You might want to take another look at this map
You might want to take another look at this map
Pokemon Sword and Shield.
Rose is trying to move the country off of fossil fuels and onto sustainable green energy. Somehow Gamefreak manages to portray this as being a terrorist and extremist. How dare he try to move Galar away from coal?
I’ve been meaning to re-watch Korra, but I remember even the first time I watched it being a bit disappointed in the “enlightened centrism” where they are trying to paint every conflict as pacifists vs extremists.
I think it’s similar to looking at BioShock 1 and BioShock Infinite. There’s a lot of writers out there who just use politics and ideology as a setting for the conflict rather than actually being central to their message. It’s simply a solid formula to make a villain: take any sort of stance and push it to violent extremes. Comstock is a religious zealot, Andrew Ryan I don’t think ever even mentions spirituality if I remember. Ken Levine’s message in the two games is not about religion, but extremes.
There are benefits. It makes the villains more nuanced and relatable. It gives the protagonist room for doubt and allows for some of the “good” guys to take on antagonistic roles. But Korra also ends up supporting an oppressive regime, and Booker DeWitt gets shoehorned into fights against the people rebelling against his enemy because… Reasons?
In my head cannon Phil Collins was watching the scene unfold
I’m not a copyright expert either, but I would think it goes one of two ways.
One is that the original rights holder of the IP could sue these binders for profiting off of it.
The other is that they can’t because the work is sufficiently transformative, in which case it would fall to he fanfic writer. From there, it probably depends on how they released their work. Some websites might claim ownership of anything published there as part of their ToS. Some authors might explicitly release their works under more open licenses to encourage community involvement. If it was just posted somewhere without addressing these questions (which I would guess is pretty common)… Sounds like a mess for the courts to sort out.
Perhaps one day humanity will look back and ask whether the lack of Internet in the thousands of years prior damaged the development of everyone who grew up without it
I do both. Jellyfin is way better if you put in the work of having a good folder structure and file names for metadata to scrape.
VLC is good for weird file types or non-video media. If you want to have a stash of reaction gifs in a playlist, I don’t know if JellyFin has any way to do that. Or if you want the tablet to display a random slideshow of pictures, like a diy digital picture frame. Also it’s easier to use if you don’t have good file names and metadata scraping.
Queue all the people in the comments talking about ad blockers or alternative apps.
Those might be great (and ad blocking is important in general), but I’ve found I ultimately just watch YouTube less.
A good chunk of my favorite creators had been pushing Nebula for the past couple years, so I finally tried it out and it’s pretty decent. I’ve even found new channels there that would have been buried on YouTube. Still tons of room for improvement for the platform, but it’s functional now.
Other creators have their own websites with text content, or podcasts hosted elsewhere.
It’s only a small handful of channels I check for on YouTube anymore. It kind of sucks that it’s mostly small channels where video is a key component and they don’t fit with the edu-tainment vibe of Nebula, and I don’t know of another platform for them. Lots of DIY home improvement, self-sufficiency (not religious or conspiratorial lol), music videos, and channels dedicated to specific videogame franchises.
I know LTT has Floatplane too. I wonder if all of these other videos streaming options getting worse will start driving more people to smaller platforms.
Except it’s not private money. Private vehicles have been heavily subsidized for almost a century in the US. We’ve had decade after decades or tax credits, interest-free loans, and bailouts to the oil and automotive industries. Most local road maintenance is financed with debt, and that debt has started to bankrupt municipalities. Minimum parking requirements encourage sprawl and reduce the tax base by filling these municipalities with land that is economically unproductive.
This all applies to electric too. Tesla famously would not exist if not for years and years of government money propping them up and artificially lowering their prices. Plus all the incentives for building owners to add charging stations, and the billions of dollars going towards expanding EV charging infrastructure in general.
And if you want to optimize for efficiency, personal EV’s are still not even close to buses or trains. Personal vehicle ownership absolutely does NOT make economic sense for anyone except the owners and managers of the companies who profit from them.
American suburbs aren’t ever going to become walkable if everyone just keeps saying “well it’s just too hard to have nice things” and keeps throwing money at perpetuating the problem instead of using that money to get out of the hole.
AND all the emissions associated with mining, refining and transporting the fuel
Except it’s nowhere near that simple. Manufacturing and shipping batteries is hardly a clean process. And the impact of the fuel is dependent upon the method used to generate the electricity, and both in the US and globally fossil fuels are still used widely for that.
Plus a lot of the pollution and carbon generation is virtually identical for personal vehicles regardless of how it’s powered. You still have tires that wear, tons of plastics and fluids (even EV’s need lubrication), and of course all of the metals involved. Then of course there is road infrastructure: thousands upon thousands of miles of asphalt and concrete separating neighborhoods and habitats. Acres upon acres of impermeable pavement soaking up heat and occupying valuable space that could be used for something more productive.
EV’s are better than ICE options because they at least will get greener as the electrical grid does, but still have the same fundamental issues that all personal vehicles do. You could add in bil-diesel and hydrogen cars too. It’s saving pennies when things like better public transportation and more walkable cities saves pounds.
Ah see this is the problem with political discussion. It turns out he never actually said that.
According to the article, one tiny piece of the $1.2 trillion dollar infrastructure bill he signed committed two federal agencies to be conduct a study on that as a potential solution.
The Forbes article editorializes that significantly to say that beaconing has received the “federal stamp of approval”.
It’s like a kid asking their parents for McDonalds for hours and the parent says “I’ll think about it”.
No I don’t remember that. Any chance you have a link?
I remember Tesla fanboys crying when Biden appointed Cummings to the NHTSA, but I can’t think of anything else connecting Biden to self-driving cars.
ITT: “What was the victim wearing at the time? Was the car acting in self-defense? Do cars have qualified immunity? Did the pedestrian pose a threat or instigate the car? Were they wearing their officially state-sanctioned Pedestrian uniform and helmet? Did the pedestrian have any pre-existing conditions?”
Drive slower, or walk yourself if you can’t see well enough to drive.
And yet it’s almost impossible to find just plain Cranberry juice in the US. The manufacturers do everything they can to try to trick you into buying “Cranberry Juice Cocktail” or “Cranberry-Flavored Juice”. It’s all just water, apple juice, and a bit of Cranberry concentrate. The real thing is ridiculously expensive and comes in small, artisanal, glass bottles.
Cran-Apple is probably better in most applications anyways. The deceptive marketing around it just irks me.
Ah damn, thanks for the correction. It seems like every few years the industry changes.
Heck even Patreon was a good way to support artists for a while, but it seems like they might be starting to succumb to the enshittification of venture capital. Bandcamp has been sold twice in the last 2 years.
If you want artists to get paid, you need to pay them more directly.
The highest margin for most is probably merch purchased at venues, including physical media. After that it's probably the merch store on the artist's website. They make money off of ticket sales for shows too, but there's a lot of middle-men and actual costs to shows so there's a wide variance in profit margin. Even local acts at bars: sometimes it's a pay-to-play scheme where the band could be losing money, sometimes they're making a few hundred bucks for a night.
Streaming on Spotify or an ad-sponsored platform like YouTube is going to give small fractions of a penny per-stream to the artist. There's plenty of artists out there who have opened their books and shown they make more from releasing music as pay-what-you-want than from Spotify.
I think the HDMI port is a big part of it too. Even if the version of it has changed over time, it’s really simple to plug a PS3 into a brand new TV, or a PS5 into a TV from the PS3’s era.
Technically, you can find all sorts of interesting outlier games with visual settings. If I remember correctly, I think the first 16:9 game was on the Genesis (maybe 32X or CD? Pretty sure it was a soccer game). I know for a fact Pac Man World for the PS1 had a 16:9 mode, and some other PS1 games did. Then on the GameCube and PlayStation you often had to read the manual to find a special button combination to hold during startup to enable higher resolutions or progressive scan. Gran Turismo 4 was one of the few PS4 games that supported 1080i. I never had an Xbox or Dreamcast, but I believe they had better support for higher resolutions. Then the PS3 was mostly 720p, but with some 1080p mixed in. I imagine some of the cheap 2D digital-only games were probably 480p. And then we start seeing dynamic resolutions where things get even more mixed: especially on the Switch. There’s the “4K checkerboarding” that a lot of PS4 games use, and now the different modes that are bridging the gaps with PC’s.
Well it can get even more complicated the closer you look.
The Famicon released in Japan in 1983, while the NES didn’t start to get released elsewhere until 1985. The SNES was 90/91, while the N64 was delayed until late 1996. And do you factor in the Virtual Boy anywhere there?
Then Sega: they dropped the Saturn real quick. The Dreamcast is, in a lot of ways, more similar to the PlayStation and N64 than the PS2 and GameCube. It sits somewhere in-between.
Applying the rule today, the Wii U and 3DS would be considered retro. I’ll admit they aren’t the first things that come to mind when I think of the word retro, but thinking about it I don’t have any strong objections.
The PS4 and Xbox One are right on the bubble. I think what complicates those was the mid-gen upgrades they received. And then the global supply shortages from the pandemic. Microsoft seems to be purposefully trying to blur the lines between generations too. So I think that is where the 10 year mark starts to break down.
You could also look at when games stop being released, but that has issues too. Just Dance 2020 released in 2019 for the Wii. You could look at when consoles stop being supported, but Nintendo was still repairing Famicoms through 2003. The Master System was still being produced in Brazil through 2022 (it might still be?).
Of course, there’s also an argument that the “retro” category should apply to the software rather than the hardware. There’s a lot of retro-inspired games that have been released recently. Undertale and The Witcher 3 both came out in 2015: will both eventually turn the corner to be considered “retro” at the same time?
Everything is subjective here, but I think a decade is a good rule of thumb to start labeling things retro. Culturally, at least in the US, we tend to group things by decade. Our radio stations will have segments dedicated to the '70s, '80s, '90s, etc. Fashion, art, books, movies, and more tend to be grouped similarly. I think videogames are pretty close. The 80’s were the 8-bit systems. The 90’s were split between 16-bit and early 3D (aka 32-bit as long as you ignore Nintendo’s marketing). The 2000’s were mostly the end of storage concerns, and the bump from mostly 240i ot 480i. The 2010’s were the upgrade to 1080p and online services.
All PS3’s could play PS1 games too