Zeusthecat

I'm super annoyed because I spent 20 minutes trying to log in to Destiny last night but kept getting the error telling me the Destiny servers were unavailable. So that's one Iron Banner night lost. At least Rocket League was able to fill in nicely.

0.99999... = 1 People always flip out over this for some reason. It is one of the simplest things to prove and yet people go through crazy mental gymnastics to continue to convince themselves that it isn't true. I love math, math is great. I was never especially good at it or cared for it all that much until I had a decent teacher in high school that was able to give me just the right perspective for all the right things to click. It was a fairly small high school too without any kind of advanced math class so my senior year, me and another girl who had taken all of the math classes the school had to offer were put in the back corner of the room for one of the lower level classes and spent the entire year going through all of the chapters and exercises in a calculus book. As great as that math teacher was, he was clueless when it came to calculus so we basically had to teach ourselves by going through the book and helping each other out with concepts that the other was struggling with. It was surprisingly effective and we were able to get through all of the standard calc 1 content and started delving a little bit into calc 2 and integration by parts. Hearkening back to the random thought thread, I also find it pretty frustrating to constantly hear people claim they are bad at math. I've found it to be one of the easier subjects to learn just by going through a math book and reading the concepts, then going through some sample problems with solutions to see the various ways to tackle the problem and learn any underlying fundamental patterns. If people like puzzles, they should love math because it's the best puzzle.

Goldeneye 007: Facility with proximity mines. The best.

At Applebee's we had to claim either 10% of our total sales for that shift or our credit card tips, whichever was higher.

Somehow I've reached a point where I will soon be out of weapon parts. Anyone have any tips for a fast way to acquire weapon parts or is it best to just run the strike playlist repeatedly and break down all the items you pick up?

On another note, I just found myself wondering what a blue whale poop would look like and realized that I didn't even know if whales pooped at all. I've literally never heard it discussed or brought up and it seems like one of the dark mysteries of the ocean that they never talk about in ocean documentaries. So I Googled it and was happy to see that yes, whales poop. But it gets more interesting than that. Whale poop is apparently super important for the environment and even has a role in keeping our air clean: Who'd have thunk that the solution to global warming could potentially be as simple as whale shit. Lots and lots of whale shit.

Nah, that's fine. The unfortunate thing about tipping percentages is that 15 - 20% can be totally adequate if you are working at a relatively busy place and they give you a good 4-6 table section; but if you work at a smaller business that doesn't bring in as many customers, you would need a much higher average tip percentage to make the same amount. I was fortunate that I worked 10 hour shifts Thursday through Sunday evenings and we had a full restaurant almost every hour of every shift I worked. I averaged about $125 to $150 in tips per shift (after bartender and host tipouts) and in my last year or two when our minimum wage went up to $3.75, I actually made a pretty steady $15 per hour on average. I imagine I was in a pretty fortunate position though and many other people in the service industry probably barely manage to eek out minimum wage.

I worked for $2.13 per hour at Applebee's for awhile and it basically worked out that my paychecks were always less than $100 after taxes even if I worked 40 hours per week. As much as I think tipping sucks, I still think it is important here in the US to try to tip at least 15 to 20% for good service at a restaurant because those employee's livelihoods completely depend on tips.

I'm sorry but this really strikes a nerve for me. The selfish desire many people have to have a boy instead of a girl (gotta preserve the all-important family name, as if that means fucking anything at all), the fear that anything not manly will somehow make a boy less of a person, and the clear preferential treatment that boys often receive over their sisters is disgusting. That being said, that internalized misogyny definitely takes a lot of work to get over. I hate myself for it but even I was ever so slightly bummed in the back of my mind when I found out our first child was going to be a girl. Even then I hated that I even thought that thought but I guess it's hard to avoid when you're surrounded by people telling you how important it is to have a boy so you can carry on the family name and have those father-son moments and all these other supposed important cultural things that go along with having a boy. Thankfully, my wife and I went to great lengths to cover the color spectrum for both of our kids to keep it as gender neutral as possible (plus the whole pink or blue thing is really boring and limited) and even with the "pink girly stuff", a lot of it ended up being handed down to our son. Even the pink carseat! What I'm really trying to say is, my son sleeps with a freaking Care Bear every night and in my mind that makes him the manliest of babies. Because he's manly enough to just enjoy shit regardless of what color it is and what gender it is targeted towards. It is also possible that I just really don't understand what "manly" means.

Further evidenced by the fact that he never teabags any corpses after his kills. Cause he's planning to eat them and doesn't want to ruin them with his balls.

That person is not a human. They are a fucking monster.

I finally had a chance to binge on some Steven Universe this weekend and it's exactly as good as everyone here has been claiming. The boundless optimism and just general attitude that Steven has makes him such an amazingly charismatic and interesting character. It's like the creators of this show realized that smiling is awesome and set out to make a show that produces the highest number of Smiles per Minute possible. And that Giant Woman song? Fucking priceless. Also, the line "you're no son of mine" was some immaculate comedic timing. I've watched the first 21 episodes so far and it looks like Hulu has everything up through episode 36 so it looks like my enjoyment will soon be cut off. Such an amazing show though.

No, I haven't played that one yet. It looks really interesting though.

Couldn't agree more. I've played through Journey countless times and it remains one of my favorite experiences. It really is the perfect length too where if you're in the mood, you can just sit down for an hour or two and go through the full game.

Well at least that is some kind of solution. Having a full 6 people together to be able to pull it off though is kind of a bummer.

CussedCayuse and I ran some 3v3 skirmish for a couple hours last night to work on honing our skills a bit more for another eventual attempt at Trials of Osiris. Overall I think we did okay but we found that in 3v3, each match pretty much came down solely to how competent the third person on our team ended up being. Unlike the 6v6 stuff that we normally run, having one person on your team that doesn't cooperate and that just runs off on their own makes it extremely difficult to come out on top. Take GavinSmoothPants for example who was nice enough to grace us with his presence two games in a row. After every single death, as soon as he spawned or was revived by one of us, he would just book it to the other end of the map by himself to go Rambo on the entire enemy team. While he did end up getting more kills than each of us, he also died way more than we did and probably cost us a couple wins that we could have snagged if he was at least somewhere in our vicinity so we could help him pick off enemies. Ultimately though, thanks to it being 3v3, we ended up adopting the strategy of "just follow this asshole everywhere he goes" and were able to clean up quite a few kills that would have otherwise been lost. Even in those matches though where you have a good team and everyone is working together, there are just some teams that fucking disintegrate us instantly. We've been getting better at sticking together throughout the match and trying to find high ground or other areas with decent cover but it just feels like there is nothing you can do against some of these teams that know every map inside and out. One thing that would be really sweet is if this game supported some kind of private PvP where you could play through each map privately and work out optimal strategies and stuff. Depending on the mode, I still tend to get hit with maps that I've only done a couple of times in the past and nothing sucks worse than bumbling your way around an unfamiliar map. Plus that was always one of my favorite things to do in Halo. Just load up a map in splitscreen and run around exploring every nook and cranny.

Sorry that I keep having to reject invites from you guys during the day. Hopefully I can carve out a few hours for a raid one of these weekends again but typically, if I'm on during the day, I'm just screwing around doing bounties since I have my kids running around and can't commit to much more than a half hour or so usually. Most of my dedicated play time tends to happen later in the evening. If you see me on any time, feel free to send an invite if you're looking for another and I'll do my best to make myself available when I can. Also, PoE 35 last night was a lot of fun. I think we'll be able to take Skolas down without too much issue now that we've spent some time on the fights. Hopefully the modifiers next week are more in our favor.

How could he have told her a secret agent would pick up his dead body if he was already dead?

San Francisco Rush for the N64. There was a particular track with a park area that had some steep hills and ramps. We used to spend hours on end trying to line up insane jumps and outdo each other with flips and stuff.

Somewhere in my brain, I feel a little bit of sympathy for people that unwittingly say shitty things like these and then react poorly to getting called out for it on a place like Twitter (although that sympathy isn't there for the shithead type of people that do it habitually). I'll be honest, what Troy Baker said is the type of thing that I might have said as a joke in the very recent past and thought nothing of it. And if someone called me out for it in a Twitter type of format, I would have most likely reacted in a similar manner and thought of the other people as over-reacting. The only reason that isn't the case any more is because I just happened to join this community and over time, was fortunate enough to get a lot of really good perspective from many different people on why these things are harmful and how my personal perspective in some of these areas was lacking. There are a couple of unfortunate things about this situation. One is that Twitter exists to amplify everyone's inane thoughts to everyone else in the world. And for some reason, a lot of people seem to not be able to grasp that spur of the moment random thoughts that you might normally say to a close group of friends or a smaller community take on a hell of a lot more weight when they are posted on a service for millions to see for all of eternity. As frustrating as that is though I do still feel some sympathy for people when they do stumble and then immediately have a bunch of people jumping down their throats and telling them how offensive they are being, but also doing so in a 140 character format. So yeah, these people should know better than to just impulsively post whatever they are thinking at any given time, but at the same time, I think it only exacerbates the problem to have millions of voices shouting this person down in bite-sized tweets. We were discussing how hard it can be for some people to admit fault in another thread and when it comes to this specific situation, I can kind of understand how someone's gut reaction would be to get defensive, not feel inclined to apologize and then get the fuck out. I'm not saying he is in the right in any way but I don't think he's necessarily an evil shithead for this either. And that is the other unfortunate thing about this situation. I don't know Troy Baker and I've never heard of any kerfuffle involving him before this, but because of this slip up he will forever be labeled as a shithead by a lot of people. There is a very real possibility that he is a shithead, and maybe there is stuff he's said/done in the past that I'm not aware of, but it is highly likely that he will forever be condemned by a lot of people just because of this one fuck up. And it's pretty clear he realizes this. It's just unfortunate that there isn't a clear avenue for people to actually give him constructive criticism and perspective like I've been able to get from Idle Thumbs forums. Sorry if this is a bit incoherent. I don't mean to say Troy Baker is in the right and I don't mean to say that people dogpiling on him is wrong. I just wanted to lament how frustrating it can be to watch this type of stuff go down in a cesspool like Twitter. Nobody seems to learn anything and it just ends in people often needlessly turning other people into enemies if they display any errors in judgment.

Yeah, I've definitely been loving PvP in this game lately. As much as I've loved playing BF4 multiplayer, the PvP in Destiny just seems to work better with my playstyle. My K/D ratio is way higher here than in BF4 and I think it's because of the years I spent playing Halo 3 and working with a system that has more mobility and that gives you enough health to actually react to getting shot at. I still really enjoy Battlefield but there there is a lot less room to react to things and maneuver around once someone trains their sights on you. Last night I had a rapid 10 kill void spree while working on the Thorn bounty and it was just the best. Love PvP.

Ugh. I've definitely known plenty of these types and I always wonder if they have ever stopped for two seconds to actually think about how stupid that line of thinking is. And unsurprisingly, there seems to be a very strong overlap between that mentality and the world view that a lot of right-wing folks seem to have. I'll definitely concede that this can get a little hairy when it comes to two people debating different points of view. If you have directly wronged someone, I really don't think it is that hard for most people to recognize. I think the only challenge there is usually just getting past your own sense of pride. But when it comes to actually debating or having an ideological argument with a person I think that's kind of different. Hearkening back to the vegan thread that Gaizokubanou mentioned, most of that was just (heated at times) debate (and also a trainwreck).

Yeah, that's why I said there are obviously exceptions. As long as you have some semblance of common sense it should be obvious which party should be apologizing in your example. And is this concept really that hard for people to grasp? Are so many people really so far up their own asses that they are incapable of understanding how their actions impact others?

Isn't that the type of stuff though that we're all supposed to be taught from a very early age? Recognizing when you hurt someone's feelings or did something bad and learning to say "I'm sorry"? I'm not really disagreeing with you, just expressing my frustration that such a basic and obvious thing that you would think would be reinforced all throughout childhood is so hard to put into practice for so many people.

I will never understand people who don't have the ability to admit they are wrong or own up to shitty things they may have done. Generally speaking, I feel like if someone goes through the effort to call you out for something you said or did, there is probably enough of a kernel of truth there that it is worth acknowledging (obviously there are exceptions). And honestly, in most situations like these, what does a person really have to lose by admitting that maybe they were wrong or misguided? Wouldn't that actually make them look like a more mature, reasonable person in the eyes of most people? In John Bain's case, maybe his primary viewership would see apologizing as some kind of weakness but I like to think it would ultimately help his image in the eyes of most people. It is frustrating that he can't fucking see that. Pride is a weird and fucked up thing.