… any chance you’ll accept those who spent the last decade warning their self-stupifying countrymen against electing the Let the Leopards Loose circus show frontman… and are now themselves fleeing … the leopards…

… any chance you’ll let us in?

We won’t be voting for the conservatives.

just uh… asking for a … friend. yep. a friend.

If I was on the Bethesda team, I would actually be very interested in trying to get feedback from the only other group of devs that remotely know what it’s like to do something similar. What approaches did they take? What’s similar? What’s different? Did the choices that other team make lead to a better product? How much more elegant is their code?

… And why didn’t Bethesda do this with the Skyblivion team?

Why didn’t they offer to at least pay them temporarily as contracted consultants?

Because management is full of themselves and maniacally, socio/psychopathically profit driven.

You can’t say they weren’t aware of the Skyblivion project, they literally coordinated a publicized action with them as part of their release schedule.

…

Game dev in particular, and even software dev generally, in America, at least… is absolutely chalk full of situations where one person or team or whatever’s work is either stolen, or fought over, or someone claims credit for a whole bunch of stuff they didn’t actually contribute nearly anything to, or make a whole big show of some streamlining effort that actually just cripples or eliminates the proverbial one dinky jenga block from the xkcd comic, and then all the blame for a whole bunch of other idiots’ plans, who never even consulted with the jenga block maintainer, well that guy or gal gets utterly blamed for all of it.

As well as of course all the NDAs and IP type bullshit where nothing even resembling what you did as a contractor or for another company can be used elsewhere, and become massively succesful, without a massive legal and financial threat.

… The actual devs, yes, did their work most likely without ‘lol lets fuck over these upstarts’ in mind.

That was in the mind of upper management and c suite though, guaranteed.

They don’t talk about that infront of the servants, I mean employees, I mean, who cares really, we’ll drive them nuts with crunch OT and then lay them off anyway, gaslighting them for the entire development cycle that that won’t happen.

…

Your instinct as a senior dev to reach out comes from a reasonable and good place.

But upper management and c suite is concerned with maximizing profit and business strategy, and in game dev, these folks have a long, stories history of routinely being as ruthless, cutthroat, duplicitous as possible.

It is warfare to them.

…

And I am not just pulling my credential check out of my ass here as some kind of gotcha style rhetoric, I also have worked in game dev, in software dev, in db admin and data analyst roles, for large corporations.

Though I do truly appreciate that you actually have the relevant credentials, and are talking from your own actually relevant experience, so I want to thank you for that, for actually having the conversation.

My experience has been almost entirely upper managers and VPs and the Board consistently doing the exact opposite of what actual developers suggest, request, or warn about, and then just slyly or sometimes quite brashly blame everyone else for causing the fuckups they were warned their plans would cause.

They think they are Gods and everyone else is a contemptible, digusting, unfortunately unavoidable part of doing business… and if a truly royal fuckup happens, they’ll turn on the people that built the corporate ladder they climbed without even a blink.

Dear fucking god, Florida.

… I proposed this as well, and another thing NaN is quite close to is… Naan bread, lol.

Basically a kind of flatbread, usually associated with India, sort of kind of like pita bread.

Its pronounced like… Non, at least the way I pronounce Non, as a PNW dialect English native speaker, not like Nan, as in Nanna, or other similar words to refer to a grandmother, or sometimes mother, different vowel sound.

Thanks, I appreciate it.

Sending ‘wise tortoise wins the race in the long run’ vibes back at you, hehe.

Thanks haha.

Always remember:

Sucking at something is the first step toward being kinda good at something.

=D

Depending on what programming language you are using, and precisely how you’ve coded a function, which exact numerical data types, and functions/methods you are using…

Actually attempting to divide something by zero will result in either NaN, Not a Number, Null, or an Unhandled Exception, as an… output value/error type.

I tried to explain ‘void’ a bit better, Im not personally familiar with any code language that’ll have ‘void’ as an output/error type when you try to divide by zero… but most people use the phrase ‘null and void’, so, my brain associated that word in as well.

As far as how those terms refer back to an anarchist mindset?

I am ‘not a number’, I am a human being, so are all others.

Null or nulled out has been a cyberpunkish slang term to refer to both an individual being seen as inherently unspecial, not unique, made into just another consumer/commodity… as well referring to actually killing or otherwise neutralizing someone or something… for decades now.

It seems you get the less programmy meaning of ‘unhandled exception’, in the ‘become ungovernable’ sense, but now hopefully you also get the math/programmer meaning, and see how these all work as double entendres or at least have somewhat esoteric meanings.

… The problem is that they don’t work as well in common speech as a replacement for common nouns… with at least one of the reasons why that is the case being that evidently the multifarious meanings are too esoteric, lol, which is why I said I was mostly proposing these as jokes.

… Or, you could swap out only the SIM card, have a new number, and the rest of the phone is literally exactly the same.

Most kids these days use social media apps for messenging and general time wasting in class… all they’d have to do is update their phone number with the major apps they use before they come into school the next day… all the contacts are in the apps themselves, not the OS’s contact list.

…

Either way, you’re still missing the point that the kid’s entire question line is literally a non sequitur, a misdirect, a distraction via tangential discussion.

You are falling into the trap of bothering to engage in the actual ship of Theseus ‘what actually constitutes the same phone?’ argument that the teacher has.

The teacher, and you, do not realize that that is irrelevant, and were this some kind of debate bro / debate club debate, you would both have fallen for a rhetorical trap, wasting time arguing over something not germaine to the actual topic.

It doesn’t matter if the kid has millionaire parents and legitimately purchased and owned a brand new phone with a live phone plan every single day, and brought it to school.

Or if the kid stole phones, borrowed someone elses phone and was caught with it.

The rule is ‘no phones in class upon pain of confiscation’.

…

Whether or not it is literally or philosophically the same phone, or a legitimately owned phone, or that particular student’s legitimately owned phone has absolutely no relevance.

… Its like how if you bring alcohol, drugs, or a gun to a school… whether or not they are your items doesn’t matter, whether or not its a single shot derringer or a full assault rifle doesn’t matter.

The leopard feasting will continue untill enough people actually do something useful and sensible to stop them… or we all die from a ballooning, out of control, leopard population.

I think the first two are… well they got more flair, more pizzazz than my suggestions!

Maybe you could … go from diverrs to like… webdivers, or some flaired up spelling of that?

More of an old school / stereotypical cyberpunk way of saying you’re doing a big deep dive into the net to find useful info, webdivers or netdivers.

Leech my seed!

… im sorry, rofl

These are mostly joke suggestions, but:

NaNs

nulls

voids

unhandled exceptions

… common theme here is the math/programming joke, but many of them also capture elements of anarchism, or can be interpreted as adopting a self-referential moniker which mocking the systems anarchists critique.

… probably it is a bit of a reach, but a good number of people refer to black cats as ‘voids’ these days, and … pretty decent history of angry black cats as symbols of anarchism.

You could also maybe l33tsp33k them up a bit?

Use ‘z’ instead of ‘s’ to pluralize?

Better response than the teacher’s:

Points for trying, but your series of questions are irrelevant non sequiturs.

Phones are banned, not just your, or any other particular physically manifested instance of the sublime, intangible, transcendent ideal of ‘a phone’.

I did not expect my invocation of the phrase to summon forth a relevant meme image, but hey there ya go, lol.

#accidentalcybermancy

Unfortunately I have since transitioned to ‘twunk’ lol.

Oi vei, I’ve had a rough go of life the last couple of years, currently doing aquatherapy to recover from over a year of homelessness, constantly on the move, routinely getting assaulted… leading to many muscle and tendon tears and bone fractures… which has forced me to now be largely sedentary…

But I am working toward getting that twink body back.

Managed to go from wheelchair to cane in the last 12 months, hopefully in another 6 or 12 I won’t need the cane and will be able to do basic daily excersize.

Neurodivergent is a kind of catch-all, umbrella term, similar to LGBTQ, meant more to differentiate from the norm, the typical, the common.

Autism, ADHD, DID, BiPolar, OCD, Tourette’s, Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, Schizophrenia…

All of these are distinct, different conditions, which fall under the ‘Neurodivergent’ label, similar to how a gay man, lesbian woman, pansexual or asexual or intersex or trans… basically all fall under the LGBTQIA+, or ‘queer’ collective term… in both situations, there are significant differences between each of the components that make up the whole.

… This meme is generally aimed at Autistic folks, it describes behaviors and preferences and ‘love language’ that are much more common among Autists.

Just as not all LGBTQIA folks… are gay men… not all Neurodivergent folks are… Autistic, or ADHD, or any other particular kind of … having a mind that works in a nonstandard way.

Also, as db0 says, Autism, and many other mental conditions… exist on scales, spectrums, and have other kinds of varation within themselves.

… The terminology confusion comes at least partially from that Neurodivergent vs Neurotypical… as far as I can tell, originated mostly within the Autistic community, and medical professionals/literature studying the Autistic community… but the terminology has since expanded to be more inclusive, as … Autistic vs Allistic already exists, and is more specific in referring specifically to Autists vs NonAutists.

Another element that causes confusion here is… basically, TikTok (in particular, but many other social media as well) is massively popular, but also has a massive tendency to take psychological terms of all kinds and just absolutely warp them far beyond what they actually mean, to the point that their new colloquial meanings bare essentially resemblence to their actual definitions… and then spread these misconceptions everywhere, rapidly.

… Thats all a long way to say: not all Neurodivergent people even have the same mental/psychological condition, so saying that an ND person doesn’t identify with a meme about Autism… is not really surprising.

Kenshi.

If you can get past the kind of… weird control scheme…

The game is basically a single player mmorpg.

You start off as an absolute weakling, and there is no … scaling, the way most other rpgs either generally have certain levelled enemies in certain areas, that you progress through linearly or unlock sequentially, or just an outright whole world spanning dynamic level matching kind of system.

You can be battling a small beast… and then a herd of very, very much more dangerous beasts, or slavers, will just happen to pass by, and royally fuck up your day.

Every character in the game, including you, plays by the same rules.

All major NPCs can be killed, the game is also full of varying factions with varying alignments towars other factions, and they will treat your character differently based on your race, the kinds of actio s you do, your reputation with other factions.

The storytelling is … a sandbox/emergent approach. Not in the sense of ‘there are no story lines or quests’… but in the sense of… a whole lot of stuff is out there, but you have to self direct yourself to go out and find it, or randomly encounter it.

Also, you can gain allies, make your own faction, and control a small army… and you can even build your own settlement, and economically interact with the rest of the world.

… Its… kind of hard to describe.

There really aren’t any other games quite like Kenshi.

Its got a good sized modding scene, and it incorperates at least some elemenrs of… every game you mentioned.

If you use a mod to up your max follower/faction member count… you can basically play the game as an RTS (with pause). Build a settlement, recruit followers (or enslave them), arm them, fees them, train them up, and go take over a city if you want.

… Or play basically solo, just you and your bonedog, maybe as a bounty hunter for hire, or a hashish smuggler, or get a pack animal and run a trade caravan.

This pun caused me so much actual pain I now have testicular torsion.

Heel turn pivot, strike a confident dreamy anime dude pose, smirk, ‘Hey, thanks!’ heel turn pivot back, continue with what you were doing.

I am not even joking. When I was younger, and anime was less generally popular, that would be probably viewed as extremely cringe…

But nowadays, anime is much, much more generally popular, and I think this would work.

Just gotta actually be confident.