Salvete Omnes

Link to the game is in the reblog so tumblr doesn’t eat the post

This fangame starts immediately after the ending of Halfway to Infinity and lets you lead both Taylor and T2 to some definition of home, hopefully, whatever you three define it to be.

Story by @pekasairroc and @sugar-splenda

Art by Sugar-Splenda

a lot of people are giving examples in the notes of things they just find annoying like not using headphones in public, but OP is talking about actual literal scripts of things to say in awkward situations

if you have a date or two with someone and you don't see a relationship developing? most millennials / gen Zers just end up ghosting. but a social script that might have been taught and rehearsed in the past could be:

"I really appreciated getting dinner with you the other night and I enjoyed your company, but I'm afraid I didn't feel a spark. I wish you the best, and hope you find that special someone!"

Remember things about your friends! Ask people about their weekends, hobbies, holidays, studies, and jobs! Listen for the concerns people have and what they are working on! Draw connections between one person and another to get the ball rolling. "Oh, Maura, you just got your first cat! You should talk to Felix, he used to work at a rescue. Felix, please tell Maura all the new-cat-guardian pointers."

"Bill, Sheila, Xan, this is my friend Kale. Kale is really into Star Trek, Bill you and them should talk about it!"

If you're looking for a manual on these sorts of things; social etiquette, social scripts, how to handle difficult and/or awkward social situations, etc. then I highly recommend picking up any book by Miss Manners. Her books really are the gold standard for learning the types of skills this post is talking about. I should also mention that Miss Manners is witty and hilarious so her books are also fun to read.

The best book by Miss Manners to get started with would be Miss Manner's Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior. This one is probably the best starting point because it gives the best overview of all the basics.

Sorry @darlingdear but I couldn't let this stay in the tags.

I say this as someone who is neurodivergent had grew up very socially awkward, but recently I find the "screw small talk, I wanna get to know the REAL you" attitude to be pretentious as well as a demonstration of a lack of boundaries.

But also, I think a lot of people who have this attitude don't actually really know what does qualify as small talk. The definition of small talk is any topic that's of no real consequence and includes topics like food, pets, sports, music, whatever show you're currently streaming, whatever book you're currently reading, and yes, the weather. A lot of people who have this "I hate small talk / I don't do small talk" attitude probably think it's only reciting a bunch of secret scripts about the weather, and don't realize how much they engage in small talk whenever they talk about their pets or their favorite foods or the really cool show they're watching right now.

Small talk is a way of sounding out a person’s attitudes. It’s about finding out if they’re a rabid asshole or someone you want to spend more time with.

I had a professor who got angry at a group of (mostly women), from five countries, all of whom met yesterday, for talking about daytime TV. He basically insulted us and called us shallow.

“That’s funny” said the child “because 2+4=6 and two pounds and four pounds is six pounds. It’s like the same as math!”

“What happens if you add 6+1?”

“SEVEN”

“What if we put one pound of mangos on the scale?” <mangos added>

“IT’S THE SAME!!”

“OK, what’s 7-4?”

“Three?”

“What if we take the four pound watermelon off the scale?” <watermelon removed>

Bill Watterson – Calvin and Hobbes (1986)

Hergé – Tintin (1947, Tintin Magazine)

Jeff Smith – Bone (1993, Bone Holiday Special)

Walt Kelly – Pogo (1950, Maclean's Magazine)

And a bonus:

The average person has enough understanding of the concept of intense, specific fears (of which arachnophobia is a common go-to example) to realize that someone with arachnophobia will probably have their enjoyment of the game ruined by a spider monster jumping out.

The solution of just getting rid of the spiders is fairly obvious, and swapping one model out for another is, to my limited understanding, one of the simpler ways to modify a game.

Seizures and what causes them are less common knowledge, due to not being referenced in something like every third piece of children's media.

Additionally, even if someone has a basic understanding that flashing lights can cause seizures, that doesn't translate directly into automatically being able to tell what needs to be adjusted. It's entirely possible that a person may not think to count something as flashing lights that produces the same effect when displayed on a lighted screen.

I can't speak for the difficulty of adjusting visual effects, because I know very little about programming, but making a mod to remove seizure triggers would at least require research and a great deal of conscientious double-checking to avoid accidentally creating something leads people to believe it is safe while still containing the danger.

The motion sickness thing is complicated because of how motion sickness works and how much it varies from person to person.

Motion sickness is actually a feature, not a bug. It's part of the human nervous system's self-preservation instincts and functions as a defense against food spoilage and other ingested toxins.

When your brain receives sensory input that doesn't make sense (such as one sense indicating movement while another reports stillness, or visuals warping strangely), your survival instincts assume you have consumed a neurotoxin, and respond with nausea in hopes of minimizing damage done by getting you to purge any not yet absorbed.

What specific combinations of sensory input cause motion sickness and how severely varies from person to person and even within an individual at different points in their life. This is impacted both by genetics and by how a person's experiences have trained their nervous system.

Time spent rocking in rocking chairs, for example, has been shown to help people become less intensely prone to motion sickness.

Each individual's experience is going to be different. Some people prone to motion sickness may only have difficulties when the camera or display does something weird and unexpected and could be helped by something as simple as removing a filter used to indicate certain effects, whereas others just can't play first person pov games at all, and accommodating them would require re-making the entire game with a different type of game play.

There genuinely should be more done about accessibility in video games, but I don't think people are actively choosing not to accommodate other conditions in order to focus on aracnophobia.

I think someone, somewhere, made a mod for a game because they or someone they knew needed it, and other modders saw that and realized making something similar for other games was a relatively low effort thing they could do that would help others.

The existence of aracnophobia mods does not inhibit the creation of other accessibility mods. There is no reason people should have to choose only one type of accessibility to mod for.

I can understand the frustration of important issues going unaddressed, especially when other issues are being handled, but shaming the compassion and helpful spirit already on display is not the way to encourage additional helpful behavior.

This post talks about a new DM feature in youtube. What it fails to mention is that as part of this new feature is that when you send someone a link to a video, and they open it in the youtube app, they will see who sent them the link. Specifically, your channel name.

If your google account name is your real name, so is your channel name by default.

This means the new default behavior is that everyone you send a youtube link to will see your full name if they open it in the mobile app.

To turn this off:

Go to your youtube app settings

Go to Privacy

Turn off "Channel visibility for shared links"

Expanding on my “Vaati made the wind waker” idea. More under cut.

* A fax machine, kids, is what we would use to send documents before email. You feed the paper copy into the machine, and it scans it and sends it to another machine in the other person's office, which prints out a copy. Why anyone sends faxes anymore is a mystery because they are less reliable than email and less info-secure than your average wet paper bag but hotels and doctors' offices really fuckin' love them a fax.

This person is clearly either stubborn or stupid. Could be both! But letting it go to voicemail repeatedly didn't work, answering and yelling "If you can hear me this is not a fax machine!" didn't work (sometimes it does -- some combined phone-fax machines, if they call you, they broadcast any audible response to whoever is nearby), and calling them didn't work because *gestures* all I have is their fax number.

I might also be stupid because it took me a while to realized I can fax them.

Hello! Please be advised that the phone number [my work number] is not a fax machine. It is my work telephone number. You have been faxing an incorrect number. I cannot receive faxes at this number. If you are aware of anyone who is giving this number out as their fax number, you would be doing me a favor if you let them know! Thank you and good luck in your faxing endeavors.