Here to talk about fighting games, self hosting web apps, and easy weeknight recipes.

My mastodon account: @tuckerm
My blog: https://tuckerm.us

  • 3 Posts
  • 38 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 14th, 2023
  • tuckerm@supermeter.socialtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•To people who choose not to swear (for non-religious reasons), what is your motivation to be that way ?
    29·
    3 days ago

    Two reasons:

    1. I live in Utah, where the Mormons are, and they get very offended by swearing. Although there are some ways in which I will definitely not accommodate their religious beliefs, I also think it’s healthy to meet other people at their comfort level (if it’s reasonable to do so). On the one hand, I understand the idea that we shouldn’t have to change who we are in order to make other people comfortable. On the other hand, I do think that if you take that idea too far, it can be a kind of antisocial behavior. When in Rome, as they say.
    2. It has more impact if you don’t do it often. Think about a Quentin Tarantino movie. By the time Samuel L. Jackson has said “fuck” for the 157th time, you’re just used to it. The word doesn’t even stand out anymore. But now consider the end of The Princess Bride, which has one swear word in the entire movie: “I want my father back you son of a bitch.” WHA-BAM! Hits like a freight train every time!

    For the follow-up questions, kind of the same answer to both of them. I feel like not swearing – or, swearing less – requires me to be more precise when I’m criticizing something. Instead of just saying that something was “like shit”, I have to give a more specific criticism. So that’s the change that it has made, and no, it hasn’t stopped me from expressing something.

  • tuckerm@supermeter.socialtoGames@sh.itjust.works•PlayStation to Shut Down New Game ‘Concord’ Two Weeks After Launch, Will Refund Players
    722·
    16 days ago

    Same. And especially for a live service game, it’s just gone. If someone made some great 3D models and animations for an offline game, even if the game doesn’t sell very well, their work is still out there. But with a live service game, that’s just it. No one else gets to see it for more than a few days.

    I also hate the fact that the dev studio will face the consequences of this, while whatever braindead exec with a master’s in bullshit administration will probably still be employed.

    But at the same time… I can’t help but enjoy the spectacular failures of these anti-consumer products lately.

  • tuckerm@supermeter.socialtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Be honest: have you ever lost your temper with a customer service rep? And did it ever help?
    2·
    1 month ago

    I’m certainly close right now. I bought a laptop from System76 in December (the Pangolin). It has not, any any point, worked acceptably. First the USB ports would frequently disconnect and reconnect. Then the trackpad started freaking out, registering constant false clicks and not letting the cursor move.

    The first time I sent it in, they shipped me back someone else’s computer.

    When I did get my own laptop back, I found that the trackpad issue hadn’t been fixed. Then it stopped waking up after being suspended.

    So I sent it in again, and got no updates from them for 30 days. They said their usual turnaround time was 7-10 days. And the first time I sent it in, it took them about a week to send it back. Well, to send a computer back. So something was wrong here.

    On top of that, the support ticket has a “Last Updated” timestamp, and it kept changing every couple of days. I asked them for details, and only received generic “sorry this is taking a while, we’re working on it” responses. I specifically wanted to know why the “last updated” timestamp was changing every few days, because of course I’m imagining that they’ve shipped my computer to someone else.

    I finally responded in all caps, asking where my computer was for that unexplained month, and why the timestamp kept changing. The support agent replied:

    Your computer was at our warehouse waiting to be worked on.

    Bless up,

    (Support agent name)

    Bless up? Fucking asshole.

    I always want to be patient with those working in customer support. It’s difficult and often thankless job. I know how unfair it is when a customer blows up at someone in customer service, not to mention how unhelpful it is. And usually the customer is yelling at someone with no power to fix the situation. But this System76 thing is getting ridiculous. They’re literally just not responding to emails and dodging questions when they do respond.

  • tuckerm@supermeter.socialtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What is an event that altered you in some way?
    9·
    2 months ago

    It was during “outdoor school,” a week long thing you did in sixth grade (age 12) at my school. You stayed in these really cool cabins that were like 100 years old and spent the week learning about nature. It was fun. Very classic summer camp type of environment.

    Also, other schools from the area did it at the same time, so there were a bunch of unfamiliar kids there. Two of the kids in my cabin were from another school, and they perfectly fit the stereotype of “edgy, bad 90s kid.” Super baggy JNCO jeans, spiked hair with a ton of gel, etc. If you don’t know who I’m talking about, watch any teen show from the 90s. They’re in it. Oh, and they said everything was lame. And gay. The cabins were gay, nature was gay, the camp was gay, your glasses were gay. You were definitely gay. That’s why you thought outdoor school was fun: because you were gay. The JNCO jeans kids were way too cool for outdoor school.

    I should mention that I was a huge nerd. I mean, I still am, but I was, too. JNCO jeans kids were way cooler than me.

    For the whole week, we kept hearing about “the night hike,” which was when you would go on a hike, by yourself, in the dark. The camp really played up the night hike, like it was going to be this big coming of age moment for us. You need to be responsible on The Night Hike. You need to stay sharp on The Night Hike. You’ll be a man after The Night Hike.

    On the last day, it’s time for the night hike. Each cabin walked as a group up a hill. At the top, you would then walk back down a trail on the other side of the hill, one person at a time, waiting about a minute after the previous person had gone. I happened to be after the two JNCO jeans kids. (Yes, the night hike was gay.)

    When it’s my turn to walk down, I realize that this much-hyped coming of age moment is going to be…no big deal whatsoever. The trail is a very gradual slope with a few turns. It’s paved, for Pete’s sake. You could even see the lights from the cabins after the second turn. And the moon was bright enough that I wouldn’t even need my flashlight. This pivotal moment wasn’t going to be pivotal at all.

    After less than a minute, I heard someone on the trail in front of me say, “H-hey, who’s there?” It’s one of the JNCO jeans kids. He’s just kind of standing there on the trail. He didn’t get very far.

    “Um, it’s Tucker, from the cabin,” I said.

    “Oh, cool,” he replied. “Um, I guess you’re walking faster than me.” He said that like I had caught up to him, which I guess is easy to do when the other person is frozen. “Want to walk down together?” His tone was way different from what it had been the rest of the week.

    “Sure,” I said.

    I don’t remember what we talked about. Probably what school we went to and that kind of thing. The whole walk only took about five minutes total, so it’s not like we talked about much. But I remember thinking to myself, “The guy that talked tough this whole week…it’s because he wasn’t.”

    So yeah, The Night Hike. Ended up learning a thing.

  • tuckerm@supermeter.socialtoTechnology@beehaw.org•Mozilla lays off 60 people, wants to build AI into Firefox
    2·
    7 months ago

    I don’t think I’ve ever seen them ask for donations as visibly as Wikipedia does. Sometimes there’s a small banner at the top of their website with a donate button. Currently, if you go to https://mozilla.org and scroll all the way down, there’s a “Donate” link in their footer.

    Seems like they’re always kind of subtle about asking for donations – I wonder if they think that if they pushed for donations harder, it would just make more people use Chrome. (On the other hand, there is no real alternative to Wikipedia, so they can do the big banner once a year.)

  • tuckerm@supermeter.socialtoGames@sh.itjust.works•Dead Cells designer says decision to stop updates is ‘asshole move’ by former studio
    241·
    7 months ago

    I’m not sure what kind of disagreement went on behind the scenes, but just as someone who enjoyed the game, this seems fine to me. Five years of post-release content is better than what you usually get, especially considering that they were all good updates and none were hasty cash grabs. The base game by itself was endlessly replayable, then they kept adding variety.

    The article mentions the studio is a co-op; I was not aware of that before. From the studio’s Wikipedia article:

    Motion Twin is run as an anarcho-syndicalist workers cooperative with equal salary and decision-making power between its members.

    WELL DAMN I already loved the game, now I love it all over again.

  • tuckerm@supermeter.socialtoGames@sh.itjust.works•Here Are All the Game Industry CEOs Who Took a Pay Cut to Prevent Layoffs
    81·
    8 months ago

    There’s also the fact that the amount they make (plus business culture in general) is going to be creating and reinforcing a God complex in them. I often wonder if a lower salary for CEOs would actually result in them being better decision makers. What if their kids went to the same school as their customers’ kids?

    People of all political ideologies say they want their political leaders to be “in touch” with everyday people; why would we want business leaders to make so much money that they wouldn’t even have to look at an everyday person if they didn’t want to?