Nepenthe

Remember, if the thick cloud emitted by the egg only drifts upwards, it’s probably no good.

No, this graphic really is solid advice for people to know, but damn if it could have been designed with a little more forethought. Imagine, for instance, if the reader is yellow/blue colorblind. They could make a guess at what’s happening, but they may not quite be sure. Arrows are doing 99% of the lifting, here.

It’s really a mix of both. More heavily the way the site has been for years because people love drama more than anything else. If you want the sweet serotonin of karma, you’ve gotta be simultaneously the funniest, meanest, and most jaded person in the room, and everyone is jockeying for that position.

It just breeds assholes by design. I’ve noticed my own behavior has changed, too, since leaving that place, although partially that’s because I just didn’t want to be like that anymore.

But it really has been noticeably affected since the protests. I was originally trying to stay for one single sub I was in, because they were the kindest, calmest community I’d met since back when forums were a thing.

Just the best group, for reasons none of us really understood and some of us kept trying to find psychological commonalities to explain. Truly 98% of them were people I’d chill with irl and I still know a few on discord. And also here. If you’re reading this, hello!

But the migration away was enough to completely alter the atmosphere imo. A lot of the more conscientious users left for other pastures, leaving behind those that were more neutral or even openly hostile about the protests.

There began to be fights and insults thrown where before this, any aggression had been unusual. The posts took a turn that reflected that feeling and I really stopped bothering with the place after a few months. I’m still a bit sad about it and there are things that I miss, but there just wasn’t enough to hold me anymore. It seemed to increasingly echo every other part of the site.

For the moment, this place is quieter but better. We still get dumb shit every now and then, but it’s not to the same degree and hopefully never will be. As above, I blame the demographic. We’ve grouped all the people with stubborn morals into a little room and it turns out they have things in common. I do miss a couple people I used to see everywhere all the time when kbin first ramped up, but we run in different circles and they’ve gotten lost in the crowd.

And yes, btw, I am also going to name you one of my favorite users to see around. You seem as kind as you are prolific.

Right? At that point, if you’re making drama out of it, you’re either pirating on misguided principle alone because you’re Ayn Rand’s petulant zombie, or you didn’t have that money to burn anyway. Your account is at zero.

Here I was, thinking it would be some insane hike like a $12 game jumping to $50, for “pirate it, then” to even be a meaningful response. No. It’s a $2 increase from…the equivalent price of chicken nuggets.

This was a painfully slow day at the newsroom.

It can be a little stressful even for me. And yes, the inventory management is atrocious btw, it’s a common complaint.

Like someone else mentioned, you can always pay a little to respec if you find out a character doesn’t have the stats to do what you’re wanting/what they’re built to do. That does require gold, and it is something that needs to be read up on and ultimately taken for a test ride to see if it’s even fun for you. That many options can feel really daunting.

But I think with enough cleverness, the game can be won with almost anything. Just last night, I watched a playthrough of a guy who had challenged himself to beat the game without killing anyone or manipulating anyone else to kill them for him, and he did it.

Whole game. The only NPC he had no way around personally harming could still be knocked out and left alive. He tricked the end boss into murdering itself through careful use of explosive barrels and he himself never fired a shot — a super cheesy fighting tactic common enough that the term “barrelmancy” is a thing.

I’m not gonna say there won’t be reloads, but there are a multitude of ways to handle most if not all altercations. Some things can be talked out of, or allies sought to help.

If not, it could be a huge, horrible fight taken head-on for the awful fun of it, or you could sneak up and thunderwave them into a hole and be done with it. Covertly poison the lot. Command them to drop their own weapon and then take it, and giggle while they flail their fists at you. Cast light on the guy with a sun sensitivity and laugh harder at their own personal hell.

You could sneak around back and take the high ground, triggering the battle by firing the first shot from a vantage point the enemy will take 4 rounds to reach through strategically placed magical spikes.

I passed one particularly worrying trial by just turning the most powerful opponent into a sheep until every other enemy was dead and I could gang up on them. Cleared another fight sitting entirely in the rafters where they had trouble hitting me, and shoved them to their death when one found a way up.

Going straight into a battle is the most expected way to do it, but there are usually shenanigans that can be played, is what I’m saying. Accept with grace the attempts that don’t work. If the rules of engagement seem unfair, change the rules.

If it helps any, the game does also reward xp fairly generously. Just reaching new/hidden areas grants a little bit, to say nothing of side quests.

That guy I was talking about, the one that finished with zero kills, ended the game at level 10. The level cap is 12. That was all just wandering around, doing stuff that didn’t require fighting.

Know which stat each class mainly uses and focus on that. Do not make the mages wear armor, it is not a happy fun experience. Beyond that, be clever and moderately lucky with your cleverness. You’ll be fine.

It’s a lot to get used to and does take time to be familiar with all your options, but I started out not very far above where you sound like you are. You do get used to it if you take your time, and I’m certain most people would be overjoyed to help.

I’m not so sure. I’ve not played the first two to be able to measure between them, but I do recall thinking that if I hadn’t been so into watching videos of other peoples’ dnd campaigns, I would be so helplessly far out of my depth.

As it was, I was already struggling a little bit with which class was best for my likely playstyle. Who can use what armor, why, and what happens when they don’t. What skills go with what stats. The general info they don’t have a need to go over when you’re not the one at the table.

Those aren’t things OP would know enough about to even know they don’t know, so I’m glad they have someone helping them. I don’t consider myself anything remotely resembling intelligent and they’re starting out with less. For being easily one of the best things I’ve played in years, it would feel impossibly daunting for a noob

Age of Attraction

Uuuunfortunately, that turned out to be an easily-accessible post that was barely chopped up probably for brevity more than anything else. Wasn’t one of their students, it was some 8yr old at their apartment complex.

Dunno if you’re from there or defensively made assumptions, but the MAP community was gonna come out fairly quick regardless and go over just as well.

Exactly. I’ve only ever pirated things I couldn’t afford, and even then I kept a running list of the good ones in the hopes that one day I could pay them legitimately. When I can afford to buy them fairly, I don’t pirate.

I was a thief when I was starving and I’m a damn thief now.

Thanks for single-handedly ruining my entire character 😭

The go-to counterpoint being that people come to social media to socialize with other humans. The moment another “human” hits me with “As an AI…” or are otherwise unmasked for any reason is the exact moment I lose a little bit of faith in the platform.

It’s not enough faith to make me stop using it the first time or even the fifth, so long as the promise of almost always interacting with another person is dangled in front of me. But that little bit can’t be regained and eventually it’s going to hit zero and I will leave.

I already have chatbots if I want to talk to myself. Talking to the cat makes me feel less lonely than chatbots do, and given the choice between the fedi forever remaining niche or retaining the bot “activity” of reddit…I’d just move to tildes.

The only halfway good argument is the use of a breaking news bot, but I’ve found I tend to get tired of those very fast for the same reason. They just make me sad and irritated, and I end up blocking them. If the news is interesting enough, I expect humans will spam it.

If they could be programmed to only post when user interaction falls…maybe, in theory, but that feels more insidious to me than anything else. The idea of a company pumping their numbers will never make me like them, and if bots are already posting stuff, why do I have to interact in order to get content? They’re already doing it. 🤷‍♂️

If I’m lurking enough to trigger the theoretical user activity bot, I’d also be fine lurking while “other users” (the bots) give me things to look at, and they’ll never go dormant.

Moving one over here was fairly hard for this reason. I admittedly should be keeping it up still, but where realizing I had nine whole subscribers made me really happy (there are tens of us!), realizing nobody was ever going to make a move of any sort even to comment and that I was going to continue carrying this entire community by myself has made me very discouraged.

I know most people are content to lurk while they look for something that’s interesting enough to post/interact with. I do that too. But come on, guys. Don’t do me like this. Nobody goes online to sit and talk to themselves.

Doesn’t make them good or necessary just because they’re common. When I see bots, I tend to block them pretty fast regardless of contribution, and my experience has been pretty damn nice here in very large part because the bot users are (to my knowledge) mostly or entirely dormant.

Nobody wants to interact with a known bot, or post where that’s the main contributor. The bot is never going to engage with them, and it somehow feels worse than posting into the void.

From an apparently uninformed discord user, deets? Granted, I’ve been annoyed at their insistence on monetizing via unasked-for “perks” I’ve absolutely never even thought to be interested in. But I’ve never felt like I was treated ill, and I assume there’s something I haven’t heard of

I’d believe it if I hadn’t already heard of Musk being the type to fire workers in his line of sight at pure random simply to fire someone. It apparently got so bad that aids would plan the route he would take to the meetings around having as few victims as possible out in the open.

It would be a smart move for anyone, and he is succeeding to a good extent (they’ll just go elsewhere?), but I think that’s just a happy accident of his. I feel like he’s really just using it as a chew toy so he can feel all big and important with the headlines. If he were being journalistically gray rocked, I wonder what he’d do.

I’m opening up a rival called “social media.” Already, we’re on everyone’s lips, set to have a userbase spanning half the web.

[Don’t assume consensus nor finished state]

Often a proposal is just that - someone trying to solve a problem by proposing technical means to address it. Having a proposal sent out to public forums doesn’t necessarily imply that the sender’s employer is determined on pushing that proposal as is.

It also doesn’t mean that the proposal is “done” and the proposal authors won’t appreciate constructive suggestions for improvement.

[Be the signal, not the noise]

In cases where controversial browser proposals (or lack of adoption for features folks want, which is a related, but different, subject), it’s not uncommon to see issues with dozens or even hundreds of comments from presumably well-intentioned folks, trying to influence the team working on the feature to change their minds.

In the many years I’ve been working on the web platform, I’ve yet to see this work. Not even once.

…?
What is this, “Good vibes only?”

That’s the one I was trying to remember, I’d heard about it back when it was just starting out! Unfortunately, it still doesn’t support türkçe, and I’m not exactly in the position as a learner to help add it or I’d be all over that :(

I can’t help myself. Are you going to add in a comma after “posted,” then?

It makes sense, but it’s more than a little depressing and I would have thought the features wouldn’t really be much of an issue for someone who chose that platform. Someone on Twitter might be aware that Reddit exists and how it works, but they’re still not very likely to uproot themselves from a platform they know and use just for that (current events notwithstanding).

Can I ask what kind of service Hubzilla is, that puts it above the other options? Especially for nerds? I’ve heard the name maybe three times now, but I know nothing else. Is it just the fact that they’re not tied down?

For me, I had my own reasons that were similar to Nougat’s. Sensible, non-eye-burning interface. A frankly surprising admiration for what I’d seen of what would become my dev’s personality and approach, where I hadn’t felt anything but veiled contempt for an admin in decades. I didn’t know about the other perks (individually muting instances, neat community tagging system, 70% compatibility with mastodon) until later, but those make me even more satisfied with my choice and I’m content to wait out the small stuff.

For inquisitive people, I’m not overly certain beyond what I’ve said. It could have been a fluke. It could be that, since lemmy was the first choice anyone ever mentioned, shitposters are just looking for the easiest way to have a good time. So lemmy got all the shitposters. And if you weren’t interested in what lemmy had to offer, there was a very good chance you weren’t interested in where the fediverse currently was in general, in order to bother reading through all the other options. A lot of people decided they didn’t like how janky and different it felt and they just went elsewhere.

I could be overly-projecting, but people who kept looking long enough to stumble across kbin instead of choosing lemmy or giving up I think would tend to be the more anxious, detail-oriented types that are liable to do their homework before making anything approaching a decision. Which would…inherently make them more likely to be hungrier for that kind of thing in general? Which naturally meshes pretty well with the aforementioned nerdiness of those who were already here when we arrived.

I really don’t want to make assumptions, though, or end up implying things like “Lol, lemmy got all the lazy chodes and we got the smart people.” Especially between such closely-linked communities that started out as quite literally the same group. Expecting such a clear delineation would be a bit laughable, and we’ll blend with each other like we always have. I have no interest in tribalism, I’m just enjoying the time period this platform is troll-less.