill them with kindness. Maybe I’ll convert them! After I got them some ice water, they started the spiel. It was so stupid, how could anyone believe this? Then I thought, wait, how is what I believe any more believable? That was an unsettling thought that I could never really shake.

I also challenged myself to read the entire Bible (NIV) front to back (which I did, thankyouverymuch). I already had a lot of apologetics for the pentateuch warfare, slavery, etc. but in Psalms there’s a verse that basically goes, “blessed is he who dashes the babies on the rocks.” And like. What the fuck is that. In what possible circumstances is killing babies okay, let alone with God’s explicit endorsement? That also stuck in my head ever since.

There was a lot else in between, but years later I stumbled into a copy of The God Delusion. “Know thine enemy, right?” So I read it on lunch breaks at work. While I now know the book has a reputation for kinda bad philosophy, by the end it had tidily dismantled the last vestiges of the purely “rational” arguments to believe in God I still had. So I sat there, an atheist for the first time in my life.

I think JRPGs do focus on choice, but usually more in terms of the gameplay and deep combat systems with weird synergies to discover. Story-wise… yeah definitely more linear.

I don’t know what peanut butter is like in other countries. In Japan it was very different, a lot sweeter.

What’s yours like? Have you ever been able to compare it to something like JIF?

Here’s an important bit from the actual journal article abstract

This lower literacy-greater receptivity link is not explained by differences in perceptions of AI’s capability, ethicality, or feared impact on humanity. Instead, this link occurs because people with lower AI literacy are more likely to perceive AI as magical and experience feelings of awe in the face of AI’s execution of tasks that seem to require uniquely human attributes.

It then goes on to say you should target ads for AI to people who don’t know anytime about AI, since they’ll see it as magical and buy in. Kinda gross, if you ask me.

Comparisons to users on other social media networks would be useful, yeah.

I don’t think I ever learned how to properly source information from primary works until college. I didn’t really get it until grad school.

Kinda the same for the scientific method. In high school it was just a thing you learn and memorize, but barely ever applied, if at all, in the actual curriculum. I wish it had been impressed upon me at a much earlier stage of my life why the scientific method is so useful and how it led to the sheer boom in our knowledge as a species. Like, they do tell us… but we didn’t really get it. I’ve heard others had better teachers… But it really would be better if the system didn’t have to rely on winning the teacher lottery.

For anyone else who was unfamiliar:

Linear economy is a system in which people buy a product, use it, and then throw it away. The term linear refers to the straight progression that a product can follow, with a beginning, a middle and an end. There is no thought along the line regarding recycling or reuse. (per https://www.eib.org/en/stories/linear-economy-recycling#%3A~%3Atext=Linear+economy+is+a+system%2Cline+regarding+recycling+or+reuse.)

Don’t have this issue myself, but usually when people complain about crows it’s because they are getting into trash cans, dumpsters, etc and just making a mess of things. Presumably they think it’s fun?

Some people really do just like the repetition. I have a couple friends that regularly log into multiple games to do their dailies. Like it’s a chore that just has to be done. But like completing chores in real life, it may not feel satisfying in the moment, but there’s a certain kind of satisfaction you get from completing a task, marking it off the to-do list. If that sense of satisfaction can be granted and wrapped in a pretty package with maybe even a reward that will finally net you that thing you’ve been eyeing in the cosmetic shop and saving up your gold to buy.

I don’t get that sort of thing. But I’m also shit at IRL chores.

Bitwarden’s free version is enough for my purposes, but I didn’t realize they had a $10/yr plan. That seems worth paying for, I’ll have to look into it.

Or giving yourself ulcers

I have no idea what genre of videogame, if any, could replicate the experience of One Piece multi-site battles on absolutely wild and varying scales of power, speed, and size.

But if any genius game dev out there wants to make it happen, I’ll take ten.

Jesus, technical people are some of the worst communicators I’ve ever worked with.

It’s not necessarily their fault though. Y’know who goes into technical jobs? People who often prefer to work with machines, physical stuff, laws of nature, that’s who. And often because it’s MUCH easier than working with people, at least for them.

On top of that, soft skills are HARD. Communication is HARD. It comes easier for some, but it’s a skill like any other. It’s the technical socialites, the diplomatic devs who become the best managers and leaders, due to the rarity of their hybrid skillsets.

I’m in the middle. Just technical enough to mostly understand the devs and understand the implications of plans, and just enough soft skills to turn that into decent documentation, emails, and working with clients.

SUCKS that I’ve gotten a taste of project management and hated the absolute fuck out of it. I probably would’ve been decent at it otherwise.

I was a child with an NES and virtually every Nintendo machine thereafter. Parents said my first language was Nintendo.

I still played outside all the time. I regularly rode my bike all over town. I didn’t have to be threatened to play outside. I dunno, people and situations are different, I guess.

That said, it’s certainly harder for kids now. I have a hard time imagining letting my kid ride a bike all over town, mostly because of traffic and stupid drivers. The free public places I used to hang out with my friends are largely gone now. Plus, like you say, the games are now designed to be addicting specifically in the ways that regularly extract more money from players. It’s just kinda bad if you’re not versed enough in the gaming ecosystem to know what’s a worthwhile experience and what’s a cash grab.

Cash has an identifier on it, but unlike a check that identifier doesn’t identify you.

And that, everybody, is literally not the correct usage of “enshittification”.

Jk, but for real though, it’s not a direct synonym for “degraded” or “gets worse”. It’s more specific than that.

Plus, “literally” now literally has an alternative definition in the dictionary meaning “figuratively”. So y’know, maybe get over the needless linguistic prescriptivism.

I feel the same about Krita. I used it for about a year of hobbyist drawing, and I just never could get comfortable using it.

Clip Studio Paint came out with 3.0, and after some deliberation I decided to pay for the update. Felt like coming home. I’ve done more art in two weeks than I’ve done in nearly a year of using Krita.

“what’s the Judge Rotenburg Center?” looks it up “Jesus”

Intent may not be relevant for your example, but a lot of US law does have different crimes and levels of criminality that depend on intent.

For example, if I kill someone on accident, that’s usually categorized as manslaughter. If I kill someone on purpose, that might be murder. Depending on how much premeditation went into, it might be murder in the first degree, which comes with the most severe punishments.

I blocked hexbear not because of their political beliefs, but because they would fucking ruin entire content sections by being super annoying.

I’m also glad to see your comment not triggering the same brigading behavior I used to see a lot more often.