Instigate

The logic is that road deaths go up during holiday periods (which is sadly a statistical fact here) so they ramp up enforcement and double the penalties for those periods to try to correct for it. I’m not a huge fan of the idea, but from a purely statistical and scientific standpoint it does at least make some amount of sense. My individual circumstance is a bit of a curveball because my punishment was way outstripping my crime, but I do have some understanding for the idea of double demerits. I think my issue was that what should have been a one-point offence (doubled to two points) became an eight-point offence just because I was on a provisional licence. That part I’m still very salty about.

Yeah, I was on my P-plates (provisional licence) at the time where you have can have up to seven demerit points before losing your licence. As a P-plater, every speeding offence automatically is moderated to the maximum value, four points, and because it was a ‘double-demerits’ weekend (for public holidays), that four points was doubled to eight points. I received more demerit points than km/h I was over the limit.

For reference, if I was on my full licence and it wasn’t double-demerits, it would have been one point out of a total twelve. Instead, I got eight points which suspended my licence. Thankfully the magistrate I had was reasonable and granted my reduction - that also meant I didn’t have to pay court costs and I represented myself, so the whole thing cost me the initial $35 court booking fee. I managed to get something that resembled justice out of it, but I’ll still have a bitter taste in my mouth because of the whole rigamarole for a long time to come.

I challenged a licence suspension in Australia when I was 19 years old. I gladly paid the $560 fine but I would’ve lost my licence for three months because I was driving 7km/h over the limit on a ‘double-demerits’ weekend. The magistrate sent me to a fortnightly driver’s course for 12 weeks, all the while I kept my licence, and after the course was over I fronted court again and successfully argued my three month suspension down to four weeks.

I’m pretty sure that going to court over traffic violations is a thing in any country that allows going to court over traffic violations.

FYI in most Australian jurisdictions, you can’t demand that the individual police officer who fined you attend court to defend themselves. That part is most likely a US thing.

One of the more believable greentexts I’ve read, and likely for this reason.

I always used to use a 3PA that had no ads or recommendations, just my own curated sub list, and I honestly loved that. There were definitely echo chambers but things worked well for me as long as I stayed conscious to that. Then when the APIpocalypse happened I browsed reddit on the web and in their official app for the first time in almost ten years and just noped right the fuck off.

At one point in my feed it went:

• Ad
• Suggested Subreddit
• Ad
• Suggested Post
• Post from subscribed feed
• Ad
• Suggested Post

Like, only 1/6 items were things I had actually asked to see. It was atrocious. Default reddit is absolutely cancer now, and I really struggle to empathise with people who are still using it vanilla without any extensions or domain changes.

I wouldn’t necessarily say never. Truthfully, I’ve pirated a few games and once I found out I loved them I’ve bought copies. I had the capacity to buy, but didn’t want to sink the money in for a potentially low return. I definitely would never have had the money to buy all of the games I pirated over the years though.

I also don’t consider sharing of ROMs of outdated games that are no longer available for sale in order to use in an emulator as piracy, and I’d say the vast majority of my fee-free game downloads were focussed there. How can I be depriving the creators of anything if I literally have no way to pay them to access the content?

Welp, looks like it’s gonna be yet another Ubisoft cash-grab. Yay.

To be fair, forcing everyone back to the office and then giving them individual offices kinda makes less sense than forcing everyone back to the office to all work in one space together. At least that way it’s actually encouraging human interaction - if you’re working from a private office you might as well be working from your private home.

Not suggesting that any of that is a good idea at all though. Forced working from an office is now officially an antiquated idea.

And even those self-imposed selective forces are ever-changing and vary quite wildly from context to context across the globe and across the socioeconomic spectrum. Modern human evolution is really fascinating.

I think he’d feel this similarly devalues it.

I respect Watterson too much to assume his stance.

Well… which is it? Do you respect him too much to assume his stance or are you assuming he’d feel this similarly devalues it?

Holy shit, is this why lowly assistants are colloquially called gophers?!? I never drew the connection. Sometime we just take weird words or phrases for granted without thinking about their etymology.

I’m not sure that your two categories of gamers are necessarily mutually exclusive. I’d consider myself somewhere in both of those camps. For instance, I have hundreds of hours logged each on a range of open world games like Skyrim, BotW, WoW etc. but I also love to play incremental games which satisfies my mathy brain. I’m generally a min/maxer and completionist and in RPGs this often means exploring every location, killing every enemy and collecting every item before progressing the main story, so as to be maxed out at all points in time. I’m not a big PvP fan, but when I do engage in PvP I tend to find some balance between whatever the meta is and whatever my personal playstyle ‘feels’ is right.