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Cake day: March 8th, 2024

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  • We had enough of them at a time that “the expats” was a relevant group of people you needed to refer to for specific things. Language lessons, HR support, what have you. I definitely heard the anglo guys refer to themselves as that frequently, and that then became the word people used.

    I had a chip on my shoulder about telling people I was a migrant, but I was pretty alone on that. The anglo guys mostly said they were “expats”.



  • It was used colloquially, for sure… by rich corporate migrants that didn’t want to self-ID as migrants. Or at least by the HR people and corpo consultants handling the international relocations and avoding the taboo word.

    Which is what the previous post is saying and it certainly matches my experience as one of the “expats”. I always self-identified as a migrant myself, though.


  • Screw that. I am forced to deal with US politics and culture in enough areas of my life to be shamed for refusing to care about their self-harming tendencies. I don’t have a need to care about what the US do to themselves in the same way I don’t have a need to care about what Argentina or Hungary or Russia do to themselves. At least Russians don’t have a real choice.

    Admittedly, I did have the compulsion to write that down here at all, as opposed to those other examples. In my defense, that’s because a) I literally wrote that as I clicked the “block” button in this community, and b) it’s insanely hard to not pay attention to the US. It requires active effort. This community isn’t even called “US politics”, it’s just called “Politics”. The US dominating my media is the default stance of the world, I have to take aggressive action to make that not be the case.




  • I am genuinely considering moving away from English language social media altogether. I find my native language media… kind of exhausting, honestly, but it’s still better than what the last Trump term triggered, so… maybe? It has the side advantage of countering some of the whole cultural imperialism, because hey, I’ll suffer it from US coastal elites, but I desperately need an alternative if it’s going to be coming form Elon Musk and Donald Trump, so…







  • Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose.

    Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None.

    I am screaming at this juxtaposition. This is such techbro thinking, where he’s oversimplifying a single data point to pretend he’s making a data-driven decision (people in a survey said media is biased) and then leaning on a confirmation biased, entirely non-data driven stance (people don’t vote based on newspaper endorsements because I said so).

    I mean, two seconds of thinking will tell you that people think the press is biased because the press is biased. There is no reason “the press” that is causing this impact is WaPo in a world of Newsmaxes, Foxes and yes, MSNBCs. You’re going to need more than a survey you read once to make that determination.

    And obviously, he has done nothing to determine that his choice doesn’t benefit Trump. He doesn’t even claim that, he just… says so.

    Or that his choice moves the needle towards lack of bias, because man, it sure seems like he’s diminishing independence here, not the opposite.

    It’s the same billionare brain rot. It’s the same wonky self-assured, biased thinking where they can’t pay enough brainpower to consider the facts independently and they’re too convinced of their own infallibility to even address basic human biases or defer to actual experts on their random convictions.

    It’s an absurd way to run a business, let alone a country. And there are few enough of these super rich idiots with a direct enough spotlight that we have a full sample size here. We (now) know how Bezos thinks. We definitely know how Zuck and Musk think. They aren’t to be trusted with the decisionmaking their money warrants them under the current system. Their squishy human brains are too weak and broken to handle it without the elaborate, dispassionate social engineering that keeps reasoably designed liberal democracies chugging along.


  • That’s fair. I do see how it being nominally a new IP instead of a numbered sequel the ways it overlaps with Persona feel like a bit of treading water.

    For me there is way more than enough to separate it, though. The bonkers story alone and the super political spin on it are crazy, plus the gameplay ends up being different enough.

    But yeah, it’s pretty much one of those. Still better than going full action RPG like Square has done with its franchises, though.



  • Ah, yeah, but the fun bit is that there are a ton of builds that let you get there. HP-based skills are powerful in this, and you can heal for cheap, so you can get there that way, and once you get a bit overlevelled and can kill mobs out of turn-based combat you’re just cruising.

    I may see what happens on harder difficulties, but I genuinely don’t care too much, because just the mechanics of figuring out the sequence for each dungeon and enemy type is so fun to do with the brilliant UI that I just… enjoy doing it, kinda like you enjoy clicking things on Diablo or something. Truly smooth design.

    I just wish they had figured out antialiasing better, because woof. I ended up injecting better AA through ReShade and never looked back.


  • I mean, it’s not like accidentally running Recall once is going to automatically compromise all your data to Microsoft in perpetuity. I don’t even know what the final implementation is supposed to be, I’ll make up my mind when I can review it, not before. Ditto for Apple’s version on the new iPhones and all the other stuff being promoted right now.

    But in this case I’m just puzzled. At this point it sure looks like they installed some package or service that is probably the ground layer for the actual feature at some point, but that doesn’t mean it’s doing anything at the moment. Maybe logging the same metadata as the Win8 feature, but it’s not clear (there is a “activity history” setting in the privacy settings now, perhaps it’s part of that?).

    If anything the panic shows how tainted the Recall name has become, but that’s not new for Microsoft. That original logging feature was also widely hated, as was a lot of their search or their current, mandatory “widget” news feed that nobody has ever found useful. The question is how widely tainted it is, and whether normies will want to burn it with fire as much as the Linux-facing techies.


  • Just because you can grind money easily or some other reason?

    In any case on Normal I haven’t felt it at all, mostly because I’ve been single-day completing most dungeons and that gets you a bit overleveled.

    But it’s still a lot faster and tighter than Persona on that front. And more flexible and nonlinear, too. For what looks like a long game, this thing moves. Much fewer, shorter stretches of just visual novelling with friends (although there’s plenty of that, too).


  • Metaphor ReFantazio is amazing.

    I doesn’t look like it needs my help, because it’s doing pretty well, but damn, it’s good.

    Maybe too much anxiety to play a game in which you’re running for office in a fantasy land, at least until November, but… yeah, it’s bonkers and it’s well written and it’s by far the most political game the Persona-adjacent studios have ever done in some really fun ways.

    Also a triumph of UI. Not only does it look great, it’s so frictionless. It’s a turn-based JRPG and it plays faster and more smoothly than that abomination of an action game Square tried to pass as a Final Fantasy VII remake by orders of magnitude. Seriously, go play it if you’re at all interested in that corner of gaming.