They mock you for subscribing to an online service. I mock you for subscribing to WoW instead of FFXIV. We are not the same.

(Insert FFXIV free trial meme here)

TFW you became the goth girl of your dreams but got no femboys to get in your skirt and ruin their fresh makeup making out. 💔

My ancestors are smiling at me, Imperial. Can you say the same?

I don't think that it's just the gifted kid programs that are causing these issues, I think it's more foundational than that.

So much of school is focused on rote memorization, test scores, and grades that kids who do well end up having their entire sense of self-worth tied to their grades. Then they get out into the real world and no longer have those academic scores to tell them that they have any value.

It's how we get stuff like this:

There's so much more in this discussion like how kids who never are challenged by schoolwork don't actually learn how to learn and therefore give up on something at the first hint of difficulty or challenge because their brain is conditioned to believe that either you're instantly good at a thing or you're a failure forever, or how there's a real lack of teaching collaborative work in school despite that being like 90% of work in life, but that's all too much for my tired brain to try to piece together into a comprehensible message. So instead I'll just end with my usual meme on the subject: Beware, the "gifted kid to burnout trans girl with a praise kink" pipeline is real.

makes me wonder if people will go with whatever works well enough and for the least amount of effort.

This has always been the case. People want something that just works right out of the box, and familiarity will keep a lot of people from considering anything else.

I've been talking for a long time now with a friend of mine about how sick we are of Windows, and more recently about how I'm planning on installing Linux on a spare HDD I have before making the commitment to getting rid of Windows entirely, and he's decided to go to 11 despite hating it because he's afraid of trying something new and having to learn a new system.

And it's not just a computer thing. People can and will hurt themselves by repeating the same mistakes because it's the familiar habit and doing something new - even if it's for your own good - is scarier. Been there, done that, plenty of times.

"I know my playerbase." -Hakita, the dev of Ultrakill

After reading thighs this many times, it no longer looks like a word.

Mine's from working at a fish market as a kid: 20 times a day, somebody would walk in the door, hold their nose, and say "Something smells fishy in here!"

...

There's a reason that I wish customer service people a quick and easy shift rather than a nice day. I already know the kind of day they're having.

But I can understand not wanting to create a barrier to entry.

Unless it's left-handed people. They can get fucked.

"Lies? In your house of God? No wonder he has abandoned you."

The thing about cats is that their concept of boundaries and interaction are wildly different from people and dogs. Cats seem like they know exactly who is allergic to them and seem to be laser guided right to them because a lot of the things you'd do if you're allergic to them come off as being respectful of their boundaries. What seems like disinterest to us seems like an open invitation to them.

In the Bible, one of the people Jesus heals is the slave of a Roman soldier. In the original Latin version of the text, the word they use is for a specific type of slave, a male usually kept as a concubine or sex slave.