VoxAdActa

I’ve tried New Vegas three or four times. By the time I actually get to New Vegas and meet Mr. House, I’m overwhelmed by the number of things I’m supposed to be doing and dead dog tired of those fucking OP Legion assassins that show up to ruin my day every fifteen minutes.

Part of that is probably on me, because I’m the guy who wants to experience the whole game in a single play-through, and I try not to take on too many new quests until I’ve finished the ones I’ve already got. I’ve also been recently informed that if I rush to New Vegas and do Mr. House’s quest, the Legion assassins will back off for a bit, which is a big deal because my god I’m sick of them. I never would have tried that on my own, as there’s nothing in the game to give me a clue that they’re connected, but maybe I’ll give it another shot and do that.

I’ve played through Fallout 1 and 2 dozens of times.

I have yet to finish Fallout 4 or Fallout: New Vegas.

The sea change from “actual RPGs” to “shooters with occasional minor choices to make” enrages me.

It doesn’t weed out anything but honest people.

That’s like saying a pre-flight check doesn’t throw up errors on anything anything but honest machines. But, more to the point, you’re right, in the sense that the people on either tail end of the “good/bad people” bell curve aren’t going to be precisely detected by a simple test of inclusion/exclusion criteria. The ~60% of people in the middle will be. That’s why it’s a screening tool, not an in-depth socio-psychological exam.

As long as your honesty comes closer to filling the socially expected role than, say, a man who’s high on meth or a Qanon conspiracist who thinks “how are you?” is a sex-trafficker code, you’re probably ok.

I agree. That’s exactly what I do. Memorize two or three different socially acceptable answers to each of the half-dozen or so most common “human vibe check” questions.

Because that’s exactly what they are. They’re human vibe checks. It’s not about finding out how you’re really feeling, or what you honestly think of the weather. It’s about being a quick way to sort out who is capable of of functioning in a social capacity and who isn’t, without putting in a lot of time and effort doing an in-depth screening.

“Small talk” is culturally designed to weed out 70-80% of those people who are likely to be dangerous, unstable, or unreliable, allowing us to know who we need to pay close attention to in our environment and who we probably don’t. It’s not a question of “lying” or “telling the truth”, it’s a question of “can you perform your socially expected role in this cultural ritual?”.

Saying “I’m fine, how are you?” is no more “lying” than doing a safety check on an airplane you’re about to fly is (because you don’t actually need to engage the flaps right now, being on the ground and all). It’s just about checking to make sure the right lights come on and the right motors engage. If a person can’t even answer a question they’ve had decades to prepare for, and can’t engage, even to a minimum acceptable degree, in a small social ceremony they’ve watched thousands of times and had hundreds of opportunities to practice themselves, that’s a bad sign. That’s like trying to engage the flaps and hearing some weird grinding noise and getting a red blinking light on the console.

It’s important to note here that I have a bit of an advantage in this arena over a lot of the rest of the community. One of my deepest autistic hyperfocus areas has been observing, experimenting, and collecting data on human interpersonal communications, specifically linguistic communication. It’s all very ritualistic, at its base, and it’s easy for me to create, memorize, and practice the scripts for performing those rituals in different contexts. And when I fuck one up, I can go back through and memorize another script so if that same conversation every comes up in the future (and it will, because there are only so many rituals!), I won’t fuck it up again (to the same degree).

Yes, motherfuckers, I do demand that all of my morals and beliefs be as close to 100% internally consistent as possible, and yes, I actually believe them all the time. Who are these assholes saying hypocrisy and amoral selfishness are fucking good things?

About the only thing we can do is unsubscribe from and block the dozen or so “Reddit Sucks” communities/magazines, and report the “We Still Hate Reddit” threads that pop up elsewhere for being posted in the wrong place (like Technology or Gaming or wherever).

All Reddit had to do was STFU and wait for a month or two. Lack of any reaction or results is probably the most demotivating thing in all human experience. Go forward with the plan, say nothing, give no interviews, send no messages, do nothing to the mods or the subreddits, and within just a couple weeks, the users would get bored and force the place to return to normal. Either through pressuring their mods or just starting new subreddits with the same theme as the closed ones. The effect on the front page and the common lurker would be minimal and transient.

Instead, Spez has to go around slinging shit from his diaper at literally every opportunity, taking more and more extreme actions, hiding behind a fake mod name, saying super salty things to everyone, etc. He’s basically the only person continuing to add fuel to this dumpster fire. It’s literally just him. If he got sick or hit by a bus or something and had to shut up for even just a week while he was recovering, Reddit would lose interest in the whole thing, because without a visible enemy to fight, the users would turn their frustrations on each other. But he’s clearly suffering from some deep psychic wound that keeps him from being able to shut his pie hole.

Reddit is going to come up with an excuse to shut this down too, because any app that remains is still going to be lightyears ahead of the official app, and everyone will go there, and the devs have neither the means nor the obligation to force people to mail them proof that they’re blind.

If Reddit is savvy, they’ll give it six months for this furor to die down before they start to move in. A bunch of little fires separated by a span of time are easier to deal with than a giant fire happening all at once. But since this is spez, the second the API calls from RedReader get above whatever arbitrary dipshit threshold he’s set in his mind, he’s going to throw another fit. Which will be probably less than two weeks into July.

DING!

“Huh, a text. I’ll get to that later.”

DING!

“Another one? That’s concerning.”

DING! DING! DING!

“Fuck this is must be some kind of emergency! I need to park my forklift and read this right now!”

It’s bamboo