Do you drop trou and stand in front of a toilet every time you need to toot the flesh whistle?

What, asking experts who have studied a topic and has forgotten more about systems of governance and effective anti corruption efforts than I’ll ever know is somehow bad now? The fuck?

Yeah, it’s a fantasy, and an extremely off-the-cuff, low-detail, wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if list. In reality, I’d probably either shut up and change absolutely nothing while I figure out the power structures, or I’d just work out a payoff to quietly step down and leave without a fuss.

assign everyone a government mandated fursona

Freak the fuck out.

Pull back from Ukraine, Crimea, and Georgia, and negotiate an immediate ceasefire.

Call as many political scientists and scholars as possible and get their advice on how the fuck I can design a reformed system of democratic governance that is robust enough to withstand the inevitable attempts to undermine and corrupt it.

Find the multitude of stashed billions from the various oligarchs and seize it, use the money to invest in overhauling Russian society–improving infrastructure and education, improving the standard of living, etc.

In the show just before these were taken, Omni-Man got in a fight with another hero named The Immortal, where The Immortal went for the eyes and tried to blind him by gouging them out. It definitely hurt him, but it didn’t work, and Omni-Man ripped The Immortal in half shortly afterwards. (He got better.)

The Phoenix Wright trilogy–the first three original GBA games/DS re-releases. They set up and develop so many arcs that pay off both within each game and across the entire trilogy. I would even go so far as to say that Phoenix Wright 3 is one of the best visual novel games of all time.

Nope. Been there, done that, turned a relatively amicable breakup into a “you’re a piece of shit and don’t ever speak to me again” situation, ruining another friendship in the process. It’s a horrible, horrible idea.

Well, aside from the obvious “make myself my fursona” bit…

I’d get rid of my ADHD, or at the very least get rid of its interaction with food and exercise. It’s been such a burden, to the point where it’s singlehandedly prevented me from taking up new hobbies (because I know I won’t stick to them and can’t afford to waste the money), kept me from focusing on new certs (because I suck at self-directed study), and it’s the single biggest reason why I’m overweight. I fucking hate it. ADHD superpowers, my ass. This is a fucking debilitating disease, and even with medicine it still sucks.

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.

Really? Fusion stops holding your hand around the time you get to sector 4, but it’s strictly linear until you’re literally about to go fight the final boss–the game explicitly blocks you from backtracking to areas that aren’t immediately plot-relevant.

I’m utterly blessed because my personal area of coverage is in the hardware and storage systems (disks, RAID, filesystems, virtualization, etc.) so I am way more likely to interact with business users instead of individual home users, which is where the vast majority of the “I have XX decades of experience” types come from. They’re also generally a lot more willing to listen to me because if I’m talking to them it’s fair odds that they fucked up bad enough that they’re at risk of losing all their data, and that’s usually enough to get them to shut up.

But god, some of the tickets I’ve seen from other employees…

In my experience, any time someone mentions how many decades of experience they have in IT, it means they either:

• Think that clicking the Facebook button on their desktop and finding their Downloads folder qualifies as experience in IT

• Have decades of actual IT experience, but think everything still works like they did in the 90s. Yeah, maybe you were an IT expert at one point, but you never bothered to keep your skills fresh, you geezer.

In either case, they think they know better than the lowly flunkie trying to help them, and trying to get them to actually listen to you and “please sir just upload debug logs, I beg you, no those aren’t debug logs, I gave you the instructions to generate debug logs three times already, maybe things will be different after the fourth time, there’s a literal KB article with step by step instructions to sync your photo library, no I won’t call you to handhold you through this, I’d literally just be reading the steps in the article” is pure suffering.

my company announced today that they were going to start a phased rollout where AI would provide first responses to support tickets submitted by users, with it initially being “reviewed” by humans with the eventual goal being it just sending responses unsupervised. The strength of my "OH HELL NO" derailed the entire meeting for a solid 15 minutes lmao

Well, I’ve tried using it for the following:

• Asking questions and looking up information in my job’s internal knowledgebase, using a specially designed LLM trained specifically on our public and internal knowledgebase. It repeatedly gave me confidently incorrect answers and linked nonexistent articles.

• Deducing a bit of Morse code that didn’t have any spaces in it, creating an ambiguous word. I figured it could iterate through the possible solutions easily enough, saving me the time of doing it myself. I gave up in frustration after it repeatedly gave answers that were incorrect from the very first letter.

If I ever get serious about looking for a new job, I’ll probably try and have it type up the first draft of a cover letter for me. With my luck, it’ll probably claim I was a combat veteran or some shit even though I’m a fat 40-something who’s never even talked with a recruitment officer in their life.

Oh, funny story–some of my coworkers at the job got the brilliant idea to use the company LLM to write responses to users for them. Needless to say, the users were NOT pleased to get messages signed “Company ChatGPT LLM.” Management put their foot down immediately that doing it was a fireable offense and made it clear that we tracked every request sent to our chatbot.

I bought a funny drawing for $20 from Goodwill showing toony animals in an 80s office setting. It was extremely dated, down to portraying a mainframe computer with eyes on it, but there’s something about it I find absolutely charming and it has a place of honor above my fireplace.

A few years later, I looked it up on a whim, and it turned out to be a limited-run lithograph called “Bits” by Robert Marble in 1983, and it was worth a hundred bucks then (closer to $250 now). There’s only 750 copies of it ever made, and mine is a relatively low number (122).

There’s no way in hell I’m selling it, but it’s a really neat little story!

It’s not that song, it’s a song that plays during the climax of End of Evangelion and has very strong themes of suicide and loss, played over an upbeat, lively tune. Just imagine these lyrics over something reminiscent of a Beatles song circa Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band:

*I know, I know I’ve let you downz

I’ve been a fool to myself

I thought that I could

live for no one else

But now through all the hurt and pain

It’s time for me to respect

the ones you love

mean more than anything

So with sadness in my heart

(I) feel the best thing I could do

is end it all

and leave forever

what’s done is done it feels so bad

what once was happy now is sad

I’ll never love again

my world is ending

It’s one of my favorite scenes in animation, just because of how utterly fucked up everything is and how many layers there are to everything

At least you’ve gotten a post from the community in the past week, it’s been months since anybody posted anything in only battlebots community on lemmy. I know it’s the off-season, but still…

I’m going to go for a bit of a deeper cut and say Mad Rat Dead. They took a genre which relies so heavily on the strength of its music (rhythm platformer), and produced a soundtrack where literally every song is a banger, and produced some great emotional moments as well–the transition from Cottage House to Kind of Hope and Neuchatel still makes me choke up just thinking about it.

It’s very user friendly in terms of tooltips, and if you don’t make deliberately bad choices during level up (e.g. taking a feat that gives you a cantrip from the Wizard class… that scales off your INT score… while playing a Barbarian with 8 intelligence that can’t cast spells while raging) it’s fairly difficult to make an unplayably bad character.

There’s a few cases where some general knowledge of D&D is helpful, such as knowing to never take True Strike because it’s literally worse than just attacking twice and having some knowledge of good builds is useful, since it helps guide what you take when you level up. That said, there’s also entire categories of actions in BG3 that don’t really have an equivalent rule in TTRPG 5e, such as weapon proficiency attacks, so online cookie cutter builds don’t capture the full extent of what you can do.

Yeah, fair. $3/hr for a 15/hr job is amazing. For a 45/hr job? Not so much.