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One of the local rural towns we pass through just had its only grocery store close. There is still a fair amount of existing businesses, and it’s really only less than an hour from my city, but it seems like it’s going to be very problematic for those people soon. It makes me wonder just how long the other businesses will be able to survive.
I have a feeling that the grocery may have closed for personal/possibly health reasons. I have no basis for this at all, just that the town itself looked to still have clean buildings for businesses (not decrepit/dilapidated like some of the other verging ghost towns) and they were open and clearly had people. That would have me suspect not that the grocery was failing, but that maybe the owner had to close for personal reasons.
No, the friend is saying
downloading music is legal as long as the artists have authorised use of their work and it is only played privately (not distributed).
Artists are opting in to allowing their music to be pirated, so it technically would be piracy under that law.
However if it’s privately played it may not matter
I got in today, got to play a few matches. It was pretty fun, I’m not huge on MOBA’s but I’m not entirely against them. I liked games like Sanctum and Sanctum 2 (this isn’t really like those, since those are tower defenses) but it’s got the same vibe going. Turning a familiar genre and adapting it into a different perspective. The characters I’ve played have been interesting, I haven’t loved them all but it seems like a decently well rounded cast. There’s some really good gameplay moments in there though with some of the character abilities. Playing slow and methodically has been working out well for me.
Interested to see what will change. It’s a bit chaotic right now, in some good ways and in some difficult to see ways. I have noticed a couple of the same characters in every game, can’t tell if it’s out of interest or if people knowing they are very strong. I like it though so far, it’s pretty easy to get the opponent tilted if in a single lane. Steal their soul points, push them with damage just enough to annoy them, punish when they start making mistakes
Lidarr is all you need.
You can do other methods, but this one is simple and effective. Set it up, tell it what bands you like, wait a day and you’ve got the entirety of your childhood favorites and nearly every discography you can think of. All for maybe an hour of upfront work.
Versus remembering every band/song you ever liked, tracking it down, downloading each individually… Like yeah, you can do that. It’s what I do for shows and movies for curation. But for music, I have so much and so many that curating like this just isn’t as worthwhile as checking off a band in Lidarr and having all of their stuff in a few hours.
The game isn’t immersive to me because watching one button perform a 20 second interaction just isn’t engaging. Which to me is the forefront of the difference between “immersion” and “engagement”.
That on top of all the little frustrations that OP mentioned. Hitching your horse is a huge pain and takes you out of the moment every time, for example.
Tbh, the entirety of RDR2 feels like that to me. It’s been critically acclaimed as the most immersive game ever, but it just is so far from actually being that for me because of all of these little things that actively take away from it.
Overall, it’s fine. It’s not really a great game IMO, but a prolonged interactive story. The gameplay aspects are sporadic and mostly require you to mash the A button to keep your horse on the trail, else you don’t move along it. With the advertising and gamers both claiming it to be an immersive game, things like these really detract. I went in expecting a cinematic experience and came out of it with the saddest GTA jank and repetitive grinding for time sensitive unlocks.
Add in the senseless unskippable animal skinning and it just results in a good 70% of the game being unenjoyable for me. I played through the story, which was mostly pretty good, and the rest of the game was waiting to get to a destination to do one thing or see one event, then waiting til I got to the next destination. The gunplay is alright, the spontaneous events are funny, sometimes a little shallow but mostly are good. but man… I was disappointed with the game, as a game.
Of course, this is all my personal preference too. I just don’t find watching multiple extended cutscenes and multiple sub-scenes every few interactions. I don’t blame it all on these sorts of things, but I have a really hard time agreeing that it deserves the acclaim it’s gotten when these are pretty significant shortcomings for a game, specifically advertised to be immersive.
Sometimes you want to ride around on a horse and take on the sights, and it sure does to a good job at that. There’s some good tools and gunplay which are pretty fun to play with and… Well, that’s about where the fun ends.
At the same time, unfortunately it is pretty standard among electronics in general. Photography, synthesizers, music equipment in general, PC parts… When you buy a pc case, you expect the bare minimum to include screws, but they don’t always include things like SATA cables.
However for VR, a simple adapter should definitely be included. I just can see why it wasn’t given the history of electronics.
I was here. There is no fucking way that I would have shown my face at a Nazi rally. That very night in Eugene the Nazi’s were going door to door looking for people to arrest. Of course, the article is saying that it was antifa who instigated… As if a literal Nazi rally isn’t instigative of itself.
I kindly disagree that showing your face makes people take you seriously. All it makes you is a target. I think the key factor is what is the protest for, as whether or not I wear a mask depends on what I am protesting. If I’m protesting a hate group or hateful ideology, I am going to keep myself safe. If I am protesting social and environmental issues I generally do not feel the need to.
Also, going to protests is inherently dangerous because peaceful protesters are not treated with peace. In that article I linked, tear gas was fired at us, the peaceful protesters, when the Nazi’s were the ones crossing the police lines. Also the police had their back to them the entire time, facing us with their riot shields. I wonder why the cops were protecting the Nazi’s at the “far-right” rally. Peaceful protesters against being treated with excessive force being met with excessive force… So honestly, no. Wearing a mask is necessary because you will be targeted and will be followed home.
The thing about peaceful protests is that they are almost impossible, because a peaceful protest is inherently the peaceful protesters dying for their cause by not retaliating. No, I don’t think we should allow Nazi’s to assault people in walking aides and attempt to stop on them. No, I don’t think peaceful protesters who are being attacked by police should just let the cops beat them to death. And even if we did, they would still label us as anything but peaceful protests.
FFS, there’s so much evidence of planted and instigated protests, like bricks being thrown by people not part of the protest but claiming that they were. Basically, there’s no such thing as a peaceful protest and so wearing a mask should be prioritize for the protesters safety.
Note: any right-wing or conservative protesters disregard this. Show the world who you really are! It’s the right thing to do!
Oh sure, I mean I wish it could be the case. I was more speaking from our reality and the situation, which is that education ends at grade 12. For anybody over the age of 18, there’s no legal requirement to learn unless you go out of your way to get a license for it (which is pretty much… Your driver’s license). How do we practically teach an entire country that is not in school? And these days we have the whole “Can it even be trusted?” group. How do we teach the elderly who have trouble using smart phones how to verify if it’s an AI image or not? And most of all, if it is saying something you are agreeing with, is there even a point in going to verify it at all? People may just not care in the first place.
it needs to be implemented as a core feature in social media, the verifications of origins.
When I was in school we had some classes on internet education, and I had tech savvy parents (young in the '90s), and I remember the checklist of getting your information on the internet. It was taught for a while, I’m sure it still is, but so few people actually take the time to go through each cited source and find the author and every little aspect to verify its trustworthiness.
And now it’s been 20 years and basically everything is taken at face value on the internet, over time the rational content being littered with irrational information. I mean, forwardsfromGrandma and those “Post this to your wall so your niece doesn’t die tonight” chain e-mails-turned-Facebook posts. I’ve also just personally felt a significant downtrend in media literacy and critical thinking skills overall, which also makes it hard to find hope sometimes. It would have to be a system more fleshed out than posting a checksum to validate because scammers are going to scam and they’ll find ways to give you their MD5 to validate against their checksum, and now we just have a verification system as complicated as the U.S. tax code.
So despite how much I want us to be able to find a solution, I’m just not entirely convinced that in a country with a decimated education system and a historical lack of interest in internet and computer literacy is going to have any major reform any time soon. Of course, that said, there was that recent deepfake bill passed unanimously, and so I think legislature will be implemented over time, I just am… Uncertain as to how it would be available to anyone who isn’t currently enrolled in school, which happens to be most of the population. And this is just the U.S.! Although I have a feeling most of the rest of the world will have not so big of an issue with finding an implementation.
I’m usually not so defeatist, I’m usually even pret seeing what steps would need to be taken to resolve problems. It’s just that this isn’t something that is intentionally designed to support companies that can make money off, like the tax code. I mean, that would effectively be whatever skunk Sam Altman proposed. In this case, it is the entire world needing to be able to distinguish reality from manufactured content, all while anyone with a GPU is able to create it.
All in all, I absolutely agree that we have to find a way to incorporate proper verification into our critical thinking skills, but my point is that those skills are what are failing and have been on the decline, and states like Florida, Arizona, Ohio, Idaho are trying to ensure that continues for our youth in those areas. Thus, if we can’t even trust states to educate our children properly, how will we educate the average American on something that is a moderately complex topic. Moreover, it has to be simple, because there is no way people will attempt to validate their content if it’s like filing taxes every time you scroll to the next reel/short, and there’s no guarantee that they would even care in the first place. There are just a lot of factors that I find make it more difficult than most problems to effectively solve
It’s been brought up and mentioned a few times, but it just gets kind of swept under the rug. The crazy part is, this has all been doable basically since around 2 months after the boom in ~April of '21 (or maybe '22 the years have really muddled me), but has only been getting easier.
Back when there were some version of this done with Trump and other politicians, the common consensus among the AI-inclined was basically, “oh, well, the thing is if we just make so much of it that none of it seems real then we’ll be able to tell what’s real from what isn’t and everyone will see how obvious it is.” Without realizing that people on Facebook will see a 256p image and think the messiah is real and God himself told them to believe it.
The scary part is there doesn’t really seem to be an effective way to stop this. Running AI locally is the best way to do it, which inherently creates the risk that you have to trust that people won’t abuse it to make deepfakes. I think even if it were banned it wouldn’t matter, since there’s probably a high chance it’s not even entirely done in the U.S. (I would say mostly, but not entirely, that just seems improbable). Real videos can’t exactly get some sort of Government Seal since they’d just be replicated and I’m not sure that the average person would be able to understand the MD5 checksum and would probably even think that’s the fake one.
Thanks for your response! I was born in Sarasota, but it was a very random reason why and I’ve only visited Florida for unrelated familial reasons, and don’t really get to keep up with it outside of what I hear from family, and whatever I happen to come across on my own, so I always really like to hear from people since it’s much more grounded in what someone would actually see day to day.
I’ve seen what you mean in the few times I’ve visited the last 20 years, and traveling the Midwest and having family there too, it’s true. Not long ago many Republicans were decent people and so many got on the deathcult mentality. Some are now seeing that it was just as bad or worse, but many initially joined because they felt disenfranchised from both parties. Even so, the policies they wanted up to 2008 we’re still about restrictions on human beings and destroying the earth for profit.
True most people are noticing effects of climate change but…
Haha! I did say some, I think the number is around… 12% and I believe that was across a national survey, so… Florida could be 0 to 0.23% of that, if it was every U.S. state lol.
Well, for people’s own ability to express basic thoughts safely, I hope a world changing event happens that allows a shift to the left in Florida. It’s an awful feeling having to hide a basic aspect of yourself like who you think could attempt to have a chance at doing some good for others. Not necessarily in regards to the Presidency even, but just better political goals in general. Humanitarian orientated ones.
Good luck. Stay safe and do your best to encourage others to encourage others to encourage others (etc) to vote. Preferably for the people that will enact policies to make your lives better.
Do people from FL like DeSantis? Cause Trump has mocked him.
I also have been under the impression that there are quite a large number of people in FL who are seeing the effects of climate change, and so I wonder if environmental policy is something that is beginning to matter more to them now. Environmental policy has been a slowly growing factor for small sets of conservative voters, so I wonder they have seen that push if in the few days of Kamala’s campaign.
I was going to make another guess that maybe FL is having younger voters. But nope, watching the video on the original website (wouldn’t appear on the archive), it was pretty clear to see that it was all 50+ Floridians with their golf carts.
Dollar general is actually one of the businesses that’s still open in the comment I made in this thread, but they don’t have groceries. There’s also a Ray’s, but that’s also not really a grocer. But I was also wondering how much of they were affecting the situation