u/the_circus

So I don’t get it. For example, the president does something egregiously (and as I understand it illegal) using his office for personal enrichment/profit, invites the media to broadcast him doing it, then even gives interviews all about it. Then he repeats the whole thing over and over. I get that the right’s just gonna cheer and chant, “Go King!” But here’s the thing that blows my mind. The left in federal power just keeps going like business as usual. I mean they complain, they campaign against it, but government is still going on. What? There aren’t any bills more important than this. Why isn’t government stalled, if not shut down dealing with this? From my view I don’t see any actual opposition. What’s called both sides (and plum forget checks and balances) is actually just uniform participation. I don’t know how anyone in the federal government right now can be called anything but just a direct employee of Trump, regardless of how much in opposition they claim to be. It seems like universal dereliction of duty, unless even the complaints are nothing but kayfabe acting and everyone involved is just a loyal employee. What I’m seeing doesn’t match my expectations in this sort of situation at all. What’s going on here that makes any sense?

I'm trying to blow up a one page pdf so it's about 4 pages by 4 pages (8.5x11), but I also need to have some precise edges on the image I'm cutting up onto larger pages. Is there a way in Canva I can make 16 8.5x11 pages from a single page pdf and precisely size the image on each page?

I didn't get a chance to start monkey island before, but I see the option is gone from the start menu now. Is there any difference between that and starting a monkey island mission from within the sea of thieves?

Yeah this is somewhat meta, but my search for a place to put my second suggestion has inspired my first suggestion and why I need a Reddit for it.

So first, i had a suggestion for Reddit and went looking for a Reddit to post it to. But all the matching ones were post restricted with no new posts in years. Now an active Reddit with restricted posts or joining is just fine. But restricted and dead, just means it really is just truly dead. They clog searches. If I’m looking for something I should be able to exclude restricted post Reddits that are dead. They’re just a waste of space.

My second suggestion, which started all this, is that instead of up arrow and down arrow there should be five options: up good (I got a promotion!), up bad (my dog passed away), down good (you’re not wrong, you’re just a jerk), down bad (your post is bad and you should feel bad), and non sequitur (have you misunderstood what the conversation is even about?).

I don’t know if it was borrowing from earlier interrogation/torture media, and I’m sure it’s inspired other films and shows, but by meme alone everyone should know what’s meant by there are 4 lights.

But to start, the left and the right are rather vague political terms. One thing we can see in the American right (I’d call it far far far right but that’d be redundant) is how almost everything is a lie. It’s been a cornerstone of their movement (“free speech” and anti cancel culture) for decades, in order to get away with saying anything. Complete abandonment of truth in order to push absolutely whatever narrative they want, even if it’s completely contradictory. They need people to go along with this, which means they need people to fundamentally abandon truth. They need the people to honestly believe there are 5 lights when they can see for themselves there are only 4.

Pushing people to that point is a slow, gradual process, but fairly easily if the lies can be kept up continuously and without interference. The true difficulty is the initial wedge. If people already accept that truth isn’t true, deny the reality they can see for themselves, then it’s just a matter of pressure and time. Stopping it either requires the lies to be held to account (things like slander, libel, and fraud laws, and a legal system that isn’t corrupt or a joke), or that initial wedge needs to be broken. And that initial wedge is religion. As long as someone is religious they’re open to accepting lies they know are lies. Anything, everything, is just a matter of degree after that. I don’t try and convince religious people to open their eyes, but if I do see an atheist who isn’t also an antitheist I’ll hopefully be able to convince them that going along with 5 lights isn’t just a personal choice.

I’m trying to be as tasteful as possible here, and trying to avoid an outright removal. But I know for myself there will one day come a new holiday I’ll be adding to my calendar. I just don’t know what to call it yet. This isn’t an entirely self serving thing either. We as a nation need to be reminded about the need to preserve the will of the people, and that some of the people, our neighbors at times, fall prey to mouthpieces that never tell a truth, especially when backed up by large budget propaganda working to keep people in the dark or at least confused. A day simply devoted to schadenfreude will die out within a generation. But a holiday more thoughtfully and tastefully designed could endure and help prevent repeating mistakes of the past. It should be a day devoted to truth, and to recognizing the difference between free speech and fraud. We’ve also rendered the idea of this being a nation of laws highly dubious. So what should this holiday become?

I’m playing around with and overhauling some quite old war board games and was thinking of replacing the lackluster CRT with a dice rolling mechanic. I was thinking of borrowing the basic idea from the game Mare Nostrum, where each unit would roll a D6, total it up, and the number of hits you got was the highest multiple of five in the total. Roll dice totaling 18, you got three hits. War isn’t all or nothing this way. In fact individual units fighting generally result in no losses.

In Mare Nostrum it’s just the dice. The military units in the game I’m working with have combat values of 1 (for weak units), 2 (mid), or 3 (heavy units). So I was thinking of D4’s for each unit, then the dice total plus combat values being the total number. I was also considering 0-5 D6’s or 1-2-2-3-3-4 D6’s, all with the multiples of five mechanic for number of hits. I do want the possibility of no losses in small battles, and making total destructions difficult. What sounds more fun to you?

I'm a board gamer and have made a few copies of long out of print games. For my last game I printed an image of the counter sheet on a sheet of label paper, cut out the square counters, and attached them to one inch square plastic tiles. For my new project though I’m going huge. Rather than making what would be 3/4 inch counters, I’m taking 70mm square sleeves and putting 70mm square card blanks in them and then just printing the counters to a much larger scale and cutting them out and slipping them into the sleeves. I’m also getting a stencil for making 3 inch hex grids and make a rather large board out of project boards.

The trick now is printing. I’m trying to print sections of what would be an 8.5x11 single page PDF so that I’ve got 12 counters, 3x4 counters, to an output 8.5x11 page - without cutting off edges or printing half counters or printing 5 million pages. I’d hoped i could just try and zoom into a section of the sheet and print screen but it’s not working so well. Any suggestions to make this easier, ideally without installing any new software? The printing itself is being done at my local library since except for a few gaming projects I'd never have any use for a good color printer myself.

I've wound up visiting that Burger king a few times in the past month, drive thru, and each time it's been a major fiasco. The drive thru has taken an inordinately long time, and the time before this one I thought had taken the cake when the people in the car behind me actually started shouting with the people in the car two ahead of me because it was taking so long.

I don't blame the workers. They're following their orders and the buck stops with whomever is managing this. So this time I placed an order on their app, buy one get one free chicken sandwiches (add pickles tomatoes and onions to each) and a large mello yellow. So they already have my order when I pull into drive thru. They also already have my order when I finally get to the order microphone and tell them I'm here. And then we wait. I turned off my engine twice before I finally got up to the window. Did they have my order all ready for me? They'd had time. No, they had no idea who I was or what I'd ordered. Presumably they had no idea what the people behind me had ordered either since it seems they didn't start cooking anything until you reached the window to pick it up anyway.

So now, finally, they begin making my order. After a while they finally had a bag and drink to hand to me and apologized for the wait. The bag was taped shut, and I think I will no longer accept fast food bags that are taped shut. Since when I got home with my order and opened it did I find my order? Not even close. I'd been randomly given a double cheeseburger with bacon (no pickles, add mayo, no mustard), a large fries, and a lemonade. Surprise!

I understand this could just be a me thing, but I suspect it's not. Also since it's relevent, I'm an atheist. I had two sort of crises of free will when I was first finding out about autism. The first was discovering my trait of wearing t-shirts and socks inside out wasn't necessarily just a "me" thing and wasn't uncommon for autistic people. The other is when I read that atheism was more common in autistic people and I had to question for a moment if I'd really come to my own conclusions or if it wasn't actually my choice.

The thing is I heard a drawn out conversation between NT people about forgiveness and needing to forgive and struggling to forgive and I realized the whole conversation was just alien to me. If I've come to a conclusion that someone is unpleasant, or dangerous, I steer clear of them. Maybe I could be wrong in my assessment, and so that might change, but does my knowledge of a person inform me they might cause me harm? After that it's just using common sense, as hackneyed an expression as that is.

Is this maybe why NT's seem to vilify or lionize people all the time? It seems to NT's that people either have to fit into a nearly flawless category, or completely evil. Maybe this is where those weird but disapointingly common prejudices come from. Maybe it's not uncommon for an NT to see someone of a different race do something bad on the news and now they hold that against everyone of that race. Or they like a way a particular politician speaks and then they completely overlook and defend everything that person does.

This also gets into how forgiveness is a cornerstone of western religion and I just don't get why. Are NT's hypervigilant in a way that one perceived betrayal poisons their view of someone far beyond simply assessing their trustworthiness? To me, you could have an accurate view of someone, or an innacurate view of someone. The only direction to move in is towards the more accurate view or expectation of behavior. Forgiveness doesn't seem to have that intent.

Edit: I feel I need to edit this because this is kind of going into nonsense. Everyone seems to have me backwards. From your, everyone else’s, perspective i would be seen as forgiving everyone, automatically, always. I’m never in the state of needing to forgive people because no one’s “living in my head rent free”. This is what I don’t get. I still steer clear of dangerous or unpleasant people. I’m not getting taken advantage of and I see people getting taken advantage of much more than me so I don’t see this grudge-holding or anger-holding to be any kind of safety tool. I just don’t do it. There aren’t acts or struggles of forgiveness for me because there’s literally nothing to do here. Everyone else is describing this thing that to me doesn’t even seem to exist.