soli

Do people really expect it to be anything other than just more GTA? The bar doesn’t seem to be set that high.

lmao that’s cool as hell

I played it a couple of years ago, before a lot of the patches, and still thought it was one of the better games I have never finished.

I have used a check. I’m more likely to be able to get a mortgage and buy a house than to be accepted for a rental again, though I’ll likely die before paying it off. I still keep a fair amount of actual cash at home “just in case”.

Will be interested to hear your guesses.

Imagine a time before instant communications, where you have no idea how life has treated the recipient since you last saw them and it might take months for your letter to arrive. It is a sincere hope that they are well and that tradgedy has not befallen them.

It would be neurotic and unreasonable if your last update on their life was only days or even hours before, but in the days of letters hope is really all you had. It’s just honest.

To be fair, I’m certain that someone has written it with that as the intended meaning. It seems like the kind of passive aggressive thing some mannered British aristocrat would do.

It has it’s roots in actual letter writing, as in “I hope this letter finds you well”.

I can’t remember the last time I got a spam email honestly. I changed my address like 5+ years ago and it just stopped and never resumed. It’s not the email provider filtering them either, the only thing it catches are legitimate but automated messages.

Starship Troopers is Heinlein not Dick, and it’s fascist nonsense. Verhoeven was right to throw the book in the bin after two chapters and the movie rules.

$200,000 for a 1 Bed 1 Bath with an hour and a half commute to the city. It’s a unit, so probably has a bunch of other fees attached for upkeep but they aren’t listed. Area is far away from necessary services, highly car dependent and notoriously crime ridden. The unit is run down and requires renovations.

Double that for a 2 Bed 1 Bath in a similar area.

Is the book so obscure that you wouldn’t be able to get a digital copy you could just paste into Chat GPT?

Going with the just de-age interpretation and not time travel, it has to be late enough I could still pass for an adult but I’d want it before any of my chronic health conditions emerge so I can mitigate them. I don’t want to look younger, I just want the health benefits.

I can’t go back to being a kid because where the hell would new identity documents come from? I still have to be able to live my current life more or less. I suppose 35 is the absolute minimum for me to take it, at 15 I wasn’t getting carded buying alcohol. I reckon at that age with the right presentation I could pass for 20 at least, and a 35 year old seeming that young isn’t completely unheard of.

I can’t go too much older because issues start compounding in my 20s. I’d love to have picked a post development age - aside from my health, I didn’t really get comfortable in my own skin until then - but it’d be too late. Maybe 40 so the worst of puberty is over, but that’s probably my limit.

Online subscriptions have actually been a thing for a long time. In some ways it’s even fallen out of favor, especially with the rise of the “freemium” model. MMOs are a great example of this as subscriptions used to be the price of entry with no other monetization, where as these days if an MMO uses subscriptions it’s a secondary “convenience” fee after entry that is almost always combined with MTX bullshit.

If you’re talking specifically about SaaS bullshit, it’s because it required a certain level of infrastructure before it became practical. We had to move away from cash and needed reliable internet connections first, amongst a host of other developments. Anything that couldn’t be a cash purchase in a physical store was losing significant market share. This didn’t stop time restricted licenses on software still being a thing, but it was generally pretty niche software.

None, and every time my coworkers talk about how many they have it seems insane. One has fucking 6 different services. It’s not even about the money. I just truly cannot be bothered working out the maze of what is where when an RSS feed will just deliver me the stuff I’m interested in when it comes out from anywhere.

I need to occupy my mind with something that isn’t related to real life. Not just avoiding topics that are stressful or otherwise emotionally loaded, just thinking about anything I’m going to do or things in my life will stop me sleeping. So I think of stories and fiction worlds until the day dreams become actual dreams.

Since I got into the habit my sleep has gotten far more regular and I have had more control over went it happens.

Heat waves are basically the only serious thing here. There isn’t really much to surviving them for the average person. Stay where it’s cool, stay hydrated, don’t over exert yourself in the heat. All really easy things to do if you have a reasonable amount of security in your life. Most don’t bother except maybe making sure to contact elderly or otherwise vulnerable relatives.

Preparation is needed if you’re not financially secure. Maybe you’re homeless, maybe you’re too broke too cool your home, maybe a lot of things. I’ve been there before. To this day I’m still aware of places I can find shelter across the city and how to get to them, with and without public transport, in a hurry.

Mostly the answer is libraries but it depends where you are in the sprawl and how bad the heat wave is. They’re great during business hours but they can close before things cool down. I learned to get really good at loitering in shops and other private places while expending as little as possible without them moving me on.

Also where to get potable drinking water for free, you’ll be surprised how hard it can be to find in a pinch.

Edit: I forgot an underrated and personal favorite method from those days - trains.

Before everything went electronic it was really easy to travel free without the stereotypical methods of fair evading, so you could relax when inspectors were on. I’d find a train with functioning air conditioning on one of the ‘safe’ lines and just ride it for the whole round trip back to the central station then find a new one. Outside of peak hour it would be dead quiet and I could read or sleep in peace, and they go till late.

If you’re curious about the fair evasion method, the old tickets were just small bits of plastic-y cardboard with a magnetic strip on the back. Ticket machines would read the magnetic strip, write to it and mark down a trip in ink on the front of the ticket. If the magnetic strip ever failed they’d still honor the ticket and use the marks on the front to determine how many trips you were owed.

All you had to do was stop it being inked (or remove it). The tolerances on the machines were quite large so you could easily just put a bit of tape on the front and peel it off after to have an unmarked ticket. If you were desperate, you could sometimes rub it off anyway. Then all you needed to do was run a magnet over the magnetic strip or bend the ticket until it was damaged in the right way for a “fresh” but broken ticket. You’d then exchange it as a broken one and have a new ticket. If inspectors ever came around while you had a broken one they’d just tell you to take it in and leave you be.

This way you’d theoretically only ever need to buy one ticket, though it was still advisable to pay when you could or fair evade other ways to avoid become a regular at the service stand. My mother was an alcoholic and my father a deadbeat so this was how I made it to school for years.

I’m sure there is some trick with the new electronic cards but I’ve been fortunate enough to not need to work that out since they came in.

Ah, you’re right then. They are trying to skip the proper channels because, for a lot of office roles, you’re trained to do exactly that.

A lot of my job now is emailing and calling people in different organizations and systems. For most of them, they’ll technically have forms that look a lot like a ticket system but their purpose isn’t organization - it’s a filter. If you are in the know you contact them directly. This is true of contacting my department as well, if you’re filling out a ticket you’re probably on the bottom of the pile and if we’ve given you direct contact information we want you to contact us directly.

This leads to a habit of trying to guess who you’re supposed to contact too. The worst that can happen is you just get linked back to the ticket system so may as well try. Being good at your job involves building up a whole list of people you contact to not be put in form purgatory.

While an IT ticket system superficially looks the same as the labyrinth of everything else we have to deal with, the difference is it’s internal. Either everyone can contact you directly anyway or the ‘wrong’ people can, so it doesn’t have the same effect of creating a curated list. It’s also an actual system (usually) instead of just being an alternative way to send an email that gets dumped into a shared inbox.

So yeah, it’s really easy to just assume IT is exactly the same as the rest of your communications if you don’t know any better. They’re just communicating with you how they would anyone else. It is insane and inefficient but that’s just how it is.

What? That’s just a normal way of communicating anything via text in a professional setting. Neutral language, brief, with a generic but appreciative sign off.

usually either trying to skip proper channels for a request, or correcting someone while having no idea what they’re talking about.

I associate this with messages that are informal and overly friendly.

Nope, just an LCD. It’ll make you feel old but 15 years ago CRTs had already lost majority market share. Sony shut down its last CRT manufacturing plants in 2008.

I know, I’d kill to hear that sweet degaussing zap again.

My neighbour gave me a TV. To be precise, he rushed it to me unannounced at the exact moment I was leaving to go to a party. I accepted as quickly as I could in an effort to still make my train.

It turns out it’s about 15 years old and I have no use for it. He’s a lovely man but I intend to post it as free to a good home then drop it at an e-recycling station if nobody is interested.