Oh i’ve done some things also.

My friend, looking up: “That sure is an interesting place for a junction box.”

Me: “It was that or the next owners will get a horizontally mounted ceiling fan.”

if that fails, the wire glue, to glue a new length on.

I’m built different. You throw me to the wolves, I come back with a mate and puppies.

I skipped 1, I adored 2 and played it to a harmful degree, I tried 3 and got bored after three attempts to get into it. There was a fourth??

I mean, the second game was basically setting the thing up for a MMO open-world, group-mission-running/loot extraction type game across a huge, cel-shaded world with open PvP areas and wild custom characters… and they dropped the ball on that?

I think I’m good on that. They gave me all kinds of warnings and preparation for crazy shit they were prepared to do if it was “bad” but I don’t remember a word they said, either before the morphine or after, for opposite reasons.

Somewhat related:

Honey = Bee vomit.

Coffee = hot bean water

Milk = modified cow blood.

So I think drinking hot coffee with honey and milk is about one of the weirdest mixtures of substances known to humanity.

I remember when I was young I worked outside in the heat and drank just iced tea all summer long.

That also led to 12 hours writhing on the floor of the ER and my first experience in understanding how death can be preferable to life. The stone passed fine eventually once it got to the bladder, but the path from the kidney to bladder was some of the most violent, life-shattering pain I could have imagined.

About 100% of shooter/survival games made with open PVP turned on all the time become kill-on-sight instantaneously, and those games usually give players a PvE mode for people too scared or annoyed with PvP, the segregation has been normal in gaming since the early days of online gaming. So it’s not as simple as saying it’s “supposed” to be PvE, it’s that they tuned the mechanics and themes to encourage more cooperation in an unprecedented way.

After watching weather with my own peepers for close to five decades in a cognitive capacity, I can safely say that weather is just getting more extreme all around.

While I love Black and the routine, I always am baffled when people complain about the weather reports getting it wrong.

For the last million years of human society, the only predictor we had for weather was passed-down stories and signs in the sky to indicate changing seasons. We knew it gets cold in winter, but we had no idea when exactly the first snowfall would be, or if there would be a blizzard that would kill half the tribe.

Today we get very accurate predictions up to a week in advance when actual storm systems are approaching because we have god-like eyes in space that can see the goddamn clouds FROM ABOVE.

We are Gods incarnate, we can see into the future with magic in space. If the storm dumps more rain than expected, wow great… nature still is complicated, you still knew a storm was coming!

That spiel is funnier if you also read it in Lewis Black’s tone.

Or “Fuck it, I bet there’s enough slack in there that I can pull it out a few more centimeters, I just have to pull really hard.”

Been watching since he started, I guarantee his previous content has aged well and is really worth watching today. It’s actually agonizing how slowly we progress technologically unless you’re speaking strictly about microprocessors and touch screens.

Otherwise we’re largely using the same damn household tech we used in the 1950’s, and even lost some over time.

Facts made a much bigger impact 20 years ago.

I’m just saying that they only did because we had social pressure on us to respect facts, because we still largely functioned in large social groups. People don’t actually care if facts are real and rational and good or make sense, they care far, far more about if their tribe-mates are going to make fun of them for not knowing the right facts according to that tribe. I firmly believe that the only thing that makes the majority of people respect reality is the pressure to conform so they don’t lose social standing or worse, be expelled from the tribe.

Now that we have atomization, our realities are entirely flexible and we don’t suffer for it, if anything we find these pseudo-tribes of invisible people to populate our heads online who will validate even the most irrational thoughts, so our driving motivation to respect shared reality just isn’t there anymore, or is dwindling rapidly at large scales.

I think we’re saying the same thing but coming to different conclusions.

I see our successes as a species as examples of trial and error and the efforts of the minority in manipulating the masses and see this as an example of why we will never rise above the same problems coming up over and over again, because our minds are inherently flawed and primitive.

You are seeing this as an example of how progressive politics actually succeeds. And I don’t argue that either, but I’m saying we’re going to having these same fights in 200 years, while our species is mostly huddled in the alleys and shadows of those titanic beings with upgraded minds and thinking capacity, if we even get far enough to build our descendant species.

I have almost no hope for our future in our present form. Something will see a better tomorrow, either an upgraded version of ourselves or some new entity unlike anything else that has lived on Earth. But it won’t be us, we don’t even know what a better future means broadly. We cling to stories and explanations to explain feelings originating in 500,000 years of ice-age survival and fighting each other.

I’ll concede that my explanation is very simplified, but the nuance has more to do with how the brain pulls together its story-telling material, which is predominantly from associations and experiences and practiced knowledge/actively reinforced education.

But for the vast majority of people who feel things, the brain just hastily assembles an explanation for those feelings on the fly, from materials “laying around” and that path of least resistance is usually whatever is on the surface of an issue or feeling, and that can be a defaulting to a supplied narrative “You’re poor and can’t succeed because immigrants ate your cat.” or it can be tied to your past “You’re suffering because girls are bad, per that one girl who was mean to you in 5th grade.”

And while there is complexity to it, we’re talking about population groups more than individual capacity to be rational.

and throughout human history, cooperation based on rational thought

My turn to push back. I am talking from experience talking to psychologists and reading about brains so it’s only partially out of my ass, but I don’t think cooperation is at ALL required to be based on rational thought, in fact most of our cooperation is based on survival impulses and hardwired defenses, which is why so much cooperative action is based around violence and fear through history. The fact that we can cooperate at all to build bridges and Arby’s restaurants and fiber-optic networks has far more to do with the vision of a small group with more advanced conceptualization using primitive tools to move large numbers of people. (Primitive tool: We pay you to build fiber-optics so that you can eat and not die.) But the thousands of people involved in the project aren’t emotionally tied to the feeling of completion when the last line is laid.

And for the most part, most of our successes and modern world has been built on more of a process of gradual trial and error than a logical plan being seen through from start to finish, of the unsuccessful cooperative actions getting left behind and the successful ones shaping the world. And we define success as that which gives us a more comfortable life with less suffering… so that alone should tell us how flawed this process can be. We are broadly using this overpowered skill of cooperative action for self-preservation, not community preservation, and logic rarely needs to apply.

How did all of the propaganda literally erase that entirely?

I struggled with this also around the pandemic watching people deny reality, and my result is that in my adult life I have been re-black-pilled by depressing new knowledge about the human species:

We are not a logic, rational creature. Our brains are not machines for working out problems, they’re machines for telling stories to create a coherent narrative. And that narrative doesn’t need to follow rules of reality, it just needs to tie ends together. This is why you ruminate and get depressed about things that aren’t real or have already happened, this is why people will cheer for their wrestlers while also knowing it’s scripted, this is why people can get into positions at the height of power by just saying “I’m the best at this.”

We are massively vulnerable to cognitive dissonance, and once again, the only thing that has kept this in check for the majority of human society has been social pressure to know the rules.

The rules have changed over the centuries, but they’ve at least required the members of the community to know how to distinguish things that are against the rules from things that are allowed, and with this comes critical thought (for self preservation) and pondering one’s choices (for self preservation) and the desire to conform and adapt to the will of the people around you (for self preservation.)

When you take away the community and the pressure for survival, people can just live with whatever stories run wild in their minds, without consequence. The rest of us just hit the “mute” button or walk away and go be alone in our own universe of our own choosing. We’re all guilty of doing this about something, at some point, and when you get millions of people doing this at all once, you no longer have “objective reality” you have millions of Main Characters not caring about consequences for choosing to believe in things that run against reality.

Yah I did, it was kinda wacky, not as bad as Civ VI but not great, I’m not opposed to the concept but I think they could have done a lot better with the idea than just “toxic gas” as the most memorable, key mechanic.

I have a pretty good idea how it happened, I just have no idea how we can guardrail our human weaknesses against every single entity committed to exploiting those weaknesses in new and inventive ways so that they can gain power over others.

We had this entirely new thing come into our lives where we could get mental stimulation on-tap anytime we want, perpetually and it fucked everyone’s minds, we lost our attention spans and learned to fear each other as organized groups worked tirelessly to change our thinking and behavior, either for commercial purposes or for social/political agendas, and it worked spectacularly because we had no idea what “the internet” does to a human brain until someone makes the internet and does it all to us.

Social pressure holds communities together, as primitive as it is, it’s a system we’re designed to work within, and as we’ve given up community outside influences are replacing it with incel-forums, loot-boxes, 24-hour news feeds, same-day shopping and and endless stream of jokes, memes and voices each desperately trying to get your attention, and getting just enough that you don’t look away or question your own capacity to question.

And of course it doesn’t help that actual bad people are doing things like indirectly paying millions of people in developing nations to spread propaganda across the US for retweets and clicks because it’s just enough money to make a career for someone in India or Philippines.

Every single fucking thing Trump has done I predicted and warned people about and got shadowbanned across half the goddamn internet for it.

Okay great we were warned, let’s stop whinging about the idiots of the past and start working to convince today’s idiots.

I spent a bunch of solo time just building up a base and trying not to progress too far so I wouldn’t ruin the fun.

I have about 20 games where I stopped before getting too far “just in case they decide to join me.” Those games are now piled up in dusty, forgotten crates alongside the Ark of the Covenant in that same giant warehouse. I think I’m part of the slim margin of people who enjoy simulated hardships as a social bonding experience, I don’t know if makes other people too bored, or too anxious, but I can’t make people play hard, slow games where you have to rely on each other and talk through problems.

I used to be able to, I had great success running groups in SCUM and Project Zomboid but as more and more short-attention-span gaming has been released, people have migrated away from investment-gaming and now just want to “chill” with some colorful slop and fast battle royals or loot extraction. Now when I ask if someone wants to play something like SCUM, they ask if we can play a server where loot and experience gain is turned up to max, enemy robots are disabled, and you can order high level gear from discord bots in chat.