sp3ctr4l

Yeah, basically nobody does actual beta testing anymore, been like that for at least a decade.

They say they do, but they're either lying or lauguably incompetent at it, my rule of thumb is bare minimum 3 months for 'day one' patches, more realistically, 6 months for them to actually finish the last 10 or 20% of the game they initially rushed out the door not including.

The patient thing also sadly/hilariously allows you to avoid the increasingly more common multiplayer game that just fucking sucks actually and more or less tanks 95% of its player count before the 6 month mark, or has some massive controversial (in terms of actual game features or lack thereof) thing going on.

Don't pay the FOMO tax, kids.

No, its still passive voicing that intermediates between the actor and the act.

The vehicle struck the child

vs

The driver struck the child

is analgous to

The bullet struck the child

vs

The cop shot the child

EDIT:

With the active phrasing... you can just append a following clause to give more detail, and it flows naturally.

The driver struck the child [with the truck] , [unaware of their presence].

The cop shot the child [unintentionally] / [with their service pistol], [while pursuing a suspect].

These kinds of statements are active voiced, and also more fact/detail content heavy.

It is entirely possible to use active voicing and also be precise... you're bending over backwards with your hyperbolic example.

The whole point of using passive voicing is that it works on the reader at a subconscious or subliminal level.

Yes, 'everybody knows' that a car doesn't drive itself, but phrasing and vocabulary have always been key elements of propaganda, because only more literate, more critically analytic readers realize what is happening in a more conscious way.

You forgot:

The truck was not damaged by the unprovoked child ambush

Now there's peak carbrain, just phrase it as insanely as when cops shoot a completely innocent person for no reason.

Yep, only minor modification is that the version of Rule 1 I was taught... not 'shoot', instead, 'destroy'.

Connotes more damage and seriousness than... well, thanks to Hollywood/Video Games, if you're the main character or otherwise have plot armor, you can probably just shrug off a few 9mm or 5.56mm rounds, right?

I guess also the uh, rider to Rule 2 was/is:

... unless you, personally, have properly verified that the gun is not loaded, recently.

And then after that was about an hour and a half of, ok, here are a bunch of different kinds of guns with different actions, heres some snap caps, lets show you how to actually do that.

Bolt actions, dropblocks, lever actions, pump actions, swing out revolver, semi auto pistol, semi auto rifle.

... I guess we 'missed' belt fed mgs, rofl.

EDIT

And yeah, rule 3 is one a lot of people tend to forget or rationalize into not being worth considering.

Rule 3 is like... here's why a semi auto rifle is probably a terrible home defense weapon, especially if you live in an apartment... stick with maybe bird shot or a 9mm? Even 9mm can pen most American internal walls if it misses a stud.

But also, Rule 3 is basically why firing any kind of a warning, or simply errant shot in a populated area just is a crime. (well, or at least a misdemeanor, ymmv, consult local gun laws, etc)

Bullets fired straight up come down somewhere, people and things have been injured and 'destroyed' by this, and an angled shot at concrete or asphalt has a decent chance of either ricocheting away into god knows what (or who), or just basically deconstructing, splintering, 'splattering' into a bunch of fragments with unpredictable trajectories.

Yeah...

The flipside of this, which I have also often encountered:

Rabidly anti-gun people who get their hands on, or get near one, and have less than 0 conception of how proper gun safety works, will sweep the fuck out of everyone, with their finger in/on the trigger...

... Or, will be utterly terrified when you do a proper unloading/check of the weapon, with it pointed in a safe direction, screaming at or even shoving you while you do this.

There's plenty of very immediate and practical stupid all the way around the sociopolitical spectrum when it comes to guns, it just comes in different flavors.

Yeah, hiring competent engineers is hard, yet you'll still go out of business if you don't. 😭

Oh yeah sure totally, not like 1/5 of the US tech sector just got laid off and their work handed to LLM AIs and a handful of vibe coders that literally are definitionally incompetent.

You completely do not understand how businesses work.

Keep dreamin buddy, you can get to the moon if you master astral projection.

Ok, yeah, I can absolutely see at least some real, relative utility in Solana then, if it is basically the fastest transacting and also least energy intensive crypto...

Though yeah, being essentially monopolized in terms of governance is a pretty big flaw, in a lot of possible scenarios.

At this point, I just wanna genuinely thank you for being the least deluded and most reasonable crypto person I've talked to in a long while... you seem to have a much more realistic view on all this than the vast majority of others I encounter.

=D

Yeah I think we agree that XMR is currently the best option in terms of... actually private and secure transactions...

But of course, it is still fairly difficult to actually pull XMR out as a standard currency, or buy into it, in a way that is actually not traceable.

Every single large scale retailer I am aware of, that has attempted to offer an ability to buy at least some segment of its goods via a crypto coin, directly... has abandoned this attempt after a few years.

You just assert this problem is solved by hiring 'competent engineers', yet no one has actually figured out how to do this, beyond basically black/gray markets, and hyper niche privacy oriented digital services.

Again, the managers, the CEOs of this business... would still need some way of objectively assessing what is and is not 'competent engineering'.

I... assume you are not familiar with modern software related hiring processes, where it has been a running joke for over a decade that HR has literally no comprehension of what they ask for in job postings, and thus has no real way to evaluate candidates by competency, they often cannot even come close to even describing the actual nature of the job.

Thoreau comes to mind.

Yep.. its a different way of life.

Slower, more intentional, less frills, less impulsive, different kinds of worries, different kinds of joys.

I myself am this... really weird sort of person that more or less grew up quite close to that, but alsi loved tech from a young age, went to uni, went to work as a corpo...

And I saw that all this 'high falutin' fast life was fun, very engaging, very rewarding in novel ways... but also, just... not ultimately sustainable, not the way we do it in most of the US... too much debt, too much consumerism, too much greed.

"Too many men, too many people, causing too many problems... not much love to go around."

So, now that ... well basically the economy is totally collapsing... well I at least am adaptable, and know how to live lean, do the long term planning I can afford to.

I forget which Bond movie it was, but Desmond Llewelyn's last line as Q:

Always have an escape plan.

I appreciate the encouragement, genuienly.

Its... been wild.

Kind of just ended up actually living through the uh Fight Club line: "It is only after you have lost everything, that you are free to do anything."

Was quite a bit of a perspective shift... and I'd previously been working with serving the homeless at a shelter (ironic), but nope, even that was nowhere near sufficient to fully understand what its like.

But yeah, it did net result in me finally defeating my impostor syndrome... I actually have genuine self confidence now.

I have literally survived things that ... I literally saw kill other people, directly in front of me.

Made my way for a good bit of it by basically being the only person around that had basic, functional first aid training, and I more or less traded that for food, cigs, 'reputation points'.

More or less dumb fucking luck that I remembered some trauma oriented medical training I got at gun range years back, and that I was able to hold onto a good more or less medical bugout bag I'd put together in case of emergencies.

Local firefighters were a lot more helpful and trustworthy than local cops, in terms of actually helping out with dire medical situations...

So I am a bit pleasantly biased towards firefighters in that way too, haha.

Anyway yeah, one of these days, I'll get to go on a hike again, and that'll honestly be me being a happy and fully content man.

Lynrd Skynrd - Simple Kind of Man begins to play

In case you didn't grow up in a rightwing / gun nut family...

Yeah, this is a thing and has been for a while,.fairly normalized use of animal mascots for... fairly serious, generally adult level topics.

I think this is more of less the idea of 'family appropriate'.

Anyway!

Ladies and Gents: The NRA's own... Eddie Eagle!

(brought to you on VHS)

Apparently he's gotten a CGI makeover these days.

EDIT:

ok, now, seriously:

Eddie's slogan there is actually a pretty decent set of instructions for young kids to sing along to (its presented in a sing song way) to actually instill a very basic but effective level of how a kid should treat / react to a found gun.

Obviously, the concept of ... keeping a gun, in a home, with kids... which can even be found 8n the first place... is an entirely different issue.

The ... slogan is obviously not a fullproof safety mechanism.

But, I can still sing that derpy slogan to this day, so it did at least work on me.

well, I'm doing my part by feeding the roving hoarde of feral catgirls that show up every couple of nights.

oddly, they ... don't seem to really go for normal cat food.

I've found that a crushed up mix of ramen packets and pocky works well, mix it with either tuna or chicken.

Also, they scream at me now if I just give them water... I gave them some boba tea once, and now it seems to be a requirement, they'll start clawing each other if it isn't present.