Zink

Well maybe this time the new battery tech can be real and gay!

I have two optimism-filled counterpoints to this.

1. Happy childhood memories are often much nicer than actually existing as a child. Much more concentrated. You already have the good stuff.

2. The only person stopping you from walking through the woods and finding cool rocks is you!

(insert caveats here about how adult life sucks for so many people right now and they don't have free time to wander in the woods. I know. It sucks. I can only encourage you to consider it a metaphor and find something realistic and rewarding that fits your life)

This is where the information economy starts to eat itself. If every message arrives pre-saturated with irony, critique, and self-awareness, then no signal can rise above the din. Warnings, reassurances, satire, and sales pitches collapse into the same register. The audience isn’t persuaded or misled so much as numbed.

It sounds like you are describing an unfolding future where all communication us ultra-processed.

I have posted about this a couple times, but ever since I saw Jon Stewart a while back describe modern propaganda as ultra-processed speech. It's engineered for reaction and engagement. It's like you said, everything collapses into the same register when there's a BOMBSHELL headline every day.

But the ultra-processed thing has been reaching much further into our media and culture than political speech for a while now. Like I dunno, everything that has half the people's faces buried in their phone in public.

I mean if we already have a dictator anyway, how about some infrastructure to go with it?

To add more specifics here for you, note that the f-stop is usually shown as a fraction, like f/2.8, f/4.0, etc.

So first of all, since the number is on the bottom of the fraction, there's where you get smaller numbers = more light.

It's also shown as a fraction because it's a ratio, between your lens's focal length (not focal distance to the subject) and the diameter of the aperture.

So if I'm taking a telephoto shot with my 70-200 @ 200 with the aperture wide open at f/2.8, that means the aperture should appear as 200/2.8 = 71.4mm. And that seems right to me! If you're the subject looking into the lens the opening looks huge.

Hello, friends in civilized lands, especially those of you who work at financial institutions...

Some of us in the states are excited to watch you do some damage to the entrenched middlemen that have been skimming from all of us for so long. Please do consider letting us sign up for the new stuff. Our money is still worth something, for now!

politicians argue "no one will want to be a cop if we hold them accountable for their actions."

That sounds a lot like when they insist that nobody will ever innovate if they ever have to pay taxes when they get rich off their product.

Oh yeah agreed. Their role in the rat race makes up a significant part of their personal identity. That's part of the design, to keep you focused on your consumption instead of your life.

I guess I should have referred to the noise as attention-grabbing things instead of serious things, lol.

offering up his apartment to fellow protesters to use the bathroom or wash off pepper spray

Wow what a terrorist! When other citizens walk in with pepper spray on them he lets them wash it off?

I bet he and his co-conspirators were involved with the undcheduled shut down of the Orphan Crushing Machine too!

Did anybody else here make the grave mistake of doing this in Oblivion, the game notorious for enemy auto-leveling?

I went off doing random shit the moment that Captain Picard let me out of that sewer, and by the time I showed up to be the Hero of Kvatch I was this crazy invisible assassin of doom, and probably at the top of the thieves guild or the dark brotherhood or both.

So then if memory serves, the town is under attack from monsters and is on fire. The game drops me into a small walled-in arena and instead of whatever lv 1 imps and cockroaches are normally there, I'm holding my bow and arrow and looking up the fiery eyes of half a dozen 12-foot-tall giga-chad linebacker demons from hell. Oh and look they are already sprinting in my direc-- DEAD!

I probably took some creative liberties there but you get the idea.

I think I had to lower the difficulty slider to get through that room. Then I put it back to normal assuming the worst was over, only to have the game put me through a CORRIDOR of hyper-strong enemies next! So twice I had to lower the difficulty.

On one hand, this happened because my character was a min-maxed glass cannon, and a stereotypical one at that (stealth archer, how original! /s). But that same character had no problem with the entire game before or after that town because the whole point of the game is to have the freedom to approach encounters as you wish.

So in many ways that situation was less about auto-leveling, and more about the meme-worthy situations where a boss late in the game requires completely new mechanics the player has never seen. Or even better, it was the anti-forced-stealth-mission!

I wonder, is hatred of advertising a common thing for folks with ADHD? They take away something you are giving your attention to because it interests you, and shove some other crap in your face just to serve their own interests.

I remember being enraged at the scheduled commercial breaks in the '80s and '90s. The only benefit they had was that I always knew which segment of the show I was in and therefore roughly what time it was.

But now? It is so much damn worse and the normies just seem more OK with it than ever. I just remind myself they are living in a society that conditions them to accept it and gives them a thousand more serious things to worry about.

Edit: some words not have right letters

Watching TV of any kind at other people's homes, and especially my parents' place, can feel like some real black mirror shit.