Yes, voting reform is extremely important. The problem is Trump’s view of voting reform is to restrict who can vote. The dems idea of voting reform is to make voting easier, and at the local levels, push for ranked choice or approval voting making 3rd parties actually viable. Voting for Trump is pushing us further from good voting reform. Harris may not be platforming voting reform, but at least she’s not going to interfere with state level reforms like Trump will.
I’m from the US and “better than a kick in the teeth” and “better than a poke in the eye” are both common around my area. Never heard the tree ones though.
Yeah, that’s fair. I think the main reasoning is that shooting something out of the air can cause it to crash on people or light stuff on fire. I also don’t like the “stand your ground” and “castle doctrine” laws, so I think both shooting people and shooting drones should be illegal.
New drones being sold in the USA are equipped with something called remote ID. In theory, it enables law enforcement to wirelessly identity the drone, who it’s registered with, and where the pilot is standing. This is very new though, and very few, if any, police departments have the tools needed to make use of it. It’s also possible to read remote ID from phones, but without the database, it only gives you so much info. Owners of older drones are supposed to attach a remote ID module to them in order to maintain legal flying, but someone being voyeuristic with their older drone probably isn’t following the rules.
Not in the US. You can report it to the police and the FAA, but it’s a federal felony offense to shoot down any aircraft, regardless of whether it’s a $100 drone or multi-million dollar full on airplane. But like the other poster said, voyeurism and harassment laws still apply. And also, if the pilot is out of sight of the drone, that’s a hefty FAA violation (assuming they don’t have a specific FAA waiver that’s hard to get) and something you can report.
FAA Certified drone pilot in the USA here. That’s wild. In the US it’s illegal to shoot down an aircraft of any sort no matter the type or who is flying it. And also, the Federal Aviation Administration is the only authority in the US when it comes to airspace, and as long as you have authorization from the FAA or are in uncontrolled space, you can fly over anyone’s property. However, that doesn’t give you the right to voyeurism or harassment. If you are intentionally spying on things that are normally considered private (peeking in a window, for instance) or repeatedly or specifically bugging a specific individual or family, then you can still be charged with those crimes. Also, unless you have a specific waiver that’s rather hard to get, you have to be within line of sight of your drone. If the drone pilot is not following the rules, they can be hit with hefty fines. Even though drones can be bought easily, there’s still strict rules that the FAA has for both recreational and professional flying, and anyone operating a drone outside those can and should be reported.
Right. Like, my use case for SD cards is for my cameras. I want to take pictures and bring them home across international borders. And a 4TB card would be amazing, though probably not fast enough. I simply don’t put files that I don’t want people to find onto my SD cards in the first place.
960mbps up/down for $75usd/m
I loved the Winamp channels. That’s where I learned about the existence of anime. I had no concept that things like Cardcaptors, Dragonball, Pokemon, etc were actually anime because I just saw them in English. But I found dubs through Winamp streaming and it sent me down the rabbit hole to buying DVDs and manga and learning to torrent fansubs. The good old days of my blazing fast 3mbps cable connection. It blew my mind coming from dial up.
SMS doesn’t handle pictures, videos, gifs, reactions, or group conversations. Things I use all the time. MMS handles some of that, but implementation varies greatly by carrier and device. If you want consistency of that functionality, you have to go with an app. Apple and Google have created replacements for SMS and MMS that could be the next version of “texting” but Apple refuses to let anyone else use theirs (iMessage) and Google has only half opened up theirs (RCS), so those don’t really fix much.
When I worked at Toys R Us, we had a kids clothes section and it was basically on a 3 week rotation. One week, brands 1 and 2 were on sale, next week brands 3 and 4, then finally brands 5 and 6 before starting over the next week. It wasn’t 100% predictable, but generally everything would go on sale at least once a month. Sales on toys were less predictable just because there’s so many more of them to cycle through.
There is typing weakness and resistance. Each Pal can have 3 moves and you can swap out the moves from whatever they know and you can also teach them moves using move fruits (aka TMs). However you don’t directly control your Pals. It’s real time action based combat. So you are running around shooting and dodging and your active Pal is doing the same all on their own. So no, it’s not a pokemon game, it just has some elements of it in the form of catching, leveling, learning moves, breeding, and having some pals prove utility skills.
The combat definitely lacks depth, but they have also provided other gameplay elements to offset. Base building is a big one. Your Pals can be assigned to do jobs in your base, and different pals are capable of different tasks. It’s first and foremost a survival game and setting up base automation is a core part of that. Your base occasionally gets raided by wild pals or bad NPCs that you have to fight off.
I actually agree that I don’t think this game will last long, for me at least. But that’s fine. Not every game needs to be a forever game. For $26 on steam (or included in game pass), I’ve already had enough enjoyment out of it just in the last few days to make up the cost. I mean, that’s pretty much the cost of going to see a movie.
It’s weird. I would say it feels very unpolished, yet at the same time, it works way better than I would have thought for an early access monster collector. It totally feels like a meme, but it’s actually quite fun at the same time. I don’t think I’ll play it forever, but it’s definitely my addiction this week. I only downloaded it because a friend suggested it, it has Pokemon elements, and it’s included in game pass so I had nothing to lose, but I’ve already put probably 15 hours into it this weekend.
It basically means trend. It’s sorta evolved from the concept of “metagaming” where you’re not just playing the game, you’re gaming the game. People now use “the meta” to refer to the collection of viable strategies for a game, and “the current meta” to refer to what is popular at this moment. This could be types of decks in a card game, character builds in an MMO or a MOBA, or other things like that. Presumably, for twitch, “the meta” is referring to not strategies of playing games, but strategies of gaming twitch. In other words, strategies to maximize viewership and income, and specifically, what is working at any given time.
What are you talking about? This is from an actual news broadcast in Spokane Washington many years ago. There’s a transcript of the broadcast on this page. One man stabbed another man who was arguing with his wife.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/what-are-you-gonna-do-stab-me
One of my favorite stories was from a D20 modern campaign we were playing. This is a setting where it’s modern time, but some supernatural stuff still exists. There was a cave system under the city that we were exploring and we found a mummy and a bunch of skeletons. I rolled a 1 on an attack roll and my DM said I dropped my sword, so for my 2nd attack I said I was going to headbutt the skeleton and I rolled a 20 so my DM ruled that I headbutted this skeleton so hard my head just went down his spine as all the bones just exploded apart. Next turn I was like, that went pretty well, who needs a sword. I tried to headbutt the next one, and rolled another 1. He then ruled that this time I killed the skeleton but it’s spine impaled my head and I died. It was the most swingly battle ever, and kinda outside the actual rules, but it’s something I’ll never forget (this was 10 years ago) and all because we made an effort to ham up critical successes and failures.
I second the world of darkness suggestion, though learning a whole new game can be intimidating. But I like the relative simplicity of the dice pool concept. Everything is a 10 sided die. 7 or higher is a success. So for example, you have 6 strength die. If you want to break down a door that takes 7 successes, well good luck. Pretty hard to roll 7 successes on 6 die (though not impossible because 10s get a bonus roll). And then overall I feel like the lore is easier to roleplay because I feel like it’s easier to picture yourself as a pack of werewolves or a coven of vampires or whatever version you’re playing.
Body language. It’s way easier to “read the room” and figure out what the players enjoy and what they don’t when you are physically sitting around a table and can monitor players reactions both actively and in your peripheral vision.
They (the investment/owner class) make their money work for them by investing and by playing the banks. Generally, they want to invest the vast majority of their money, and never cash out of their portfolio. When they need “cash” to buy something, they do it with loans and there’s lots of tricks (that I’m not super familiar with) to make loans as cheap as possible, and potentially even profitable if their investments are doing better than the cost of the loan.
Now, why would they spend money pushing propaganda when instead they could be investing that money? Well, when you are that rich, you don’t actually have to spend that much to push propaganda. People are already clamoring for your opinion, because they see you as successful and think, if I copy you then I too can be successful. And when you do need to buy an article, it’s pocket change compared to your vast wealth. And if instead you need to buy a TV news network, a newspaper, or a website, that itself can be an investment. As long as you don’t run it into the ground, it may make you money at the same time as allowing you to push propaganda.
And why do they want to push propaganda in the first place? Because if the working class (those that live off paychecks instead of investments) has the time, energy, and knowledge to do something about wealth inequality, then the investment class will start to have to pay their fair share and lose a bit of their wealth. The investment class doesn’t want that to happen so they need to rob the working class of those 3 things. Manufacturing a culture war is one way to steal time and energy from the working class, because they now have to spend that time and energy on defending personal rights. Busting unions is another way to rob time and energy, as the fewer rights workers have, and the less they are paid, the more time and energy they have to spend to stay out of poverty.
It’s all a ploy to get people to pay less attention to how the investment class gets their money so that they can keep racking up the score without interference.
That said, some of the investment class actually truly holds hateful views, as does some of the working class, but the working class has nothing to gain by acting on that hatred except a sense of personal fulfillment. The investment class benefits financially, so they may act out the hatred even if they don’t feel it.