Christian

I have never played Mario 64 outside of a couple five-minute sessions on a Toys-R-Us demo when I was maybe 10, but the Watch for Rolling Rocks half-A-press video - a speedrun with the added condition that a longer time will trump a shorter time if the player presses ‘A’ (jump) less than in the faster run - is almost unquestionably my favorite youtube video ever. It’s a hilariously silly niche thing, but beyond that it’s like watching someone try to explain their doctoral dissertation, making their best attempt while knowing full-well both that they won’t be able to get their audience to follow every piece and also that no one else is as engaged in the topic as they are. As long aa I don’t feel like a captive audience, I can find a real joy in exposure to that sort of enthusiasm. Laying that on top of something that’s just a little funny hits the spot for me so much.

Now, you’re probably wondering what I’m gonna need all this speed for. After all, I do build up speed for twelve hours. But to answer that, we need to talk about parallel universes, and if you thought my other tangents were complicated, just you wait. Okay, so Mario’s position is a floating point number, but it’s converted to a short when the game uses it to test for collision with floor triangles…

I felt like I had to double up because she was already late on vaccines and it was very unlikely I’d have another opportunity soon to get her to the vet.

Knew we were moving months in advance so about six months before the move I was trying to get her comfortable going in the cage by giving her wet food in there. I thought after a couple months I would try shutting the door quietly and opening it right back up and then gradually get her used to the door being closed for longer durations, but the very first time she was very unhappy and the next couple months she basically said fuck you I’m eating the dry food in protest right in front of you when you’re doing this. When she finally started going back in I felt like I can’t play with getting her accustomed again, I’ve got to just do it on the day, and I was pretty confident that if I didn’t get her vaccines then it would be a very long time.

Our little lady had some trauma in her youth and was extremely resistant to being picked up and would absolutly not take direction to go into a crate. After a few years of her getting more comfortable I knew I could probably get her in again one time by tricking her, but I should save that for an emergency and nothing else. Eventually that was needed when we had to move. Of course, knowing I had to make the most of that I scheduled a vet appointment for that day.

It was somehow much worse than I had anticipated, starting as soon as I shut her in. She was so scared, throwing her full body with as much force as she could against the walls of the crate over and over and over, keeping that up while I was carrying her to the car and the first few minutes of the drive before she finally started to calm down. Watching that shook me, emotionally painful and just building anxiety about the appointment.

She actually was very submissive for the vet, who seemed to think I was crazy because at that point I was visibly a lot more terrified and upset than the cat.

Awful day in general, I have never seen an animal more depressed than she was after finishing that appointment and getting to the new place, it was horrific. She was normally extremely skittish about potentially being touched, but would invite pets sometimes. In that first day though, she was just do whatever you want I don’t care. I had to pick her up body basically limp out of the crate, she had never let me pick her up. She didn’t move from where I had placed her for hours, zero reaction to any action from me. She got back to her old self after a few weeks, but that day is still very painful to think back to I feel like I’m about to cry just from writing this.

I too was naïve enough to think that since my girl was shy around people I needed to solve that by getting her a companion. I wasn’t aware growling was something cats did until making that mistake. It’s especially weird because I don’t think I ever heard her hiss. Her growl was very intimidating to me, but not to the kitten. Okay little man, I’m not sure she wants to play today.

I think she was mad about that decision for a long time.

It is kind of depressing to be honest. I’m antifascist, I just happen to also be a loser.

When in a healthy relationship it doesn’t bother me, but now that I’m single again and will be looking at revisiting the whole dating thing at some point it’s uncomfortable to think too much about.

A couple people here have suggested wet food to lure the cat down, but when mine found a spot abouve the cabinets that was much easier to get up than down that solution crossed my mind for only an instant before I realized it would probably only take one more go for him to realize there’s a huge incentive to risking injury.

He would do this thing when he was angry where he would howl like a dog to make sure everyone within earshot understood the severity of whatever great injustice had taken place, and not taking him down when he wanted to be was definitely one of those cases. I’d give him maybe an hour to get his screaming in before getting around to helping him.

Completely missed their opportunity to start the headline with “Proud New Dad” and having the reveal at the end be that he was no less proud of this before fatherhood.

I still remember like twenty years ago undergrad probability theory a professor posed some question to the class and even though this prof was normally very thorough with being helpful and walking through answers with students, this one guy answered so wildly off-the-mark the prof paused a bit and then just said “no” and moved on.

We were doing final exam review for earlier semester material and the question was about the probability of randomly drawing some hand of cards, something like a hand of five cards with exactly three jacks. Guy answered very confidently “it’s 1 minus the null set”. I remember this because I immediately asked the kid next to me what was said and just heard the same thing repeated.

So many things wrong. A “null set” is a concept from measure theory, which was not used in this second-year-undergrad course. Since using “the” here implies there’s just one, he almost certainly meant the empty set. That’s whatever. But we’re not in a set theory class, 1 is a number, not a set, so we’re not in a context where it makes any sense to subtract sets from numbers. But if we just push all of that aside and say okay fine, represent 1 as a set however you want and subtract the empty set, taking any set A and subtracting the empty set just gives A back, meaning he’s given an extremely roundabout way of saying the probability is 1, a 100% chance of randomly drawing that specific hand of cards.

Situation where it’s would be one thing if we’re early on and he’ll discover he’s in over his head, but right before the final is such a wild time to sound fully confident in an answer that wrong.

Moral of the story: sometimes having that much confidence behind an awful understanding will give bystanders enough secondhand embarrassment that they’ll still think of you from time to time twenty years later.

It’s borderline inspirational. It almost makes me want to make a linkedin account just to riff on this for every mundane aspect of my life. I mean I don’t have anything as impressive as a top-25 spot on a Clash of Clans leaderboard, but just because I can’t compete with this guy doesn’t mean I’m unhirable.

First draft for a pitch:

Hey hiring managers, have you ever had to deal with ungrateful employees who incessantly whine about needing “sick time” for imaginary problems like “food poisoning”? We’ve all been there. What you need is a guy who is still in sepsis recovery and can barely function day to day to help them realize how good they have it.

Due to supply-and-demand, you should be ready to make a highly competitive offer. Hourly wages are acceptable with overtime pay over forty hours, and under the agreement that I will be on-the-clock for every hour which I spend recovering from sepsis, which is all of them.

Most were the type you see on lemmy that would rather not vote if there isn’t a perfect candidate on the ballot, even if there was one candidate that they agreed with the majority of items.

Okay, I thought we were discussing something wholly different. I worked in Dearborn and we all had friends who lost relatives as our country refused to stop sending arms. One of my best students completely fell off after losing a lot of her extended family and it was painful to watch.

But you don’t need to have personal experience with someone affected to be outraged. It’s a line some people are unwilling to cross. I am one of them. Downplaying that as they “would rather not vote if there isn’t a perfect candidate on the ballot” is either wholly disingenuous or a complete absence of empathy. A candidate I have “agreed with the majority of items” but disagreed on the morality of supplying weapons used to commit a genocide is one I will not vote for.

If the president is aware that he is sending weapons killing innocents and still signs off to send more, and one of those bombs kills someone I love, would you blame me for not voting for him? If not, why would you blame someone who empathizes with me for making the same decision?

The democrats did not have to support this, and would have won the election if not for this complete moral bankruptcy. Blaming nonvoters is shifting blame from the powerful to the powerless.

It was a warning to ensure that your discussion include love for the people behind the discussion, and not just hate for them for being wrong.

I think I’ve gone over twenty years with this being the exact thing that bothers me and have never been able to articulate it as well as you just did in one sentence.

People without empathy shouldn’t have the right to lead people (politics, work, …).

The inclusion of the phrase “have the right to” is what changes this statement from sensible to nonsense. We’d need a way to declare who has that right, and I cannot imagine any idea of an empathy certification board that is not horrifically dystopian.

I’m not convinced, could you share your evidence?

Probably shouldn’t assume that guy’s personal view is the norm.

For me that sounds exactly as appealing as using pineapple.

I will excuse a lot of those people here in the US.

In my own case, I am physically disabled at the moment watching the people taking care of me and providing me transportation be horribly overworked to the point where it is painful to watch. What should I be doing with my time? Should I judge my caretakers for not making some sort of time? Is it inexcusable that I am not pressuring them to do something?

I’d like to know actually what I can do, because I’m not happy with where things are. You suggest it’s a moral failure but I literally don’t know what action I can take that would not be judged a moral failure.

Maybe my situation is unique in some ways, but it’s not that unique in the idea that for a lot of people, finding more time could cost the livlihoods of both them and their dependents. Maybe the people you meet in your day-to-day life can easily find time to organize, etc at no significant cost, but the majority of the remaining population are oppressed themselves, just in a less severe way. Every family is isolated, and when you are isolated with a precarious livlihood, setting aside time for something comes at a cost, so is a serious choice. The obvious answer is to try to become less isolated, but that requires setting aside time without guaranteed payoff. It’s easy to judge people for not doing that when there’s no potential cost to your own dependents.

Most people here are living day-to-day trying to cling to what little joys they have. You can come up with laundry lists of ways they are wasting their time and money, but those wastes are hard to give up for someone living day-to-day. Maybe I’m misunderstanding something, but decrying the inaction from the majority of our population is shifting blame to the powerless.

The last one got me. The ones before were just mildly amusing.

You don’t have to like it for it to be a valid topping.

That’s a hill you will die on from old age. I have never once heard someone say pineapple is not a valid topping in a way I thought was meant to be taken literally and not as a hyperbolic way of saying “I don’t like it”.

How is that true in a way different from other industries? I do think there’s no necessity for the race of the VA to correspond with the race of the character. That might be because I don’t have a good grasp on the arguments otherwise though.

The argument I’ve heard in favor of VAs matching their characters is to avoid laundering white perspectives to minority characters, which would make sense if the VA didn’t have their livelihood on the line when asked to read from a script written by a cishet white man. I feel like requiring a minority do that makes no difference other than providing a cover of legitimacy for the words said.

But as a cishet white male myself, maybe I’m mischaracterizing the argument, I’d be curious. I have asked my (racial minority) wife at one point a couple years back and she wasn’t sure.

It’s a given that there are insensitivities in hirings, but I struggle to imagine a way in which that would be unique to voice acting specifically.

I generally do try to empathize but I can’t even get myself to begin thinking about this. It’s like the words hit my brain and bounce off.