My life is almost a total failure. I am in my 20s

Your life has barely started. It can’t be a failure when it’s barely begun. You spend 18 years with no real control over yourself or your trajectory, then you finally begin to make a few relevant decisions for yourself. Even if you’re 29, you really only start your life when you’re 19-20. That’s 10 years out of 50+, assuming you live to be at least 70. You have only lived a small fraction of your life.

I won’t pretend to know the unique challenges you’re facing, the difficulities of finding work in your region/with your degree, or the social/economic struggles you’re facing because I am so far divorced from your life that any direct discussion is so meaningless. I would never have the relevant information and context, so I can’t suggest what you should do in a tangible way. What I can say, is this: find what you want to measure your life in, and work towards that. If you value your life through work and wealth, I can understand why you’d feel the way you do, but there far more ways to be prosperous, and things you can focus on.

A healthy dose of positive nihilism would do you wonders: each and every one of us is so tiny, so insignificant, that the difference between a “successful” and “unsuccessful” life in the terms you’ve defined literally do not matter. You and Elon Musk will both die and decompose, and regardless of either of your impact on the world, this rock we’re riding around the sun will continue to support life for a time, and one day everything humanity has ever conceived will be dust, and our sun will explode, and the universe won’t care if you lived with your parents or owned a mansion. The only things that matter are the things we, individually, give meaning to. If you choose to find meaning and value in creating art then your work has meaning and value. If you choose to find meaning and value in helping others find joy and happiness, then dedicate yourself to your friends, your family and your community, because that has meaning and value. If you want to experience the world through literature and media, then engaging with that material has meaning and value. No one else can define what matters to you in this world, because they’re not you.

I’m sorry that what you’ve spent time and energy on isn’t panning out for you. I really, truly am. But step back, and think about if those things matter to you because they matter to you, or because everyone else has told you it’s what a successful, prosperous life looks like. Then consider what your version of a good and meaningful is, and chase that. Many people waste 10, 15, 20+ years on things that they ultimately realize don’t bring them joy. In a way, you’re lucky to have found out sometime in your 20s that what you’ve been working on isn’t leading you where you want to be. It took me until 33.

My friend, I hate to tell you, but that’s just not true. We are incredibly at the whims of everyone else to even get too and from work or school each day. We only have running water, electricity, food in the fridge, etc., because we all depend on each other.

Don’t mistake being independant with being self-sufficent. Don’t mistake requiring the support of others for requiring the support of any one, specific person. Every single one of us is dependant on many of us, but none of us should plan on being dependant on any one specific person for our entire life. And that’s okay. This is how society functions, and life is a lot better for it.

Though I am sorry for whatever happened today to leave you feeling that jaded. Some individuals really just aren’t worth it. It sucks when we think they are, and find out the hard way.

I’ve just haven’t had universally good, or even clear majority good, experiences with cats. I don’t “dislike” them, but I don’t choose to like a given cat by default, because I never know what I am getting into. The cuddliest cat can and has suddenly decided it is clawing the shit out of me without warning, and without fail the owner acts like that’s just their cats personality, or just a “cat” thing.

I’ve never had a dog react in such a way unprovoked. Sure, I’ve met asshole dogs, and they warn me not to go near them immediately. But I’ve never had a dog wander up to me, insist on pets, and then all of a sudden bite me.

I like animals that try to tell me how they’re feeling, rather than flip with no warning, and I feel the same way about people.

I can see the logic behind the mistaken correlation between narcissts and cat haters. Cats are known to be independant animals, unlike many other pets that praise you unconditionally just because you provide the food. They don’t feed a stereotypical narcissists desire. But it’s a gross oversimplification of both human-animal relationships and diagnosible narcissism to suggest that there’s any real correlation between the two based on that.

“I’m a gamer myself, and therefore I know what I’m talking about”

Should we call it a fallacious call to authority, meme on it for being a “how do you do, fellow gamers” moment, or simply mock the guy for whoring himself out in favor of daddy corporate? I could write an essay on the ways this is an absurd statement.

Gamers hate Denuvo because it doesn’t “simply work”. It limits paying customers from accessing their content, bogs down mid-range machines that are already overtaxxed by poor optimization and, in admittedly uncommon cases, full on breaks some games until patches and fixes roll out. Stop pretending that “gamers” are out here rioting because they’re too cheap and immoral to pay for content. Quit your fuckin’ lying.

Well, if the goal is to be something terrifying, you’ve got the spirit for sure.

I immediately opt out of any platform that aggressively tries to decide what content I consume.

Why the hate?

Gosh people… Shutdown your brain

You can’t seriously be shocked that people are downvoting you when your only defense is “stop using that silly little brain to think”.

Human life expectancy has doubled in those couple hundred years. Believing that something is good just because it is old is absurd.

Alright, I’ll bite: what exactly is a “stonefruit” in this context? Google just says “fruits with large seeds that are basically rocks in the middle”, which I suspect is not the pseudo-intellectual flex your boss is going for?

It might be boring and obvious, but the speeds.

I used to have to plan ahead, set overnight downloads, very consciously and actively manage data rates and in general never plan around getting something. Today, I can get basically ANYTHING in less than an hour on FiOp. Most things, 5-10 minutes. Transfer rate has outscaled data size, and it’s fantastic.

Fantastic article.

I’ve got nothing against cosplay, but these right-wing nut jobs pretending to be Roman conqueror’s just take it too far.

It kinda gets different when you’re talking about a series of actors intermingling in an environment designed by the seller. There are certain expectations for the experience that was sold to you, and another customer disregarding the social contract of what the expected environment is supposed to be like is problematic.

It’s like buying a ticket to go to a theatre. You expect the people around you to also use the product and environment in a way similiar to you. Someone on their phone, screaming at the movie, throwing their feet up on your chair, etc, isn’t okay, and the people who defend their selfishness with “I paid to be here, I can do what I want” deserve to be kicked out. Cheating on an online, competitive game is no different, and I expect such players to be kicked out so the rest of us can have the experience we were promised when we made our purchase.

Does this mean the game in question should have full control over the code you’re running on your machine? I mean absolutely not, no one is strip searching you at the entrance of the theatre, but there need to be some degree of limitations on how individuals interact with the shared environment that consumers are being offered. The theatre doesn’t allow you to take videos, and doesn’t give you access to a copy of the film to clip, or edit to your hearts content, and the notion that the consumer should have such rights seems insane. But taking an online game, editing the files, and then connecting to everyone else’s shared experience and forcing your version on others should be protected, because the code is running on your machine? To be clear, I don’t think you’re seriously suggesting that is the case, but therein lies the problem: there’s a lot of weird nuance when it comes to multiple consumers being provided a digital product like this. How they interact together is inherently a part of the sold product, so giving consumers free reign to do what they want once the product is in their hands doesn’t work the way it does with single player games, end user software, or physical products.

The real problem is the laziness of devs not hosting their own server environments, so I hear you there. But that is, unfortunately, a problem seperate from whether hackers should be held accountable for ruining a product for others.

So, AI that is strictly incapabale of generating new ideas is going to be fed decades of police reports as it’s database, and use that data to discern that makes a good police report?

Surely this won’t replicate decade old systematic problems with racial profiling. I mean, all these police reports are certainly objective, with no hint of bias to be found in the officers writing.

Sick. I’ve had Rollerdrome on my wishlist for a while now, but have never seen a good sale, nor found myself with the free time and desire to play it on the spot to demand a full price purchase. I will gladly pirate and experience this now.

I mean, fuck Take2, I’d rather be able to hand these people money for a good game, but in lieu of being able to do so, I am happy to oblige their request.

Came here to post this as well.

Just watch the first episode or two, and if it doesn’t have you hooked, it’s not your jam anyway.

But it will have you hooked, because it’s the best piece of American television in recent history.

The point of treating companies like people is so no one in those companies can be held accountable. The worst case for them that the intangible “coorporation” did something wrong and now it has to go away, so the entire board moves to a new company under a new name that owns the same properties and has the same practices. Only now they have practice obfuscating their crimes.

What ends lives and careers for people are just a minor inconvinience to coorporations.

I like this. You’re good people.

Not sure how you can talk about “the big three” of condiments and leave out mayo. Is it just non-existant outside of North America or something?

This.

Nothing says “I have fulfilled my social obligation, but I don’t give a shit about you” more than a low value giftcard for somewhere generic.

Alternatively, give him a halfway decent gift and feel better about yourself for not continuing the cycle of neglect, even when he won’t appreciate it. We can make the world better, even for those of us that don’t deserve it, and considering how to make it a better place as opposed to how to get back at the people who make it a worse one is just a better use of our time and energy.

Besides, at the end of the day, truly awful people already live with the worst punishment so could imagine: having to wake up every morning and continue being themselves.

I take “nice” to mean something very different than “good” or “kind”. No, I am not a nice person. I am inclined to be an honest asshole over a nice liar. I try my best to be good, kind, understanding, etc., but “nice” is, in my books, more about manners than good acts or genuine understanding. And I generally feel that time and effort spent on attempting to be “nice” is much better spent on genuinely empathizing with and supporting people, even when that support isn’t kind or well-mannered at a glance.

I think I just take issue with the word “nice”.

Infinite growth is referred to as cancer. Your friend is obviously right that we cannot sustain infinite growth, but it’s misguided to think that the only way out species can possibly survive to any length is by having more children and increasing our population year over year.

With improving technologies and automations, far less labour is required to achieve the same results. There is no reason we need an infinitely increasing population on our decidedly finite earth just to keep our species afloat. This would take a major restructuring of our social and economic systems to do correctly, otherwise we run the risk of centralized wealth mucking it all up, but the point remains that there’s no necessity to continue reproducing at the rate we have been. This supposed “need” for labour is just capitalist propaganda perpetuating the idea that work is inherently good, all designed to fuel an inherently exploitative economy. Line must go up, otherwise how can the privledged few assure that their net worth continues to grow exponentially?