Managed to get to the stage with my job, where I just kinda resent having to go to work because I’d rather be doing other things, as opposed to deeply hating it because I’m freaking out constantly. This is a big step for me, I had to leave my last career after crashing and burning, due undiagnosed ADHD. Had a couple of years off getting myself sorted out and correctly medicated, and started back in a new role, but with a genuine question about whether I could have a professional career again.

The first couple of years were really hard, just so stressful and I needed to see a therapist at points to keep going. But I did, and now in my 3rd year I’ve hit a very manageable level of stress that seems normal and bearable. Interestingly, this isn’t because I finally started being organised and stopped leaving things to the last minute. Nope, I just embraced my terrible work habits, stopped beating myself up about them, and changed my expectations for work so that paperwork was minimized and doing all my prep at the last minute was fine. Much less mentally horrific for me and, despite ‘lowering my standards’ the quality of my work probably increased, because I was doing what I could actually achieve not pushing to do something amazing that never materialised.

Just started playing this again for the first time in years. Trying out the texture upgrades from tfix, and they seem pretty good. Still feels very retro!

I generally play at least one of the Ultima games every year, mostly the late 80s and early 90s ones.

I’m not a fan of that change, but I don’t really see it as an attempt to be more ‘politically correct’.

Han Solo was going to marry Leia, and you look back and say, “Should he be a cold-blooded killer?” Because I was thinking mythologically—should he be a cowboy, should he be John Wayne? And I said, “Yeah, he should be John Wayne.” And when you’re John Wayne, you don’t shoot people [first]—you let them have the first shot. It’s a mythological reality that we hope our society pays attention to."

I think Lucas is wrong, because even if he shoots first Han is being threatened with kidnap and death, so he’s not a cold-blooded murderer to shoot the guy threatening him. But unless we’re rolling all ideas of heroism and morality into woke/PC then I don’t think that example works at all.

You don’t need to actively kill people off unless you’re in a rush. Just let climate change render parts of the world uninhabitable while enforcing strict border control, and make sure your population don’t have access to decent healthcare and vaccinations so that prevmtable diseases reduce the local numbers.

Not only is it distracting and disgusting, but it starts normalising ads everywhere. Cigarettes were digitally removed so as to not set a bad example for kids. But letting them think that it’s perfectly normal to have glowing ads decorating the walls of your workplace is fiiiine.

What movie dialogue did they edit?

Here’s something from 2025 and it’s even better, because AI!

Its definitely just proof of concept for now, but it seems a grim, if inevitable, step in the war of ads vs adblockers.

Yeah, given that that account got deleted not long after that (if it’s the one I’m thinking of) then it quite probably was a bot…

Most insults are some attempt to link an aspect of a person or their behaviour with a negatively perceived thing. Most powerful insults also include breaking some form of social taboo.

Thus we have mild insults like “your argument is…” “weak-sauce” which associate the argument with the (presumably undesirable) sauce of insufficient strength; “shit” which is mild taboo but so widely used and conventional that it doesn’t hit hard; “loose stool-water, arse-gravy of the worst kind” which is both a bit taboo and reasonably novel (but wordy and pretentious).

If you’re trying to find insults that are going to impact someone, you have to find things that are upsetting / undesirable or them, so that association with that negative thing is bad and they want to avoid it. This is tricky if they have a different worldview, because what is offputting to you might be fine to them (eg. religious people insulting behaviour as ‘sinful’ or ‘satanic’ doesn’t really land for non-believers).

This is extra tricky if you don’t agree with what they find disgusting, because when you use something that disgusts them as an insult you are reinforcing the idea that it IS something to be disgusted by. Making fun of Trump’s ‘Lady-hands’ or ‘micropenis’ might be hurtful to him (or his supporters) but it also telling men that traditional masculine features and penis size are the qualities of real men. But that’s the problem, you can’t use someone’s beliefs against them while also challenging those beliefs as wrong.

So you can just accept that insults are problematic, and continue to call people ‘retarded fags’ because you know that has a negative association to them, ignoring the innocent minorities also hurt by that language. Or you can find things that are universally seen as bad and undesirable (mostly varistions on bodily functions) or that don’t really hurt the stereotyped group (“you’re whining like a little baby” is less problematic than “like a woman on the rag” or “like a little removed”). But these generally aren’t as impactful…

Looking at this data Norway seems to have low levels of economic inequality, low rates of poverty, and a high median disposable income (behind Luxembourg but around that of France and Austria).

Its far from perfect, but I imagine social inequality for stuff like gender and race is pretty low, officially speaking at least. I get the feeling that Scandinavians can be a big negative about foreigners, but I have zero firsthand knowledge on that.

Meeting other people’s friends groups (as you described meeting your partner’s friends) is a great way to shortcut that awkwardness. Its not just that someone else has done the hard work of filtering folks out, but that people are just on better form when with friends. Part of the problem of making friends in random social events is most people are either a bit awkward or putting on a social ‘mask’, which makes it harder to actually identify the people you’d like once you got past that.

My wife social circle has a bunch of people who entered as someone’s partner for a whole, but stayed friends with us after they broke up (even if there was a delicate period post-split where we hung out with them both, but never together).

Glad that you’re a human! The worst part about the rise in bot posts is that it creates an atmosphere of distrust. The fact that you’ve commented, and hopefully don’t delete your account in a few hours, is very reassuring.

I still think someone going to jail for posting a meme is beyond mildlyinfuriating. But that’s a matter of opinion.

This is more than mildlyinfuriating. Also, this new account has posted ten times in its first hour. Mostly politics.

Given what we’ve seen in the last few weeks about the scale of paid actors using social media to increase tensions and divisions, I’m getting very sick of this kinda behaviour.

I fucking hate CK and the way the American right is using this story to push their agenda. But that doesn’t mean I want to see bots trying using that to reaction to push our buttons.

It’s not weird to think about the other paths you could have gone down. But I would avoiding feeling too much regret. If something genuinely seems interesting to you, make it part of your current life, even just as a hobby or side project. Remembering that we are more than just our current selves is important for not getting swallowed by the grind.

If it’s feeling envy about the better life some alternate you has, try to keep in mind that nothing is simple. Although other choices might seem appealing in abstract, maybe they’d also lead to more problems. Sure, you could have been a doctor, but maybe the stress would have driven you to burnout and opiate addiction (69% of doctors misuse prescription substances).

I’d also say, that as I get older, I feel like I hit different “Save Points” that prevent to much regret. I chose to study philosophy instead of law, which means I’m a lot less rich than I might have been, but I would trade my weird, chilled friends from uni for the bunch of competitive over achievers I would have been “friends” with if I’d gone down that route. I met my spouse during a stressful period in my life, completing a degree for a profession I no longer work in. I could see that whole period of study as a complete waste of time, but if I’d never met the person I married the my life would be incomparably poorer.

Wow, that site is unhinged. Also, that article feels like it’s been heavily rewritten by AI, if not pure ai slop. Normally I enjoy crazy paranoid rants about demonic symbolism on cereal boxes, or whatever, but that article was shallow and vacuous.

I probably agree, but I’m not quite sure what you mean. Do you mean that people who are in a disadvantaged group in a society are more sensitive to language that is biased against their group? So women notice (and can be offended) by phrases like “you throw like a girl” while men might not care, or even notice, that it’s sexist.

Or do you mean people in disadvantaged groups are, in general better at detecting bias in language? So, poor people are better at spotting politic bias in reporting?

Do you think emotional abuse is more common from immigrant parents? I feel like I see a lot of comments about the stress and pressure that immigrant parents put on their kids, but it’s not something I know anything about.

If so, why do you think it’s like that? Is it just that families that immigrant are often in difficult financial situations, without lots of social support so the parents are super stressed? Or that the kinds of people who are willing to immigrate are aspirational and so demand a lot of their children? Or is partly that their way if parenting would be normal back where they grew up, but for its difficult for their kids growing up in a society with different standards and expectations around childhood?

In case any non-British are reading this, ‘chav’ is a term used to describe a small subset of British working class people. It used to describe young people with “loutish (ill-mannered) behaviour, violence, and particular speech patterns (all of which are stereotypes)” (Wikipedia.)

It is not a term used to describe the general working class population of Britian.