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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • For what it’s worth, I played the NES release of DQ1, and then a translation of the japan-only SNES release of DQ2 recently (I actually beat DQ2 last week) and I found DQ2 to be a much better game than DQ1 overall. DQ1 was… interesting, but it was very much a game that did not respect the player’s time in the least, to the point of expecting the player to fight literally hundreds of battles in order to grind up enough money and experience to afford the gear. The most charitable thing I can say about it is that the battle system was so rudimentary and so grindy that the gameplay felt more like it was focused on resource management–there was a tension in deciding whether you could afford to take another fight, or if you needed to return to town and spend money sleeping at an inn to heal (setting your grind back at least 1-2 fights with how piddly gold and XP drops were), optimizing efficiency in spending your MP to heal vs. the risk of dying to the next monster, etc.

    DQ2 meanwhile was a much more robust and much less grindy game–the simple addition of multiple party members and multiple enemies in a single battle meant that your gold and XP gains were multiplied over the first game. While it still demanded grinding, it was much more reasonable about it, and it felt much more like a “modern” JRPG like you’re used to seeing.








  • The problem is that there’s no incentive for employees to stay beyond a few years. Why spend months or years training someone if they leave after the second year?

    But then you have to question why employees aren’t loyal any longer, and that’s because pensions and benefits have eroded, and your pay doesn’t keep up as you stay longer at a company. Why stay at a company for 20, 30, or 40 years when you can come out way ahead financially by hopping jobs every 2-4 years?




  • Who even knows? For whatever reason the board decided to keep quiet, didn’t elaborate on its reasoning, let Altman and his allies control the narrative, and rolled over when the employees inevitably revolted. All we have is speculation and unnamed “sources close to the matter,” which you may or may not find credible.

    Even if the actual reasoning was absolutely justified–and knowing how much of a techbro Altman is (especially with his insanely creepy project to combine cryptocurrency with retina scans), I absolutely believe the speculation that the board felt Altman wasn’t trustworthy–they didn’t bother to actually tell anyone that reasoning, and clearly felt they could just weather the firestorm up until they realized it was too late and they’d already shot themselves in the foot.






  • First, it’s important to find an instance that caters to your interests, especially if you have more niche hobbies. Once you’re set up, search for and follow hashtags related to your personal interests, and use those to find accounts you like. Use hashtags in your own posts so that people can discover you more easily, and browse users that follow you to see if they’d be interesting to follow back and expand your network out. Keep an eye on the local and federated timeline for interesting posts, which includes all posts from people on the same instance and from all federated instances. Eventually, as you build up a follow list (and especially as you follow highly active accounts) your followed accounts will start introducing you to new accounts themselves through boosting posts.

    It’s more work since you’re building the network yourself instead of having it spoon-fed to you by an algorithm, but it’s overall much more rewarding, and lets you tailor your experience to your own personal preferences.




  • Theoretically it can happen. In practical terms, 99% of those cases are out of three things:

    • A charade to get an angry customer to go away (pretending to fire an employee)

    • The last straw in a series of incidents that add up to justify firing the employee (i.e. the employee has repeatedly made a mistake with no improvement over a long period of time)

    • Misconduct egregious enough to warrant firing them on the spot (for example, the employee punches a customer, or shows up to a job site blackout drunk)

    The remaining 1% of cases are truly shitty managers that are a nightmare to work for.