VoxAdActa

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

I was a Teamster when I worked for Sygma, and out of all the unions I've been a member of (four, now), the Teamsters were the motherfucking worst. If they were actively trying to take a revolving door of 18- and 19-year-olds just getting their first big-boy jobs and turn them into all into die-hard anti-union voters for life, they couldn't do a better job than they're doing right now, and I told my steward that before I quit.

They designed the whole contract specifically to offload all the real work onto the new guys, protect the older guys when they decided to throw hands on the loading dock, and give as much overtime as possible to the ancient, divorced boomers with no family to go home to, that they could spend pretending to sweep the floors while the trainees finished the actual loading. Guys would bid order picking, then use seniority to bump bid loads/receivers off their jobs and wouldn't pick a single case for the whole contract, while getting paid picker bonuses and shift differentials.

And just to rub salt into the wound, those perks (bumping lower guys off their bid jobs and "sweeping the floor" during overtime) were specifically written out of the latest contract, so only the guys hired under the previous contract would ever get to do them. They straight robbed those kids of even anything to look forward to if they toughed out the low-seniority years. They also negotiated a different pay scale for under 5 years, 5-10 years, and 10 years in, and you can guess which end of that they weighted the raises toward. It was a complete shitshow, and when kids would quit, the Teamsters would keep their initiation fee (taken out of the first three paychecks). You could call to try to get it back, but the best they'd do would be to put it towards your initiation fee for your next Teamster job, as if any of those kids would ever willingly subject themselves to that shit ever again.

AND THERE'S MORE. I just don't feel like typing up a fucking novel on it. Don't even get me started on the shady shit they did during the contract negotiations I was actually present for. It was worse than maddening; it felt like it was specifically crafted by the senior guys to make sure that ladder was pulled up as high as they could behind them, while not actually making any waves for the company. And the safety issues they ignored and covered up, and the fancy fucking "union meetings" they never told anyone about so that they were only attended by the office reps, because they were being held at the most expensive restaurants in the city, on the union's dime, and the number of stewards who were literally fucking floor supervisors, and on, and on, and on....

UIW was kind of spineless and milquetoast, but they took care of us. The Teamsters are fucking old-school mob racket motherfuckers who are single-handedly responsible for an entire generation of workers who think all unions are a scam.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Legion assassins are after you because you have a bad reputation with the legion.

Oh.

Well shit.

So maybe I shouldn't go to Nipton and toss a grenade at the Legionaries as they're walking away after their leader finished shit-talking me.

They just explode in such an easy, satisfying way! How do they even know it was me? All the witnesses are unrecognizable flesh chunks!

Ok, maybe I will load up another try.

[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago (15 children)

Right? "Go outside!" AND THEN DO WHAT, MOTHERFUCKER? Just be depressed outside??

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago

Old Reddit is Reddit. If they get rid of it, I'm sure as fuck not sticking around for this new site. It looks like Bing and Youtube had a deformed little monster-child.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Cool, glad to hear you admit that you're full of shit and this never happened. Cheers!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Well, if it's true, you were using another name, because "Facebones" doesn't show up in any of the modlogs.

Weird how "trust me, bro" suddenly became the standard of proof today.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I've tried New Vegas three or four times. By the time I actually get to New Vegas and meet Mr. House, I'm overwhelmed by the number of things I'm supposed to be doing and dead dog tired of those fucking OP Legion assassins that show up to ruin my day every fifteen minutes.

Part of that is probably on me, because I'm the guy who wants to experience the whole game in a single play-through, and I try not to take on too many new quests until I've finished the ones I've already got. I've also been recently informed that if I rush to New Vegas and do Mr. House's quest, the Legion assassins will back off for a bit, which is a big deal because my god I'm sick of them. I never would have tried that on my own, as there's nothing in the game to give me a clue that they're connected, but maybe I'll give it another shot and do that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Not commenting on whether or not the story is true, but I do agree that it probably wasn't made by AI.

I read scientific papers in academic journals every day, so I'm very familiar with the style and conventions of academic writing. This post reads like it was written by someone who's trying very hard not to write a scientific paper, but whose primary writing practice is entirely in writing scientific papers. The prose in this piece will often begin in a storytelling style, then slowly drift back to academic writing, persist in that mode for a while, then the author seems to realize it and yank the reins to go back to storytelling.

While I admit that LLMs are good at mimicking different writing styles, I'm not at all confident they're capable of pulling off the kind of slow-drifting back-and-forth that I see in this post, especially while remaining inside the specific formatting skeleton of an academic paper.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I’m glad you are very considerate and have never made a mistake when excited about something before. Good for you friend.

I'm serious, though. How do you make that "mistake"? How do you get so excited that you completely tunnel-vision out the simultaneous existence of hundreds of people? That's absolutely in no way neurotypical.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

It's news that occurred somewhere in the world, I guess. That's what all the "US news is world news!" people were saying in the meta thread.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This is Ohio. The Republicans will just keep calling referendums on the same thing over and over again until they get the results they want. They don't care. They literally use dirty tricks to circumvent what the citizens want every year. Just look at how medical marijuana played out.

First try: The governor gets the bank to cancel the account of the pro-weed side, because the organization had the word "marijuana" in its name. No bank account, can't be a real group, can't put something on the ballot. Sucks to be you.

Second try: The legislature tried and failed to keep the legal weed issue off the ballot. So instead, they put their own weed issue on the ballot that would forever prevent legal weed in Ohio (even if the first issue passed), and then gave it a name that was almost identical to the pro-weed issue. I seem to remember that neither ended up passing because voters were, as intended, confused, and just having the second issue on the ballot split the vote.

Third try: The issue got on the ballot, the polls were high, everyone in the state basically was ready to stand out in the rain and vote in favor of medical marijuana. So the legislature called a special session and passed their own legal medical marijuana law, and then convinced the courts that their law made the ballot issue obsolete, so it was thrown out.

BUT, the legislature's version was a clusterfuck in that the legislature had to personally approve applications for grow ops and dispensaries. A few hundred businesses applied for the permit, and, last I checked, 0 were approved. This led to a situation where it was legal to have medical marijuana, but not legal to buy or grow it, or bring it in from out of state. Which means if you get caught with weed, the cops couldn't cite you for having weed (if you had your med card), but they could site you for buying or transporting that weed, because there's no way to legally get it in the state.

That was like six or seven years ago, and I haven't kept up with it, but if there's a single legal dispensary in Ohio, I will be incredibly surprised. The whole point was to not approve any.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It's not just me. If I was literally the only other person in the store, sure, I could understand that, they thought they were alone, they weren't expecting to encounter anyone else.

How the fuck do you just stop being aware of an entire seething mass of other humans flowing around you?

 

Hey, just wanted to mention this thing I noticed. So I blocked a user after a few rounds in a thread, but when they responded to me, I still got the notification and could still see the first line of their post from that screen. But the entire comment thread, including my own replies, was invisible from the article page until I unblocked him.

Right now, it seems like the "block" function doesn't keep people from talking trash directly to me, it just keeps me from responding to them or seeing any part of the thread from anyone under their highest post.

That really kind of takes all the teeth out of the "block, don't defederate" argument, but I'm also sure it's just some kind of bug.

 

A friend asked me earlier tonight if I had "processed" some stuff that happened to me a while back, and I jokingly told her "My philosophy on emotional processing is: I ain't got time to bleed."

Several hours later, which is just now, I thought about it again and I realized that was way too accurate. Mentally and emotionally, I'm living my entire life as if I was being stalked by the Predator.

I went through so much shit for fifteen straight years, where I was always running or hiding or fighting or outwitting dangerous people (my ex), financial disasters, and housing catastrophes, with a horde of other issues of varying sizes flowing in to fill up all the gaps. I've been out of that life for almost five years now, and the serious crises have slowed down to what I suppose is a more normal pace of about one or two a year (instead of before, when I was squaring my shoulders and taking a deep breath every time I walked in my front door, preparing to find out what emergency was waiting for me).

Even though I'm not constantly running or hiding from a Predator now, I'm still... there. I'm still in that jungle. It's not that he's gone, it's that I don't know where he is or how much time I have before he finds me. I'm spending all my emotional energy on carving wooden stakes and digging tiger pits and preparing for the fight that, in my heart of hearts, I know is coming.

Of course, life is life, and sometimes shit just hits the fan, and I'm always glad for my tiger pits when it does, so my brain doesn't really see this as a problem. "Yeah, it's exhausting, but aren't you glad you had the deep-deep-super-emergency savings account when X happened? Aren't you glad knew and had practiced three alternative routes to get to that client's office when the highway flooded? Aren't you glad you left for that meeting an hour and a half early? Aren't you glad.... aren't you glad... aren't you glad?"

And yeah, I kind of am. I'm generally in an ok position for the one-in-a-hundred or one-in-a-thousand bad random event to happen. So what if I'm spending an equal amount of money and time and worry on the other 999 things that don't happen? Even though I'm kind of disturbed by this realization right now, I'm still having a hard time convincing myself that this is a problem. It's not normal, obviously, but is it really so bad? Especially since sometimes my friends get into some shit and I can say "Hey, here's five bundles of field-made leg-spike-traps to help you out with that Predator that's on your ass. Don't worry, I have ten more in my hidden stash, and thirty more in my extra-hidden stash, I'll be fine."

So no, I ain't got time to bleed. I have to rig up these snare traps and swinging-log-traps for a monster I've seen neither hide nor hair of in five years. If I stop to think about what I've been through, much less take the time to cry about it, it might catch me unawares. I'm still not prepared enough.

But when I ask my brain, "When will I be prepared enough?", my brain replies: "Shut up, it'll hear you. Whittle another spear."

 
10
D&D Rule (media.kbin.social)
 
 

Hi! I've recently started playing, and I love the game so far!

The only complaint I have (other than the targeting system; I came from ESO, so this tab-target thing is really messing me up) is that I feel like I was pushed to level 80 way too fast. I wasn't even trying; just basically going from story chapter to story chapter (because I'd gain 10+ levels just walking back and forth between them). I barely know how to play my core class, and now I'm looking at picking a specialization that looks like it's going to completely change how my class works?

Anyway, I'm a Mesmer. I've tried to find a breakdown on the differences between the Chronomancer, Virtuoso, and Mirage, but all I can find are either bare lists of abilities or builds that don't explain anything; they just say "Pick this, this, this, and this, and use these weapons."

What I'm trying to find is what each specialization is good for, how they play (distant/melee, shatter-focused, clone focused), what use cases each of the new weapons shines in, etc. So if someone could give me a general rundown on how each Elite Specialization plays and is supposed to function, I'd be really appreciative. Thanks in advance!

More details on my character/playstyle right now, if it matters:

I'm playing solo for now in the overworld. I do want to try dungeons at some point, since they were my favorite part of ESO, but I'm worried I'll get yelled at if I'm not optimized. And, again, I'm only mildly competent with my core class; I still die to big things in the overworld because I haven't mastered how all my buttons (and targeting) work. I'm using a Greatsword (for range and AOE) and Scepter+Sword (for clone generation, single-target damage, and defense when things get too close). I rely a lot on phantasms and shatter skills (even though I'm not entirely sure what the specific use case for each type of shatter is supposed to be; I mostly just use F1 and F4 in a pinch).

Because I appreciate the defensive options of Scepter+Sword, I was thinking of going with Chronomancer for the offhand Shield. But the Mirage dodge-replacement sounds really cool, and the Virtuoso's dagger weapon looks almost awesome enough to tempt me into ditching the clones I've been leaning on for the last 79 levels. So I just don't know.

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