Oof. I’ve had places that the pipeline was getting long. At one of my previous jobs I made it so all the tests could run locally, and we were keeping the full build as slow as possible.

We also didn’t do any browser tests (eg: selenium) because those tend to be slow and most people are bad at making them stable.

It’s important to know whats worth testing.

That’s the plan. Unfortunately the market is kind of meh. Lots of AI slop. Lots of getting ghosted.

There’s a lot of fear at my job about changing code. I’ve been trying to tell them to start writing automated tests. Or at least a linter to check for syntax errors. They’re all like “ooh that sounds hard maybe next quarter”

Meanwhile, a trivial change requires a whole day because the developer has to manually test everything.

I just unilaterally added checks to code I have ownership over, but anything shared I’m getting “maybe in two quarters we can prioritize this” from management.

My job has a “scrum master”. She’s nice, I guess, but as far as I can tell her entire job is sharing her screen so we can look at tickets. Then people tell her what to click on and what text to change. It’s excruciating because it would just be faster for the person talking to change it, instead of being like “remove the second bullet point. No, not that one”

On top of that they have all these tasks for “unit testing” but they don’t actually do unit testing. Someone just said, in the distant past, we should do testing so it’s there.

That’s my kind of game. The “let’s not be political (even though it is political)” flavor is less appealing.

The thing you need to weigh is the inconvenience of them putting in the effort to become tech savvy. That’s a big inconvenience. So, the inconvenience of dealing with ads and whatnot looks much smaller from their perspective.

Yeah, I can follow the train of thought. They don’t know that like an hour of reading now will save them decades of pain, I guess.

Like, there’s degrees. Learning how to compile Firefox from source with custom changes is way more work than “search: how do I get rid of ads? Search: best adblocker. Click install on ublock.”

Which brings me back to what I was trying to say earlier. People imagine dealing with these problems is way harder than it actually is, so they don’t even look.

Something like this is coming up at work. They’re like “oh it’s going to be like weeks of work to get a linter for our code” and I’m like “it’s fifteen minutes please just let me help you”.

I dunno, a lot of the people in my life that aren’t tech savvy are inconvenienced. The ads pop up and block stuff. But they don’t know how to do anything about it.

I guess it’s easier to just do nothing and suffer than learn what adblock is. It’s easier to use the shitty defaults.

Well that’s fascinating. I’m not sure what to do with this information. Maybe read the study more carefully when I have more time

Many people have a sort of learned helplessness. They don’t really know computer fundamentals, they get scared and stressed so they stop thinking, and then they don’t want to deal with it.

People aren’t rational. They’re emotional.

Yeah Fallout4 was kind of bad. I played it a lot anyway (sim settlements 2 is pretty good) but the core of it is rotten.

Just remember it’s basically garbage in, garbage out. I know a lot of folks half-ass it (bad photos, lazy profile, half-assed messages) and then are surprised that they don’t rise above the sea of other half-assed people and the algorithms.

I bought a couple things on epic early on because I thought competition would be good. But epic kind of sucks and has no Linux support, so I stopped.

To many “smart” people have stood up and taken the credit for hundreds of others and generations of work.

Like CEOs taking credit for all the work their engineers did.

I’ve sent this to many coworkers.

I wanted to introduce a jar where every time you sent a useless “hello” message you had to put double whatever you put in last time (starting at $1). People are empty headed idiots maybe losing +$1000 will wake them up.

That’s an interesting point you make and I partly agree. There are certain undertones and sometimes you can create a better story by engaging these undertones and creating a monster in noble clothing and a metaphor for the societal corset women are forced ro wear.

Well, I’m glad we’re approaching some common ground.

No one here is making the argument that you’re seriously “encouraging mindless slaughter of people based on some regular dungeon crawling”. No one’s saying you’re, like, recommending people go out and do that in real life. The argument is there is a message, even if it’s unintentional.

But other times I just want to enjoy a trash movie or 15$ airport library book.

There’s little wrong with enjoying a trash movie, but

And the undertones there are purely accidental and shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

Why? What authority says subtext shouldn’t be taken seriously?

There’s a lot of rich material for analysis, for talking about what our society values among other things, by looking at the messages in pop culture. Imagine two societies. In one, all their pop culture and trashy airport novels are about murder and plunder. In the other, they’re about cooperation and building a better world together. Do you think that would mean anything? Do you think you could infer anything at all from that? It says something that we’re cool with “then I killed him and took his stuff! Rock on!”. We’ve all played that kind of game, but if you think about it that’s a horrible story.

Surely there are stories that would be on the far side of the line for you. “I killed the men and enslaved the women! Look at all these points the game gave me!” would probably make most people uncomfortable. Why is the line there, but murder is fine? Does the placement of that line mean anything?

And again, this doesn’t mean you can’t play a beer-and-pretzels half-brained game about tactics, strategy, and extermination. But to wave your hands in the air and say it doesn’t mean anything is absurd.

I dunno man, you’re the one that said the players can’t talk focus on gay rights now. there’s a demon invasion. Which, again, maps pretty cleanly to that kind of attitude. But I think you might be the kind of person who doesn’t understand subtext, or maybe text.

you choose to lead a gay rights movement while the world is being overrun by the demon king’s hordes.

This maps kind of easily onto “We can’t fight for gay rights right now. They just blew up the twin towers!” or similar “wait your turn for justice” arguments.

I get the impression that you don’t see that kind of thing, and furthermore don’t care. You run whatever kind of game you want, but I would be surprised if your settings weren’t full of unexamined biases and defaults.

Have you taken any literature or maybe other media classes at the 200 level?

Sometimes people say really weird things and I wonder if they just don’t know any better. Maybe they’re a teenager.

But like “fact from fiction” is irrelevant here. No one’s saying Dracula is non-fiction, but you can still read it and take meaning from the text. Furthermore, it’s not just a story about a guy who bites people. The read on how women are expected to behave is pretty obvious, for example.

You don’t have to care about the subtext of “kill all the goblins and take their stuff”, but saying there is no subtext or “no one cares” is absurd and self-centered.

People do not all have the same working definition of “politics”. Many people seem to use it to mean “overt content about contemporary issues”, but that’s not really a good definition.

If your game has sentient creatures with agency and desires, it has politics.

For example, if your game has a king, there’s politics. Having the people accept monarchy is a political statement. It’s not as hot-button as, say, having slavery, but it’s still political.

You might not be surprised if your players react to a world with chattel slavery by trying to free the slaves and end that institution. The same mechanism may lead them to want to end absolute monarchy. They see something in the setting they perceive as unjust, and want to change it.

A lot of people are kind of… uncritical, about many things. They don’t see absolute monarchy as “political” because it’s a familiar story trope. They are happy to accept this uncritically so they can get to the fun part where you get a quest to slay the dragon. (Note that the target of killing the dragon rather than, say, negotiating or rehoming it is also political)

People then get frustrated because they feel stupid, and they’re being blocked from pursuing the content they want. They just want to, for example, do a tactical mini game about fighting a big monster that spits fire. They don’t want to talk about the merits of absolute monarchy or slaying sentient creatures.

It’s okay to not always want to engage in the political dimension. That doesn’t mean it’s not there. If someone responds to the king giving you a quest with “wait, this is an absolute monarchy where the first born son becomes king? That’s fucked up” they’re not “making it political”. It already was political.

If you present a man and a woman as monogamously married in your game, that’s political. That’s a statement. If you show a big queer polycule, that’s also a statement. The latter will ping the aforementioned uncritical players as “political”, because it’s more atypical, but both are “political”.

Some of this can be handled in session 0. But sometimes you learn that some people in the group have different tastes and probably shouldn’t play together.

Well, thankfully I included examples other than magic.

However, I do think trying too hard on “martials should be like real life” easily leads to harsher limitations for them. It’s not always intentional. But when someone says “I want to leap 15 feet over the chasm” some people get all “you can’t do that! I can barely jump five feet and I’m athletic (they’re not)” and you have a whole digression where someone looks up human records and then argues about if 16 strength is really Olympic class and what about all your equipment and blah blah blah.

It’s much rarer for that kind of argument to come up with wizard types, in my experience.

Clearer rules up front help, though I feel like half of DND players have never read the rules.