H1B skilled worker visas. You have to prove that you tried to hire locally and couldn’t find anyone qualified. The whole point is that the qualifications are impossible, so you are either under qualified or lying. Since no qualified candidate exists, you can bring someone over from overseas and hold the risk of being deported if you fire them over their heads - and you suddenly get less thorough about checking qualifications for your immigrant candidates.
Specifically, it started out to track, dox, and harass Chris-Chan (originally just for being a weirdo though they eventually came out as trans and made news in 2021 for being arrested for incest). The nearly two decade old (since 2007) ongoing campaign against them means they are probably the single most documented human being in history.
They don’t often target women just for being women, but much like with trans people and furries they also hate a hate-on for crowdfunded youtube personalities and fat acceptance and all of those groups do have their share of women (especially the last one - fat acceptance is primarily about women). They even target fundamentalist Christians and Quiverfull families sometimes (which tend to be very Conservative).
Also, there’s no “was” - they still exist are are operating.
I actually had someone whose family member died of Covid tell me that his brother-in-law didn’t really die of Covid, he died of something else, because it’s all overblown and the hospitals are doing a similar scam to this myth (i.e. making it out as a bigger deal than it needs to be.)
That sort of thing goes around here a lot too, usually framed in terms of “He didn’t die of COVID, but if you die from any cause whatsoever while you also have COVID they’ll count it as dying of COVID to make the COVID numbers bigger.” It usually falls apart when you ask why they want the COVID numbers to be bigger than they really are.
That’s exactly what I was thinking. I’m totally fine with about half of the directions given, and the rest are baking in right wing talking points.
It must be confusing to be told to be unbiased, but also to adopt specific biases like that. Also, I find it amusing to tell it not to repeat any part of the prompt under any circumstances but also to tell it specifically what to say under certain circumstances, which would require repeating that part of the prompt.
Uhhh “based” is mostly home the mods that nexus removes and are re-uploaded there because they promote bigoted or intolerant ideology.
For anyone who’s curious what this means exactly, we’re talking about things like mods that remove pride flags, mods that replace body type 1/2 or a/b with sex identifiers, mods that restore content cut from the initial release of games for other regions, a weird scattering of lewd mods, one mod that adds child conscripts to M&B2, one that restores the cut Notch and /v/ splashes to Minecraft and removes the BLM and COVID ones that replaced them, that sort of thing.
In order to decree this unconstitutional, SCOTUS would have to make a majority decision that what Trump did doesn’t fall under insurrection.
No, they wouldn’t. They would just have to accept a due process argument, essentially that the opinion of a CO state judge is not the appropriate venue or process for determining if someone is an insurrectionist. Probably calling for either Congress or criminal courts to establish that.
This is notably different than the CSA, as CSA officers were openly and publicly members of an organization that openly and publicly waged a war against the US.
This is what the MI court basically said. They left the challenge open for the general election qualifications.
I honestly think they were right on this. Ultimately the primary is an election for a private organization to decide who they are going to back as candidates for various offices. There’s no legal basis for forcing them to choose candidates who actually qualify for those offices.
Now the general election is an entirely different boat.
The number of people using Firefox plus ad blockers must be quite small
Hmm, apparently either it’s not fully spread to all users yet, or AdGuard + MalwareBytes gets around it automatically. Of course, I also run Anti-Adblock Blocker, Bypass Paywalls Clean and Sponsorblock so it could be one of those stopping it from bothering me either.
Actual Sunlight. It has one achievement, “Actual Sunlight”, whose description is “Thank you.” It’s awarded at the end of the game. 37.8% of players have the achievement.
It’s a short RPG Maker game about depression that probably resonates a bit too much with a bit too much of it’s base. It’s bleak, and inane, and all the other sorts of ways that life generally sucks, especially for lonely, introverted, geeky 30-somethings. And the ending of the game is
choosing suicide.
I wouldn’t be shocked if a good half or more of players can’t bring themselves to drag through it, and some number further just shut the game down and quit when they reach
the prompt: “Go to the roof of the building and jump off?” and both options are Yes.
Heaven’s Vault
You play a space archaeologist, and the big central mechanic of the game is translating things written in the Ancient language.
Ancient is written using ideographs, and more complex ideas are represented by combining glyphs that describe the concept, like ever more complex compound words. There are art of speech markers, glyphs that describe how other glyphs in a word relate to each other, intensifiers, and even a few cases where super common words are just the combination of other basic glyphs into a single composite like a Norse bindrune (for example the symbols for creature and knowledge overlap to make person, an intelligent creature). 46 base ideographs, but that includes digits, so it’s only 10 more than English.
So for example, a word that reads NOUN-person-Sub/Obj CONNECTOR-NOUN-knowledge-person means “Emperor”, because noun-knowledge-person means “law” and thus the result is a person who the law belongs to, aka a ruler or in the context of an empire the emperor. Replace that noun marker glyph at the beginning with the adjective marker glyph and you would have “imperial”, the quality of being emperor-like.
One of the longest words to appear in the game translates as “mouse” and it’s 21 letters long and is literally something like creature-CONNECTOR-many-many-Sub/Obj CONNECTOR-ADJECTIVE-NOT-ADJECTIVE-CONNECTOR-many-creature-CONNECTOR-ADJECTIVE-ABSTRACT NOUN-person-CONNECTOR-light-NOUN-plant-CONNECTOR-rock, which is several words stitched into a compound word, where some of those words are themselves compound words (the idea is something like “creature like a very small pig”, but the word I’m calling “pig” means “creature that is happy in the soil” where happy is something like “the quality of a person who is metaphorically full of light” and “soil” is “plant-earth”). Those CONNECTORS are letters that are used to build compound words.
I had a moment in Tunic where I realized what the references in the manual to the [HOLY CROSS] were talking about, but I don’t think my revelation was the typical.
I’d actually figured out the [HOLY CROSS] really early on, solved a bunch of puzzles using it, got some manual pages I probably wasn’t supposed to have yet, but didn’t know that the thing I was using was the [HOLY CROSS] because I lacked the context of a certain page that spells it out and based on some comments and videos elsewhere is the point where a lot of people first figure out how to use it.
It probably didn’t hurt that I was fresh off The Witness and my brain was subconsciously looking for tricks of perspective and environmental puzzles, which Tunic is absolutely full of.
Majesty (Majesty 2 is okay, but lacks the charm of the original, but YMMV) - you run a kingdom full of heroes. The catch? You don’t command the heroes. They have their own AI and goals and you have to offer incentives and place the necessary buildings appropriately to both enable and encourage them to do their jobs of saving the kingdom.
I loved that you could build temples and get specialty priests for 5 different gods, but never more than two in one level, because some of the gods were opposed to others, including the one I never used because they were monotheists and I didn’t want to give up all other types of priests.
Also that every hero type had their own priorities and preferences and would do what they preferred barring a significant bounty on something else. Also that Rogues could fuck you over if a hero died and you wanted to use the resurrection spell on them because a rogue near where they died might just rob their grave.
Star Trek: Bridge Crew. Multiplayer only (at least practically speaking). Each person plays a separate member of the titular bridge crew, and cooperation to achieve even simple tasks is key.
Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator did it before that, in 2010. ST: Bridge Crew is more or less “Artemis but with Star Trek branding”. Artemis just released a remake/sequel-sort-of-thing a bit over a month ago (called Artemis Cosmos, though it’s had a…rocky…launch so far) that’s a complete rewrite from the ground up.
And when I say they did it first, I mean to the point that some of the reviews describe Artemis by likening it to being a member of the bridge crew on the Enterprise, because there wasn’t a game like that on the market.
Gods Will Be Watching. A series of puzzle scenarios about calculated risk, failure, and learning the rules anew each time.
Under known, under appreciated but fantastic.
Majora’s Mask: a 3-day timeloop where everything resets when you go back
As far as time loop mechanics go, there are some other strong contenders for playing with the concept:
The Sexy Brutale - you are stuck in a short time loop in which people die, and you need to save them. Successfully saving someone grants you a special power that can be used to try to save others. You have to untangle who and how to save each one and exactly what’s going on. You keep the powers between loops, and also start each loop from the last clock you checked in at.
Deathloop - Arkane stealth shooter stuck in a one day loop. Several locations, different events in each location each day, goal is to arrange the right day so you can kill all your targets in one loop.
Death Come True - interactive film game. You wake up in a hotel room, and have to figure out what’s going on. Loop continues until you die, at which point you wake up in the hotel room again.
12 Minutes - You come back to your apartment, and unless you change the course of events (or on the first loop, do not touch the controls at all) you will die in less than 12 minutes. Then loop until you understand what’s going on.
The Turing Test is a puzzle game like Portal, but instead of portals, you have a gun that can be used to move energy orbs from around the rooms to unlock doors. The game feels like it encourages creative problem solving a lot more than most puzzle games.
Along those lines I’d want to recommend the Talos Principle as well.
And also the Witness, which does fantastic things with environmental puzzles.
Mostly because you’re defining “art” in such a way that being produced by MidJourney disqualifies it automatically.