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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Even with civilisation or society, there’s always been a subset of people looking to exploit whatever facet of existence they can, whether it be religion, politics, crimes of opportunity, weaknesses in social systems, or even the justice systems that are supposedly meant to deal with those flaws.

    And to add even more complexity, other people who aren’t pieces of shit looking to exploit others form emotional attachments to those who are and are fooled by their lies and will defend them. Others don’t have attachments but see parallels to themselves and worry that attempts to deal with the problematic ones will result in the same treatment being applied to them (and aren’t necessarily wrong because even justice trying to act in good faith can get it wrong).

    It’s all a complex web of power struggles and religion is just one set of stands.


  • KQ6 was great though. You’d go through and beat the game but notice that you’re many points short of the maximum and there were a bunch of loose threads that never got solved. It was the first game I ever played with two paths to the end and finding that second path was so good. Especially getting to play during one scene that was seen many times before as a cut scene, along with a puzzle whose solution completely changed the tone of the scene (figuratively and literally lol).

    Though I don’t think I have the patience to do all of that again. I think I originally played that game over a period of months with no progress at all in many sessions. But I kept coming back to it as a kid.




  • I grew up playing King’s Quest 5, 6, and 7. I was curious about the earlier ones and eventually found them on an abandonware site a while back and they didn’t age very well. Turns out 5 was the first one that was all point and click based. Prior to that, they were text based and you needed to know the exact wording or alternatives that they had thought of or you couldn’t do anything. I’m sure they were great games for their time but I just couldn’t get into them.

    More recently, I bought the collection on steam. I’m not sure how well someone who has never played them before would enjoy them, but I found 5 and 6 still stood up, despite being like 30 years old. Though it might also help that I could still remember a bunch of the puzzles, as they could be pretty unforgiving of mistakes. Save often because you could die at any moment, and hope you don’t miss picking up an item you’ll need later on or you might get eaten by a yeti or something.


  • I don’t have the patience to keep it up for a long time but I barely get any scam calls after pushing the button to talk to someone and then just asking about the plot holes in their script. Like the one claiming there’s going to be a warrant for me, why does the guy need to ask for my name and other information? Why would revenue Canada (of anyone who isn’t a scammer of some sort) ever want any kind of payment in gift cards? I’ll use a tone of voice on the verge of laughter, too.

    One time, after I asked, the guy just asked me why I even pressed the button to talk to a person and then hung up. Most of the time they just hang up. Sometimes the English option seems to only be there to make it seem more realistic for those who would pick the Chinese option because the call disconnects right after picking English.

    Though more recently I’ve just been hanging up early in the recording when I do get the odd scam call. They might filter that, too, because even the volume of those calls stays low. Which makes sense because even just making the calls probably costs them something, even if it’s just pennies.



  • Tbf that could have been done by tenants who figured the landlord would use that damage to argue they should lose their entire deposit despite not costing nearly that much to repair properly.

    Not that it wouldn’t be plausible that the landlord did it themselves or hired someone who didn’t know what they were doing but were willing to do it cheap, like Ricky.



  • Yeah, this is the impression I got when he talked about spending so much time training for the problems, especially the bit where he said it was all about hoping you’ve already seen and memorized the problems while pretending it’s the first time you’ve seen them. That’s the whole point of obscure problems like that: to show how you can handle a new problem.

    I’ve interviewed for technical positions and I don’t even really care if you get the right answer as much as I care about how you approach the problem.

    Shit like this will just make it harder to figure out who the real programmers are and separate them from the people who are only there because they know tech skills means money but didn’t actually develop any tech skills because they were too busy gaming the system. I don’t want to hire someone who spent hours memorizing things they think I want regurgitated on command. I want to hire someone who can understand the overall picture of what’s going on and what needs to be done because it’s interesting to them.





  • I’ve noticed Waze (owned by Google) sometimes suggests a route I don’t feel like (eg I’m on the highway and not in a rush so I don’t feel like taking an exit Waze suggests), but when I ignore it and it recalculates, the estimated time goes down.

    On the one hand, I know that it has to explore the alternative routes from time to time to know which ones are fastest and that if it’s directing a sufficient portion of the overall flow, it has to use multiple routes or else any single route it suggests will become bogged down with too much traffic, but I gotta wonder if there’s other motivations, especially when it’s a highway exit.