sp3ctr4l @ sp3ctr4l @lemmy.dbzer0.com

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4 mo. ago

derp, looks like i fucked up the last url and made lemmy throw a fit... spaces in urls are problematic

Well, you've got a point with those that are hearing impaired or have a speech impediment, no argument there.

...

But uh, I am also a high functioning autistic... and, maybe I've just been around the block a bit more, crafted and worn more masks, maybe I am just older.... the way I see it is 'cultured' is another malleable, non specific adjective or group description, where... everyone who uses such a term actually has their own specific definition of what it means, but acts like everyone actually has the same definition.

I guess my use of the term is also coming across as... meaning that anyone it applies to is some kind of innately, fundamentally inferior, and I don't mean it in that way.

There are plenty of exceptional people who have no familiarity with ... some subset of all possible media or traditions or cuisine or concievably literally anything that anyone could consider to be a marker of 'cultured'.

And on its own... there's no shame in that at all... this seems so obvious to me that I am kind of baffled I'd need to explicitly say it.

If you don't know how to say a word, there's no real, serious reason to be embarassed: you never learned, you never had the experiences that could lead to that.

Someone can just say, oh, its actually said this way, (in this case this is rather clear and objective as the people who named it have an official, correct, 'canon' way to say it), and then you go 'oh, ok, thanks!'

...

Anyway:

Im not trying to say that not looking up how to pronounce a word means you are uncultured... that would just mean you never looked up how to pronounce it.

I am trying to say that many people who are familiar with and have read/seen/experienced Beckett... are more likely to get the reference immediately, similar to how an inside joke works.

So if you haven't seen Waiting for Godot... thats a part of culture you haven't experienced.

Thats what I mean by uncultured.

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Ok, as for actual recommendations:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=izX5dIzI2RE

Turns out there is at least this rather low visual quality, but entire Waiting for Godot movie just on a tiny youtube channel...

And it also appears that I am so uncultured to have not realize there have in fact been several cinematic versions of the play!

This one appears to be from 2001, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, produced in Ireland... not sure if it got a showing in theatres, or was made for public TV broadcast.

Seems right to me to go to an Irish production, with Irish cast, for a seminal Irish screenplay... at least as an introduction.

There are evidently at least 8 or 9 film/tv versions of Waiting for Godot, including one directed by Beckett himself, I had no idea haha!

www.imdb.com/find/?=waiting for godot

EDIT: bad url, bad! uh yeah, i guess just copy and paste it manually?

Yes, but if they can't actually pull off the last part... uh... that doesn't end well.

You make good points, my view is obviously America centric.

As I literally used to work for MSFT, in various parts of their city sized corporate HQ outside of Seattle, and a few 'smaller', though still massive by the standards of any non megacorp, 'satellite' campuses in other parts of the broader Seattle area.

...

I completely agree that refusal to do reasonable location specific pricing is a huge problem, and I'd say that basically stems from MSFT being astoundingly myopic, to the point of the management culture being cult-like.

Perhaps a sort of saving grace for international customers is that uh, the US dollar is currently crashing against basically every other currency?

Or perhaps that is an actual cause of why AAA game prices go up in USD: MSFTs costs are primarily in USD, so they figure out a way to smudge costs over the whole system in a way that trickles up to them in USD, by using their influence to functionally make everything else somewhat subsidize their attempt to grow or maintain market share.

MSFT gaming seems to be transitioning to pretty much abandoning being a 'console maker', and moving toward 'we are an uber publisher'.

...

But anyway... I get that from the consumer perspective, yes, it makes sense to go with GamesPass...

The problem is that from a business perspective, what this does is destroy the economics of actually making a game.

It reduces sales, which reduces profit, which means now game publishers force game studios to cut costs, so they fire half their staff or reassign them, which destroys all the undocumented knowledge of the game studio, and then they are replaced with cheaper per hour paid contractors who don't know that information, which results in sloppier, buggier games that ironically always go overbudget, overschedule, and don't sell as well.

...

Maybe think if it as an infrasctucture style situation, with game devs as the road maintenance crews, and consumers of games as car drivers:

If you skimp on road maintenance, and then also make everyone drive much much more, by making public transit very expensive/shitty, and cars are now all a cheap personal rental service...

... eventually the roads give out, pot holes everywhere, bridges falling apart... and the entire system grinds to a halt rather rapidly, because now, a decade later, there aren't any more talented road maintenance crews, they all quit from the shit wages and shit working conditions, their specialized vehicles sre in disrepair, and there is also not enough money to hire and train a massive new workforce to fix all the roads.

£230k is approximately $315k...

Yeah, in the US, that's significantly on the cheaper end as well, broadly speaking... i think what you call a bungalow is roughly what we'd call a starter home... but the problem in the US is... we don't really build those anymore, the construction companies can only turn a profit by making larger homes, that are also built to very shoddy standards.

That and the only areas with $315 or lower as a median home price are quite poor, with terrible economies and no reasonable transportation options... and the US largely murdered remote working after the corpos realized it would make their commericial office values collapse.

US median home sale price, over the whole US, is about $425k as of May, about £315k.

Maybe that will change after the whole housing market crashes, but that level of specificity is way too hard to meaningfully predict.

As to a second home tax... yeah you would think this we be an obvious thing to do, to combat gentrification, or at least make it have more fair broad social impacts... but here in the States, nearly nowhere actually does it, and there are a ton of legal loopholes and bs you can do to get around it.

Instead, a lot of places actually encourage second homes with tax incentives and write offs for getting one... because... entrepreneurship, or something.

Not that I'm aware of, but if you wanna start one, it might be a good idea to not fill it with fabricated quotes that remove all the surrounding context.

Maybe you could go back to reddit, make a subreddit entirely devoted to shit stirring and drama there?

Seems like a better fit to me.

Yeah, it used to be quite common for PC gaming magazines to include a demo disk, basically, here's the game and the first level or two, often you could fit a couple game's demo versions on one cd.

GamesPass could easily do something like uh... hey, this game here, you can play for 2 or 5 or 10 hours, and then if you want more, you can buy it with... I dunno, a 1/4 to 1/3 discount if you're subbed to GamesPass, and you've got the playtime.

Hey, uh, is Uber still cheaper than a taxi?

Oh, no, it isn't, and also taxis, largely don't exist anymore, and also public transit (the much cheaper to the 'consumer' option) is now 10 to 15 years behind where it should be.

Roughly the same business model there.

You're trading short term low cost and convenience and broad array of choices for long term higher prices and the broad stagnation/destruction of the entire industry, fucking over all the people who work in said industry.

Arkane sucks now because MSFT forced them to make the kind of game they did not have experience in making.

It's like hiring a plumber to fix your electrical problems, hiring a car mechanic to diagnose your skin condition.

This is the whole thing of large publishers buying out successful dev teams, then mismanaging the fuck out of them, then destroying them, by firing 1/4 of the staff, throwing another 1/4 all around their various other studios, then hiring a bunch of contractors for the remaining dev team to babysit / onboard for 6 months before they know how to do anything useful...

...all for a game that's either a castrated, mutated version of what the studio is known for, of course with latest trending corpo buzzwords a 'core features', or is just something wildly different from the studio's previous work.

This happens with extreme regularity in the history of the video game industry.

Almost like being rich is more likely to indicate someone is a pompous buffoon that takes credit for other people's successes and blames other people for their own failures, than it is to indicate they are some kind of Ayn Rand style entrepreneurial ubermensch, mr 'gonzo- rand 19'.

Yet another example of:

C Suite / Upper Management doesn't listen when a seasoned software engineer of some kind points out an extremely obvious medium/long-run problem with the business model they're being asked to either functionally invent, or massively contribute to.

Ah. Well, as you can see, I am most familiar with the US economy...

but uh... broadly speaking, ya'll did the whole Brexit thing, and as best I am aware off the top of my head, ya'll are a bit more economically intertwined with the US than most of the rest of the EU...

So, as the US collapses, that'll disproportionately affect the UK as compared to other Eurozone economies, the financial / currency / bond market situation in the US will 'contagion' over to the UK faster, as will demand collapse for material goods and services.

But, I'd have to look over UK econ data in detail to be more specific than that.

Out of curiosity, can I ask what you approximatelty paid for the house in the UK?

One weird thing that could start happening (or intensifying) is that as the US dollar devalues... is that people/corporations with mostly USD will start trying to buy homes in places that they expect will have relative currency appreciation compared to the USD... basically, slow or long term currency arbitrage via homes as mainly financial assets.

Dang, I can't say I've ever heard You Bun Too... thats new to me!

Hah! I'm gonna go with the last one, hahaha!

Anywhere in MA I can rent a studio apt for ~$700 a month?

Probably not lol, I'm on SSDI, but an actual proper city/town sounds great!

Uh, in a few words:

Great Depression 2.0, potentially worse.

The dollar has lost roughly 10% against all other currencies, because we are a debt laden nightmare that is either going to or beginning to default, going to not be the world currency / favored safe asset nation for bonds.

And we produce basically nothing tangible, we import a lot, so... everything gets more expensive.

Also we functionally just fired all our construction workers and farmers via ICE raids, so food goes up in price a lot, probably shortages, ie, famine... and we can't actually build any new houses or warehouses or office buildings or anything without much higher cost, from both imported materials and higher labor costs...

Oh right and the dollar tanking generally means oil, gas goes up in price, so anything involving logistics is now considerably more expensive.

Oh and basically everyone in the bottom 2/3rds by income distribution is in massivr amounts of debt, so, garnished wages, reduced consumer demand...

Yeah, I could go on, but I am quite serious when I say this could actually be worse than the Great Depression.

... I hope to god you didn't buy in roughly the lower 1/3rd of the country, almost all of those areas will be uninsurable within 10 years due to more frequent and more severe climate/weather events.

SoCals gonna burn down, Florida's gonna sink/melt into the ocean, get washed out by hurricanes.

Possibly the only possible bright sidd is that if you have significant stock investments of some kind, those might 'melt up' to roughly keep track with the devuation of the dollar, so you may have a chance at at least treading water there...

... but basically everything else is going to be a shitshow, business can't afford to pay the wages that would be necesssary for a worker to survive, amped up to 11... rents will probably start to trend down after a while though, as housing values nose dive.

Or maybe they'll just say you need to have ridiculous income level to qualify, but we'll give you 3 to 6 months of free rent.

They tend to do literally everything other than just lower prices for as long as they can.

I'd fuckin watch that.

I agree with your specification.

The kind if mixed use, areas that are walkable, have seating, various kinds of shops... usually only in a few districts of a few fairly large towns or large cities.

There is seating, sometimes, in like... restaurants in basically a strip mall type set up... but they're like islands, surrounded by acres of parking lots.

All the way up and down the West Coast, multiple times, over the course of more than 2 decades of being driving age... from Bellingham WA down to LA / San Diego... many, many places in between... also many places all the way out to South Dakota via I 90.

If I gave you a full list, I'd have to rewrite Johnny Cash's "I've been everywhere"... I've actually been to a good number of places in the original lyrics.

Basically yes.

We don't do that in the US anywhere near as much.

Maybe a park will have a table and bench, maybe some certain restaurants in certain parts of certain cities will have them.

But its much, much less common, as our society is designed to be unwalkable, designed for cars and parking lots and air conditioning.

Ubuntu.

Oo boon too?

Oo bun too?

Pretty sure the correct pronunciation is the first, but a lot of people say it as the second.

... lets just name the next big FOSS thing 'Uranus' and watch everyone disagree about how to pronounce that, very loudly.