Not-So-Mith'd Opportunity: Random Banter # 222

[Tvtyrant]

At this point my family is giving our corporate masters our entire lineage through a heritage sharing group on facebook.

[Anonymouswizard]

So anyway last night a Facebook friend block me on Facebook because I'm not LGBT.

I really want to go on a rant here, but rules.

To give the short version, I've become less enthused with the concept of LGBT as a thing, and I'm still not sold on LGBTQ+. I'm not saying that I'm against LGBT people, but I've seen people use it to dive right into that 'us versus them' mentality on both sides of the topic, which unfortunately will tend to end up also including a person's politics until either you think like them or you're scum. When you add in the fact that in many ways Facebook is only better than 4chan due to a lack of anonyminity you can get blocked fast, although I've only had it happen once.

Another thing is that, if somebody only knows you via Facebook and doesn't really interact with you in real life the mental barrier to unfirending/blocking can be a lot lower (heck, I unfriend people based entirely on 'I don't care about what you post'). I've removed people I interact with in real life from there because of things they've posted/shared, it can lead to arguments but sometimes people just sicken me that much (and no I cannot go into it here).


Well my Unknown Armies campaign might have fallen apart due to being four weeks without a session, so while I wait for the next group meeting I'm working on a Fuzion-based anime-style setting for fun. I'm not going to get to use my interdimensional portal mechanics with that if people decide to drop UA, but it means a more lighthearted setting that might not turn people off.

[Teddy]

Once you've actually learnt how most programming languages work you'll find them easier because of how they flow, and I hate how my first experience with programming was in BASIC. I still have to fight the urge to use gotos instead of For and While loops (I rarely use Do-While, although I understand why you'd use it).

Don't worry, you can acquire such cross connections later in your career as well. For example, I keep trying to do Python style for-loops in Java, despite Java being both my first and most used language. (When programming Python, I instead try to use Matlab's range syntax in my for-loops, but at least I learned Matlab before Python.)

Also, there aren't really a lot of cases where you'd actually find use for do-while-loops. In fact, I'll be as bold as to suggest that their most popular use might be as a workaround to a caveat with macro expansion in C/C++.

Younger folks are steering away from Facebook, but I gotta say it's very active, at least in my experience, with people above the age of 22. I can't imagine leaving the platform, I've been on it for 10 years since teendom.

In my experience, that line is rather somewhere around 35-40. The younger people, while still mostly present, aren't really very active any longer. Most of my friends in my own age bracket are quite silent nowadays, even though I see them like my posts from time to time.

[Anonymouswizard]

Don't worry, you can acquire such cross connections later in your career as well. For example, I keep trying to do Python style for-loops in Java, despite Java being both my first and most used language. (When programming Python, I instead try to use Matlab's range syntax in my for-loops, but at least I learned Matlab before Python.)

Also, there aren't really a lot of cases where you'd actually find use for do-while-loops. In fact, I'll be as bold as to suggest that their most popular use might be as a workaround to a caveat with macro expansion in C/C++.

Yep. It took years until I allowed myself to learn how to do gotos in C, because I knew I wouldn't learn how to code properly if I gave myself that way out. Although I also have to fight the urge not to default to printf as my standard text output function (unfortunately it makes formatting so much easier than any other way I've learnt).

In my experience, that line is rather somewhere around 35-40. The younger people, while still mostly present, aren't really very active any longer. Most of my friends in my own age bracket are quite silent nowadays, even though I see them like my posts from time to time.

Yeah, I find it's mainly those in their 40s and over who are incredibly active. People my age (mid twenties) seem to have migrated over to just sending people a message rather than going through the post-comment routine. Facebook is only my main way of contacting friends because I spent years aggressively avoiding Whatsapp (I couldn't have both it and Spotify on my phone) and most people I know aren't willing to move to Telegram.

I suspect that 'social media' is dying a slow death, despite what companies want me to believe, and that forums are going to outlast social media sites. Heck, I have it on good authority that the companies running social media sites have significantly branched out into other areas, although my friend still refuses to get me an internship or entry-level job.

And now I think about it I should see if I qualify for lab tech positions. Although I suspect I'll need experience for that, which is becoming a pain (it feels like I can't get a job without industry experience, and that I can't get the jobs which will give me that experience without a better degree or industry experience).

[LaZodiac]

Behold!

The Tropical Thunder!

Spoiler

Show

[Bartmanhomer]

I really want to go on a rant here, but rules.

To give the short version, I've become less enthused with the concept of LGBT as a thing, and I'm still not sold on LGBTQ+. I'm not saying that I'm against LGBT people, but I've seen people use it to dive right into that 'us versus them' mentality on both sides of the topic, which unfortunately will tend to end up also including a person's politics until either you think like them or you're scum. When you add in the fact that in many ways Facebook is only better than 4chan due to a lack of anonyminity you can get blocked fast, although I've only had it happen once.

Another thing is that, if somebody only knows you via Facebook and doesn't really interact with you in real life the mental barrier to unfirending/blocking can be a lot lower (heck, I unfriend people based entirely on 'I don't care about what you post'). I've removed people I interact with in real life from there because of things they've posted/shared, it can lead to arguments but sometimes people just sicken me that much (and no I cannot go into it here).


Well my Unknown Armies campaign might have fallen apart due to being four weeks without a session, so while I wait for the next group meeting I'm working on a Fuzion-based anime-style setting for fun. I'm not going to get to use my interdimensional portal mechanics with that if people decide to drop UA, but it means a more lighthearted setting that might not turn people off.

Well he was asking me if I was gay or bisexual and I honestly told him I'm straight then he block me after I told him I was straight. I didn't know the guy that well and he wasn't really much of a friend anyway. Oh well.

[Peelee]

Well he was asking me if I was gay or bisexual and I honestly told him I'm straight then he block me after I told him I was straight. I didn't know the guy that well and he wasn't really much of a friend anyway. Oh well.

What the guy local? It's possible he was attracted to you and read "I'm straight" as "you'll never have a relationship with me" and got upset. People can be crappy that way.

[DataNinja]

Behold!

The Tropical Thunder!

Spoiler

Show

Ah, excellent. A full three meals worth of food right there.

[Bartmanhomer]

What the guy local? It's possible he was attracted to you and read "I'm straight" as "you'll never have a relationship with me" and got upset. People can be crappy that way.

No he wasn't local. I friended him January 2019 and he started to talk to me on Facebook Messenger last night.

[LaZodiac]

Ah, excellent. A full three meals worth of food right there.

I mean it's two doughnuts and a scoop of ice cream. Handful of pineapples aside it's basically just a small dessert. Everyone keeps reacting as if this is some kinda abomination unto god or whatever.

Ya'll got weird food habits.

[HalfTangible]

Behold!

The Tropical Thunder!

Spoiler

Show

AKA heart attack on a plate.

Younger folks are steering away from Facebook, but I gotta say it's very active, at least in my experience, with people above the age of 22. I can't imagine leaving the platform, I've been on it for 10 years since teendom.

I was mostly joking.

[Lacco]

All of them. So anyway last night a Facebook friend block me on Facebook because I'm not LGBT.

All of them...what?

If all of them are what you like, then I will send you a PM if I ever do a re-recruiting (at the moment the one game I plan on running is invite-only and already full). I could be persuaded to run a solo or duo game later. Maybe.

Re: Facebook... well, my feed consists of news from my swordfighting group (no.1 reason I ever go there), ads, one overly active couple's photoposts (to paraphrase the doge: much sport, such running), recipes from two or three stsy-at-home moms, kid photos (almost everyone I know has them now), passive aggressive statements thrown to the void, general questions (do you know if X is any good?), lots of jokes and the two paranoid guys - one of thrm is antivaxxer, anti-everything but prone to lengthy discussions on nothing and the other takes every hoax and perpetuates it. The two often clash in epic (read: stupid) debates on topics nobody cares about.

I may hereby pronounce my facebook account half-dead, as the best stuff there are posts from a professional optimist.

@Anonymouswizard: I am unenthusiastic about extremists from any side of any discussion.

On the other hand, I have blocked only a single person from FB and it was cathartic. The person was all right in RL but every time she contacted me via FB a drama started out. So I decided to enjoy some drama myself and unfriended her. Cue a distressed call where I explained the RL/FB issue. So we normally talk but never communicate via facebook.

I use messenger to talk to people. Haven't posted anything this year yet. Two things last year. Changed my photo 3 years ago. Can't say I'm active user of social media...

[DataNinja]

I mean it's two doughnuts and a scoop of ice cream. Handful of pineapples aside it's basically just a small dessert. Everyone keeps reacting as if this is some kinda abomination unto god or whatever.

Ya'll got weird food habits.

Oh, my mistake. I mistook the pineapple as potatoes and cheese curds, and the caramel(?) as gravy, and interpreted it as doughnuts and whipped cream atop poutine.

So, disregard my comment. Seems like an okay desert to me, even if not to my tastes. Clearly not good for my eyes, though.

[factotum]

Yep. It took years until I allowed myself to learn how to do gotos in C, because I knew I wouldn't learn how to code properly if I gave myself that way out.

I've never used a goto in C? Can't think of a situation where it would be necessary. As for Do...While, I actually quite like the way Visual BASIC handles those--you can put the condition either at the start or the end of the loop, using Do While...Loop or Do...Loop While. You can also use Until rather than While, but since all that effectively does is reverse the sense of the loop condition (While executes while the condition is true, Until executes until it's true) I've never really seen the point of it.

[Insane Jeenyus]

A thought experiment I have been mulling over, can you play a game of clue on line .. .. .. .. ..

[Teddy]

I suspect that 'social media' is dying a slow death, despite what companies want me to believe, and that forums are going to outlast social media sites. Heck, I have it on good authority that the companies running social media sites have significantly branched out into other areas, although my friend still refuses to get me an internship or entry-level job.

I don't know, as far as I've seen, web forums have suffered quite an athropy in the past decade as well, and if they have more staying power than social media, then it's probably because it's easier to set up a web forum on your own domain for non-social interactions for e.g. software developers (for e.g. bug reports, help requests etc.).

My (rather simple) analysis of the development of the Internet ecosystem pins the blame for the decline of web forums and social media alike on Reddit (and other niched media, like Stack Exchange). People don't seek out new areas online to just be overal social, they do so to fulfil niche needs, be it cat pictures, suggestions for the newest hottest computer assembly, speculation about the next triple-A action-RPG, help and reference for a specific programming language or any of the other billion niche interests that people share. In the past, that search would probably end on some web forum, and in the gaps between new posts directly relevant to their niche, people would convene and discuss general topics and be social just to pass the time.

However, media such as Reddit explicitly serve specific niches while at the same time discouraging unrelated socialisation, meaning the people who end up on a specific subreddit (or Stack Exchange topic never start making friends in the downtime. Plus, because they do it so well and attract so many people with the same interest, there isn't very much of a downtime to speak of in the first place.

That said, I'm seeing a growing movement that's filling the semi-social niche that forums traditionally have occupied, and that's Discord servers. Indie game developers and other small-scale content creators with medium-sized fan bases find it easier to set up a Discord server than to deploy a web forum, and chat rooms are arguably even more inviting toward random socialisation than web forums are. Even I, who prefer to type out my thoughts in full before posting them and am fairly misadjusted to fast-moving conversations, have found that I spend more time on Discord nowadays than on web forums.

I've never used a goto in C? Can't think of a situation where it would be necessary. As for Do...While, I actually quite like the way Visual BASIC handles those--you can put the condition either at the start or the end of the loop, using Do While...Loop or Do...Loop While. You can also use Until rather than While, but since all that effectively does is reverse the sense of the loop condition (While executes while the condition is true, Until executes until it's true) I've never really seen the point of it.

They're most often used on the form of "goto error;" to immediately go to a clean-up block in functions that may need to abort early (especially in multiple places) based on some error condition. In Java, that is usually handled by try-catch-finally-blocks instead. There's also a very niche optimisation of switch statements where you use computed gotos to jump to a different numeric label based on a computation. The only reason I know of its existence is because I've seen it in the source code of the CPython virtual machine for switching over the different opcodes, a process you'd imagine they'd want to optimise as much as absolutely possible.

[LaZodiac]

A thought experiment I have been mulling over, can you play a game of clue on line .. .. .. .. ..

There are a variety of ways of playing board games online, most immediate in my memory is Tabletop Simulator on Steam. There is almost certainly a Clue pack someone has made.

[Insane Jeenyus]

I was thinking of play by post for those who do not have hours on end to sit in front of a computer. I have all four of the Magnificent 7 moves as well as the Planet of the Apes movies that came out in December 2011 that all need to be watched. Not to mention Louie L'Amour and a few others.

I HAVE to watch them. the dvds have been SCREAMING at me day and night!

[Bartmanhomer]

All of them...what?

If all of them are what you like, then I will send you a PM if I ever do a re-recruiting (at the moment the one game I plan on running is invite-only and already full). I could be persuaded to run a solo or duo game later. Maybe.

Re: Facebook... well, my feed consists of news from my swordfighting group (no.1 reason I ever go there), ads, one overly active couple's photoposts (to paraphrase the doge: much sport, such running), recipes from two or three stsy-at-home moms, kid photos (almost everyone I know has them now), passive aggressive statements thrown to the void, general questions (do you know if X is any good?), lots of jokes and the two paranoid guys - one of thrm is antivaxxer, anti-everything but prone to lengthy discussions on nothing and the other takes every hoax and perpetuates it. The two often clash in epic (read: stupid) debates on topics nobody cares about.

I may hereby pronounce my facebook account half-dead, as the best stuff there are posts from a professional optimist.

@Anonymouswizard: I am unenthusiastic about extremists from any side of any discussion.

On the other hand, I have blocked only a single person from FB and it was cathartic. The person was all right in RL but every time she contacted me via FB a drama started out. So I decided to enjoy some drama myself and unfriended her. Cue a distressed call where I explained the RL/FB issue. So we normally talk but never communicate via facebook.

I use messenger to talk to people. Haven't posted anything this year yet. Two things last year. Changed my photo 3 years ago. Can't say I'm active user of social media...

Ok. PM me all the info.

[factotum]

They're most often used on the form of "goto error;" to immediately go to a clean-up block in functions that may need to abort early (especially in multiple places) based on some error condition.

I always tend to use a multiple if construction to handle that--so long as the function isn't too long it's readable enough.

[Anonymouswizard]

I was thinking of play by post for those who do not have hours on end to sit in front of a computer. I have all four of the Magnificent 7 moves as well as the Planet of the Apes movies that came out in December 2011 that all need to be watched. Not to mention Louie L'Amour and a few others.

There's more than one Seven Samurai film?


Well my leg aches and feels like it isn't resting right, and I've still got two days of work to go. Anybody got advice for that?

[Insane Jeenyus]

[QUOTE=Anonymouswizard;24082560]There's more than one Seven Samurai film?[Quote]

Why of course there is more then one movie about the plight of the Seven Samurai. There are the original stories before that about the Magnificent Seven!!*

*blue indicates sarcasm!

Well my leg aches and feels like it isn't resting right, and I've still got two days of work to go. Anybody got advice for that?

depending on the type of ache, either hot or cold applied locally, for starters

[Lacco]

Ok. PM me all the info.

If I run anything, I'll PM you. In the meantime, get acquainted with rules for RoS for your own convenience.

[Anonymouswizard]

There's more than one Seven Samurai film?

Why of course there is more then one movie about the plight of the Seven Samurai. There are the original stories before that about the Magnificent Seven!!*

*blue indicates sarcasm!

I didn't know that, thank you for enlightening me about blue text!

And I really want a film called Those Magnificent Seven Samurai in their Flying Machines jessy because the title makes me giggle.

depending on the type of ache, either hot or cold applied locally, for starters

I'm planning a nice got bath when I get home


Also man, I really need to boost my self confidence and my Sense Motive skill. I'm sure anybody who's found me even remotely attractive has since been put off by my obliviousness (and immaturity).

[Teddy]

I always tend to use a multiple if construction to handle that--so long as the function isn't too long it's readable enough.

That's definitely legit as well, but this is one of the rare cases where using a goto doesn't produce worse spaghetti than the alternatives.

I'm planning a nice got bath when I get home

I understand that you meant to write "hot", but now I can't help but imagine what a goth bath would be like.
...
The chances that it would involve either blood or ink are pretty much 1. Possibly even poems written with ink-rippled fraktur in the blood.

[Anonymouswizard]

I understand that you meant to write "hot", but now I can't help but imagine what a goth bath would be like.
...
The chances that it would involve either blood or ink are pretty much 1. Possibly even poems written with ink-rippled fraktur in the blood.

Don't presume things, I'm getting out my candles, blood, and terrible overly dramatic poetry as I type!

[DataNinja]

Don't presume things, I'm getting out my candles, blood, and terrible overly dramatic poetry as I type!

I wouldn't get out your blood, if I were you. I hear humans (and presumably human-descendants) need that in their bodies.

[Anonymouswizard]

I wouldn't get out your blood, if I were you. I hear humans (and presumably human-descendants) need that in their bodies.

Don't worry, I have a guy who supplies me. I don't know why he hangs out near the orphanage, but it's high quality blood

In all seriousness, because I just realised my last post could be interpreted as a suicide reference, no I'm not considering it.


Unpopular opinion time! As far as I'm concerned a story that never ends is inherently wrong as a story and I don't get why some people's reaction to a story ending seems to be 'more story with these characters/world please'. It doesn't msatter how long it is, but the themes should be brought to a conclusion, and once they've reached that conclusion why go on?

[Comrade]

Unpopular opinion time! As far as I'm concerned a story that never ends is inherently wrong as a story and I don't get why some people's reaction to a story ending seems to be 'more story with these characters/world please'. It doesn't msatter how long it is, but the themes should be brought to a conclusion, and once they've reached that conclusion why go on?

Is that all that unpopular of an opinion? I know I'm sure glad when my favorite authors know when to call it quits on a series.

I understand that you meant to write "hot", but now I can't help but imagine what a goth bath would be like.

Like a regular bath, but with Type O Negative playing in the background, maybe.

[DataNinja]

Unpopular opinion time! As far as I'm concerned a story that never ends is inherently wrong as a story and I don't get why some people's reaction to a story ending seems to be 'more story with these characters/world please'. It doesn't msatter how long it is, but the themes should be brought to a conclusion, and once they've reached that conclusion why go on?

I think it's wanting more from the world and characters and whatnot. But, I agree. Franchises, especially movies, tend to overstay their welcome. I loved The Iron Giant. Wouldn't want a sequel. I thought Megamind was a fun movie, but I think it said all it needed to, and would just become stale quickly if it tried to have a sequel. The Hobbit? Three movies was more than enough, thanks, you really coulda compressed that. Wreck It Ralph? Fresh and clever, but, man, was the sequel disappointing.

Really, I could go on. But the point is, yes, I agree with you that people should recognize that franchises tend to have a shelf life, and that wanting them to go on for more than that is going to result in a lot of tarnishing by sheer necessity. It's really hard to stay fresh while still capturing whatever fade the first product special.