The illusion of choice is even more illusory than it seems.

Even if there was real choice inherent in the systems themselves, most people have limited ability to take advantage of said choice without completely starting over, usually with damn near nothing.

What I mean is most people aren’t wealthy, they don’t have in-demand skills, they don’t have family abroad, they can’t get sponsors to other countries. That means they are effectively stuck wherever they are, until something so bad happens they have to abandon their lives and flee.

This is going to cause problems for them…

Don’t republican conventions and things of that sort tend to impact Grindr pretty heavily?

Haha, that’s a fair point.

I’d have to actually like the game and have been sucked into it to want to spend days and days finding mods that sound like good additions, or address frustrations with vanilla mechanics, and then bash my head against the wall trying to figure out the error logs and why the map didn’t spawn anything this time (I don’t have a tech background, I learn tech on the fly to do specific things, so troubleshooting is a big challenge). Like I have over a thousand rimworld mods I individually, manually, downloaded (I don’t use steam but I found a site that rips mods from steam). I’m currently running about 650 of them, but I had over 100 hours in before I even looked at mods, and it started with running out of storage and having to dedicate half my map to storage space, because I HOARD STUFF and 3 stacks per tile with vanilla shelves is just not enough space. You never know when you’ll need 167 elephant tusks. Oh they are vendor trash that can be used as a shitty improvised weapon and that’s it? Well I found that out after about a month.

I just know factorio would hit my frustration buttons quicker than my obsession buttons because I can’t even bring myself to do the fairly simple automation in rimworld because it’s too finicky and I have to learn stuff and figure out where to lay pipes and shit, so I’d struggle to hit the “let’s find mods to make this game even more overwhelming” stage.

But now I’m even more jealous, if there’s a vibrant modding community and all…

Eh, I’ve worked in a few call centers and from what I’ve seen, they just constantly hire, training groups for various contracts are frequent, and people are pulled from closed contracts to fill in when people leave or are fired from ongoing contracts. They also tend to overhire for each training group because a lot of people will quit or not be good at it.

They CHURN, and they don’t give a fuck because everyone is going to burn out or move on in short order anyway. That’s just the nature of the job. If you don’t seem like a good fit quickly they won’t keep you around. Is all metrics.

They are horrible places to work. Often referred to as “employment of last resort” by employment services people around here.

I’ve genuinely never understood how people can stand chocolate and fruit together. Or fruit and coffee for that matter. Chocolate and coffee taste kinda similar to me though so those mix well…

But fruit with either is just super nasty to me.

All that said, the best chocolate I’ve ever had was some imported thing that tasted vaguely of raspberry, but wasn’t actually supposed to. It was just chocolate that got stored with other candies.

Non-paywalled link cuz I wanted to read it

https://archive.ph/uqJsi

What’s a paradox game? I assume that’s some sort of studio?

I wish I liked games like factorio.

I love base building stuff (rimworld is my current obsession, tho I almost like making my heavily modded game function properly more than actually playing it) but automation is just too many moving parts, and too much planing and I can’t bring myself to do any of it right.

If not for that it would probably be entirely my jam. I get downright jealous when I see some of the amazing stuff people do.

I’m imagining a t-Rex with a high capacity O2 tank strapped to its back, and a little tiny human size oxygen mask covering like a single nostril…

But oh no! The O2 is low and it needs to change the tank, but the itty bitty rexy arms can’t reach so it’s just spinning in circles trying to get the strap off. It’s getting dizzy now from a lack of oxygen and, well, spinning. Eventually it just sort of falls over and maybe some other Dino comes and changes the tank for it (altruism isn’t just a human trait!). That Dino sighs and says “you do this every day. Just ask for help, dingus.”.

Thanks for that giggle :)

I’m just gunna leave this here… I had to go searching for it from the meme. Highly related. But SpongeBob.

http://stillinthesimulation.com/untitled-comic/the-bikini-bottom-horror-chapter-1-rise-of-the-star/

Go old school with Jax/ jacks.

Oooooooof

I… don’t think that’s insulation…

It’s a really shit grainy picture but I’m pretty sure that’s a massive bee or wasp hive…

Can confirm. Not squeamish per se, but not interested in putting things into any holes (other than food in mouth, and even that’s a pretty weak drive) and I’m definitely not passing on my shit genes, so.

Instructions extremely unclear…

Died.

Shit this one doesn’t even work for that does it?