I’m still slightly mad that everyone wanted to use AIM instead of ICQ, even though icq was better. It had offline messaging and you could change your display name, neither of which aim supported.
Anyone younger than like 30 probably has no idea that those were noteworthy features at one time. You could only send someone a message if they were actively connected at the same time as you.
There was an old PC game called “Dominus”. I don’t really know much about it. My dad just randomly picked it up as an xmas gift one year for me. It was pretty sweet.
You’re the lord of a kingdom that gets invaded by like eight armies. You have your own monster units you can deploy. You can deploy traps. You can cast spells. You can go down and fight hand to hand. If they make it to the throne room and kill you, it’s game over.
If you capture enemy troops, you can interrogate them. There’s a little animation where they get poked with a red hot iron poker. If you capture a leader, you can sometimes negotiate peace. If you capture an enemy mage, you can learn part of a secret spell. I never got a secret spell working, though.
It was super cool. Never met anyone who’s played it.
The common “curse” words like “shit” and “fuck” are pretty impersonal. They can signal an escalation, but are typically pretty minor. They don’t even do that when the speaker is like “I just took a huge shit. Don’t go in there for a while”
Other words, like racial slurs and anti-queer stuff, invoke more history and violence. If someone calls someone an asshole that’s probably not that big a deal. If they call someone a n-word f-gay-slur, there might be a hate crime about to happen.
So I don’t use those words. I don’t want to bring the stuff they import into the scene.
People who are the typical recipients of the slurs using them themselves is a related topic I’m not very qualified to speak on, and I wouldn’t try to police their language.
I have a hypothesis I can’t really test because I’m not into men, but I feel like more men are unattractive than women. I’m going to guess it’s because a lot of men put zero effort in.
This is one of my biggest peeves in games. Ass Creed Valhalla was really bad about it. Identical looking dudes on opposite sides of a river. One set are pushovers the others are completely lethal. Hate it.
I live in nyc. You can get large plain pie for $18 from most places. Toppings are usually about $4 each.
But there are expensive places. At work we ordered some pies for an in-office event last week. The guy picked a fancy place where all the pies were at least $30.
I’m lucky enough to live somewhere with 24/7 public transit and generally walkable spaces. Some of my coworkers have moved out of the city to cheaper places and I’m just like yeah sure you pay less for rent or your mortgage, but now you’re in a car-first wasteland.
I was going to say something like this but probably less well written.
I’ve definitely had coworkers that I simply do not trust to commit code without review. And there’s one guy who’s a cool dude and all, but all of his ideas seem to be “let’s throw everything out and do it with a different library/language/paradigm”. And I’m just like no please no.
I have not seen it, but in some cases one might confuse effortless effort for visible effort.
Effortless effort is pretty universally appealing in most facets of life. The person who casually rides a bike up a hill generally looks better than someone who’s pumping and struggling.
In my mind, with appearance, someone who looks like they’re trying too hard often suffers that as a penalty to how they’re evaluated. But the person who did put effort in without it being obvious will probably come out ahead.
See also: men who say women look better without makeup. Woman comes in to work without makeup. Men respond with “oh my God are you ok? You look unwell”. The woman was wearing makeup, but it was subtle and men didn’t notice.
Though there’s also the halo effect and intimacy. Someone in sweatpants can ping as Hot because that signals intimacy. Different facet of the evaluation.
Someone who’s really good at guitar will ping Hot because of the halo effect. That is- when someone is good at one thing, we think they’re good at everything, where being hot is a thing.
Laezel. I like strong, competent women. Shadowheart is kind of a sad wallflower, and karlach is… fine, but doesn’t hit my love of competence and control.