(Serious Answer: How do those things even work? A quick check of a manufacturer’s website doesn’t tell me anything about OS or hardware… I guess this is one of those things where the only way to find out for sure is to get a decomissioned unit from the manufacturer for security research purposes. Like that ATM.)
I’ve seen some of the terminals at a local Walmart booting up; they unquestionably run some form of Windows XP.
It’s sad that toxic game culture is so prevalent cuz like. As someone who has ended up in random matches with kids before, I can attest to how fucking easy it is to reverse and un-teach shitty attitudes in kids.
Example: I downloaded Friday the 13th because it’s free on psn. I dunno how to play, so I just enter quick play and I’m matched with 3-4 kids on mic. Immediately on mic they’re shitty and disparaging to each other. They laugh at each others deaths, they actively work against team mates and self sabotage, they call each other “fags”, etc. From the sounds of the voices they cannot be older than 13-14.
I put on my mic and just decide I ain’t havin it. I am nice. I thank them for barricading doors or leaving me items. When they break free from Jason’s grasp I say “good job!” or I try to help them. One kid survived for most of the match by himself. When he dies, I tell him he did a fantastic job.
The mood shift is practically INSTANT. These kids almost immediately stop being dick heads. They start encouraging each other and being kind. After the match all of them try to friend request me. Which should tell you a couple of things:
A) kids want to be kind, and they want to have a nice time playing games. But encounters with adults like me or so rare that they’ve trained themselves to instantly put on a toxic, shitty, defensive veneer when encountering any new person online. It’s literally just THAT EASY to not groom a horrible gaming community, it’s just that NO ONE does it.
B) the speed of which they all tried to friend me was cute, but paints for me such a sad picture? Like these kids are SO desperate to find people to play with who aren’t crappy jerks. They played with me for 10 minutes TOPS and all instantly tried to reach out to me.
tl;dr: The kids are alright. Adults are shit heads.
I cant agree with this post more
I witnessed something similar with my younger brother (this was when he was In fifth grade so bear with me here) and his friends. The teacher assigned for them to build a somewhat accurate spanish mission in Minecraft because their school had gotten some iPads and she needed to assign them something other than a PowerPoint.
Now here’s the thing. Most of these boys, my brother included, have ADD/ADHD. About a week into the project all they had in their shared world was chaos. Somebody filled the place with tnt and lit it up. Holes everywhere. Whenever one would attempt to try and build something (mostly wood huts and not the actual project) it would be destroyed within minutes as the boys began to insult each other heavily and complain that the design was ugly.
I brought my own ipad with me and decided to sit with the boys while they continued their reign of terror. I joined the world and built a hallway out of brick at the very center of this war zone. Immediately one of them tried to destroy it under the impression that “it looks bad”.
Anyway, then I showed him some pictures similar to these:
I reasoned that it would be easier to sway this kid toward another pretty block than trying to get him to stick to the materials of the time, so I asked him if he would like to help me replace my brick design with quartz (eh, it’s white).
Bam! One of the ten year old anarchists is dutifully building me a glittering gem hallway for our insanely rich monks.
The other three are off somewhere still yelling at each other and setting off explosives, but we have something built. Much to my surprise the kid asked if he could build the church next because he “wanted to build the most important part”.
Here’s where I learned something important. I don’t have ADD or ADHD but as I said before my brother does. When he gets fixated on something, he’s really gets into it. Once a few minutes had passed and this kid already had four walls up I decided to grid up the entire mission. One gets the church, one gets the farm, etc.
After playing the game with them for an hour, I had a pretty good idea of where each kid should go.
Church kid, I found, was very particular about materials and shape(hence his hangup over the brick). I gave him free reign over the outer walls of the mission and showed him the reference pictures to get him started.
My brother liked the farms most (he was building dirt domes over the cows don’t ask me how I made this connection it just worked, okay), so he was in charge of building pens for the animals.
Another kid was, at first glance, very loud and bossy when it came to decorating (constantly said we were making chairs wrong). Turns out he likes interior design, like putting benches and beds in the little rooms, so his bossiness was just frustration with my brother’s artistic sense I guess.
Another was very good with placing trees and plants around the exterior (I guessed this because he covered the place in a ridiculous amount of trees and I asked him if he would like to know where they are supposed to go). He got to make a vineyard for us and organized how the crops should go.
So how did it turn out?
Actually very nice!!
So what did we learn? Kids actually like to play games and be praised for their creativity and intuition. If I had just told them to stop messing around rather than direct their attention to areas within their interests, they never would have gotten anything done.
After an hour of gaming they:
Mirrored my language; “thank you!”, “which part are you working on?”, “I like this block.”
Realized each other’s strengths; “hey [kid name] can you help me with the roof?” “How do you make the big trees [kid name]?”
Were able to articulate exactly what they did or didn’t like without using force; “that looks good!”, “how about we put it there?”, “I don’t like that block, how about this one?”
On the plus side, since we moved the game file to my device for safekeeping, I now have a cute little souvenir of the time I played Minecraft with four ten year olds.
This is a really long post, but it’s super important. In games like Fortnite where you’ll find lots of kids, it’s important (if you can) to steer them away from toxicity. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run into kids who talk like toxic adults and the act of just being nice to them completely turns them around.
We had to write a Mini Comic for my Illustration Class so I did mine based on The Frog and The Scorpion. Hopefully you all know the story!
But if you don’t know the story… In the original the scorpion stings the frog in the middle of the river. When the frog asks “why” the scorpion says “it’s in my nature” and they both die. I like my ending more.
Done with watercolor and pen and ink nib.
I always thought this story was fucked up, even when I heard it as a very young child. I even got put in the naughty corner, and a star next to my name crossed off for questioning it.
This story is so much better, and I like it’s message much more.
a girl i know told me how a guy she knows once moved out from his parents, ate nothing but fries and meatballs for HALF A YEAR, and got scurvy. imagine the doctor’s face when this guy shows up with like his gums bleeding and the doc has to fucking say DUDE…. THATS SCURVY…. in this day and age
this is turning into a “how a person i know got scurvy” thread and im so here for this, please share your scurvy stories if you have any
the other day someone posted pics from the reddit page r/zerocarbs where these fools only ate meat and 0 vegetables or fruits and all the posts were about various symptoms of scurvy. i died when one literally read ‘i don’t want to start the vitamin C debate again but’
THE VITAMIN C DEBATE
Okay, I have to hop on board this, because I have had a close encounter of the aggravating kind with scurvy.
I have a stepdaughter. When she was 11, she came to stay with us one summer sporting the weirdest rash, she was puffy, and exhausted. Considering she is a freaking athlete (soccer, basketball, swimming, track, you name it), we were super concerned about this. Her mom swore they had no idea what was wrong, but a doctor said she did not need to be hospitalized. Allergies and a summer cold, they said.
On the drive back from picking her up, I noticed she didn’t want to eat anything. I begged and begged her to eat, she just would tear up and refuse to eat.
We get her home, and my older sister is there. We insist Taylor eat something. Finally she starts sobbing that it hurts to eat. I get mouth ulcers a lot, from stress, so I ask her if I can take a look.
Not only did she have mouth ulcers, her gums we’re bleeding.
I stood up, looked at my sister, and said “Holy fuck, she has scurvy.” I grew up in a food insecure situation, so we knew what to look for.
“Nuh uh” and sister looks. “How the fuck? That’s scurvy”
My stepdaughter lives in a very affluent area in Connecticut, USA, and goes to public school. It should not be possible for her to have scurvy, in theory. Much less one this bad.
Unless she is the world’s pickiest eater (she is) whose mother indulges and even encourages this behavior (she does).
One huge fight between my spouse and the ex wife, and two weeks of every vitamin C carrying food we can convince her to eat, and she was on her way back to a clean bill of health.
Her mom now allows her to eat fruit, despite the ‘sugar’, and drink fruit flavored beverages.
My stepdaughter still hates lemons, I still hate her mom.
On the plus side, my older sister decided to be a pirate for Halloween as a joke.
Storytime! So one of my RenFaire buddies, known to the other Rennies as The Dread Pirate Fred, has always been a bit pirate obsessed. At camp one night, he told us about his Freshman year in College, when he and his dorm mates all were feeling sick and run down with various ick, and they all went independently to campus medical to get checked out. After some tests, the Doc called them all into his office together, sat them down, and asked, “Boys, when was the last time any of you ate an orange?”
Fred immediately perks up and goes, “We have scurvy?!? COOL!!!”
He’s a marine archaeologist now, specializing in recovering 18th century wrecks in the Caribbean, in case anybody’s curious…
