This is an old thread, but I have to thank you for recommending this book. I ordered it and have been hooked! Incredible writing and storytelling. Thanks from this Texan.
Anecdotal, but I literally went from reading this message to looking down at my phone where one of my friends was re-posting (in support of) someone complaining on twitter: "Stop stealing from $ETHNIC_MERCHANTS! It's not just a cute top, it's a culture!"
This comment is not germane to the point you were making, just wanted to share:
I am a web dev who knows nothing of the Collatz conjecture, so I had to check out the Wikipedia article for it. Thanks for teaching me something today.
I wrote this JavaScript function based on what I read in the article. It's a simple algorithm but it was fun to see it work. For anyone who is in my shoes (weak mathematical background), running this function might be a useful supplement for illustrating the gist concept of the Collatz conjecture:
function collatz(i) {
console.log(i); // for visual feedback
if (i <= 0) throw new Error('Input must be a positive integer');
if (i === 1) return i;
if (i % 2 === 0) return collatz(i/2);
return collatz((3*i)+1);
}
collatz(42); // or any positive integer
It was bad UX because people couldn't easily tell the difference between a vorpal bunny and a weak one. The name wasn't enough. UO had a "consider" style skill but no one used it (I forget the name, "evaluate" or something). Eventually, "consider" was streamlined in MMOs into color coding mobiles, a la WoW. But in UO, people relied on the creature's sprite to assess difficulty.
The energy vortex sprite was a different Easter Egg iirc. And sometimes, you could get energy vortices that were llama-shaped...
Speaking of killing everything in UO, in what would be considered the "T2A" era of this game (I'm estimating something like 1998-1999), I remember manipulating the line-of-sight bug that let you attack NPCs inside town in such a way that the town guards wouldn't come (There were many "criminal acts" you could commit, like attacking or stealing from a player, and if you did them in town the guards would instantly kill you).
I would town kill NPCs to get colors of cloth that were not achievable using the dye tubs available to you. They would spawn with colors that were less garish than the ones you would end up with if you dyed them. I would chop their clothes up, sort them by colors, and use the raw cloth to create clothes on my tailor. It was a great money maker, because killing NPCs was quick and easy, and in the end it's just clothing items, but the product was not available anywhere else. If someone killed you in the process, you were naked except for a weapon anyway, and people generally did not understand what I wanted with the cloth in the first place so it didn't get looted.
From the housing system to the criminal system, UO was just the best MMO. You could do anything, but you had to suffer the consequences. I love the totally free-market economy it gives rise to. I feel like MMORPGs got a lot softer and less "libertarian" (if I can use that word without all the political baggage), for better or worse. Probably for better, because WoW was popular in a way that UO never would be.
I always heard Anarchy Online was great, but I never got around to playing it.
Dark Age of Camelot was amazing. I remember many times standing in the frontier as part of a friendly army facing the enemy both armies equaling 100 to 200 people. Someone would give the order to charge and all hell broke loose. Defending keeps was also fun, throwing things off the battlements. Good times.
Working at Amazon is literally no one's "only choice" in the US. In fact, I would bet on it being a better option than most of what is available to low or unskilled workers.
Just to take this down a certain path: having your foot amputated is better than having your whole foot cut off, but nobody is going to describe either as good choices.
Picking between running madly around an amazon warehouse for 15 dollars an hour or taking some other low skill job for less seems fine, until Amazon realizes that the workers are all interchangeable and the company benefits more by burning through them quickly and replacing them with fresh bodies than it does by continued support for its staff with long term plans of employment. The second they decide to exploit their labor for their sole benefit, rather than something that can be seen as mutually beneficial for both in the long term, that's when people start to feel you should be doing better.
Also, just to address a theme that gets thrown around a lot. >>Working at Amazon is literally no one's "only choice" in the US.
What does this mean? The US is a massive country with huge differences from one region to the next, never mind the difference between the urban and rural areas within a region. To try and pretend its a unified country with unified value systems and a unified equally distributed economic system is asinine. On top of that, who the fuck knows what's going on in "Joe Random-US-Citizen"'s life. Maybe it is his only option because he also has to take care of his dying father and is racked with student debt from a failed attempt at getting his BA. IDK what anyone's value choices represent, but this whole "you can always just do better if you really wanted" is a lie I'm sick of being peddled. The US is economically more advanced than many countries. There's still people living in relative poverty. There's still massive social problems.
Any time someone says any broad group (Americans, Gays, Engineers) all face the same situations, I have to roll my eyes because it's never true.
Sorry if this came across as a personal attack on your views (it isn't, I don't really know them from your 2 sentences), it's just something I see get brought up and this was me finally responding.
When people report driving cars, having sex, cooking entire meals and then eating them, and various other strange behavior while under the influence of Ambien, saying "racism isn't a side effect of Ambien" is a snarky and asinine tweet. It's the kind of cheap shot a writer for a late night talk show would write.
> What is it with this obsession that every requires the best doctor?
Being only willing to settle for the absolute best doctor in the world is ridiculous, but it is perfectly rational to want to choose the best one out of a small group of candidates. I can't imagine approaching it any other way when my personal health is on the line.
