Teachers have ALWAYS made those screams. My mother, a french teacher always complained that before she could teach kids french, she had to teach them how to read a clock, how to do math, and how the days of the week work (these were fifth graders mind you). She blamed education policy, but this is nothing more than what happens when 30% of your students are in poverty.
The reality is that some percentage of students will always fall through the cracks, and the human brain loves to blame whatever is "new" for problems that are "new" to you. This has been a problem for teachers since at least the No Child Left Behind policy, and even goes as far back as Socrates bemoaning his students being terrible because books meant they didn't have to have perfect memories.
Students suffered because covid was both a huge disruption to their education, and parents freaked out instead of trying to handle it (and plenty of people literally could not handle it anyway). It doesn't help that half the country openly cries that education is nothing more than liberal indoctrination, and openly downplay the value of even basic education, like the three Rs, and claims that anything higher than a high school education is also liberal indoctrination, is "woke", and is valueless.
I 100% hate tiktok, but I don't think it is (currently) being used to mentally attack the US. Maybe someday if we are ever at war with China, but right now they are content believing that inclusivity is toxic on it's own. I don't think tiktok changes people's brain significantly. I do think it is extremely low value way to spend time, and that it is addictive, two serious issues when taken together, but then again I spent my life watching several hours of TV a day. I especially don't like how tiktok seems to purposely direct new male users to what is basically softcore porn.
I own this car and the engine. I did extensive engine repairs and maintenance (rod bearings, valve cover seals, throttle actuators, SAP, plugs, coils, sensors).
This is insanely expensive amount of parts in this video, not even counting the work itself. Basically it would never make economic sense to do a rebuild like this.
RuneScape fascinated me as a kid but going back as an adult, it got really boring once I got past level ~60 in anything as the content did not change quickly enough to keep me engaged. Never seemed fun to grind something for hours just to get another level.
I thought about getting into custom botting as a fun challenge but it’s still kinda pointless - even if I had a ton of gp and max levels there would not be much to do except all the quests. PvP in the contemporary scene seems way too complicated and difficult due to the reliance on quirks of the game engine.
Definitely an interesting and quirky game but can’t fathom spending days of RL time grinding levels to chop a different color tree.
Ironman here btw. I started playing Old School Runescape in 2018 in my 30s because of the swamp man. I fucking love this game.
I take frequent breaks from the grind, but I keep seeing a parallel with real life effort: nothing worthwhile is achievable unless you put your back and a LOT of time into it.
Like the meme says, Runescape players either are basement dwelling NEETs, or accomplished people with families, going to the gym every day. There's no in between.
(Grinding OSRS a couple hours a week is the only thing keeping me sane while trying to bootstrap a business)
I haven't played since maxing and finishing my 200ms circa 2016, but at least at that point your meme was pretty true of the efficient skilling community. A surprising number of high-ehp players held down professional jobs while legitimately competing with the NEETs for highscore ranks by pushing the envelope on high efficiency skilling methods like tick fishing. Iirc, a number of fairly prominent skillers like autumn elegy, mazhar, gingbino and other hexis people worked in tech.
We all die, become dust and soon forgotten, whether your time is spent maxing RS or achieving world peace. The only judge will be yourself in your deathbed.
(It might now be obvious I was not raised Protestant nor Calvinist)
Not all, just 2277 + buyables/easy ones, but still well north of 20k hours (including rs2, so not just since 2013) all told. If it actually were 200m all I'd probably feel differently.
And no, not really.
One, it was a lot of fun. I guess I should clarify that I spent much of that playtime doing pvp of one sort or another and the stats were almost incidental. Mastery of one thing has always been more attractive than spreading time around a bunch of different games, and I have a lot of fond memories of what it was like to play that game at a high level and still have good friends from that time. So, from that angle I don't consider the time wasted any more than I'd consider time spent relaxing, playing any other games or reading a good book wasted. I was never a NEET and didn't really push it beyond what I'd call fairly typical entertainment hours per week, but those hours were just concentrated on this one thing over a long timeframe, and that adds up - especially when both leisure and competitive goals are satisfied by different aspects of the same thing. More a case of being unusually efficient in using my spare/entertainment time than of reshaping my life around it.
On that note, you develop some pretty intense split focus abilities regularly playing multiple accounts at once and/or doing high-intensity skilling. A lot of those hours were actually me, in some kind of zen robot state, bashing out actions while paying almost full attention to reading or watching something else. Read an awful lot of books while grinding, worked on my language, got some good treadmill/powerlifting time, that sort of stuff. I find that I'm more relaxed and creative when doing some kind of physical activity like running, and that same dynamic felt true of skilling. When not multilogging, skilling can be very meditative and relaxing. Something about having a task that takes some but not a ton of attention is just nice.
Sorry, as down-thread, I phrased that terribly - not 200m all, just 2277 and ~1b total xp, though I guess I was top 100-200 overall/ehp when I was playing. My distribution of xp is unique enough to identify me, so sorry for not naming the skills.
I played RuneScape compulsively[1] from about 2005 to about 2013, but haven't really played it since (besides trying OSRS a bit). It's probably the original reason I was interested in programming (I fondly remember poking the client's memory in a debugger to make my local GP seem higher than it actually was).
[1]: I mean this literally: RuneScape is an addicting game, in a way that makes me a little sad.
I played RuneScape daily from 2005 - 2009 (I started playing with a friend after school every day when I was in 2nd grade).
Definitely gave me a leg up on things like spelling, social interaction, learning not to trust strangers who promise to guard you through the wilderness, etc. Arguably guided, subconsciously, some much later intuitions I had about psychology / economics / game theory. And it was probably also responsible in getting me interested in computers.
I could see it being part of a funnel that makes people more likely to wind up on HN.
It exposed me to scripting early on (13), when I started trying to figure out how to bot making bow strings or whatever. Computer club was lit in middle school…
Even though I played many games in the 2000s, I actually never played Runescape, even though it sounds like something teenage me would have absolutely loved. I feel like I really missed out on a part of many people's childhoods
