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Did your own research turn up anything neat that the article I linked seems to be missing, at a skim?

Right. That is the point of targeted results, which are what we are talking about. There are targeted results, and there are sponsored results, which are also targeted, but are paid ads that are labeled "ad". They used to be labeled "sponsored" but they changed it at some point. These are usually the top four listings in the results.

I am opposed to the targeted general results, but not to the targeted paid ads because they are labeled as ads.

Targeted results make Google money indirectly. Sponsored targeted results make Google money directly.

Right. I don't think we're disagreeing exactly, I think I just need to think for awhile on how best to frame the monetary side of the issue that I'm seeing.

A start might be to say this: Google doesn't make money directly from targeted search results, true. But the companies who benefit from them do directly make money from them.

There's a good article on the topic of political correctness as the Enemy of the xenophobic right. Origins, what have you.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/30/political-correctness-how-the-right-invented-phantom-enemy-donald-trump

I haven't DMed a Pathfinder game in ages.

When I did, I recall my usual method being to keep the easy fights coming as usual, and occasionally (like, twice a session? More if the sessions are particularly long) throw out stuff intentionally built to kill them effortlessly. This stuff would be named enemies, setting up a foe and a plotline piece by piece. After every encounter they "lose", weaken the next a bit more. The strongest one is final boss of that plot, next strongest is his right hand man, etc. etc. Then instead of killing them when they lose an encounter, they get beaten soundly, mocked, and the enemy would get out before they got back up.

Sets up a story, fleshes out the world, and lets you test what their party is capable of.

Meanwhile keep raising the "floor" difficulty, e.g. easy fights, steadily. By the time they beat one of your "named" foes, you should have nailed a comfortable medium.

It's not the best method, but I never was very good at nailing difficulty with munchkin players. I did best with players who wanted a cool character that maybe ended up a bit shit.

preview edit: And of course, Roger is absolutely right. An easy campaign isn't bad if everyone enjoys themselves.

Xenoturdburger is clearly one of those  alt-right spackbags.

Should anymore consideration be given?

Nope.

I'd personally give consideration to the form of beating best suited to his ideological derangement, but that's mostly because minced fascist turns me on.

Whole and intact fascist is just wasted fun.

I just stumbled into this.

P3nt, you're great. If I had known what you were working on my life over the past three years would have been so much easier.

Your work actually reminds me of a piece I had a cool guy make for a personal project of mine over the past couple days. Maybe you'll like it? Not really meaning to threadjack here, FTR, more to try and give you something to look at in return for what you've given all of us to look at.

https://gyazo.com/18d23600ff62d3cb2de65776078eaa66

If I ever come into money and you happen to need work, I'll trade you cash for stuff not far off of things you'd already be making.

Keep it up.

I heard very good things about the new Doom. I'm not entirely surprised though, id Software are pretty damn good at what they do, and John Carmack definitely knows a thing or two about first person shooters, to put it mildly.  What's more amazing to my mind is that he was at the cutting edge in the early 90s, and he's somehow stayed there right up to the present and his work with Oculus Rift.  Pretty impressive, has to be said.

It's my understanding that the new DOOM has little to nothing new from Carmack in it, since he jumped ship shortly after they did another complete reboot of development to join the Oculus team. I don't have any solid sources on this, just scuttlebutt in the development industry says DOOM 2016 is not his work for the most part.

id Software also hasn't been very relevant since Doom 3. Doom 3 BFG was unsuccessful, Quake Live had limited outreach, and DOOM 4 was in development hell for years. Almost all their "decent" original people were fired between 01 and 04 except for Carmack. The work environment was also unhealthy as hell around that time, nigh on abusive, and (to hear the stories) has not improved. I worked for American McGee from 2013 to 2015 and got to hear the occasional angry rant about it.

But yes, Carmack himself is a great guy with a storied history. He helped me navigate some copyright stuff with Bethesda's lawyers at one point, so I can, legally speaking, use the concept of "slipgates" from Quake 1 in whatever I want, so long as the world is otherwise divorced from their IP. And he's definitely never been behind the curve technologically.

I find the idea of Trump using Reality TV tropes for political ends to be more distressing than quite a few of the things he's done. That's a way to get people politically invested in you -- make yourself into a "character", add a dramatic soundtrack to government procedure, encourage dramatic emotional responses from the other "characters" in the production. That's terrifying. It makes him seem less real and endears him to people who aren't politically inclined. It will undoubtedly do precisely what it's supposed to do, too; reality TV has a lot of studying and focus group testing done to ensure ideal responses from the audience.

It's funny, at a distance. But it has a lot of potential for abuse, and Trump is precisely who would abuse it.

Forcing everyone to read xerosaburu's posts would be socially unjust.

I don't have anything to add. This sums this entire topic up.

There are, true, people who have good things to say on the subject. But xerosubaru's very presence makes me want to just smear vomit and feces on the walls to spite the little bastard. Anything else I want to type right now devolves into what "my kind" like to do to "his kind". I'll let him have his gruesome internet skullfucking from a distance for now, and reminisce about the places I've been where maintenance crews go in armed and with a coroner on speed dial.

Yeah, but I'm not talking about ads. I avoid/despise ads. I understand why they're there and I don't use an adblocker most of the time, but I've never clicked an ad except by accident.

I get these links in search results for "440 stainless bar stock "1 inch by 1/2 inch"" and so forth. These are definitely search results, not ads. That could be said to be unique to me, except I know of many people it affects along the same lines -- when I played airsoft for a couple years people would notice they mainly got search results for rare airsoft guns from their favorite sites. It lead to some funny arguments, in fact. The same thing happens with videogames -- I know people who will search for, say, "Shadowrun Hong Kong", but because they only use Steam and Humble Store, the gog.com page doesn't show up. Usually, the official site is near the bottom of the first page for them.

There's definitely a monetary benefit for companies from having targeted search results.

This puts an article I read earlier today in a terrifying new light. Drawing parallels between Trump and the current Hungarian government under Orban.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-build-an-autocracy/513872/

The parallels seem sound too. I disagree with some of the points the writer makes (namely that Trumpism isn't quite fascism -- no, but neither was any other fascist government save Mussolini's, as per Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism...) but the parallels are good, the conclusions are good, it's well written as far as I can tell.

Normally I'd say "...but let's not threadjack", but this thread seems to be going nowhere worthwhile unless xerosubaru starts making a hilarious fool of himself in public.

preview edit: And there he goes! What happened to this?

The misogyny, homophobia and whole-scale restriction of the rights women and LGBT's in these countries with these cultures presents a real threat which has to be acknowledged.

We need to protect ourselves from evul cultures! Unless they're only harming those filthy poor folks what steal from our gubment and leeech off of the societies, then it's okay.

These types of people joincommunities like ours because they think "think for yourself" translates to "open minds for sale to first ideological buyer". Which is usually the case, but our folks are made of stouter, smarter stuff.

No, I doubt he cares either. If he does, he has some double-time backpedalling to get to. And some vicious mockery to endure.

Reading through the replies I've missed during my day-long nap...

The problem I'm seeing is that Google isn't the only one to benefit from their results algorithms. So does every online merchant from Amazon to Walmart, and the list continues all the way down to relatively small merchants. These are visible, undeniable monetary benefits.

Anecdote to outline the point: I once bought a length of pipe from speedymetals.com, for a firearms replica project's fake suppressor. (They had low shipping costs.) I now regularly see speedymetals.com results on Google searches to find good cheap bar stock of 1440 steel and so forth. That means that this relatively small supplier is getting a net benefit from Google's algorithms. I visit them more often than I should because they're quick (always top results), efficient (I can read their site layout instantly) and familiar (I know the company is good and how to navigate the site). I've bought more than I should have from them -- sacrificing an extra dollar here and there in favor of not bargain-hunting and dealing with unknown vendors. They're making money off of me, due to Google's algorithms.

So let's say you start a grassroots movement -- you have Google not understanding the problem and tons of businesses who don't understand the problem /and/ can show solid benefits from it. From small businesses to titans. And you have people who feel uneasy because they don't truly understand the problem, it just "makes sense" to them. These people will drop out of the movement. And then you have grassroots /against/ it from people who don't understand the problem, don't have any intuitive alignment with the problem, and benefit from it (see below).

I don't think there's any way to really "get rid of it" except by first destroying the monetary benefits. Something like AdBlock for search engine personalization, or the education I talked about before.

And then you have to make the end-user WANT that for some reason.

Keep in mind that echo chambers of this model are useful! They're comforting, they make it easier to find things if you have narrow interests with ambiguous jargon, they keep you in a tight-knit circle, these are things people want. You have to override these simple, short-term individual benefits in favor of a complex, long-term societal benefit. This is a tough problem. If it wasn't, anti-vaxxers would not be a thing. They certainly wouldn't be gaining popularity.

I'm uncertain of the best way to attack this. It's an uphill battle no matter how you look at it, and there's no obvious "best" approach. I'm thinking like, a meme might actually /be/ the best approach. It's not a good one still, but the other options that come to mind are worse. Play to people's paranoia and the gut-reaction to the idea of censorship/information control. Probably need to examine Trumpist rhetoric to get the best reaction out of it (the "fake news"/"secret Democrat criminal conspiracies" thing has gotten a lot of traction, more than I expected, and I'm not entirely sure why).

Bit off topic, Big Words wasn't a thing when I was active. There a ref piece on it? I kind of get the general idea, but the specifics are evading me enough that trying to put work toward it is basically procrastination, except I type out a bunch of word salad and feel endlessly confused about it.

That's definitely, IMO, the right mindset to have in these times.

Maybe five, ten years ago you could reasonably talk about "oh, maybe they're just edgy", but real Nazis are stalking these streets today. If you don't want to be mistaken for the Enemy, you don't adopt their ideological uniform. Period. The Resistance isn't too sure on who's part of them at the best of times.