Yeah, it can be hard, but many things worth doing are hard. If you start with the bare minimum, the other person’s first impression of you is that you half-assed it. Would you be extra interested in someone who’s too half assed to even read your profile?

Put in the hard work. If you don’t have the energy, don’t use the apps. Half-assing it is just going to make you unhappy.

Except when actually trying to make a match, it’s more advantageous to literally swipe right on everyone to maximize matches and then unmatch if you match with someone you aren’t interested in.

This isn’t true if their system punishes people for swiping “yes” on everyone. While I can’t be certain that’s the case, it seems very plausible it is. Swipe yes on everyone, your profile is down ranked, you don’t get as many good matches.

Additionally, tinder and hinge only allow you a limited number of yes swipes per day. If you blow them on the first ten profiles, you’re going to have worse results than if you spend a little longer looking at profiles.

Furthermore, on hinge, you can send a message with your like. Your chances of having a conversation and date go way down without a good message.

Thinking about my friend group, about half the people met their long term partners on dating apps. The other half is a mix of work and large social groups (eg: people who all go to certain kinds of music festivals)

I guess it varies by age and region.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/20/key-takeaways-on-americans-views-of-and-experiences-with-dating-and-relationships/

While meeting partners through personal networks is still the most common kind of introduction, about one-in-ten partnered adults (12%) say they met their partner online. About a third (32%) of adults who are married, living with a partner or are in a committed relationship say friends and family helped them find their match. Smaller shares say they met through work (18%), through school (17%), online (12%), at a bar or restaurant (8%), at a place of worship (5%) or somewhere else (8%).

Some other sources I’m seeing say it’s as high as 60% of couples met online.

I think dating apps are mostly used for hookups

This isn’t especially true. Maybe Feeld and Tinder are less “serious”, but the idea of dating apps is mainstream enough that you find all sorts of people and goals.

The capitalism and for-profit nature does make them all kind of suck, though

The top of the funnel I could see an argument for not putting a lot of thought in. You’re just trying to get a pool of potential matches. (The apps are cruel for making you pay for this and not just giving you the list up front)

But once you do have a match, you have to put in some effort to stand out. A lot of people get a match and all they write is “hey”, and then they go right into the trash. Why would I engage with someone who just wrote “hey” when I could instead talk to someone who read my profile and said something personalized?

Also swiping yes on everyone might do strange things to their recommendation algorithm. Unfortunately that’s a black box, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that puts you in some sort of chum bucket shadow ban situation.

And also, yeah, making you pay for basic filters is a trashy design. Match group should be broken up.

Most of the apps are trashy and don’t optimize for good matches.

At the same time, many users half-ass using them, or deploy a variety of self-sabotage. (No, it’s not that you’re not tall or hot or whatever. It’s more likely your impersonal message didn’t warrant a response)

These two facts together mean a lot of people have truly bad outcomes.

Cool. Been on Pop!_os for a year or so. Not memorable issues. Plays games fine.

Microsoft should be broken up. Even if they walk back some of their AI slop, they’re too big. They don’t fail like they should for releasing a bad product.

Interesting. The inability to pan and walk around makes it very different. I liked “walking” around in geoguesser until I found a landmark or something, but I never played competitively or obsessively.

So as a senior, you could abstain. But then your junior colleagues will eventually code circles around you, because they’re wearing bazooka-powered jetpacks and you’re still riding around on a fixie bike

Lol this works in a way the author probably didn’t intend. They are wearing extremely dangerous tools that were never really a great idea. They’ll code some circles, set their legs on fire, and crash into a wall.

Bg1 and 2, Dragon age, and mass effect famously had save imports, so “the only way” doesn’t check out.

The dark souls games are so far removed in time that the previous game is legend, so that’s an option.

For the tv show they also could have, as I said, just set it somewhere and somewhen else. They can have rumors about what’s happening in Vegas, but it’s 20 years ago and you’re in Chicago, so who knows what’s true.

So, yeah, they could’ve done something else and still made a TV show.

What made new Vegas interesting was that it’s not just another kitschy wasteland romp. It’s post-post-apocalypse, and it asks who rebuilds after.

My limited understanding is the TV show nuked the NCR so they could do more wasteland theme park, and not continue that train of thought. But also didn’t just set it somewhere else.

But admittedly I haven’t actually watched it.

But also, again, trying to make a TV show intersect with a video game with multiple endings is a foolish idea. You won’t make everyone happy, and it’s an entirely avoidable problem. They could’ve just set the show in a different part of the world that hasn’t had a game.

I found a pizza place near me that still has like 2010 prices. It’s like a large pie with 5 toppings for $20. Most places are more like $30 now, here (NYC)

I kind of refuse to watch Fallout. Partly because I read they fucked up the NCR. But also Amazon sucks , and Bethesda is kind of creatively bankrupt.

Spoiler for Shadowheart’s story

And for the main plot in act 3, with a certain bhaalspawn.

Annoying, but I get why they didn’t do like a save import from an ancient game.

Related, if they ever make another game in the franchise this show will probably be canon, so it’s not entirely ignorable.

Technically I don’t have to watch it. I don’t have to play any more games in the franchise either. But if I do want to play more games in the franchise, I’ll probably have to deal with the show.

Can we just not do this?

One, not every thing needs to be a whole franchise universe.

Two, the game had a lot of decisions players could make. Collapsing that into a single canon is going to be unsatisfying. It was annoying enough that bg3 made some big decisions about choices from bg2.

Related, if they ever make another game in the franchise this show will probably be canon, so it’s not entirely ignorable.

Three, it’s not even that interesting a setting. It’s pretty Standard Fantasy.

Yeah I don’t really like the model where it starts basic and hard, and each failure makes it a little easier.

Feels like it would be more interesting if you started with high stats, and each successful run you had to remove or lower something. Sure, you won with 200 health but can you win with 100? Hades kind of had this alongside the upgrades as you go.

I didn’t like dead cells or rogue legacy that much because it felt like I would’ve won if I had grinded more, and that’s not what I want.

I feel like games are usually a mix of execution challenges and numbers challenges. In a pure action game or other games without progression (eg: chess) you win or lose from your decisions and input. But in numbers games, you win or lose based on the stats. There’s really no way cloud from the start of the original ff7 can defeat disc 3 bosses. The numbers just aren’t there.

Some rogue-lites feel like they’re trying to be execution games but have a less clear numbers check on top. Doesn’t always work for me.

I do really like the traditional rogue like Crawl: Stone Soup, though. No meta game aside from the occasional player ghost.

Is it like the other ones where it takes several hours until you start finding interesting guns and get cool powers?

I don’t understand how my coworkers are using windows. Like, they routinely have issues where it randomly reboots or gets sluggish. And it’s just flat out unfit for software development, unless you’re targeting windows specific stuff. They can’t even run our code locally.

Maybe some of the problems are janky security stuff to try to lock it down

I’ve heard this but I haven’t taken the time to find a rom and emulator and get it working (on Linux)