Chobbes
The proliferation of this stuff has started to make me far less receptive to being asked to tip. I’ve basically started to make a mental rule to hit “no tip” on every square terminal I encounter to guard myself from the guilt and pressure when it’s a really absurd tipping situation like a self checkout, or picking something up or whatever. I really don’t want to be an asshole, and I do try my best to tip in the appropriate situations… But I actually hate it so much that I avoid patronizing services where tips are expected. I just find navigating this to be more mental effort than I can spare most of the time and I hate second guessing myself about how much to tip or if to tip at all, and I just always feel taken advantage of or like I didn’t do enough… I usually just suck it up and tip when in doubt, but I really don’t like how it makes me feel. I just want everybody to be able to make a good living and to not have to think about any of this and have the price just be the price (with taxes included too, by god).
Thanks :). I’ve actually been looking for the RSVP stuff and I wasn’t sure which RFC to look through (wasn’t sure if it was in the CalDAV one or the iCalendar one… and they’re weirdly huge). I appreciate you pointing me in the right direction!
Also was curious how they were implementing reactions in e-mail. I actually think it’s a good feature, and it’s one that’s slowly been making it into XMPP and stuff. Emoji reactions and stuff sound kind of dumb and like a “whatever, who cares?” feature, but I find that on platforms like slack they’re actually a really good way to deal with quickly confirming something / finalizing decisions / quickly gauging the opinion of a group. I think a huge problem with e-mail and instant messaging is that they can be quite noisy, so having a “quiet” way to respond without having a thread explode is actually pretty welcome in my opinion.
Of course, I don’t think we’re actually in danger of bacteria suddenly eating through plastic like it’s a moldy apple or anything… Obviously wood is still hard to break down, and plastics aren’t too dissimilar. It’s just kind of cool that we can build something super cheaply out of plastic and it will hold up well in the elements without much care at all.
At the risk of sounding super ignorant the desire for plastic to biodegrade always seems really short-sighted to me? I understand that there are problems with plastic pollution for the ecosystem and that there may be health concerns with microplastics and whatnot… And that we probably shouldn’t make so many disposable items that we do want to degrade out of plastic (and that we should probably not have as many disposable items in the first place)… But plastics are also kind of miracle materials and ideally you want them to not break down in many use cases. Like, wouldn’t it be bad if all of a sudden we have bacteria that will eat through blood bags and plastic structures?
It seems like this article is mostly talking about studying microbes to design plastic eating enzymes that will help efficiently recycle plastic in the future, and that sounds super cool and very useful. But the whole “we should have bacteria that can quickly break down plastic in the environment” angle that I hear about a lot seems kind of risky to me because one of the reasons plastics are so awesome is that they’re very resistant to degradation… Maybe I’m just ignorant, though.
I’d agree that “it gets better later” isn’t a good way to promote a game, but I dunno that a game has to be good (or at least at its best) from the start. Totally understandable if people don’t want to, or can’t invest the time into something that doesn’t grip them right away, but at least for me a slow start can be really nice, especially when a game ends up unfolding in unexpected ways later on. I can enjoy that kind of pacing, and sometimes it’s rewarding to have something start off kind of painful for one reason or another and become something much greater. At least personally I think a “weak start” can end up making the full experience better overall, as it’s kind of a part of the journey.
But of course, if you’re not enjoying it and you don’t want to continue and you want to refund it… That’s totally reasonable! A game that’s a slow burn is probably a much harder sell and not going to appeal to as broad of an audience, and I think that’s okay.
It’s a bit odd… I guess people just want to feel justified in their own beliefs about the thing which manifests as anger. But I think there’s often perfectly reasonable justifications for these things too… Like, Uber and Lyft both required drivers to mask, so it’s perfectly reasonable for them to just keep the mask on between picking up passengers, and in that case it really wouldn’t be useless… Maybe somebody is picking somebody up or just dropped somebody off and feels more comfortable keeping the mask on in the meantime… Maybe it’s just easier to put the mask on at home and they don’t want to fiddle with it during the day… Or maybe it’s completely pointless, but it doesn’t harm anybody so who cares?
Honestly, I’ve just found the response to COVID (particularly in the USA) really depressing to the point where I just don’t want to be around people anymore. I guess just all of the selfishness and vitriol about the whole thing really took a toll on me.