this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
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If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
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A lot of cheat codes were back in yonder days for testers and Q&A. Need to check something on stage 9, instead of playing through the game use the code to jump there to test. Got stuck but need to test further, noclip to go through terrain then test again for replication purposes. They weren't intended for us but were a very nice and welcome addition. Now they don't have extensive Q&A anymore to need such.
They still have the QA stuff, it's just done differently. An in-game terminal that's disabled for the release build, for instance.
This is only really possible with modern game engines though. Older games were often using code that was written specifically for that game. So simply disabling the cheat codes could likely break things elsewhere in the game. But modern game engines that were written with those testing tools in mind are able to safely disable the cheats before release without breaking the rest of the game.
Also journalists, many of whom didn't grow up with videogames.
Difficulty used to be seen as a way to adjust the play time, which was tied to the value proposition for the customer. A lot of older games used to have a gigantic difficulty spike 3 or 4 levels in specifically for rental markets. The Lion King and Battletoads are famous examples. The idea is you get the players hooked with a couple of reasonably challenging levels, then put in a wall that eats up the whole weekend they rented the game for so they want to rent it again next weekend to try to get past it.
If you give journalists cheat codes then they can go and get screenshots of the later levels and write about how cool they are, further incentivizing players to keep renting or jjsy buy the game outright and push past.
Didn't consider it from that angle, I just know a lot of times it was Q&A testing tools.
So you'd go buy it.
They didn't make any money if you rented it twice or 1000 times. If you finished the game in a weekend you'd never go buy it.
It was the equivalent of console.log everywhere.
We have better debuggers now.
Yeah they fired all of qa now the engineers test their own code and everything is shitty