I have social anxiety disorder, which I deal with in the workplace by putting on a "Customer Service" persona. So in any interview, I consider the interviewer as my customer and I want to make them happy. In an interview for a previous job, the Lead Architect was very aggressively putting me through several technical questions and at one point he told me I was completely wrong in one of my answers. When I politely tried to explain why I believed my answer was correct and offered to demonstrate on my laptop, he got angry and stormed out of the interview, leaving his two embarrassed looking coworkers to continue.
It was a bad experience, but the other two interviewers were very nice and I really wanted to work for this non-profit, so I sent a follow-up email apologizing for upsetting the Lead Architect so much, saying that I thought it was just a misunderstanding, that there were multiple correct answers, and provided some documentation to further explain why I answered the way I did.
I got a job offer that afternoon, and two weeks after I started they fired the Lead Architect. That same week, I went out to lunch with the team, where one of the interviewers told everyone about how I made the Lead Architect look so stupid during the interview and that I was so incredibly nice about it that they knew they had to hire me. Turns out it was a workplace where everyone highly valued politeness and the Architect had been antagonizing and bullying everyone for years. Ended up being one of the friendliest places I've ever worked.
So in the game we get to play Bladerunners, which are slave-catchers of the future--except their job is to murder the slaves who escape. It's weird to me that 30 years later people still don't understand that the whole point of the movie is that the Bladerunner is the replicant slave of the bad guys and the other replicants are slaves fighting for their freedom. I love the thought-provoking Bladerunner universe and this looks like it may be a thoughtful production, but playing a slave-catcher is seriously problematic.
First, it is clear that the genre of "table top RPG" is littered with thieves, assassins, slavers and criminals. Hell, there is a trope that players are often little more than "murder hobos". Playing as a slaver, slave catcher, slave, escaped slave would be nothing new.
Specifically to replicant blade runners, I think there is lots of room for soul searching and meaningful play in coming to grips with potentially being a tool/the tool of your own oppression.
Maybe you start as a blade runner but come to champion the replicant cause. Maybe you smuggle the weak and sick off world. Maybe after your day job ticketing replicants for minor infractions you conduct corporate sabotage against the Tyrell Corporation. Maybe you play as a replicant member of an off-world kick-murder squad or captain a replicant gunship off the shoulder of Orion. Maybe you run a chop shop helping replicants bypass retinal scans. The world of Bladerunner is ripe with RP options. In my opinion, it would be a shame to dismiss the opportunity because you can only see problematic themes.
To paraphrase Roy Batty
You saw a slave narrative, I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
Philip K. Dick's stories are everything but simple. In link above there is a story was about man undergoing surgery only to discover he has a punch tape inside him. He finds out he's an Android. So he starts messing with the tape, punching out pieces only to discover it materialized a flock of geese.
In anger he tears the tape causing entire world to disappear.
Being "less than human" was a key justification for a lot of slavery, so it is quite plausible that this "reductionist view" was deliberately engendered by Dick.
> the whole point of the movie is that the Bladerunner is the replicant slave of the bad guys
This is far from being a settled canon. Ridley Scott claims it is so, but what does he know? Movie makers often create lore that forces fans to go great lengths to explain coherently. Remember that Kessel run in 12 parsecs?!
It's a game, you make your own rules and stories. I'm glad I could live through the 80's playing "offensive" RPG like Berlin XVIII,In Nomine Satanas or Paranoia without anybody telling me they were "problematic".
That's why these are called "dystopia" and you're not necessarily playing the good guys, there is nothing "problematic" with it.
I think the new "safe, diverse and inclusive" D&D version is aimed at people concerned by "problematisms". See? there are RPG for everybody.
Well, according to the description of this game, you don't actually know whether you're a replicant and you're watching the dawn of a new age of replicants.
I feel that, with the right GM, it's a very nice setting to discuss slavery.
It was a pretty significant part of the plot that it's nontrivial to distinguish replicants from humans, and every replicant Deckard kills is trying to escape confinement. There's also a replicant that is indistinguishable from a human. A chess playing neural network isn't anywhere close to being comparable to a slave.
And IMO, merely creating such an AI isn't even immoral, as long as we don't force it into labor it wants to escape from.
"every replicant Deckard kills is trying to escape confinement"
I guess that is true at some level depending on how one defines "confinement".
It is not clear to me that Roy or Pris are looking to escape their professions rather, they are in love and about to die of "old age". As Roy bluntly states "I want more life".
If we program the AI to want to serve us, is that moral? This path pretty quickly gets you to The Restaurant at the End of the Universe levels of discomfort[1]
As someone on the autism spectrum, there are AI-y tasks that I would enjoy as a job but which would to most people feel as, at best, unbearably tedious. If you view "AI programmed to enjoy doing boring computer tasks" as vaguely adjacent to an autistic person, then I would say that it's perfectly moral to create such an entity, as long as we treat it well by its own standards. I'm sure there are situations that could get me to second-guess that rule of thumb, but the golden rule feels adequate.
Neuromancer had the "Turing police" monitoring AIs. Watts Blindsight universe has the "Cloudkillers", who turn off AI that gets too smart. It's becoming a more common trope in sci-fi.
Starting out with a horrible character that tries to turn good and undo their evil while battling their past is a common trope. So is the "the world is broken beyond fixing it". Be it movie, video game or tabletop RPG. I am not sure how that could be "seriously problematic" in this case.
Remember, the world just acts a backdrop. A horrible person can still try to let their character murder-rape everyone in a Teletubbies RPG. In the end how the story unfolds depends a lot on the party & game master, and what kind of characters/game they want to play.
Slavery isn’t just early pre civil war American south slavery. Slavery is surely bad but so are a lot of institutions controlling the poor, and I’m not sure the moral disgust with it scales to the concept of slavery generally.
Gladiators, drafts, totalitarian states, etc.
A lot of them are really just slavery under a nuanced scheme that we’re all fine role playing.
The great thing about tabletop RPGs, though, is that you're ultimately free to do whatever you want. It's the job of the dungeon master to roll with whatever the players do and possibly even change the entire narrative on the fly. In that way, tabletop RPGs are typically much less constrained compared to video game / computer RPGs.
So it's entirely possible that you could start the game as a slave catcher, but if that's not something that you actually want your character to be, then you could definitely try to escape that role! And it would be up to the DM to decide how to respond to your actions...
True, although if GP's analogy about slave-catchers is accurate, I think we'd also look askance about a board game that pitted US slaves against slavers, allowing you to play both sides.
One of the best board games (not an RPG) that I have ever played is "Liberty or Death". In it, you can play as American Patriots, The French, The British or the Indians. It is asymmetric with each faction having their own objectives. I have never run into a match were people had a problem playing any of the factions or that the game was problematic.
There are always people looking askance at one thing or another, especially nowadays when it's so fashionable to be that person.
I'm sure you could make an absolutely offensive game about the topic, but you could also make a game that treats the subject carefully. Do you look askance at Secret Hitler?
Wouldn’t the same apply to scenarios in the Second World War?
Edit: Writing this I just thought maybe not since I can’t think of any that focus on running a PoW / Gulag / Concentration camp, whereas this focus on the slave catching.
It depends entirely on who you talk to. Urban America is taking this threat seriously and locking down for the winter while rural America thinks it's a hoax. In Virginia, our cities are keeping the curve flattened, while the virus is surging off the charts in our rural communities.
Nothing convinces them. When a loved one dies of asphyxiation, they shrug it off and say that person died of obesity, old age, or a lack of vitamins. We have nurses telling stories of patients struggling to breath, but who still refuse to believe this virus is real and only cease gasping about the "fake news" when they are intubated.
Complicating this is our HIPAA regulations. The media can't show you what's happening inside our hospitals right now. They can only show the refrigeration trucks for bodies and roads closed for oxygen trucks outside the hospitals. So the conspiracy theorists claim these are for show and that the hospitals are actually empty.
With the complete abdication of leadership at the federal level--where some of our officials are openly urging citizens to fight against policies slowing the spread of the virus, we can do nothing but stay inside and hope to ride this out.
A bit melodramatic. However I'd say the hoax folks will reap what they sow. The truth always comes out eventually. Personal responsibility is a thing as well.
Collateral damage is a shame, but there's a limit to how much you force other people to do what you want. So be it.
It might seem so, but I'd say it's accurate, for exmaple:
“Their last dying words are, ‘This can’t be happening. It’s not real,’” Doering said, adding that some patients prefer to believe that they have pneumonia or other diseases rather than covid-19, despite seeing their positive test results.[1]
It sounds harsh, but people die every day, many because of their own negligence. We can warn them ahead of time the best we can, but that's about it.
Keep in mind the general urge to call them morons has the opposite effect. Not saying anyone in the thread specifically has done that, but melodrama/hand-wringing is in the neighborhood.
I think that's pretty accurate, but even in Urban America there's a divide between people who aren't taking any chances vs people who are wearing PPE but are living their best life.
For me, I'm just not going anywhere or doing anything. It turns out that I can have everything delivered, and my risk is essentially 0. I'm going to wait it out until there's a vaccine. If the numbers dip very low in my area, I might try to squeeze in a doctor and dentist visit. I'm not immunocompromised, but it's not that hard to live as if I was. I'm considering this whole thing a bit of an experiment to see how self-sufficient I can be.
Conversely, I have coworkers that are traveling all over the country (wearing masks), and staying at cheap airbnb's. Some are relocating because of the changing housing market. If you don't mind taking on a minimal amount of risk, you can get a lot of good deals on flights/hotels/airbnbs/apartments/etc right now. Personally, even a little risk isn't worth it when I know there's 95% effective vaccine being manufactured.
At this point, it's obvious that we'll never get rid of COVID-19 entirely as a disease. Hopefully it'll become a disease only for the people that believe in "fake news" and "anti-vax".
> The rural-urban divide comes down to the understanding that death is the price for life, which has vanished in the urban millieu, but it's still visceral to those living closer to nature and its ubiquitous birth-life-death cycle.
This is a thought provoking viewpoint that could be explored better.
Beyond that though, the point of the first paragraph seems to be that "everybody is going to get it... those that will die will die". I disagree.
You anticipate one of the most concrete rebuttals to the first paragraph, vaccines, and then proceed to argue that vaccines are bad because they disrupt natural selection. This is an absurd argument. Are you opposed to children's hospitals because they disrupt natural selection? Your rebuttal is not relevant. What you have argued is a small and theoretical downside to vaccines, but it is not a rebuttal. Vaccines have completely eliminated multiple diseases. They will help with Covid and save lives, and the fact that they have a small downside by disrupting natural selection does not change the fact that they will help and save lives.
You only address vaccines while ignoring other counterpoints: I live in an area where our hospitals are at capacity. There are dozens (dozens!) of ICU bed available for millions of people. Only a couple dozen ICU beds for the entire state, and these beds need to serve not only the worst Covid cases but all other patients who have had heart attacks or any other health issues. I strongly disagree that "those that will die will die", but instead say that "those that don't have to die will die" if we don't wear masks and follow community guidelines.
You then close by asking for more charity. After having said "everybody is going to get it... those that will die will die... life goes on" you ask for others to have more charity...
That's the point. Live your life being ready to depart next week. Live your life being ready your loved ones to depart next week. That's not to say it's something to look forward to. Or not take reasonable precautions to avoid it. You will know worry, you will know suffering, and when the inevitable happens, you will know grief. Know that death is natural and inevitable. And yet here we are. We are here because our ancestors had the strength to raise the next generation, not because somehow individual death was defeated.
On the urban side, we are acting as if we have somehow become immortal, and that everybody must sacrifice everything, school, work, family, friends, so that some can live to 85 instead of 77. That is an unprecedented high price to ask.
Natural selection, it's cold and harsh. It doesn't fix individual, aside that the immune system is a natural selection mechanism within the organism level natural selection. It simply selects fit individuals to reproduce. We are well atuned to this mechanism, witness 'youth' or 'beauty'. Think of dental braces. In old times, without orthodontics, would be a visible marker of less than optimal fitness. Ugly. Negative selection pressure. As orthodontics becomes more prevalent, in the beginning everybody gets a beauty boost. Let's celebrate. Yet, in a few generations, in absence of any selection pressure, a larger and larger fraction of the population now needs dental braces. Teeth simply don't fit on the mandible anymore. We can handle this with technology, but it's a growing problem. Should we close orthodontics clinics tomorrow? Probably not, but that should not prevent us from recognizing the long term hidden costs of medical technology. 'Use sparingly, mostly for emergencies'.
Ultimately this is just the same old argument over personal freedoms, personal inconveniences, saving lives, and balancing it all.
> We are here because our ancestors had the strength to raise the next generation, not because somehow individual death was defeated.
Yes, no individual life (save one's own ancestors) is responsible for where we are now. But I would help a dying man on the sidewalk, I would be in favor of criminal charges against myself if I just passed him by. I would participate in a large scale search for a neighbor lost on a hike, and I would support the fuel and maintenance costs of helicopters and other search vehicles, and I would support those several rescuers who risk their lives to save one. I would support spending $400,000 to perform a quadruple bypass on a 77 year old man so he can live to be 85. I would take on personal inconvenience along with 50 of my neighbors to save a single life. I would follow community health guidelines. I would wear a mask.
Sometimes I wonder if people have been hurt so bad emotionally that they feel they need to project a lack of empathy as a way of showing others they are strong. That they are not a target. It's subconscious, probably. Thank you for patiently trying to get them to see your side of things.
> Beyond which we realize that we've inadvertently cultivated a debilitated fragile population that can only survive through sophisticated technological methods.
Can you think of a causal mechanism that would make the population more fragile because of vaccines? Or is it just some inocent poetry from the same old book than "everything that does not kill us makes us stronger"?
(From another answer I wrote in this thread) Think of dental braces. In old times, without orthodontics, misaligned teeth would be a visible marker of less than optimal fitness. Ugly. Negative selection pressure. As orthodontics becomes more prevalent, in the beginning lots of people get a beauty boost. Celebrate! Yet, in a few generations, a larger and larger fraction of the population now needs more and more sophisticated dental braces. Teeth simply don't fit on the mandible anymore, because there is no selection force to prefer people with good teeth as marriage partners. Everybody has visibly good teeth! We can keep this illusion going with technology, but it's a growing problem. Should we close orthodontics clinics tomorrow? Probably not, but that should not prevent us from recognizing the long term hidden costs of medical technology. Use sparingly, mostly for emergencies.
Sorry but arguing that it's better to let people die from illness rather than fight a virus with medicine will require more than an analogy.
I asked for a mechanism that would make the population more fragile overall (not only less resistant to a specific strain of a specific virus) if we train the immune system with a vaccine. Also keep in mind this is an age disease, ie those who are more likely to die from the virus will do so after their reproductive period.
(Note: do you seriously believe today's teeth are more troublesome and less fit for the job than in the past ?)
This is sophist crap, reverse-engineered to justify your dislike of urbanites. If the situation were reversed-- people in urban areas behaving carelessly and dying in droves while in rural areas people were taking appropriate precautions-- you'd be screaming about how it just proves that the "urban milieu" is atomized and doesn't care about anyone but themselves, while in rural areas people still care about their community above the individual.
"For there’s the real rub with digital isolation — the problem those billionaires identified when we were gaming out their bunker strategies. The people and things we’d be leaving behind are still out there. And the more we ask them to service our bubbles, the more oppressed and angry they’re going to get."
Yes I know, no one is rich, we're all just various layers of middle class - even if we're hiring landscapers and pool service and think of ourselves as supply-side jesus.
Yes, we are all rich in a sense in the programmer world. That pool guy in my town, Seattle, or the guy cutting my grass today where the air is dangerous with smoke, they are out in it and I'm not.
I was paying my lawn guy to not come during the early part of the pandemic, he wanted to come so I let him.
One part of this still infuriates me and restricts my behavior on the platform (which I barely interact with anymore): showing my friends what I click like on if it's a public post. I've had politically-impassioned relatives attack me for liking candidates they don't like or if I comment on a public post and Facebook points my comment out to them.
It also works the other way too. I really didn't need to know that my friend's septuagenarian father liked a video titled, "Booty-Jiggling Showdown."
So there are aspects of this we've come to accept, but I think most people have also modified their interactions with platforms like this to protect themselves.
My word, I remember years back when I didn't realise that this was a thing, and it took my mate showing me his feed filled with me liking a whole load of random sexy filth pages. I remember commenting wondering if my mum could see all the shit I'd liked, to which she responded "yep.". Absolutely mortified mate.
That is exactly why I ended up leaving Twitter. As soon as Twitter started showing me everything my friend marked with a “like” (Favourite? Star?), I started seeing explicit examples of my friends’ kinks.
The poster. It used to be that shares/retweets were used to put a post on your friends feed and likes were used to express support/appreciation to the poster/creator.
Twitter always had the problem where faves (now likes) were public but people didn't always realize – they were used as a combo of bookmarks and upvotes. But even then, there was a difference between having your likes viewable on your profile and when they started randomly showing your likes on followers' feeds.
Same here, Facebook's belief that maximising public interaction would be good for their product is basically killing it for me. It's not even just controversial content like politics or nsfw stuff, it begins with banalities like I know that various loved ones would be annoyed if I filled their timelines with geekery over a hobby they don't share or internet banter like this.
I'm not particularly pro or anti Facebook, but my engagement with the platform is severely curtailed by the need for self-censoring due to their public first mentality. Essentially I learned to treat everything with that tiny globe symbol as read-only (and every closed audience potentially public, but that's a different story, more about self-preservation than about courtesy).
I'd say that's not really the problem with Facebook (well it is but bear with me): long ago, at the end of the 90's, it was highly recommended to use pseudonyms on the Internet because `you never know who's who` and well.. it was right and we didn't know what the Internet could really do.
When Facebook/Gmail happened and people were nudged to use their real names... because we need `real` connections. Well, that didn't tipped enough of us. Facebook was the tinder of the day, right ?
But then the whole privacy thing came back to bite us hard (and will bite harder in the coming years).
So we are back to using pseudonyms (which according to my friend's 11yo daughter's guide to the Internet everyone should use anyway) as the default. Except for professional things. We need a professional Internet presence, hello LinkedIn and $name $familyname + 'pro' Facebook account.
Now there was an argument that with everything in the open then people would get more tolerant about other's mischievings and out-of-the-accepted-norm behavior. Big nope as a whole it turned out.
Anyway, youth of today have figured it out years ago and just have multiple personas with different accounts.
With different accounts, not with different circles or different sharing settings. And of course with silly names.
Like you said Facebook isn't designed around the various personas of an individual but increasingly during the last decade the whole Internet community makers (software builders and evangelists and users) were misled on the `true identity` thing and we are only slowly assessing the damage and recovering.
What I mean to say is: everyone was on board with not having various personas. Latest large scale attempt to overcome this failed hard (Google's circles) because people don't want to micro-manage their online Rolodex and it turns out you can't trust Google to respect that firewall anyway (see the cases about people being outed as transgenders).
Only pseudonyms and different accounts can alleviate that and it's going to happen more because most of people will get back to that mindset.
I've considered taking pseudonymity one step further by moving it into the real world, and having one name for legal documents and another (or two) for personal use (think Earthsea rules). Seems to work for a few hackers I know, and the best part is that it doesn't require any legal name change rigamarole, since nobody can stop you from just start calling yourself whatever you want whenever you want.
For me anyway, it was quite surprisingly freeing to realize that there's no reason that the name on my birth certificate has to have anything to do with the name I choose to present to people.
Huh, I guess I already do this in a small way: I'm "Dan" socially and "Daniel" for anything that requires my signature. I don't think I'd be brave enough to take it further though. Most systems/companies/govt agencies are flexible enough that it doesn't matter if I put the wrong one down, but making a mistake with two completely different names could be problematic.
Yes, when providing your name to an entity it takes manual consideration to decide whether or not that entity has any good reason to try to associate you with the name the government knows you by (your legal name). I'd give my legal name when setting up a bank account, but not when setting up a Facebook or Twitter account (who might ask for legal ID, but then I don't need those accounts anyway).
I always took at least part of Zuck's infamous "dumb fucks" comment to be prompted by people violating what were such basic rules of social Internet behavior at the time: do not post real, identifiable shit about yourself, do not use your real name, and so on. They were "dumb fucks" because they were, and were acting like, such Internet n00bs.
Now that stuff's normal, in large part thanks to Facebook, and it causes all kinds of problems.
Completely agree. My persona at work and at university are two separate things. My persona when I come home and interact with my kids is different to my persona when I'm arguing with a colleague about database schematics. My political views are relevant with my friends but could cause problems with my employer. In reality we have many hats but Facebook restricts us to one and lets all our friends and family know our every interaction, too, promoting a false sense of ourselves. Zuckerberg said, in the OP's article, that (to paraphrase), it's only friends and family that know what you like/what you've been doing. Do you ring your nan every time you take a dump? Or text your brother when you're feeling horny? No. Facebook is blind to the individual facets of our characters.
The idea of a like feature on a platform that's supposed to be for you, your friends and family is kind of fucked in general. Likes, contrarily enough, encourage you to not give a fuck. Why bother responding to your friends or family when you can just click like, give them acknowledgment and move on to the next thing. It's bad enough on random internet forums, but if it's your friends and family you should put the effort in to actually respond to something if you actually care, otherwise don't. I think the discourse and posts on Facebook would be radically different without the like feature.
Yes, yes, yes! This has been bothering me lately, I see a friends picture on Instagram, tap twice, move on. This means, at best, that I acknowledge seeing that photo but it tricks my mind into thinking I did "something" better than that.
I myself don't even check the likes I receive so I suppose some people out there don't too, that reinforces my feelings towards liking stuff being shallow substitutes of real interactions. I will make a point of writing a comment now, if I can't come up with something then I guess I don't really care and there is nothing to like about it.
I noticed yesterday that I've stopped clicking the like button on anything that I don't want to be broadcast to other people, on any platform. It's no longer about what I like, it's about what I like that is also palatable to my friends, family, coworkers, and any future employers.
> but so many of the lies spread via social media are easily disproved by consulting primary sources.
I wish this were true. I used to post snopes links and primary sources to Baby Boomer posts on Facebook, but it's hopeless. They either don't trust the fact-check, can rationalize it away, or just don't care. One of the most shocking realizations of my adult life has been learning that a very large portion of my otherwise high-functioning friends will believe anything, no matter how crazy or self-contradictory, if it reinforces their sense of self-righteousness.
Since there are multiple complaints about the photos in this thread, I think I should point out that the photos appear to be a metaphor for the hiring process. All of those highly-diverse ice cream cones look dazzlingly yummy, but we can only pick one.
It's totally okay if you didn't get the metaphor... there's lot's of symbolism that goes over my head in lots of media, but I don't think it's fair to say the photos aren't relevant to the content.
The reason why the pictures are distracting is because it turns, what arguably is the best blog article I've read in years about hiring, into a glamor post. The pictures changes the tone from "it's about our business" to "it's about me."
There's a easy way to adjust the tone: Keep the headshot at the beginning, and crop the ones in the middle of the article to just the ice cream.
After the conclusion, include a blurb that says something like, "hiring is like choosing an ice cream cone; you can't have all the flavors," and then put in a ton of face shots with ice cream.
Keeps the focus in the article and still allows personal expression!
I think an important theme of the article is that there are human beings making the decision. A list of hiring procedures under a banner is a very different article.
>I should point out that the photos appear to be a metaphor for the hiring process
I took it more along the lines of a metaphor of the power dynamic of the interviewee/hiring manager. Whereas the interviewee may be stressed and concerned about getting a job to put food on the table to feed their family or keep a roof over their head, the person in power doesn't give a shit about you...its all about them and their desire, which happens to be eating ice cream while flexing their power to deny you a job.
In the authors own words:
>Why take the outcome personally?
Yeah why take the outcome of your career and livelihood personally
I've screened a lot of people for technical roles.
When I reject someone: It's not about me, it's about your ability to do the job.
Getting a technical job is like dating: I had to interview at a lot of different companies before I chose the company that I work at. It took me about 6 weeks, full-time, to find my current role.
Software engineering involves some learned skills, but also an aptitude that can not be learned. The same is true for athletics, musicianship, entrepreneurship, ect.
If you're frustrated in your job search, it may be time to evaluate both the kind of career you're trying to have, the lifestyle it affords. Sometimes making ends meet means living more frugally with a more appropriate career.
This really struck a nerve with me as a board gamer. There's a renaissance in board gaming at the moment, where new publications have tripled from about 1,000 a year to 3,000. Old, collectible games are increasing in value, and there are now speculators who invest in kickstarters to get possession of soon-to-be rare expansions that will shoot up in value once the game comes to market.
There's a growing buzz in the gaming community about all of this. People, myself included, are worried about the fact that we own dozens of games that we may likely never play, but we had to buy them because of fear of missing out (FOMO). Many people are refusing to buy some games altogether because they recognize that they are completionists who will have to obsessively-compulsively track down every hard-to-find discontinued expansion.
There are forums now discussion coping mechanisms for managing the compulsion to buy new games (no one feels like they are playing too many board games, just buying too many). Some people keep a ratio of games owned to games played and won't allow themselves to buy new games unless they've played at least 80% of the games in their collection. Others give themselves board game allowances, where they are allowed to purchase one or two games a month. It's really fascinating to watch, and I keep wondering how far this can go before the bubble bursts.
"When a video finishes playing, YouTube should show the next video in the same channel."
This is how it worked just a couple years ago. I would binge-watch a channel's entire history of videos on history, board games, or other fascinating subjects in the background while I did other things. At some point it changed, and now every video I watch gets followed by some click-bait often highly-political nonsense meant to get me outraged or shocked at something.
I've decided to turn it off and just stream documentaries on Curiosity Stream now. When I do watch YouTube, I get nagging pop-ups asking me to upgrade my service, but why would I do that when they've ruined what I enjoyed about the site?
I am a huge fan of Isaac Asimov, and I am seriously disappointed to learn that he sexually molested women so brazenly. I couldn't believe it when I read the article, but a quick google search produced primary documentation. Not only was his butt-pinching well known among his peers, but was openly joked about as a harmless quirk:
It was a bad experience, but the other two interviewers were very nice and I really wanted to work for this non-profit, so I sent a follow-up email apologizing for upsetting the Lead Architect so much, saying that I thought it was just a misunderstanding, that there were multiple correct answers, and provided some documentation to further explain why I answered the way I did.
I got a job offer that afternoon, and two weeks after I started they fired the Lead Architect. That same week, I went out to lunch with the team, where one of the interviewers told everyone about how I made the Lead Architect look so stupid during the interview and that I was so incredibly nice about it that they knew they had to hire me. Turns out it was a workplace where everyone highly valued politeness and the Architect had been antagonizing and bullying everyone for years. Ended up being one of the friendliest places I've ever worked.