really? they’re almost as common as cigarette butts once were now. are you a hermit?

what do you mean? there’s a million refillable options out there. have been for years. the popularity of disposables is mostly about convenience, habit (it’s similar to buying cigarettes), and laziness. it’s a great example of how much people just don’t give a shit. it’s actually waaaay cheaper in the long run to use a refillable one. gives a better experience with more flavor options too. but it’s maybe 5% less convenient to use. therefore only about 5% of users go for that.

i fucking hate human nature.

i have like 5 friends in trying to convince away from the disposables right now. I’m 3 years in, and may have one that would be willing to try it i bought it for him. it’s so fucking hard to change anyone’s buying habits. i don’t get why. these are all people that SAY they care about the environment. then i show them an easy to fix way that they are FUCKING INCREDIBLY AWFUL to the environment and they just shrug…

oh, there’s fields and fields of entire cars just sitting in all inhabited remote places. it’s becoming a real problem in Alaska. there’s towns there literally getting buried in dead cars because it’s too expensive to take them anywhere else.

generally if you think “i wonder if this type of thing is getting disposed of properly or if it’s a huge ecological problem” the answer is always the latter. the humans in charge don’t care about the environment. that’s not profitable.

what do you mean pairing? what kind of os do you plan to put on the mini pc? the biggest hurdle is going to be hdcp compliance with any legal streaming service. something like kodi on the other hand, just works like any other pc? a mini pc is just that. a mini pc. there’s nearly infinite method to connect streaming services to a pc. I have a Plex server, but it doesn’t play nice with all content, so honestly, i usually just use my network storage and pull things straight from the file browser. load them into media player classic with madvr.

I know there’s newer systems that do fancier things, but I’m content. I need to upgrade my nas to be better able to transcode x265 video streams. that’s s big drawback on Plex for me. my biggest use case is watching things virtually with friends. it’s how i watch movies with people. my server can current encode a single x265 video stream pretty well, but the second it has more than one client it chugs. forget it if 4 people want a 4k movie. I would need a crazy beefy rig to run that. it also won’t convert hdr without paying. most of my friends aren’t trying to watch on an hdr screen.

so, we’re back to me streaming via discord screenshare. it’s not the best, but at least i don’t need to keep a separate 4k hdr copy of movie for myself and a 1080p x264 copy for Plex that way. mad vr will even handle the hdr conversion for me when I stream.

it works well enough, though I’m open to suggestions as well. it needs to be easy for the clients to use. it can be hard for me, that’s fine, but jellyfin is too much for most of my friends and family. Plex is already pushing it.

yeah, but that’s a whole generation after this. most games were colorful by then. especially once hdr started to come around.

games like crysis 3 and far cry 4 really helped break the trend.

I’d say crysis is almost the exact inflection point. look at it, it still has a lot of that brown aesthetic, but it’s colorful and has bright skies and giant lens flairs. the lens flairs especially became part of the norm moving forward.

there just isn’t the money in that kind of product anymore. studio porn in general isn’t doing great. especially among younger viewers.

I worked for hustler broadcast for a bit, so i can confidently say that you’re not wrong. we would still occasionally air some of those older more serious movies, but basically anything since 2000 has been more on the goofy side. that said, there are some genuinely funny ones out there. they aren’t very good as porn, but they were my favorites. like there was one where Trump and Kim jong un captured Hilary Clinton in North Korea and they all had sex. the trump and the Kim were terrible, but the Hilary genuinely kind of looked the part, if Hillary Clinton had massive fake boobs. there was an Obama one from 2008 that was incredibly racist. it basically had Obama coming into the White House and revealing that he was actually a big bad gangster rapper, or whatever, here to fuck all your white bitches. I think there were three of those.

honestly, there’s some high concept only fans out there if you’re willing to pay. I know of one couple that does a legit travel blog with travel sex interludes. you might also find enjoyment in erotic literature if you haven’t given that much of a shot. the Internet stuff of very different from the published stuff, maybe give them both a shot?

all of this kind of comes together to really get in the way of high concept studio porn. women with intelligence, self respect, talent, or real ambition don’t go into studio porn. it’s the toxic old way to get into porn. anyone that might have been good enough to actually perform well in those movies either goes for softcore stuff that they can claim isn’t porn, or will self start on onlyfans. honestly, i bet we’ll start to see more of that kind of content come out of the new porn media world. these days we’re seeing more and more collectives and small companies operate through onlyfans. for better and worse. an optimistic take from someone that has worked on the back end of that industry for you is that these companies might be perfect for that. especially the ones that operate more like streamer houses. where it’s just a co-op of creators and maybe a little suuport staff or a manager. that’s the kind of situation i think we’ll start seeing low budget high concept porn with better production than it used to have because it’s easier to be better for cheaper these days.

holy hell that’s so much.

huh, i guess I hadn’t heard anyone’s actual experience from it. I’ve never been myself. it’s only interesting enough for me to want to know that it exists. there is no world in which I would actually pay what it costs to go to Disney world. it’s just not my thing. I’d rather find some elk to watch frolic or some shit. that sounds when more magical. still neat to see that it’s kind of real now.

but yeah, my biases make it easy to believe that it’s all cheaper and shittier than they lead on. that sounds like what a company like Disney would do. make something that looks flashy and makes a good headline, but disappoints when in person.

thank you for sharing your experiences.

for that to be a temporary exhibit is almost crazier. that thing i dreamed of having as a child isn’t even worth keeping around when compared to everything else they’ve got going on.

this is America, half this country gets a boner when they think about shooting someone and being praised for it. all cops started this way and so they don’t feel bad when the enable vigilante justice in others. they all think that shit’s cool as hell anyway

what is, “aes”? it’s usually best to define niche acronyms when using them in a general community.

the article you linked doesn’t help, it’s too niche for Google to help… autocratic ethnostate? authoritarian election trick?

when it comes to genuinely unique technology based experiences like that, there’s nothing that beats Disney world. Disney Land is really nothing like it. Disney Land is mostly a regular theme park, not that much different than a six flags. Disney world has the most money and research put into it of any physical attraction in the world. that shit has probably had more money dumped into it than the Roman collosseum in its time. the things thet have there now feel like actual magic. they have 3d hologram systems, the have lightsabers that extend and look exactly like the movies, they have the same level of robot as what Tesla used to announce the cybertaxi just running around the park all the time. I’ve never been, but they have the most unbelievable entertainment technology there. i can see how a child would walk away feeling like they experienced something special.

i couldn’t remember if there was active pvp. i just remember never actually running into it in my time playing.

the base invasion system in metal gear solid 5. it was a risky optional side part, but you would place your best guys and equipment around your base and other players could try to break through that. i don’t remember many of the specifics, but it was kind of interesting.

i currently have one of the few municipal Internet plans in the United States.

best Internet I’ve ever had. gigabit symmetric fiber for a flat $60/mo. no fees, no outages, no data caps.

during the one outage i experienced in the three years I’ve had them i was quickly able to find multiple places to see status updates about the hardware issue they had and it was fixed in under an hour.

they also have a 2.5 gig and a 10 gig option for reasonable prices. I don’t think many other companies even offer anything above 1 gig outside of business packages.

it will be difficult for me to move anywhere else. with the work that i do this has been life-changing. come to Longmont Colorado, we have good Internet, amazing mountain sunsets, and lots of tacos.

i love my government Internet. it’s one of the biggest things keeping me here.

yeah funny enough, this is more of a recent thing. it’s still spreading at the moment. isps over here just kind of got it in their head that they could make extra money with this one day.

twitter built itself on doing this the most nonsensical and annoying way possible.

i would consider persona to be a different genre. it’s closer to Pokemon with a lot of dialogue. i guess I’m defining visual novels partly as things that don’t have much gameplay. if there is a significant other portion of gameplay with complex mechanics outside of dialogue that’s just a different thing in my book.

I… don’t love persona, but that more because i can’t get into the teenage highschool drama. the number of times i felt myself internally screaming “holy shit i don’t care, you won’t even remember this in 5 years” made me eventually realize I just wasn’t having a great time. liked the Pokemon fights though. I could see myself loving a different game that plays similar with a more mature story.

eh, I’d rather choose either art or voice. manga ot audio book. i tend to lean towards Audio books because it leaves my eyes and hands free to do other things.

for me it’s just a struggle. it requires me to give it all of my senses, like a movie, but it does so little to hold them. a single still image that changes once ever like 20 lines holds my interest for maybe 2 seconds if it’s a good one. then the dialogue goes on for 5 minutes. it’s almost always bottom of the barrel voice acting. I’ll admit, having been completely put off by the biggest mainstream ones having no choices and just being shitty books, so i haven’t tried any with choices, but the fact that the most popular ones don’t really have choices… you just can’t avoid a medium being defined by its biggest representatives. those are the ones that draw people in and hook them. clearly the choices aren’t the thing fans of the medium like.

again, i just can’t imagine having anything but an infinitely better time reading a manga. fate had me frustratedly dragging myself through it by the end. I’ve never actually managed to finish any others. if was so many hours of me begging it to be less slow. even with all the modern mods and fixes to make it as customizable of an experience as possible. it made me want to pull my hair out at times because of how tedious it was. like maybe if i ate 1000mg thc gummy i could melt into enough, but it’s just so painfully slow otherwise.

idk, i kind of can’t stand this format of visual novel.

i love books. i love story driven games. virtual novels like this somehow manage to capture the worst aspects of both. like, it’s a book that forces you to read it slowly, or at least at a somewhat fixed pace. i hate being locked to a computer to read, i hate having to either continuously click to advance to the next slids after every 2 sentences or less or have to read at a fixed pace, i honestly hate having low quality badly mixed sounds effects in my ear while I’m trying to read.

these aren’t low gameplay games. these are just extra tedious books. I’d so much rather just read a manga every time.