So there's radio equipment that allows you to listen in to random people's conversations about nothing, and it's called the Jerk Nerd...

It's Japan. I've read there's alot more things it's still important to do by mail for cultural reasons. It's not just business inertia.

Others are complaining, rightly, that this topic is junk. It's all down to taste, and these media are too widely varied for us to give useful answers even if it weren't.

With video games though, there is one that can be considered more or less objectively a must-play: Deus Ex. Even if you wind up not liking it for some reason, it's important. It's like not reading any Shakespeare.

For table games, it's much harder. They're definitely worthy of being called art, but they are obviously much less "literary" in nature. There's no paradigm-shifting cultural messages to receive.

Despite that, there is one that I think kind of encapsulates the state of the art, and depending on how your group handle it, it can be either a light party game or a total brainfry, so it's got that going for it: The Resistance. Funny thing is, I fucking hate it, so you know that recommendation has at least a little objective value.

I have frequently wished there was a reliable way to tell somebody "your tail light's out," "your blinker's on," or best of all, "stop tailgating me, you stumpcock."

A "tattle on that vehicle" button would also be nice.

Actually, you're pointing out something that makes this a particularly good example of what I'm talking about. Even though only one detail is changed, 2048 isn't a rip-off of Threes. Using twos instead of threes makes it work completely differently on a mathematical level.

I know that the versions of don't-touch-white and 2048 that I have aren't the "originals." They were the most popular ones at the time I jumped in because they're better. The devs start with a rip-off and then add more interesting features that the original didn't have. With dead simple microgames like this, it's easy for each game to become its own little subgenre, with new ideas being layered on by each iteration. If we "protect" the original versions of these things, it will only make crappy games crappier by removing the innovative force that pushes time-wasters to become real entertainment.

...I have no idea what you mean by that. Why can't you just state what your actual complaint is? All I did was swap out one complex sentence for three simpler ones. I tend to expect that readers are capable of following more compact styles, because until they prove I shouldn't, I prefer to respect their intelligence.

...What else is wrong with it? It's pretty straight forward. If an imbalance of women in CS is due to anything other than "they aren't interested," or if that lack of interest is itself due to sexist pressure, then it's a problem. My whole point is that neither side of the argument does a very good job of establishing whether the reasons for the imbalance are or aren't problematic. They both just rectally research everything.

I call it typoing "or" to "our." If that alone makes the entire message unintelligible to you, you're a lazy reader.

Excessive use of ganja appears to be negatively affecting your reading comprehension.

I think the whole issue is that depending on what the reason is, it is a problem. What's really wrong on both sides of it is that people tend to just assume it is our isn't a problematic reason, without actually getting one anywhere but their ass.

I was told that I was smart. I felt like I was smart. My grades, my ability to answer questions while mostly asleep, and the fact that everyone always asked me when they couldn't do things all proved I was smart. Everyone told me I was destined for great things, and I believed it.

Unfortunately, since it took so long for me to encounter something that required me to actually work, I didn't learn to do that until far too late. I had plenty of time to run around being a smart little asshole, and later on, plenty of time to learn that everyone hated me for it, and only tolerated me for oracular ability to remember shit that was going to be on the test. Once I realized I actually wasn't going to amount to anything, on account of being too depressed to care about doing so, I also had plenty of time to reflect on how I was failing everyone who believed in my potential.

The mistake isn't telling them they're smart. It's convincing them that being smart is an important gift, and that it will bring them success and respect. You only get those things by learning things that aren't taught in school, and people should be able to feel like they're worth something without them anyway.

...How so? I just read it, and the only thing that makes it in any way "less sensational" is the fact that this mother and child are both so thoroughly whipped by this idiotic culture that they're playing along with the idea of it being the kid's fault for daring to have some cheek.

"You and every other human on this planet are apex predators with all that which that entails."

Ha. Wow. WOW. I love it when people do this. You say "apex predator" and you have this vision in your mind of something that is mercenary and heartless, driven only by its hunger and raw will to selfishly survive.

And you don't know shit about biology. Our ridiculous anti-romantic concept of "apex predators" is largely based on our historical cultural depiction of wolves... which is monstrously inaccurate. We became the dominant species specifically because of our tendency to altruistically cooperate, just as canines are the number two for basically the same reason. Just... god, read a book man, do you have any idea how stupid you sound? It's like a teenager's idea of how the most cool badass hitman would act. You know most sociopaths don't become CEOs, right? Those are just the exceedingly lucky and high-functioning ones. The rest of them all wind up in prison for pointlessly abusing people.

The natural result of a truly free market is socialism. Members of a vibrant community tend to realize that they do better when their neighbors do, and empathize with them enough to know that a streak of bad luck could make them the pest in their neighborhood, so it's good to take care of those who fall behind.

Capitalism is separate from the free market, and a perversion of it. A wealthy member of a community, before this "genius" invention was made, would've been happy to organize large projects for the public good simply for the prestige of having been in charge of them. Now they require that a portion of workers' labor be diverted to them permanently, returning far more value than they ever contributed. This encourages the venture capitalist to go play in other markets, leaving the community that made him with all the money he's stolen from it, and polluting others that he cares even less about.

While it has made large projects easier to start, those projects have had less and less value to the common people over time. At this point, the labor market is an arrangement whereby you either build something you don't care about for a rich person, or you don't eat. It is functionally indistinguishable from slavery, and it is not meaningfully consensual, given that is harder than ever to be an entrepreneur. We make a big noise about how the internet allows the little guy to make globalism work for him, but in practice what that means is that, in addition to the chokehold multinationals have on every mass market, you're fighting over the scraps of every niche market with literally every other person in the world with a vaguely similar idea.

Capitalism only benefits the people who won the game before everyone else had a complete grasp of the rules. It won't even work for them forever; the harder they play, the less is left for them to win. Capitalism will one day be remembered mainly as the most efficient way to exploit a community to death. Unfortunately, most of us have to rediscover what a functioning community is first, and that's not going to happen before an economic collapse that kills thousands of white people.