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tuckerm

@ tuckerm @supermeter.social

Posts
7
Comments
99
Joined
3 yr. ago

Here to talk about fighting games, self hosting web apps, and easy weeknight recipes.

My mastodon account: @tuckermMy blog: https://tuckerm.us

  • Do you think the world would have been a better place if there were no religions?

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  • This is a hard question. I think that we would be better off if more people adopted secular worldviews. But throughout history? I don't think we can simply say "what if there were no religions" -- we'd have to be completely different creatures for it to have gone that way. But I do think we'd be better off if we were that kind of creature.

    It's interesting that every group of people, basically ever, has started a religion. I'm no anthropologist, but as far as I know, every civilization to have ever existed has formed one. Forming a religion is as natural as forming a language. Clearly, it's a thing we do. Lacking an explanation for our questions, from "what are rainbows?" to "what happens when we die?" we will apparently just fill something in. Everyone did it.

    For us to have not formed religions, we'd have to be more comfortable with uncertainty. We'd need to have been better at accepting that we don't know some things, and we can doggedly look for answers, but we shouldn't insist that we know something before we really do. And I think our species kind of sucks at that.

    If we were better at accepting uncertainty while still pursuing answers, we'd all be better off. And maybe, as a side effect of that, we wouldn't have formed religions.

    When Og and Bog saw the sun come over the hill one morning, and Og was like, "Hey Bog, how do you think that happens?" Bog should've said, "I don't know. Maybe someday, someone will know." Instead, Bog went off on some real bullshit, and now here we are.

  • What is something people you encounter at your job say that makes you want to scream? (Job, person & quote)

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  • Just charge them for bananas. 4011. Everything is bananas if it doesn't scan.

  • What is something people you encounter at your job say that makes you want to scream? (Job, person & quote)

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  • Do this as a temporary measure. We will code it properly later

    I'm always blown away whenever someone says that they like some language or framework because it's "great for prototyping."

    Like, what magical fairyland software company do you work at where your prototypes are not immediately put into production as soon as they kind of start to work?

  • What is something people you encounter at your job say that makes you want to scream? (Job, person & quote)

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  • I once had a job in an office building that was shared by several different businesses. One of them was an accounting firm that seemed like an incredibly boring place. And I swear, every time two guys from the accounting firm passed each other in the hallway, they had to say to each other, "You having fun yet?" or "Are ya workin' hard or hardly workin'?"

    It must have been a requirement. Literally company policy. I heard it so many times in just a couple years, there's no other explanation. Like, if you didn't say it, the manager would ask to see you in his office, and he'd be like, "Hey Phil, someone tells me that you and Dave passed each other in the hallway, and neither of you said 'you having fun yet.' Now you know we like to have fun around here, and 'you having fun yet' is part of our company culture, so I'm gonna need you to make sure that you say 'you having fun yet.' It's for fun. And we like to have fun. It's mandatory."

  • What is something people you encounter at your job say that makes you want to scream? (Job, person & quote)

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  • Job: cashier. Not my current job, but definitely the one that racked up the most irritating quotes.

    Customer: "Now, don't you try to double scan my items. I'm watching you."

    I heard this one constantly when I was a cashier at a grocery store. At first I assumed that they were kidding. After all, it's such a stupid accusation to make. It was only after about 100 elderly people had said it while staring daggers at me that I realized they weren't kidding.

    I assume there must have been a news report in the 1960s about store clerks charging you twice for an item and then taking the extra cash, and a certain kind of person had been paranoid about it ever since. Except this wasn't in the 1960s, it was the 2010s, and such a scam couldn't even work anymore. The cash register isn't just a lockbox like it was in the 60s, it's a computer and it knows exactly how much money should be in it. And if it has less than that in it when your shift ends, you're screwed.

    Plus, you're paying with a credit card, Gertrude, how am I supposed to steal your shit when you're paying with a credit card?

    I think the thing that made it so irritating was the fact that they are willing to whip out this assertive, domineering attitude at you based on information that hasn't been true for about forty freaking years. They have a mistrust of other people because they don't know how the world works anymore, yet they think they've outsmarted you.

  • It’s not them, it’s us: the real reason teens are ‘addicted’ to video games

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  • This article brings up a great point.

    In addition, I've always thought that video games work the way we were told the world worked. (At least, the way we were told it worked in the 90s in America.) Work hard to get some resources so that you can use those resources to build more stuff to get more resources, etc.

    Kids today can work as hard as they want, only to still have no chance of paying for college and still have no chance of buying a house. Video games at least provide that "strategy - effort - reward - next level" cycle that our brains find very rewarding, which, for far too many people, does not exist in real life.

    That's probably what makes modern games so disappointing, too. Games were one area that actually was a meritocracy... until pay-to-win messed that up.

  • what're some of your gaming hot takes? In regards to opinions about certain characters or plot points, etc.

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  • Sonic and Dr. Robotnik are codependent. They don't actually want to defeat each other. That's why Robotnik is always building these elaborate bases that, for some reason, have a bunch of perfectly Sonic-sized tubes for getting around in. And it's why there's always that moment at the end where Sonic is chasing Robotnik but doesn't catch him.

  • A sim rally & racing game community

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  • Cool! I'm not a hardcore sim racing fan, but I got a little into them when I realized that you can play them without a wheel if you use the gyroscope in a PS5 controller for steering. It's not perfect, but it's accurate enough to play these games that are otherwise unplayable with an analog stick.

    BTW if anyone is reading this and thinks you might want to try it, Assetto Corsa is two dollars on the Steam sale right now. It came out a while ago, but there are graphics mods that make it look nice. https://store.steampowered.com/app/244210/AssettoCorsa/

  • New Feature to Highlight journalism on Mastodon

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  • This is very cool. I'm hoping 404media.co and aftermath.site do it -- those are two independent sites that I've subscribed to after hearing about them on the fediverse. Seems like most of 404media's writers are on Mastodon, at least.

    I also like that this feature creates the ability to have a known link for an author across multiple websites. With that, you could show posts that link to any other article by the same author, regardless of which site the article was published on. So then you can see all the threads of discussion about all of the articles that particular author has written.

  • What are your plans for when the Milky Way galaxy collides with Andromeda?

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  • I'm more than happy to jump over to whichever side is winning. Got my Andromeda flag ready to fly as soon as things start leaning in their favor.

  • Play Your Way – enjoy your GOG games with Luna cloud streaming

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  • I'm guessing GP was referring to the fact that the DRM-free download store is partnering with a "you don't actually own this" streaming service. As long as it's optional, I don't have an issue with it, and the word ironic doesn't necessarily imply that its a negative.

  • Blumenkrantz "Massively Improves" Mesa's glReadPixels Performance With 7 Lines Of Code

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  • Very cool. I'm also really curious about how the author ended up looking at Blazblue when working on this, haha.

  • YouTube is dedicated to making itself worse; destroys SponsorBlock with ad injection changes

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  • This may not work out the way I want it to, but I'm actually a little excited about these tech companies making a bunch of anti-consumer decisions all at once. So many mainstream users will be looking for alternatives, and it's going to provide a great opportunity for non-profit open source projects. It's already happening with the fediverse suddenly becoming a viable place for discussion in the last 1.5 years. After Windows Recall was announced, I've seen more people talking about switching to Linux than ever before. Part of me can't wait for unskippable Youtube ads.

  • What was announced at Summer Games Fest that you are most excited for?

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  • I've never been excited for DLC before, but Street Fighter 6 adding Terry and Mai, from King of Fighters, was very unexpected. I think that was my favorite.

    I've been playing Capcom vs. SNK 2 whenver I have a few minutes to spare these days: https://saltylike.us/@tuckerm/112482256002789207.

  • Google accidentally published internal Search documentation to GitHub

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  • Bleh, I really hate to side with Google, especially when releasing this documentation benefits users and hiding it benefits Google.

    But it seems weird for this new license to be legally binding. If someone committed this to the wrong repo, and that person didn't have legal authority over the original content, then how can they have legally relicensed it?

  • God of War Ragnarök will require a PSN account to play on PC

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  • Aw, I was looking forward to this one. But also, meh, my unplayed backlog is huge.

    I'm gonna put on my casual-observer-business-analyst hat real quick: it seems weird that Sony is making so many decisions that they know will piss off customers with their brand lately. Microsoft has been striking out hard with underwhelming exclusives, whereas at least Sony has had a few hits. Sony could take advantage of that and use this generation to crush the Xbox brand pretty hard. The payoff would be huge later on.

    Business execs always fancy themselves as military generals; I'm sure they've heard that Napoleon quote, "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." Instead, they seem to be taking advantage of Microsoft's blunders to just knowingly make their own blunders.

    Like, even from a cutthroat business exec mindset, there is a profit-motivated reason to just chill out with the anti-consumer stuff right now. Your biggest competitor has been absolutely unloading a clip into their own foot for like two years. Quit drawing attention to yourself.

  • German parliament will stop using fax machines

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  • I think the the previous post was sarcasm. :)

  • New open source Bandcamp alternative "Mirlo" is a worker co-op!

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  • Great moments in PC gaming: That time Valve released three new games on the same day

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  • I'm so glad I bought this in a store back when PC games were still available in physical releases. Even though I'm pretty sure this one was just a Steam installer on a CD, I love having an actual copy of The Orange Box on my shelf.