TheSambassador

joined 1 year ago
[–] TheSambassador 7 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I think the way we consume news has gotten incredibly unhealthy. The rush to know things as fast as possible has lowered the quality of news, and mixing the news into your entertainment feed of the entire day might be weird for our brain.

I feel you though. There's shitty things happening in the world and it doesn't seem like it's helpful to anyone for me to know about every little instance. I wish I could just get detailed stories for local news, and just get general stats for national stuff.

[–] TheSambassador 5 points 2 days ago

I do agree, but the thing that really defines your worldview is what you think the ratio of "good" to "bad" people are, along with how much you think people can change.

Personally, I think a lot of humans are largely interested in maintaining the status quo and avoiding large amounts of change. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're bad or evil or unredeemable, it just means that they're influenced by the systems that we've built and take comfort in what is known.

Be careful of diving too far into cynicism. Why would you try to change anything if you think it's impossible? Understand that the world is frustrating sometimes and give grace whenever you can when people make mistakes (as long as you make it clear when boundaries are crossed).

[–] TheSambassador 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Really depends on the road. Try biking on the road in Texas or Florida.

[–] TheSambassador 22 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Why would Terraria staff ever crunch? Nobody except the utterly deranged would be expecting more content from them, and even then there would be no reasonable person who would need it sooner. There's no deadline for them to crunch to.

[–] TheSambassador 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

People see a sample size of 30 and assume it's instantly a bad study. A small sample size can still have considerable power depending on the experimental design and assuming that the sample is actually random across the target population. At the very least, it's information that can be used to guide the experimental design of future studies.

[–] TheSambassador 4 points 3 weeks ago

Never mind, hadn't scrolled down far enough, now they're coming through.

[–] TheSambassador 13 points 3 weeks ago

First time I bought condoms, I also bought goldfish crackers.

[–] TheSambassador 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Same, and I usually just browse TopDay.

[–] TheSambassador 9 points 1 month ago (6 children)

most

Source?

I'm pushing back on this viewpoint wherever I'm seeing it. Humans are certainly flawed in a lot of ways, especially in how easy it can be to mislead us, but this cynical worldview that most people are actively wanting others to hurt is not based in reality. Honestly it sounds like me when I was in the depths of depression.

I think we have a major problem with how we share and consume news. Stories are shared as screen-capped headlines that emphasize the Bad thing that happened, and even if you find the original article, it's stuffed with ads that make you not want to bother. Random one-off bad/stupid things that one person did somewhere far away are reported as world news without statistics and context.

The result? Increasing cynicism. The good, uplifting stories rarely come through. People begin to base their worldview and how they interact with other people on this "fact" that most people suck. This culminates in them becoming the thing that they think everyone is - they go through life scared of or angry at other people by default.

It isn't an inevitability. Maybe I'm wrong, but believing in people is a much better existence, even when they occasionally let me down.

[–] TheSambassador 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Sure .. but a single donut?

Honestly the process for getting reimbursed is annoying enough that I'm only going to do it for stuff that's more than $10. I don't need to be reimbursed often though

[–] TheSambassador 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Welcome to most modern journalism! Remember when every news org started spending time going to Twitter to get the general population's reactions (instead of actually interviewing real people and figuring out how actually widespread a viewpoint is)? It's been downhill from there.

Combined with most people only reading headlines, news organizations almost never providing context for most actual facts, and wealth concentration like we've never seen, the current state of news media is pretty dire.

You can get people to assume almost any cynical worldview you want when you can chip away at their belief in humanity by repeatedly showing only the worst examples of it. This is what conservative news media has been so good at - getting them to believe a specific image of "liberal" and allowing that image to represent ALL liberals instead of just the most extreme side. Honestly, it feels like most people on the left are similarly starting to use dehumanizing language to describe conservatives. All this leads to people avoiding communication because they assume that everyone on "the other side" believes insane nonsense. Sometimes they do. A lot of times, they don't.

[–] TheSambassador 6 points 1 month ago

Most Bethesda RPGs are going for bredth instead of depth. They give you a giant world to explore and usually throw you into that world with complete freedom relatively quickly.

I generally agree that Skyrim (and Oblivion to be honest) aren't particularly strong games when you look at pretty much any individual system, and the games don't interest me much, but I totally get the appeal.

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