I have a friend who pulled their kid out of public school largely because of posters like this.

The clincher was when they were going over some material about classroom / playground behaviour and bad feelings. They colour coded the feelings, like Blue is Sad and Red is Angry. Yellow was Wiggly, which described most fidgeting behaviours.

Teachers were telling kids that if you had any of the bad feelings you had to quietly sit by yourself until you're feeling better.

My friend has ADHD and took exception to the idea that being fidgety was a 'bad' feeling. And in general, none of these are ultimately bad feelings to have. I mean, nobody really wants to be sad or angry, but telling children they're bad for having feelings is fucked up no matter how you slice it.

I admit that if a child is disruptively angry, then a timeout is warranted. We have the same rule for adults, and if you can't control your temper then you need to cool off before you can be civil again. But telling kids that they can't hang out with their friends if they're feeling sad or fidgety is just cruel and pointless. It has potential to cause a lot of harm to a child's development for the sake of 'classroom discipline'

I would swear T-shirt sizes have shrunk since I was a teenager.

I thought that too, but it turns out I just got fat

S

When my cat does this, I sit on her (gently).

I figure she does the same to me, so it's fair play.

Generally speaking, games don't fail because of the decisions made by the developers. That's usually caused by people higher up the food chain, you'd think a film/tv producer would know all about that

That's interesting, when I was a kid I remember always hearing that an octopus has eight tentacles and a squid has ten. I suppose 'limbs' might have been a more accurate descriptor.

Oddly, I knew that cuttlefish have a distinction between arms and tentacles. I'm not in biology, but I always thought of them as tiny squid, so it wouldn't surprise me if they were related.

If you're correcting me on the joke, it's a pun where "ten tickles" sounds like "tentacles." The number ten is unrelated to the number of limbs - it's actually usually told about an octopus

That's a fair assessment. It's kind of like the rule for premature optimization: don't.

With experience you might get some intuition about when it's good to lean into inheritance. We were definitely lacking experience at that point though.

OOP is a pretty powerful paradigm, which means it's also easy to provide enough rope to hang yourself with. See also just about any other meme here about OOP

It's all fun and games until there's a shahed in the bodega

How many tickles does it take to make a squid fly?

I figure it's got to be about ten tickles

I think it depends on what you may or may not have an opinion about.

Extreme example: if you don't have an opinion about nazis, you might be a nazi

I know you're apprehensive about using vinegar, but it is quite a potent degreaser. And I mean, don't give it a bath, but wiping it down with a rag or a toothbrush shouldn't be too bad. That's how I clean my air fryer

You could try something like isopropyl alcohol if you're concerned about the electronics. If you use a high purity then it actually evaporates on its own and is non-corrosive. It's my goto cleaner for electronics parts.

So... if I apply for a super high IQ job that's unpaid, does that prove I'm under qualified?

I heard a story about a professor studying crows (or possibly ravens).

For an experiment he put on a Halloween mask and started harassing the birds until they'd swarm him and chase him away. Then he'd leave and come back without the mask and the birds would be pretty chill. A few days later he'd bring our the mask and he'd get swarmed again. I think he got some volunteers to wear the mask too, and they had the same experience. The birds were trained to hate masks.

Anyway, one academic career later and he finds the mask in a dusty office something like forty years later. He decides to try it again, and the birds swarm him.

The mask hadn't seen the light of day for decades by this point. My understanding was that none of the birds from the original experiment would have still been alive.

The implication that the professor arrived at was that these birds had folklore which they've passed down through the generations. So they're teaching their kids to hold onto their grudges even longer

There's a couple things at play here when you talk to people online.

Ultimately, there's a difference between feeling attacked and being attacked. Both are common in online discussions.

Why do people attack people?

The anonymity and distance of the internet makes it easier for people to share strong opinions - for better or worse. There's a certain amount of psychology around the design of social media that pushes people towards confrontation.

Sometimes aggression is the default state for people. Depending on your world view that might be either sad or necessary.

That said, I believe there's a difference between a justified attack and an unjustified one. If someone is spreading hate, we all owe it to the community to fuck that person up with our words. If someone shares a harmless opinion then there isn't much call for a personal attack.

Why do I feel attacked?

If you feel attacked on the internet, there's ultimately two possibilities: you're being attacked or you're mistaken. For the sake of this section, let's say you're mistaken.

Non-verbal communication is an essential part of communication between humans, and is something that's hard to replicate in text. Ultimately, our non-verbal cues set an expected tone.

Sometimes when writing we recognize this and use a tonal indicator to set expectations. Emoji 🙄, gestures *rolls eyes* and, appending flags /s are all ways that we might set tone. These three examples all indicate "sarcasm" which for many people seems to be the default way to express themselves.

Sarcasm in particular is problematic because it often inverts the meaning of what was said. The phrase, "oh yeah, brilliant idea" has opposite interpretations if you're being sarcastic. Sometimes the writer assumes the reader will know what they intended because they were feeling sarcastic when they typed it. Of course, as a reader we have no way of knowing what the writer's feelings were at the time of writing.

Another element at play here is that a good deal of conversation on the internet is debate. Some people equate disagreement with condemnation, so if your feelings are hurt by that it's common to lash out. Many debates on the internet start civilly enough and then deteriorate to name calling and cursing in short order. It's wise to try to be the bigger person and assume no malice, because once it gets out it's hard to put back.

Statistics and Bias

You probably had the right idea that only about 1% of users are active commenters. Similar to that, there's also a phenomenon where the most vocal (and often inflammatory) users represent a similarly small portion of the group.

Our brains are evolved for survival, so they pay special attention to negative stimuli. Basically, they're always looking for trouble, and if you're looking for trouble you're likely to find it.

What this ultimately means is that we remember the bad things far more memorably than the good things. It also means that even if a small percentage of people are attacking others, because they dominate the conversation we start to believe that everyone carries that opinion. But as you point out, 99% of users aren't even commenting, so we really don't have a good grasp on what the larger population is like.

It also means that if you exercise your block list, you don't have to put in too much work to remove the most hateful people from your feed.

Closing

Anyway, I think you have the right idea. It sounds like you don't go looking for fights.

I try to keep a similar philosophy. If I disagree with someone then I'll seek to empathize or educate. However, if someone is vocal about my erasure or directing hate and violence towards people then I'll let them have it. I figure those people are looking for trouble and by golly I'll give it to them - it's always morally correct to punch a nazi.

Most of my college coursework was around OOP. That said, they actually did a pretty lousy job of explaining it in a practical sense, so since we were left to figure it out ourselves a lot of our assignments ended up looking like this.

At the end of the program, our capstone project was to build a full stack app. They did a pretty good job simulating a real professional experience: we all worked together on requirements gathering and database design, then were expected to build our own app.

To really drive home the real world experience, the professor would change the requirements partway through the project. Which is a total dick move, but actually a good lesson on its own.

Anyway, this app was mostly about rendering a bunch of different views, and something subtly would change that ended up affecting all views. After the fact, the professor would say something to the effect of "If you used good objects, you'll only have to make the change in one place."

This of course is only helpful if you really appreciated the power of OOP and planned it from the start. Most of us were flying by the seat of our pants, so it was usually a ton of work to get those changes in

My dad recently got hearing aids. The technology has come a long way. His are bluetooth and pair with his phone.

Back in the day of you wanted to ignore someone you'd just turn off your hearing aids. He uses his to listen to music now.

I'm sure there might be some practical difference between hearing aids and airbuds, but it does seem like there's a lot of overlap

It's funny you say that, because I think the cart is what most diehard fans of the first game disliked. It replaces the dungeon crawl. I suppose the Stress system gets a significant rework, but it keeps the spirit of the original

I think it's a big step forward though

As a general rule when seeking knowledge you should define what your Three Letter Acronyms (TLA) are. I don't know what these are even with a smidgen of context

If it's legal or political you should probably specify what country you're referring to when you're in the world community

I'm a big fan of Darkest Dungeon, but I'm also a chronic restarter. Building a roster of heroes is fun, but permadeath is so punishing. I have a similar problem in XCOM where you spend so long in a campaign building up your roster, then you lose your ace squad and the whole thing unravels

I really enjoyed Darkest Dungeon 2. There are some radical changes, but it still hits the core vibe and offers a more roguelike experience. Even if I fail my run in spectacular fashion, I'm able to start over on the next one. Far less frustrating than a whole new campaign

Coolio, thanks for the detailed reply

I've got lots of new stuff to check out now!