supersquirrel

I really appreciate how human and cute it is, accessibility and hardware should feel like this. I mean the edgey gamer RGB shit sure that can be fun too but I like how this device says "sure, I could be for you!" in it's aesthetics.

Ok here me out, imagine this movie but all the F1 car noises are just samples of kittens meowing like that old silly video.

I was trying to think how to answer this because it is such a nuanced question and I don't want to just resort to "it depends!".

I think I figured out how best to put how I feel about it though. It is like how I see fake fireplaces or fake christmas trees or fake flowers... I don't mind fake things because often times the real thing isn't sufficent, practical or remotely possible. The only things I don't like are things that try to disguise their fakeness by valuing above all else perfect mimcry of the real thing or things that are tiresomely "realistic" or "accomplished" past the point that it means anything.

What does it mean to look out the window of a spaceship? Does it matter the nature of that interface? Whether it is literally an analog barrier or some digitally sensed picture that is processed and fed back to you in a form your mind can better comprehend? Every time I fly the idea of looking out of the window of the plane is fascinating to me, but the experience is glarey, annoying, awkward and unfillfulling usually. I would much prefer if they stuck a nice video camera on the underside of the plane and let me switch to it on the video monitor on the seat in front of me, I would be much more likely to watch that than a movie.

What I am trying to say is that I grew up with video games, I have never really cared about the idea of "what is REAL and what is Digital/Fake/Simulated" vs "What experiences are meaningful to me and why?" (the answer is often things with pleasant organic feeling fidelity) so ok if we are looking at a planet with a more limited color palette... what does "True Color" even mean in that context? How would Martians design film like the way Fujifilm has specific film chemistries that portray the specific blues of Earth's skies well while making skin tones look nice in portraits? Would Martian photographers get into different types of purposefully narrowed color palettes of Sepia to beautifully capture the incredible patterns written into the surface of Mars? Would they try to expand the narrow color palette into ""False Colors""" that helped our non-adjusted Earth eyes see the latent dynamism invisible to our perception? What unexpected transformations of sensed images from the surface of mars to different color palettes contain beauty we haven't discovered yet?

This information on Fujifilms digital simulations of different analog Fujifilm film types is instructive to what I am talking about, what would be the equivalents of these film chemistries camera film experts would arrive at intuitively over an interative process if they spent all their time photographing on mars? I have read articles on film chemistries that were specifically designed to emulate how we perhaps remember the blue sky, not how we actually perceive it for that is the experience we desire in a photograph, this is the thorny nature of perception.

https://www.fujifilm-x.com/en-us/exposure-center/get-to-grips-with-film-simulation-modes/

These are questions that have to be answered in an uncountable number of ways to be answered at all, but to put it simply, my eyes get tired of the tones from the images I see from mars, not in the detail. There is always detail to the colors, but if you unfocus your eyes and just look at the general overall color (and more importantly dynamics of color changes at a broader scale, what in music production is called dynamic range and what compressors are used to limit) I think it is that specific palette that becomes tiresome to your eyes.... kind of like in music production how your ears can become fatigued by a specific genre's style of music production that emphasizes energetic high frequency content after awhile and your body will start naturally craving a musical style that is more mellow in that respect. I want that, for mars photos lol. Notice I am not saying I have decided I don't like the genre's style of music production, simply that a constant stream of it is... unbalanced in a way that becomes uncomfortable after awhile and that there may be a way to introduce more balance if the imbalance isn't actually intended as a core experience.

Edit ok one more stab about being even more specific. Something I find very grating about the culture I live in, is that people incessantly describe art as "narrative" and while I think all art is storytelling it is the singular narrative that I take issue with. I believe the most serious responsibility artists have to the society they live in is to identify the simple large narratives that are growing out of control and topple them. When an artist starts to see mars photos and think "oh that is a Mars photo" and pass it over without actually looking at it, the natural next question the artist thinks is "wait what is a "Mars photo"? you know what that annoys me for some reason I am going to go see if I can make normal looking photos of mars just for the hell of it". Artists will do this intuitively, it might not ever even reach the conscious part of their mind they are so reflexively intune with that particular genius, it is like a seagull adjusting perfectly to a great random blast of wind that catches everyone else off guard on the shoreline, yet the seagull without hesitation retains its pose in the air above.

The aversion artists have to letting the mundane hang lifeless is what I am talking about. It is the way simple easy lies get under the skin of artists and give them an allergic reaction that makes artists so vital and powerful.

Sharks will never be in the public domain, they will only lurk in the Public Domain.

Ok whatever you aren't seriously telling me Musk is this bad at running companies, what we are seeing here is the Martians know we are getting close to invading and are launching a pre-emptive strike that is devishly designed to make us look incompetent... which is why we need to strike Mars FIRST.

We aren't the baddies, we just can't be the goodies today, tomorrow honey.

I recommend it so much I want to preface this with the fact I am basically an upaid shill for this game, but I think it is awesome that it is genuinely free (not lootbox, microtransaction free, genuinely free).

https://store.steampowered.com/app/736590/Operation_Harsh_Doorstop/

Operation Harsh Doorstop is meant to be a spiritual successor to mods like Project Reality and Forgotten Hope 2 for Battlefield 2, the last game that EA allowed to have modding in it.

I don't care what EA does now with trying to innovate the battlefield genre, they killed it so I am uninterested in EA-Frankenstein's Monster here.

No, I will shill for Operation Harsh Doorstop because even if you don't like the vanilla big map, semi-realistic vehicle team based FPS mechanics of OHD, the game is moddable and already has different mods that totally switch up the gameplay, including a star wars mod, a halo mod and others.

If you don't pick OHD, maybe try out Easy Red 2 which is only WW2 but very cool and has tons and tons of vehicles and period accurate battles that are really well done.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1324780/Easy_Red_2/

Seriously, forget EA, forget AAA big map FPS team based games, AAA studios don't give a shit about them and will always try to give you almost what you want but then funnel you back into a COD style lootbox grindfest that has nothing to do with the fascinating depth of combined arms gameplay.

Maybe check out Splitgate 2?

I don't know, feel free to suggest other indie shooters here, but yeah... eew EA and battlefield are dead to me.

well

If Obama wasn't a coward he would literally attack Iran right now, like he would dress up in a big eagle suit and run at the border fence to Iran and start punching the fence and be like "SEE TRUMP! I am doing it! I started the war before you!!!" while Iranian border guards calmly waved from behind the fence.

If I was Obama I would also write "secret nuclear bomb program" on a nerf ball and throw it over the fence and then start screaming about how I found incontrovertible evidence of Iran's nuclear bomb program while pointing at the ball.

The camera would zoom in on the nerf ball with the haphazardly written sharpie on it saying "secret nuclear bomb program" while I mumbled in triumph and the US would realize how insane it was for a brief second.

How Academics Are Pushing Back on the Academic Publishing *Mafia.

Cartel?

Just don't call it a business, that makes it seem way less shady than it is.

I mean yes and no, you are just saying what lots of fans of abstracts claim makes them superior to other types of games... to which the rest of the board gaming community smiles bemusedly and goes on playing whatever type of game they find the most intriguing which may or may not be an abstract (it probably isn't).

Yeah, the problem with Ukraine is you can slam armored columns through the landscape a lot easier.

As soon as things start to slow down in tougher terrain like you are describing in Finland artillery just becomes even more decisive because the coordinated movements of concentrated mechanized forces becomes more and more bottlenecked to having to pass through very obvious and predictable artillery targets you can precompute if you want.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5bhRe5oVBbY&pp=0gcJCb4JAYcqIYzv

This video just came out of Ukraine and demonstrates an example of how artillery becomes even more powerful with bottlenecks, a signficant vigorous Russian armored assault here is snagged up by fierce resistance.. in the form of mines, dragons teeth but then the critical devastating weapons system is the... dirt trench.

The dirt trench makes the Russian vehicles sit there for just long enough to figure out what to do for artillery to fire a salvo and rain down on their vulnerable, static position. Once the artillery locks onto the position pushing that avenue of assault becomes essentially a lost cause though the Russians seem to have a hard time realizing that in this case. The motorbikes may be a brutal way to attempt to gamble being able to pass through the artillery zone fast enough not to die to shrapnel, and if you don't value your life that may work for awhile..but there is a reason armored vehicles aren't going anywhere, assaulting somebody with artillery and artillery spotters like this is a daunting prospect and you better be ready to do so or you will get obliterated.

Without the artillery that dirt trench was just an annoying somewhat confusing delay, with the artillery it spelled the end of the entire operation and worse the entire existence of the people involved in this folly of an assault. That is how artillery changes things.