What You've Done Today - Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life

[Gfted1]

Good news everyone, Im down to 214.45 lb.! It turns out that simply not stuffing my face is working for me and doesnt require any physical effort on my part. HUZZAH!

[BruceVC]

1 minute ago, Gfted1 said:

Good news everyone, Im down to 214.45 lb.! It turns out that simply not stuffing my face is working for me and doesnt require any physical effort on my part. HUZZAH!

Nice, do you not go for those walks anymore?

I still do but I havent been for the last 4 days because we are  going through a  rainy spell at the moment 

 

[Gfted1]

9 minutes ago, BruceVC said:

Nice, do you not go for those walks anymore?

I still do but I havent been for the last 4 days because we are  going through a  rainy spell at the moment 

 

I havent gone for a walk since Y1 of Covid. Its a good idea though and I enjoy getting out of the house a bit. Maybe when it cools down a little Ill start again. 

Speaking of which, whats the summer temperatures in SA like? Awful? 

[BruceVC]

56 minutes ago, Gfted1 said:

I havent gone for a walk since Y1 of Covid. Its a good idea though and I enjoy getting out of the house a bit. Maybe when it cools down a little Ill start again. 

Speaking of which, whats the summer temperatures in SA like? Awful? 

Summers in Cpt I find very hot and some days its uncomfortably hot with  average temperatures being about 84-89 Fahrenheit. But its not hot every day which is nice. We are now in Winter and today is the coldest day of the year so far, 53F in the daytime 

But I dont mind the cold, I dont really feel it. Its the heat that bothers me. I normally go for my walk when the sun rises which is now at 7:40 am and the temperature is 48F

[Gfted1]

1 hour ago, BruceVC said:

Summers in Cpt I find very hot and some days its uncomfortably hot with  average temperatures being about 84-89 Fahrenheit. But its not hot every day which is nice. We are now in Winter and today is the coldest day of the year so far, 53F in the daytime 

But I dont mind the cold, I dont really feel it. Its the heat that bothers me. I normally go for my walk when the sun rises which is now at 7:40 am and the temperature is 48F

Huh, for some reason I thought the summer temperatures would be much higher in SA.

[BruceVC]

1 hour ago, Gfted1 said:

Huh, for some reason I thought the summer temperatures would be much higher in SA.

It depends where you live, we have different weather patterns in different parts of the country. Not as different as the US but it varies 

[Amentep]

4 hours ago, Gfted1 said:

Im not a PC gamer any more since my desktop power supply died and I never bothered to replace it. Now all my gaming is on mobile.

I'm mostly playing Switch and Mobile, but I'm thinking of buying a gaming laptop.  But I admit I don't complete games near as much as I used to, either (and sometimes judge if its worth buying a game based on how much into I think I'll actually play it vs cost).

4 hours ago, Gfted1 said:

Im currently playing:

Star Trek Fleet Command

Hawk: Freedom Squad

Clash of Clans

Boom Beach

Diablo Immortal

I've got a few mobile games I'm playing, primarily Fire Emblem Heroes, Another Eden: The Cat Beyond Time And Space and Diablo Immortal.  DI is pretty good, but I'm not really a MMORPG player, so the group/warband/clan/Immortal-Shadow stuff is a kind of a loss for me personally.

Chris

[Malcador]

Fun meeting with management to be told, essentially

 

[Gfted1]

19 minutes ago, Amentep said:

DI is pretty good, but I'm not really a MMORPG player, so the group/warband/clan/Immortal-Shadow stuff is a kind of a loss for me personally.

Im familiar with the first three; group = party for a dungeon, warband = group of 8 players who get together on a regular basis, clan = alliance. But I have no idea what Immortal-Shadow does. I never group up unless I cant solo a dungeon. My level 42 Necro is already a wrecking machine and I play on Arkain's Valor server.

[Amentep]

57 minutes ago, Gfted1 said:

Im familiar with the first three; group = party for a dungeon, warband = group of 8 players who get together on a regular basis, clan = alliance. But I have no idea what Immortal-Shadow does. I never group up unless I cant solo a dungeon. My level 42 Necro is already a wrecking machine and I play on Arkain's Valor server.

The Immortals and the Shadows are two groups vying for power in Sanctuary.  I gather its something for players after playing the plot; there's a point where you get invited into one of the factions and if you accept you have missions related to the group as well as enmity with the other group.

EDIT - it may be something you only get post lvl 50; my Crusader was 52 when I decided to switch to a Barb and see how they played.  I'm on Ureh, but I don't really play enough to be a good team player so haven't explored much of the coop play excepting a couple of dungeon only groupings for extra spoils.

EDIT2 - since I'd just started the Barb, recreated her on Arkaine's Valor.

[Sarex]

51 minutes ago, Malcador said:

Fun meeting with management to be told, essentially

We had a similar meeting, where they essentially told us we are going to need +50% dev team in the very near future and we have no idea how to hire or onboard that many people.

[Malcador]

I think our approach is a couple of pickup trucks driving around Mumbai.

[Sarex]

2 minutes ago, Malcador said:

I think our approach is a couple of pickup trucks driving around Mumbai.

Mmmm, seeing as how half of our team is from India I don't think that will change much. Joking aside they are quality workers and when needed work 16 hours a day 7 days a week and somehow we still have too much work to handle...

[Malcador]

Yah, not trying to say they're bad just being from India, it's that we hire seemingly terrible ones.  Like a Java developer that needed to know what an inner class was, or the support guy that forgets to double check what his Linux commands do - pro-tip never write 'rm -rf .'

One of our Indian team members left, and told me he got a 60% pay raise to do less at a new job locally

[Sarex]

1 hour ago, Malcador said:

Yah, not trying to say they're bad just being from India

The thing is that is not that far from the truth, the good ones rarely stay in India. They usually work until they get a CV good enough to get a visa to the US or Canada. That is happening to my employer as we speak and seeing as how they don't care about abusing them I imagine it will happen to the rest of the team from India. Although they are pivoting to the EU for their workforce now.

My previous employer, also from the US, imported so many people from India on a work visa, that at one point their head dev was an Indian (still is probably). The employer is a very large and wealthy, to give you perspective. Although I think they mostly hired Indians as no one else from the US wanted to work in Florida...

Edit: Also there is cheap Indian labor and then there is CHEAP Indian labor.

Edited June 15, 2022 by Sarex

[Gfted1]

1 hour ago, Amentep said:

EDIT2 - since I'd just started the Barb, recreated her on Arkaine's Valor.

Battle.net Gfted1#1596. Hit me up if youde like to splode some mooks.

[LadyCrimson]

Does "I play mostly mobile" etc. these days mean Switch/Deck? I still think of it as phone/tablet.    I tried phone/tablet games initially, and some of them are all right for brief time wasters but no desire to touch-smash a screen constantly or have a controller attached to those for anything more complex.

Plus it's not PC vs other format for me. Mostly it's just ... the industry has changed a lot + when I do play something my feeling is often "this is cute/cool but I can't be bothered to sit here and keep playing or do the "git gud" process (if needed), so I turn it off. The core concept or loops of most games is always the same and I'm bored of that loop, no matter how different the details around it might be.

Edit: it's akin to when I became bored of fantasy novels, or the film industry etc.
I should take up some (low-key) dance again maybe. Turn the family room into a dance-room. Maybe I just don't want to sit in front of a screen anymore.

Edited June 16, 2022 by LadyCrimson

[Bartimaeus]

8 hours ago, LadyCrimson said:

Mostly it's just ... the industry has changed a lot + when I do play something my feeling is often "this is cute/cool but I can't be bothered to sit here and keep playing or do the "git gud" process (if needed), so I turn it off. The core concept or loops of most games is always the same and I'm bored of that loop, no matter how different the details around it might be.

Edit: it's akin to when I became bored of fantasy novels, or the film industry etc.
I should take up some (low-key) dance again maybe. Turn the family room into a dance-room. Maybe I just don't want to sit in front of a screen anymore.

Gaming is very established in its fundamentals, conventions, and style at this point, and there's not a lot of deviation from it. Myself and others that I know feel the same discontent and/or fatigue that you do - you pick up a game that you think looks nice, you start playing it, and within a half hour you feel like you pretty much grasp the game in its entirety. Maybe you don't know every gameplay mechanic yet, but the ones you do know are pretty much the exact same ones found in a dozen other games that you've played and already mastered, while the ones that you'd figure out later wouldn't be much of a surprise or fundamentally change how you play the game; maybe you don't know exactly how the story will go or what will happen to the characters, but you get a general feel for all of it and what it's going for...you feel like you've seen it all executed so many times before, and much better in your favorite works. You more or less know what playing the rest of the game will be like and there's no delight in any of it, so continuing to play feels much like going through the motions - depending on how extreme the feeling for the particular game is, you're usually somewhere between simply occupying yourself with something that is "fine"...or outright numbing your brain by mindlessly shambling forward.

Indie games have more experimentation than AAA games, but if you look at the top indie games of any given genre, it's largely going to be stuff that doesn't really depart from their given niches much more than the tired AAA offerings. On top of already feeling a kind of general gaming depression, these storefronts where you're trying to find something (anything!) that's different to enjoy instead bury you under endless tidal waves of samey stuff in a sickeningly over-saturated market that makes it all feel rather impossible. Everything culminates in the general feeling that either gaming has changed or you have (and it's probably a bit of both on top of getting older and having experienced it all already)...and maybe it would be better if you just find something better to do with your time. There are exceptions where something in particular magically hooks you, but it is rare and fleeting. Unfortunately, these sorts of problems pretty much also apply to every other medium of entertainment (...and possibly every source of entertainment in life in general - everything starts to get tired when you've seen or done it too many times).

tl;dr: I recommend taking up dance again, .

Edited June 16, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[Gfted1]

10 hours ago, LadyCrimson said:

...no desire to touch-smash a screen constantly or have a controller attached to those for anything more complex.

I have a legit problem with virtual joysticks, my thumb constantly wanders off point and then I have to reposition.

[Gorth]

16 hours ago, Sarex said:

Mmmm, seeing as how half of our team is from India I don't think that will change much. Joking aside they are quality workers and when needed work 16 hours a day 7 days a week and somehow we still have too much work to handle...

That sounds like 20 years of my life...

[Amentep]

2 hours ago, Gfted1 said:

I have a legit problem with virtual joysticks, my thumb constantly wanders off point and then I have to reposition.

Yeeah, I have that problem too, which is why I've tried to avoid mobile joystick games. Except Diablo (why did my character stop moving and attacking, did I get disconnected from the server? No, my thumbs just drifted.

RE Staffing issues - over the course of 10 years I went from having around ~25 FT staff to now having 9. Spread over 7 locations.  In public facing offices. 5 of the 7 locations are now run by a single person.  

RE: Gaming - I confess, that as I've gotten older, I have less patience for the longer narratives that a lot of RPGs strive for.  While I still love RPGs, I just don't have the stamina (and to be fair, have a lot more demands on my time) than I used to.  I've degenerated into a filthy casual gamer.   

[Malcador]

I think I should outsource my work to some people, I can look productive that way.

[Gorth]

9 minutes ago, Amentep said:

 I've degenerated into a filthy casual gamer.   

I haven't turned all casual (yet), but I do struggle with games I would have played 24/7 and "devoured" 20 years ago. I still haven't finished neither Witcher III nor Pillars or Eternity. Shorter games that I know well are fine. Love playing a game of Master of Orion 2, War in Russia (old SSI turnbased strategy), Jagged Alliance 2 etc. Games I can save and put aside after an hour or two. Same thing with Guild Wars 2. I deliberately stay clear of anything that looks like raiding or other team activities that *used* to be like a second day job when it came to time commitment required....

[BruceVC]

2 hours ago, Gorth said:

I haven't turned all casual (yet), but I do struggle with games I would have played 24/7 and "devoured" 20 years ago. I still haven't finished neither Witcher III nor Pillars or Eternity. Shorter games that I know well are fine. Love playing a game of Master of Orion 2, War in Russia (old SSI turnbased strategy), Jagged Alliance 2 etc. Games I can save and put aside after an hour or two. Same thing with Guild Wars 2. I deliberately stay clear of anything that looks like raiding or other team activities that *used* to be like a second day job when it came to time commitment required....

I thought  it was mandatory as part of the job interview process as a moderator to have played and loved  PoE?

Please tell me you joking about not playing W3? Its my second favorite RPG of all time 

 

 

[Gfted1]

6 minutes ago, BruceVC said:

I thought  it was mandatory as part of the job interview process as a moderator to have played and loved  PoE?